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Storm Lake
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Description
“A reminder that even the smallest newspapers can hold the most powerful among us accountable.”—The New York Times Book Review
Watch the documentary Storm Lake on PBS.
Iowa plays an outsize role in national politics. Iowa introduced Barack Obama and voted bigly for Donald Trump. But is it a bellwether for America, a harbinger of its future? Art Cullen’s answer is complicated and honest. In truth, Iowa is losing ground. The Trump trade wars are hammering farmers and manufacturers. Health insurance premiums and drug prices are soaring. That’s what Iowans are dealing with, and the problems they face are the problems of the heartland.
In this candid and timely book, Art Cullen—the Storm Lake Times newspaperman who won a Pulitzer Prize for taking on big corporate agri-industry and its poisoning of local rivers—describes how the heartland has changed dramatically over his career. In a story where politics, agriculture, the environment, and immigration all converge, Cullen offers an unsentimental ode to rural America and to the resilient people of a vibrant community of fifteen thousand in Northwest Iowa, as much survivors as their town.An Honoree of the Society of Midland Authors Literary Award
“Cullen’s book demonstrates the important role that local editors play in standing up and speaking to power in America…Storm Lake is an engaging, folksy read about how a small-town newspaper editor copes with existential threats to a way of life and an industry vital to American democracy in a state known for its extremes of weather, economics, and politics. [Cullen] tells good stories and writes with a journalistic flair that prefers punch to polish…The pages of Storm Lake clearly demonstrate why Cullen won journalism’s most revered prize.”—The National Book Review
“With a self-effacing, homespun honesty…Cullen makes an eloquent case that community newspapers are integral to the fabric of small towns..[and] that diversity is keeping Storm Lake alive. Many Latino, Laotian and Vietnamese families work in the packinghouses. Cullen argues that these families have thrown a much-needed life preserver to Storm Lake’s economy.”—StarTribune
“An engaging storyteller, Cullen recounts the deeds (and misdeeds) of youth, but his writer’s passion shines when he discusses the events that led him to write the prize-winning editorials. . . The moral, economic, and social history of a small town in Iowa might not seem like much of a story, but in Cullen’s hands, it is.”—Booklist
“Storm Lake is a must-read, and it is a great read.”—WBUR
“An impassioned, significant book from a newsman who made a difference.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“[A] memoir that gracefully illuminates the challenges facing the American heartland. Composed of political history, tales of civic controversies, and human interest stories, the subject matter is elevated by Cullen’s passion into parables relevant to all Americans . . . a window into small-town America.”—Publishers Weekly
“Read this book and you will understand why Art Cullen’s courageous writing—sensitive, challenging, sometimes abrasive—helped build Storm Lake into, as Cullen phrases it, ‘a community, not just an unrelated gathering of people.’ Cullen captures, in prose that is almost poetry, the ethos of small town, rural Iowa, the heart and soul of the ‘good America.’”—Tom Harkin, former United States Senator from Iowa
“Mechanization may have driven out small farmers, smothered the lake, and helped push the town paper to the edge of starvation, but Storm Lake has persevered, clutching its social fabric against the forces that have torn so much of the rural plains asunder. If you care about the future of the Republic, Art Cullen’s thoughtful, clear-eyed ode to his western Iowa hometown is not to be missed.” —Colin Woodard, author of American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America and American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good
“Art Cullen does not believe in the notion of fly-over country. He knows that Storm Lake is a place where hard working and community-minded people live, work, and play. He believes strongly that Storm Lake is worth writing about and fighting for, and you will too after reading Storm Lake.” —Tom Vilsack, former Governor of Iowa
“Pulitzer Prize winner Art Cullen embodies what community journalism is all about, which is an understanding—even love—of place and people, a determination to make things better and the backbone to challenge powerful interests. Cullen knows Iowa and a lot more. This book will delight you and inform you and surprise you. It will also give you hope. At a time when press freedoms are threatened and facts are in dispute, it is good to know that Cullen and his compatriots are standing guard.” —Dan Balz, Chief Correspondent, Washington Post, and author of the New York Times bestseller Collision 2012
“This is a cry from the heart from the heartland, and it is for those people on the coasts who think nothing important happens in the middle of the country. In fact, everything important that is happening pretty much anywhere in the country happens there–right there, around Storm Lake, in Iowa.” —John M. Barry, author of The Great Influenza and Rising Tide
Art Cullen is half the ownership and 25 percent of the news staff of The Storm Lake Times (founded by his brother John) and winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing for his editorials taking on corporate agribusiness for fouling the state’s water and despoiling its soil. He was profiled by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Katie Couric and many other places after winning. This is his first book.
Chapter 1
The First Question: Why?
A good reporter’s first task is to ask questions. It’s a family habit of ours, learned early on.
My first memory is of waving good-bye to Dad on our sun-drenched lawn one Sunday morning a hundred yards north of the sparkling lake. I was two. Dad piled into a car bound for Madison, Wisconsin, where he would be a guinea pig for a potential cure for tuberculosis. The year was 1959.
Why did he leave me there? Where was he going? Would he come back?
A childhood friend of his from Whittemore, Iowa, Lloyd Roth, head of the department of pharmacology at the University of Chicago, was working on this project at the Veterans Administration hospital. Roth was also a physicist and had worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb.
Dad had picked up TB during World War II while stationed in Sicily with the Army Air Corps. He was a captain in charge of a supply depot at an air base; it’s a wonder the planes could fly because he didn’t know a screw from a screwdriver. The disease didn’t fully manifest itself until after the war. When it did, more than a decade later, our family was in quarantine in Storm Lake, Iowa, a meatpacking town of about seven thousand with a small college and, yes, a lake.
There we were, Mom alone with six kids, I the youngest.
Brother Bill let loose hamsters in the basement that spread throughout the house.
Brother Jim and I painted the basement red—including the clothes and bedding drying in the furnace room.
Brother Tom, the eldest, tore the screen doors off the Corral Drive-In theater with a beery buddy.
Brother John wanted to run away.
Sister Ann was taking care of me, after a fashion.
Mom called Dad in the hospital hoping for sympathy. He laughed.
They took out a lung and he wasn’t supposed to last more than a few months. He made it fourteen years, just long enough for me not to understand him.
Meantime, Mom had been battling the VA ever since the war ended, trying to get him promised benefits. The records building in St. Louis burned down and with it the evidence that Dad contracted TB while in service.
She had been through an endless siege for information before. Her first husband and father of my oldest brother, Tom, Omer Kelly, was shot to death in a Chicago bar when Tom was about two. Mom spent years trying to find out how he died. Her father, Art Murray, traveled from Bancroft, Iowa, to Chicago with his lawyer, Luke Linnan, to find justice. Linnan had an old friend who was a judge there. The judge told them to go home, and to quit asking questions.
She never quit asking.
Our mother reared us to do the same.
Sometimes your questions get answered. Which means, of course, that often they don’t. I have been a reporter and editor for Iowa newspapers for thirty-eight years, and I’ve spent a lot of that time asking questions about little towns and about quiet people who also ask the same questions amid a patchwork of corn and soybean rows.
I didn’t mean to wind up in Storm Lake at all. I was driving to the big city and bright lights but took a U-turn to come back home where brother John had just started a weekly newspaper, The Storm Lake Times. I did not want to go back. But the journey led me to the story of a lifetime, to a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for taking on corporate agriculture over river pollution, and down a road to a place where I finally realized that I belonged.
Worlds are built and worlds are buried amid the tall grass here in Iowa. You plunge your finger in the soft black soil and expose a seed, a kernel of knowing where you are, a story, an idea, a myth of who you are, and it grows out here against all the odds. It persists against the hail that comes sideways. It preserves itself frozen in a January gale out of the northwest that makes you wonder how you ever survived. It gets flooded and scorched and comes back. No matter what you do for the next ten years, it comes back. It demands you pay heed to it, heel to it, nurture it, and hope for it. It’s the land, the story, an impulse to take a rough first draft of history, a drive to divine some truth in a place that lays it bare, by asking and listening. To love a place and be its chronicler, to commit yourself to it, to prick its conscience and make it aware that we have bucked up against its limits, and to leave your mark for posterity. The seed becomes a song, its verses written in this expansive green garden, and you are left to discern them and write one anew. To be a friend to the place and not to spoil it.
These are the questions I start with.
Who came first, and where did they go?
What is our place?
When will I live up to him?
How do we live against that horizon?
Why am I drawn or pushed here?
Where are we going?
Into the pink sunset, down Buena Vista County blacktop C-49, as the combines spew dust and corn stover, you can almost see the lights eleven miles west as dusk enshrouds Varina, home to St. Columbkille Catholic Church and a grain elevator outpost with a smattering of weathered frame houses.
Home beckons.
Storm Lake, Iowa.
US
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| Dimensions | 0.7000 × 5.4500 × 8.4000 in |
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| Subjects | storm lake, heartland, public policy, POL020000, democratic candidates, iowa caucus, heartland forum, Iowa Farmers Union, gifts for environmentalists, gifts for journalists, art cullen, patriot, small town America, hypoxia, soybean, nitrogen, dreamer, daca, dredging, gulf of mexico, water works, des moines, agriculture, immigration, rural, SOC026020, trump, midwest, environment, journalism, climate change, pulitzer, global warming, primary, gifts for writers, farm, mexico, water, immigrant, iowa, newspaper, presidential election, American politics, 2020 |