Autumn in a Very, Very Small Town

A Real Epidemic and the Best Halloween Ever

In the summer of 1955, a polio epidemic attacked the United States, and its epicenter was Appleton, Wisconsin.  The infection rate in Appleton and the surrounding county was 128.48 per 100,000, compared with 37.55 per 100,000 in Boston, Mass., the nation's second-hardest hit area. 

My family was in the process of moving from Marinette, Wisconsin, to Appleton that very summer.  My parents prudently decided to ship me and my little sister Alison to our maternal grandparents, who lived in the tiny town of Yorkville, Illinois . . . far enough from the polio outbreak to be a safe haven.  Mom was with us most of the summer, and Dad visited when he could.  Because we had spent a week or so every summer in Yorkville, this extended visit didn’t seem unsettling: I loved my grandparents’ big house on the river, and I was happy doing pretty much nothing other than reading and playing the piano.  There were fireflies to catch and ice cream to eat in the warm evenings while the adults played bridge and whispered about illness and death.

Things changed when the leaves began to turn.  My mother left Yorkville to join my father in Appleton, to look for a house and to begin negotiating how to fit into a new town and a new life.   The polio epidemic there was subsiding slowly although the threat remained; my parents decided that their children were safer in Yorkville, at least until Christmas.  So my sister and I stayed with my grandparents, and I entered third grade.  I was seven years old.  

The main Bristol-Yorkville school building was constructed in 1888; my mother and her sisters also attended school there.

I should explain that in 1955, what we knew as ‘Yorkville’ was actually two villages separated by the Illinois Fox River: Yorkville proper to the south, and Bristol to the north.  Each micro-municipality numbered about 500 people, if you counted dogs, cats, and chickens.  So we’re talking about an extremely small town, or towns . . . so small that the only school (grades 1 through 12) was a no-nonsense brick building two blocks north of my grandparents’ house, in the more genteel portion of this bifurcated place.  The school ‘belonged’ to those of us who lived on the north side of the river (often, families like mine who had lived there for generations).  The kids from the south side were . . . well, kids from the south side.

As an entering third-grader, I needed what any third-grade girl needed – a best friend.  I found one right away, a sweet girl from a big family that lived on the south side.  To get to school, she had to walk from ‘below town’ (‘town’ was directly across the bridge that divided north from south, Bristol and Yorkville); we would join up in the ‘City’ Park a block up from my grandparents’ house and proceed the half block to school.  In my memory, walking through the park was always leisurely, a series of small discoveries (really red maple leaves that hadn’t been there the day before, a lost biscuit from a weekend bake sale).  I don’t remember much about school itself, except that on the rare occasions I had homework, I’d sneak into what had been my Aunt Mary’s bedroom – enchanting in yellow and shelves full of painted porcelain – to study at her ‘desk,’ which was really a vanity table.

This changing-venue maneuver wasn’t really necessary.  That autumn, my sister and I had moved from the back bedroom of my grandparents’ house (a somewhat claustrophobic space that used to be reserved for the ‘hired girl’) to the airy, blue-and-white double bedroom that had been shared by my mother and my Aunt Eleanor, a room that had generous windows overlooking the river . . . and a vanity I certainly could have used as a desk.  But because I was in school and my sister, just turned four years old, was not, I guess I needed my own separate space.

The bridge between Bristol and Yorkville as seen from a corner of my grandparents’ backyard; a new bridge – much less elegant – was built in 1985.

Space.  That’s what Yorkville/Bristol gave me that lovely autumn.  It’s not that I had been particularly restricted: in Marinette, when I was six or younger, I had walked unaccompanied to school (behind my house, but one had to go around the block), to my best friend’s home down the street, to the corner store, to the library on the river.  But Marinette – a hardworking town of then about 10,000, suffused with the paper industry’s sulfur smell and the demographic divisions that followed – had not been a free-range environment for a little kid.  I always knew that my town had ‘other’ places (downtown with its big department store and bars and even less reputable dives, ‘rougher’ neighborhoods where we knew no one) where I could not wander and would not be welcome. 

But my grandparents’ little town was wide open to me.  Of course, it was much smaller than Marinette; even a third-grader, with a bit of resolve, could walk from one end to the other (Yorkville then was very vertical . . . strung along on Bridge Street, from top to bottom, but only a couple of blocks wide) and feel as if she had tramped through the whole place. What I didn’t understand that autumn was that free movement in that tiny double village was also a function of local history and social custom.

Everybody knew my grandparents and my grandfather’s family.  My great-grandfather had been the town’s first lawyer and had founded a bank there.  My grandfather followed in his footsteps, and brought his college-educated bride from Wisconsin to enrich his life . . . and the town’s.  [At this point, all I need to say is: read Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street to understand this part of my family.]  Various relatives were scattered about, in town (like Aunt Alice, across the street) and on neighboring farms (like Uncle John, just outside Bristol, or other, more hazy people, like Aunt Wathena, with whom I associate osage oranges).  My mother and her sisters had been popular and eligible girls in Yorkville (my grandparents had the good sense to send them to college far away, and none of them married Yorkville boys . . . although their cousin Joyce did marry a local man who became the first mayor of consolidated Yorkville/Bristol in 1957.  But I digress). 

The point is: it was easy for my grandparents to let me go alone ‘over town’ across the bridge, to visit the library, to pick up the mail (there was then no home delivery), to indulge in a double chocolate soda at Webster’s drugstore . . . or walk to school, or even to the Game Farm (basically a fowl reserve with a few farm animals on display) northwest of the school, bordering on rich farm land.  Everybody knew my grandparents, had known my mother, and therefore knew me.  I could neither get lost nor get in serious trouble.  All the space I could possibly conceive of, there, was mine.

The original Kendall County courthouse, Yorkville, built in 1864 and reconstructed after a fire in 1887; my grandfather and great-grandfather had law offices there.

Branches became bare, and Halloween was near.  My southside best friend invited me to go trick-or-treating.  I was a reasonably well-behaved granddaughter, partially because I was a relatively self-sufficient child and partially because I didn’t want to provoke my grandmother’s sharp tongue (she was known for pronouncements such as “Alison is clumsy, but [pause in which I would wait for the rare word of praise] Deborah is stubborn”).  Therefore, I asked her permission, which – after a few acid comments about my friend’s family, who although having lived in Yorkville for as long or longer than she had, were, to her, marginally disreputable, probably because they were not white-collar folks – she granted.

I remember little about a costume (pillow sack for treats?  scraps from Grandma’s sewing basket to approximate a pirate?)  What was important was that my friend, in company with her siblings and a small gang of other southsiders, called for me at my grandparents just after sunset . . . and we were off.  Like, all over the place.  Northside, Southside, Bristol and Yorkville.  No Mary Jane, Milk Dud, or apple (yuck) went unclaimed.  When a rumor reached us that a house was giving out full-sized, real candy bars, we hit it three times.  We sat in the middle of the bridge and exchanged treats that we didn’t like for ones we did.  It seemed like midnight, or later, but it was probably nine o’clock – still fairly late for an unsupervised seven-year old – when I got back to my grandparents’ house. Playing cards in the library, Grandma and Grandpa reminded me that it was time for bed. 

Upstairs, I woke my little sister.  Alison had been too young to go trick-or-treating, so I shared some of my loot (not, I’m sure, the full-sized Hershey bars, but still . . . ).  I fell asleep feeling as if I owned the world.

Halloween many, many years later . . . students and friends, David Letterman, the Mad Monk, Wall Street crooks, the local ghoul . . .

That Halloween was almost sixty years ago.  Since then, I’ve enjoyed many wonderful Halloweens.  When my daughter was young, it was great fun to concoct costumes from whatever was lying about – she was a particularly fetching fortuneteller, a beautiful princess, and even an adorably non-threatening pirate; I remember fondly looking in on her after trick-or-treating, as she painstakingly arranged her candy into arcane categories [size? ingredients? color? desirability?]  that marked a personal Halloween landscape. In later years, I enjoyed hosting Halloween parties for my graduate students (whose costume creativity was a source of endless wonderment), then passing the baton to the Luyendyk brothers, who’ve exceeded anything I ever concocted but let me attend anyway, and kibbutzing on the fantastic Halloween extravaganzas my sister Alison has created.

But that long-ago Halloween, when I was seven years old, remains my best Halloween ever.  Reason number one, as I’ve tried to explain, is that it was the moment in my life that I felt like an autonomous individual . . . free to go where and do what I wanted, even if only for a few hours.  I’ve also tried to explain, however elliptically, reason number two:  that it was a small, circumscribed time that affected me so deeply that I’ve revisited it over the years . . . and have realized that its pleasure was in large part a function of class divisions, social prejudices, and economic disparities, and – yes –responses to a dangerous disease. 

Yet these adult realizations, no matter how important or how true, do not take away the visceral memories of freedom, of the sheer exhilarating joy of being able to go anywhere that I could possibly imagine, which adhered to that best Halloween ever, the capstone of autumn in a very, very small town.