Worthington Minnesota "My memories of Worthington are ... colored by what went on with my father," says Tim O'Brien.

Layne Kennedy

From Brooklyn to Worthington, Minnesota

Novelist Tim O'Brien revisits his past to come to terms with his rural hometown

  • By Tim O'Brien
  • Photographs by Layne Kennedy
  • Smithsonian magazine, November 2009

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    Tim OBrien

    From Brooklyn to Worthington, Minnesota

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    From the year of his birth in 1914 until the outbreak of war in 1941, my father lived in a mostly white, mostly working-class, mostly Irish Catholic neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. He was an altar boy. He played stickball and freeze tag on safe, tree-lined streets. To hear my dad talk about it, one would've thought he had grown up in some long-lost Eden, an urban paradise that had vanished beneath the seas of history, and until his death a few years ago, he held fast to an impossibly idyllic, relentlessly romanticized Brooklyn of the 1920s and '30s. No matter that his own father died in 1925. No matter that he went to work as a 12-year-old to help support a family of five. No matter the hardships of the Great Depression. Despite everything, my dad's eyes would soften as he reminisced about weekend excursions to Coney Island, apartment buildings festooned with flower boxes, the aroma of hot bread at the corner bakery, Saturday afternoons at Ebbets Field, the noisy bustle along Flatbush Avenue, pickup football games on the Parade Grounds, ice-cream cones that could be had for a nickel and a polite thank-you.

    Following Pearl Harbor, my father joined the Navy, and soon afterward, without the dimmest inkling that he had stepped off a great cliff, he left behind both Brooklyn and his youth. He served on a destroyer at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, met my mother in Norfolk, Virginia, got married in 1945, and, for reasons still unclear to me, set off with my mom to live amid the corn and soybeans of southern Minnesota. (True, my mother had grown up in the area, but even so, why didn't they settle in Brooklyn? Why not Pasadena or even the Bahamas?)

    I showed up in October 1946, part of an early surge that would become a great nationwide baby boom. My sister, Kathy, was born a year later. In the summer of 1954, after several years in Austin, Minnesota, our family moved across the state to the small, rural town of Worthington, where my dad became regional manager for a life insurance company. To me, at age 7, Worthington seemed a perfectly splendid spot on the earth. There was ice skating in winter, organized baseball in summer, a fine old Carnegie library, a decent golf course, a Dairy Queen, an outdoor movie theater and a lake clean enough for swimming. More impressively, the town styled itself Turkey Capital of the World, a title that struck me as both grand and a bit peculiar. Among the earth's offerings, turkeys seemed a strange thing to boast about. Still, I was content for the first year or two. I was very close to happy.

    My father, though, did not care for the place. Too isolated. Too dull and pastoral. Too far removed from his big-city youth.

    He soon began drinking. He drank a lot, and he drank often, and with each passing year he drank more. Over the next decade he twice ended up in a state treatment facility for alcoholics. None of this, of course, was the fault of the town, any more than soybeans can be faulted for being soybeans. Rather, like a suit of clothes that may fit beautifully on one man but too snugly on another, I have come to believe that Worthington—or maybe the rural Midwest in general—made my dad feel somehow limited, consigned to a life he hadn't planned for himself, marooned as a permanent stranger in a place he could not understand in his blood. An outgoing, extravagantly verbal man, he now lived among famously laconic Norwegians. A man accustomed to a certain vertical scale to things, he lived on prairies so flat and so unvaried that one spot could be mistaken for any other. A man who had dreamed of becoming a writer, he found himself driving down lonely farm lanes with his insurance applications and a halfhearted sales pitch.

    Then, as now, Worthington was a long way from Brooklyn, and not just in the geographical sense. Tucked into the southwestern corner of Minnesota—12 miles from Iowa, 45 miles from South Dakota—the town was home to about 8,000 people when our family arrived in 1954. For centuries the surrounding plains had been the land of the Sioux, but by the mid-1950s not much remained of that: a few burial mounds, an arrowhead here and there, and some borrowed nomenclature. To the south was Sioux City, to the west Sioux Falls, to the northeast Mankato, where on December 26, 1862, a group of 38 Sioux were hanged by the federal government in a single mass execution, the result of a bloody revolt earlier that year.

    Founded in the 1870s as a railroad watering station, Worthington was an agricultural community almost from the start. Tidy farms sprang up. Sturdy Germans and Scandinavians began fencing in and squaring off the Sioux's stolen hunting grounds. Alongside the few surviving Indian names—Lake Okabena, Ocheyedan River—such solidly European names as Jackson and Fulda and Lismore and Worthington were soon transposed to the prairie. Throughout my youth, and still today, the town was at its core a support system for outlying farms. No coincidence that I played shortstop for the Rural Electric Association's Little League team. No coincidence that a meatpacking plant became, and remains, the town's primary employer.

    For my father, still a relatively young man, it had to be bewildering to find himself in a landscape of grain elevators, silos, farm implement dealerships, feed stores and livestock sales barns. I don't mean to be deterministic about it. Human suffering can rarely be reduced to a single cause, and my dad may well have ended up with similar problems no matter where he lived. Yet unlike Chicago or New York, small-town Minnesota did not allow a man's failings to disappear beneath a veil of numbers. People talked. Secrets did not stay secret. And for me, already full of shame and embarrassment at my dad's drinking, the humiliating glare of public scrutiny began eating away at my stomach and at my self-esteem. I overheard things in school. There was teasing and innuendo. I felt pitied at times. Other times I felt judged. Some of this was imagined, no doubt, but some was as real as a toothache. One summer afternoon in the late '50s, I heard myself explaining to my teammates that my dad would no longer be coaching Little League, that he was in a state hospital, that he might or might not be back home that summer. I did not utter the word "alcohol"—nothing of the sort—but the mortification of that day still opens a trapdoor in my heart.

    From the year of his birth in 1914 until the outbreak of war in 1941, my father lived in a mostly white, mostly working-class, mostly Irish Catholic neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. He was an altar boy. He played stickball and freeze tag on safe, tree-lined streets. To hear my dad talk about it, one would've thought he had grown up in some long-lost Eden, an urban paradise that had vanished beneath the seas of history, and until his death a few years ago, he held fast to an impossibly idyllic, relentlessly romanticized Brooklyn of the 1920s and '30s. No matter that his own father died in 1925. No matter that he went to work as a 12-year-old to help support a family of five. No matter the hardships of the Great Depression. Despite everything, my dad's eyes would soften as he reminisced about weekend excursions to Coney Island, apartment buildings festooned with flower boxes, the aroma of hot bread at the corner bakery, Saturday afternoons at Ebbets Field, the noisy bustle along Flatbush Avenue, pickup football games on the Parade Grounds, ice-cream cones that could be had for a nickel and a polite thank-you.

    Following Pearl Harbor, my father joined the Navy, and soon afterward, without the dimmest inkling that he had stepped off a great cliff, he left behind both Brooklyn and his youth. He served on a destroyer at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, met my mother in Norfolk, Virginia, got married in 1945, and, for reasons still unclear to me, set off with my mom to live amid the corn and soybeans of southern Minnesota. (True, my mother had grown up in the area, but even so, why didn't they settle in Brooklyn? Why not Pasadena or even the Bahamas?)

    I showed up in October 1946, part of an early surge that would become a great nationwide baby boom. My sister, Kathy, was born a year later. In the summer of 1954, after several years in Austin, Minnesota, our family moved across the state to the small, rural town of Worthington, where my dad became regional manager for a life insurance company. To me, at age 7, Worthington seemed a perfectly splendid spot on the earth. There was ice skating in winter, organized baseball in summer, a fine old Carnegie library, a decent golf course, a Dairy Queen, an outdoor movie theater and a lake clean enough for swimming. More impressively, the town styled itself Turkey Capital of the World, a title that struck me as both grand and a bit peculiar. Among the earth's offerings, turkeys seemed a strange thing to boast about. Still, I was content for the first year or two. I was very close to happy.

    My father, though, did not care for the place. Too isolated. Too dull and pastoral. Too far removed from his big-city youth.

    He soon began drinking. He drank a lot, and he drank often, and with each passing year he drank more. Over the next decade he twice ended up in a state treatment facility for alcoholics. None of this, of course, was the fault of the town, any more than soybeans can be faulted for being soybeans. Rather, like a suit of clothes that may fit beautifully on one man but too snugly on another, I have come to believe that Worthington—or maybe the rural Midwest in general—made my dad feel somehow limited, consigned to a life he hadn't planned for himself, marooned as a permanent stranger in a place he could not understand in his blood. An outgoing, extravagantly verbal man, he now lived among famously laconic Norwegians. A man accustomed to a certain vertical scale to things, he lived on prairies so flat and so unvaried that one spot could be mistaken for any other. A man who had dreamed of becoming a writer, he found himself driving down lonely farm lanes with his insurance applications and a halfhearted sales pitch.

    Then, as now, Worthington was a long way from Brooklyn, and not just in the geographical sense. Tucked into the southwestern corner of Minnesota—12 miles from Iowa, 45 miles from South Dakota—the town was home to about 8,000 people when our family arrived in 1954. For centuries the surrounding plains had been the land of the Sioux, but by the mid-1950s not much remained of that: a few burial mounds, an arrowhead here and there, and some borrowed nomenclature. To the south was Sioux City, to the west Sioux Falls, to the northeast Mankato, where on December 26, 1862, a group of 38 Sioux were hanged by the federal government in a single mass execution, the result of a bloody revolt earlier that year.

    Founded in the 1870s as a railroad watering station, Worthington was an agricultural community almost from the start. Tidy farms sprang up. Sturdy Germans and Scandinavians began fencing in and squaring off the Sioux's stolen hunting grounds. Alongside the few surviving Indian names—Lake Okabena, Ocheyedan River—such solidly European names as Jackson and Fulda and Lismore and Worthington were soon transposed to the prairie. Throughout my youth, and still today, the town was at its core a support system for outlying farms. No coincidence that I played shortstop for the Rural Electric Association's Little League team. No coincidence that a meatpacking plant became, and remains, the town's primary employer.

    For my father, still a relatively young man, it had to be bewildering to find himself in a landscape of grain elevators, silos, farm implement dealerships, feed stores and livestock sales barns. I don't mean to be deterministic about it. Human suffering can rarely be reduced to a single cause, and my dad may well have ended up with similar problems no matter where he lived. Yet unlike Chicago or New York, small-town Minnesota did not allow a man's failings to disappear beneath a veil of numbers. People talked. Secrets did not stay secret. And for me, already full of shame and embarrassment at my dad's drinking, the humiliating glare of public scrutiny began eating away at my stomach and at my self-esteem. I overheard things in school. There was teasing and innuendo. I felt pitied at times. Other times I felt judged. Some of this was imagined, no doubt, but some was as real as a toothache. One summer afternoon in the late '50s, I heard myself explaining to my teammates that my dad would no longer be coaching Little League, that he was in a state hospital, that he might or might not be back home that summer. I did not utter the word "alcohol"—nothing of the sort—but the mortification of that day still opens a trapdoor in my heart.

    Decades later, my memories of Worthington are as much colored by what went on with my father—his increasing bitterness, the gossip, the midnight quarrels, the silent suppers, the bottles hidden away in the garage—as by anything having to do with the town itself. I began to hate the place. Not for what it was, but for what it was to me, and to my dad. After all, I loved my father. He was a good man. He was funny and intelligent and well read and conversant in history and a terrific storyteller and generous with his time and great with kids. Yet every object in town seemed to shimmer with an opposite judgment. The water tower overlooking Centennial Park seemed censorious and unforgiving. Main Street's Gobbler Café, with its crowd of Sunday diners fresh from church, seemed to hum with a soft, persistent rebuke.

    Again, this was partly an echo of my own pain and fear. But pain and fear have a way of influencing our attitudes toward the most innocent, most inanimate objects in the world. Places are defined not just by their physicality, but also by the joys and tragedies that transpire in those places. A tree is a tree until it is used for a hanging. A liquor store is a liquor store until your father almost owns the joint. (Years later, as a soldier in Vietnam, I would encounter this dynamic again. The paddies and the mountains and the red clay trails—all of it seemed to pulse with the purest evil.) After departing for college in 1964, I never again lived in Worthington. My parents stayed on well into their old age, finally moving in 2002 to a retirement community in San Antonio. My dad died two years later.

    A few months ago, when I paid a return visit to Worthington, a deep and familiar sadness settled inside me as I approached the town on Highway 60. The flat, repetitive landscape carried the feel of eternity, utterly without limit, reaching off toward a vast horizon just as our lives do. Maybe I was feeling old. Maybe, like my father, I was conscious of my own lost youth.

    I stayed in Worthington only a short while, but long enough to discover that much had changed. In place of the almost entirely white community of 50 years ago, I found a town in which 42 languages or dialects are spoken, a place teeming with immigrants from Laos, Peru, Ethiopia, Sudan, Thailand, Vietnam and Mexico. Soccer is played on the field where I once booted ground balls. On the premises of the old Coast to Coast hardware store is a thriving establishment called Top Asian Foods; the Comunidad Cristiana de Worth­­ington occupies the site of a restaurant where I once tried to bribe high-school dates with Cokes and burgers. In the town's phone book, alongside the Andersons and Jensens of my youth, there were such surnames as Ngamsang and Ngoc and Flores and Figueroa.

    The new, cosmopolitan Worthington, with a population of around 11,000, did not arise without tensions and resentments. A county Web page listing incarcerations contains a hefty percentage of Spanish, Asian and African names, and, as might be expected, few newcomers are among Worthington's most prosperous citizens. Barriers of language and tradition haven't completely vanished.

    But the sadness I'd felt on returning home was replaced by a surprised, even shocked admiration for the community's flexibility and resilience. (If towns could suffer heart attacks, I would've imagined Worthington dropping stone-dead at such radical change.) I was astonished, yes, and I was also a little proud of the place. Whatever its growing pains and residual problems, the insular, homog­enized community of my youth had managed to accept and accommodate a truly amazing new diversity.

    Near the end of my visit, I stopped briefly in front of my old house on 11th Avenue. The day was sunny and still. The house seemed deserted. For a while I just sat there, feeling all kinds of things, half hoping for some closing benediction. I suppose I was seeking ghosts from my past. Maybe a glimpse of my dad. Maybe the two of us playing catch on a summer afternoon. But of course he was gone now, and so was the town I grew up in.

    Tim O'Brien's books include Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried.


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    Comments

    I live in Worthington, MN and, in fact I knew Tim O'Brien and was interviewed by Tim when he made his 2009 sojourn back to his home town. Tim's observations are very interesting to me as I made the decision years ago to live my live in this small, rural prairie town. I have witnessed the changes Tim speaks of firsthand. I knew Tim's father real well and played golf with Bill on many ocassions. I played on the same high school golf team as Tim's brother, Greg and still see him "once in a blue moon". While Tim's perspective on Worthington is different from how I see its evolution, it is probably quite accurate. Thanks, Tim O'Brien for a very introspective view on Worthington now and then. I hope our path cross again sometime in the future!

    Posted by Marty Rickers on October 22,2009 | 05:32 PM

    Hi Tim~ I graduated from high school with you, and I read your Smithsonian Magazine article a few minutes ago. I thought it was very well written and touching as I can relate to many personal comments you made. We had our 45th class reunion Sept. 19, and I actually tried to get an address to send to you some information. I had only gone to our first reunion, but this one was so unbelievable! Within 45 years, many faces have changed but there was definitely a bonding taking place after visiting with many of our classmates.I had only a few close friends in high school and they seemed to be there also. I never felt particularly close to many in our large class of '64. Through the years, I have been so proud of your reporting on CNN. My husband as well served in Viet Nam and an experience he will never forget. That is evident when he starts a conversation with someone on the topic!! I feel like I am rambling on trying to get some things in this email. I would really enjoy hearing from you and corresponding again. I called the magazine to see if I could get your address, but of course, they wouldn't give that out. They will forward a letter, however. I have much to say to you on your article. Hoping to hear from you.

    Your classmate,
    Sandi

    Posted by Sandra (Ling) Schulze on October 23,2009 | 01:27 PM

    What a great article! Like Tim, I, too, lived in Worthington and was a classmate of Marty Rickers, the previous commenter. I just didn't live there as long. But the community is in my blood and is a very big part of me.

    Small towns all over America celebrate something like Castroville, California's Artichoke Festival, or Gayville, South Dakota and Yates Center, Kansas claiming to be the Hay Capital of the World. Small towns take great pride in their heritage and rightfully so.

    I love going to Turkey Day and catching up with old friends, driving by our old house and remembering what my life was once like. Some people say you can't go home. I don't believe that. I love to go home and when I leave, look forward to my next visit.

    Posted by Mike Patrick on October 23,2009 | 04:58 PM

    Tim, thank you for the wonderful article in Smithsonian. When it came in the mail yesterday and I saw the cover cap was about you, I knew immediately you were sharing your Worthington roots. As a Rickers sibling who ventured away from Worthington (I now live in Denver, CO), I share your pride for the way Worthington has adapted to its new residents and changing community. People still tease me about being from the "Turkey Capital" of the world, but I smile and remember the good ol' days.

    What my brother failed to mention above is that our family memories of you are as a magician at Marty's birthday party when he was 9 or 10 and you were in high school. I still remember you bringing in your "tricks" and we all were looking for your rabbit!!! I frankly don't remember if you pulled a rabbit out of your hat, but I do know that you entertained us well. I also know that you have been "entertaining" our nation well over the past 30 years with your excellent writing. Keep up the good work!

    Posted by Margaret Rickers Hinchey on October 23,2009 | 05:35 PM

    Several weeks ago I finished reading, The Things They Carried. Last night I read My Kind of Town in the Smithsonian Magazine and it was not until then that, if the years are correct, Mr. O'Brien and I shared the same kindergarten class in Austin, MN. But more interesting was that my mother and his father may have both experienced the sadness at the loss of an intellectual life. Worthington, MN and Huron, South Dakota.

    While my mother nor I were not chastised, she turned more and more to Tim's fathers affliction as a means of enduring the void. She had flirted with the intellect of Washington DC during WWII as a part of the Code and Cypher Ladies from Canada and she dutifully struggled to make my sister and I work at original thought.

    I can't relate to Vietnam only because I was 4F due to hearing loss. My ROTC Commander tried to get me to sign a waver so I could 'Be a part of THIS mans army' He said as I asked why..."So you can't hold us responsible for not hearing bullets passing and in-coming mortar rounds."

    Carry on old friend.

    Posted by Bruce Smalley on October 25,2009 | 06:51 PM

    Hello, Tim.
    What a remarkable picture you paint of your growing up years in Wgtn. I was your classmate and never had any inkling of what you were going through. I just recall that you were a great writer,and Miss Wick was quite the English teacher in those days. I'm glad you got back to visit Wgtn. Like Sandi,I found that our class re-union this year was really a bonding that had not happened before. My old home across the street from the lake on West Shore Drive is now occupied by another family. I, too, am amazed at the changes in the town. It doesn't seem at all like the place that I grew up in. Take care, and I hope our paths cross some time in the future. Jan

    Posted by Janice on October 25,2009 | 07:44 PM

    Hi Tim O'Brien,
    I was recently reunited with my O'Brien cousins at a funeral for my cousin Tom O'Brien. My cousin Matthew and I were discussing you and your books and wondering how an O'Brien got to Minnesota. Well, you've answered our query.
    I was born in Brooklyn in '47 and I yearn for the Brooklyn you so aptly described in this article, I wonder if this isn't so for many transplanted Brooklynites. We moved to Jersey when I was about fours years old but we returned for summers and holidays and those were the best days of my childhood.
    My Dad too turned to alcohol for solace and thinking now how I yearn for Brooklyn, must he not also have yearned for his lost days at Ebbets Field, the Parade Grounds, Coney Island and Flatbush Ave with a butcher and a baker just down the block?
    Too bad our dads have passed on, perhaps they knew each other in that long ago Brooklyn of so many dreams.
    Now I think I'll go and read "The Things They Carried" again because I love that book. Thanks so much.
    Nancy O'Brien

    Posted by Nancy on October 26,2009 | 09:21 AM

    Tim,
    What a wonderful article...reading about your father brought tears to my eyes. I first met him when I was a grade-school girl...our families would spend time watching my brother Mike and your brother, Greg, play Legion Baseball together. My dad, Bruce Traphagen, who died in 1978, always spoke highly of your Dad. Bill O'Brien was such a special man...very funny, intelligent and always made me feel good with his wonderful sense of humor, spoken in the great Brooklyn accent of his! Our friends, Pat and Karyl O'Neill, also speak so fondly of your dad. I had no idea that he dreamed of being a writer...he would have been a great one, I'm sure...just like his son. I was not aware of his reputation from the 1950's...but I know he was a good man...had a wonderful wife and was proud of his family! Thanks for sharing your memories!

    Posted by Paula Traphagen-Bossert on October 26,2009 | 01:13 PM

    Hello Tim
    I read with intrest your article about Worthington, Minnesota. My grandparents lived in Nobles County long before I was born. I lived in the same house till I graduated from WJC. My high school class of '59 held their 50th reunion on Turkey Day weekend this year and I was able to ride on a hay wagon in the parade. The theatres that you mentioned provided me with a job that was a lot of fun and a great education. My father taught me the skills of woodworking in his cabinet shop and I am still using the same tools that he used to support our family of 9 kids. Our mother made sure that we were in church every Sunday and for that I am very thankful.

    I also found the town of my youth greatly changed but I feel fortuniate to be able to return to visit family and friends in the Worthington area.

    Thank you for your article,
    Mel Leistico

    Posted by Mel Leistico on October 26,2009 | 10:58 PM

    Hi Neighbor,

    Was just back to Worthington for Turkey Day and my 50th class reunion. You are correct, Worthington has become the melting pot of rural America. Some things have change in town, but on the most part have remained the same. I too drove down 11th Ave and the houses look small today and yet they were large when we lived there. Say hi to Kathy. Drop a line when you have time.

    Gerry Osterberg
    Class of 59

    Posted by Gerry Osterberg on October 27,2009 | 06:05 AM

    Hi Tim, I like the others have been trying to track you down. We did so many things together as junior high schoolers... I especially remember the newspaper we published and I still have copies of. Dick and I have been in AZ since 1970 and love it. We are now in Houston fighting Leukemia for Dick which we both attribute to that Agent Orange stuff. Drop a line sometime.
    Barb

    Posted by Barb Griffith Bjornstad on October 27,2009 | 06:46 PM

    I have Grand Children living in near by Round Lake where their Dad, my son, is a Lutheran pastor. I live in Cincinnati and have found it reassuring for the children to be in this setting of relative tranquility. Thanks fore the article.

    Posted by Ronn Rucker on October 28,2009 | 10:34 AM

    Tim,

    You probaly don't remember me because, I hate to tell you this, but I am about 4 years younger than you; however, we were neighbors and our families did things together. I am sure our dads drank together. My dad, Harry (Duney) Metz, Jr. died at the age of 38 and I was 12 at the time so I have always been a little jealous of anyone who has both their parents to an old age. (The parents to an old age, not you!) I also remember your 3-legged dog. That dog could run faster than any 4-legged dog I had ever seen or have seen since. I think I remember our parents shared a lawn mower for a few summers too, until a couple of houses "sprang up" between your house and ours. I loved your article on Worthington. When I was a kid I thought it was the best place in the whole world (even though I had never been anywhere else in the word). Since then I have been to and lived in a lot of different places in the world and I find the best place is where I am at the time. Home isn't a place it is a state of mind to me. Worthington gave me good roots and those roots let me grow and move on to other places and people. Thanks for the memories!! Chris (Metz) Lucas

    Posted by Chris (Metz) Lucas on October 29,2009 | 01:25 PM

    The Tim O'Brien article about Worthington and Brooklyn is interesting and amusing, but not pertinent. What does his family dysfunction have to do with Worthington? I would say nothing at all. If he wants to discuss his family, that is one thing. If he wants to discuss Worthington, that is quite another thing.

    The fact is that Worthington is wholly the equal of Brooklyn or any other place he would care to mention. I lived in Brooklyn for several years, but I am essentially a life long resident of Worthington and I can tell you that Brooklyn has absolutely nothing on Worthington. Of course, I do not confuse my personal or family relationships with place like he does.

    Tim O'Brien was fortunate indeed to grow up in a civilized place like Worthington. It was the best thing his father ever did for his family. But ingratitude is ever the reward we get for wayward sons.

    Tim O'Brien apparently favors diversity of population. We shall soon see if Worthington and the nation is any better for having a diverse population. The lessons of history are not at all encouraging in this respect, but maybe Tim O'Brien, the novelist, knows more about these sort of things than I do.

    Posted by Edward Dolan on October 29,2009 | 10:17 PM

    Great article. My hometown was also Worthington, Minnesota. I wrote about my experience on my blog at: http://chainlink-chainoflakesncd.blogspot.com/

    Posted by Paul Moore on October 31,2009 | 12:53 PM

    Tim:

    Thank you for a good article. You captured Worthington well, then and now.

    I was at our 45th high school class reunion, though missed the Turkey Day parade. It was good to get back and to find out how our Class of 1964 was doing. After the reunion, I drove around the lake and past the house on Smith Ave. that I grew up in - a tradition whenever I get back to town.

    I enjoyed your talk in the Twin Cities last March and appreciate your writing this article for the Smithsonian.

    Barb Sommer

    Posted by Barb Windschill Sommer on November 4,2009 | 12:13 PM

    Thanks, Tim, for your thoughts on 'Our Town'. I listen now as kids in the Saint Paul schools are reading and discussing 'The Things They Carried' and I am remembering how much fun it was for students in Worthington to read that book. It was their book.

    I left Worthington 13 years ago, but a part of me will always miss the small town intimacy in all of its splendor and pain.

    I am sending the article on to many. Thank you again.

    Mary Beth Blegen

    Posted by Mary Beth Blegen on November 4,2009 | 06:35 PM

    Dear Tim,

    Thanks for a wonderful article in which you captured so much of the power and sentiment of what it is to call someplace home. I share memories of a father who could never shake his private battle with alcohol - that often times makes going back to the town where I was raised more than melancholy.

    The last part of your narrative is most compelling as I have been immersed in working with communities undergoing demographic changes and transformation. This is especially true for meat packing towns all across the USA. There is a great deal that folks don't even imagine when they sit down to a turkey dinner or grab a burger. Meat processing is an industry that has brought the world to small, rural communities.

    I thank you for the gripping prose that highlights how lucky we are to have the diversity color our communities and enrich our lives.

    Kind regards.

    Posted by Joe Wismann-Horther on November 5,2009 | 06:49 PM

    Thanks for sharing your heart in this article. My wife is from Worthington, and coming to know the town as an outsider has been a pretty interesting experience. We live in Wisconsin now and only visit there a few times a year. One of those occasions is the annual King Turkey Day celebration... which is only appropriate in light of your reference to Worthington being the Turkey capital of the world.

    Relating to your comments about how you felt about Worthington, particularly the painful mental and emotional associations you mentioned, I have experienced the same to a much lesser degree. After I graduated from college in 1998, I moved in with my parents for about a year. They were living in Poplar Branch, North Carolina, a community that felt very isolated and backward to me. I was very lonely during that year and was wrapped up in my own addictions. It was, simpy put, one of the worst experiences in my life. Even now, if I pass through that area when going down south to visit my parents, or I hear a song that I came to know during that year, I am instantly reminded of how painful that was. Even now, I can feel it in the pit of my stomach.

    All that to simply say that I can certainly relate to how you were feeling about Worthington previous to your recent visit. I'm glad that you were able to see it for what it is becoming. Many of the old vestiges of the "laconic" northern European attitudes remain, but it is being infused with the flavor of new cultures and it has been pretty exciting to see from a distance. My wife and I are adopting a little boy from Ethiopia, and our first experience with Ethiopian food was actually in Worthington, of all places, at the Queen of Sheba restaurant right down town. It is quite the little rural Minnesota town!

    Posted by Ed Hudgins on November 9,2009 | 09:31 AM

    Mr. O'Brien,

    In this article, you bring Worthington, Minnesota, to life. I feel by adding such a personal element you bring this story closer to your readers. I enjoy your writing and can't wait to read more.

    Posted by Mandy Power on November 11,2009 | 07:02 PM

    Tim:

    I really enjoyed the article. It was interesting how you tied the characteristics of a small town to the dysfunction of your family. A small town really can hold you back.

    Even small towns can grow over time though as showcased in your article. The transformation of your former small town to a more diverse and more cultural place sounded like a welcome revelation.

    All in all I thought the story was told from a very interesting perspective. Although the story's pertinence has been questioned by other commenters, I found the story thought provoking, interesting, and a good read.

    Posted by Kevin Bruen on November 13,2009 | 10:01 AM

    The grandson of a blue-collar Sicilian immigrant, I grew up in the 1940s and early '50s in an Illinois village of 100. Insular? Probably. Idyllic? No doubt. Since then, I've had the good fortune to have lived in large cities in several states, traveled to Europe often and had two books published by traditional publishers. Unlike Mr. O'Brien, I look back to my childhood with nothing but fondness. We all go through teenage angst. We all want to see the world. But that doesn't mean the town of our youth was bad, though it may well mean that our home life was not the best.

    I find myself wondering how much diversity is good. Contrary to what Mr. O'Brien and so many others want us to believe--indeed, what they foist upon us as a given--I'm not so sure that the degree of diversity represented by 42 languages and dialects in a town of 11,000, whether in the Midwest or anywhere else, bodes well for our culture. I won't live to see the the answers. My children and grandchildren will. I'm far less confident than Mr. O'Brien in the prospects.

    Posted by Peter Shianna on November 15,2009 | 09:06 PM

    This article was interesting. Like Edward, I initially almost lost interest as the connections being drawn were not logical....but that is exactly the point....the connections we make are not logical in situations like this-but emotional..... nor are the components that create family, individual, and community dynamics logical. The town may not have had anything to do with his father's drinking, nor Brooklyn for that matter, and logically, they do not...but emotionally (Or spiritually if you prefer to think of it in that context) they absolutely are connected, by the bonds of the author's experience and his very human ability to step back and see the connections, as illogical or non causal as they may seem to be....perhaps not standard fare for Somithsoinian, but very intriguing.

    Even more fascinating? Reading the thread of responses....there's more rich material to mine from this. I look forward to a follow up essay.

    Posted by Dale J. Young on November 19,2009 | 03:56 PM

    Looks like I'm joining a number of my fellow former Worthingtonians in their comments. Great article, Tim. I make it home more often than you do and have seen many of the changes you chronicle. The town has indeed changed, and your always observant eye captures more of those changes than most locals probably notice.

    Thanks, too, for remembering your Dad. I never had the privilege of having him as a coach (I was never the athletic type!!), but I do remember a big, gentle man with a shock of white hair stopping at my table at the Nobles County Library to tell me "Steve, keep reading; it opens new worlds for you," and a father who expressed his pride in "all of Tim's books" when I visited with him before interviewing you in 1980.

    Please give my best to your Mom and to Kathy and Greg. I still use "If I Die In A Combat Zone" in my Vietnam War class. It resounds as well with today's students as it did when I first used it 24 years ago.

    And you are always welcome to drop in and visit with my classes if you ever happen to be in Hibbing!!

    Steve Potts, Hibbing, Minnesota

    Posted by Steve Potts on November 19,2009 | 04:38 PM

    Hi Tim
    Just finished reading your article on Worthington and what you remember about it when you grew up here and your perspective of it now. Good article. I was in your sister Kathy class and she introduced us once in high school. The thing I would like to tell you is about your Dad. I got to know your Dad when he and his fellow agent, I believe his name was Tommy Burns, if I remember right, would stop in at the local pool hall in Rushmore, Mn. I'm originally from Rushmore and when your Dad and Tommy would stop in they were alway up for a game of pool. I, and my best friend, played many a pool games with them. I don't remember who won, but what I do remember is, your Dad was one of the nices guys I ever met. By the time the pool games ended, we had tears in our eyes from laughing. I don't know if he drank to much, it's not for me to judge, all I know is he was a very nice guy.

    Posted by Jerry Wiertzema on November 22,2009 | 09:37 PM

    Hi, Tim!

    Just came apon your article about Worthington. You likely will not remember me but I was in your graduating class. I certainly remember you and remember you with great fondness. You were always a gentleman.

    I wasn't aware of your family concerns and never heard anything bad about you nor your family.

    I live in Belle Plaine, Mn (just south of Minneapolis). Have lived pretty much all over Minnesota.

    Now that my parents are gone, I don't make it back to Worthington much although still have some relatives there. Will be going there for a family Christmas party on my wife's side.

    I actually moved back to Worthington from 1988 to 1995. My kids kind of grew up during that time. My daughter met Marty & Pam Ricker's daughter there and are still life-long friends. Worthington was a great place to grow up and I think it was for my kids too, at least for the short time they were there.

    I was back for our 45th High School reunion last month. Had a blast! Was hoping to see you there.

    Would love to see you if you're in our area! Most people pass through Belle Plaine when going to the cities!

    By the way, loved your article!

    - Bob

    Posted by Bob Holbrook on November 23,2009 | 08:13 PM

    Tim,

    I liked the article. I was the class of 83. I knew your brother as he was in the same class as my sister and we knew each other through golf. The main reason for my liking was the warm memories it brought back of the "Silver Fox" as your dad was known to me. Sometimes it was Wild Bill. The summer of 1982, Bill and Gene Seleen took interest in me and let me play some golf with them. They treated me well, gave me wonderful memories and taught me what it meant to look after the next generation. Bill also taught me how to play, and win, at liars poker. Everytime I saw him after that summer, for many years, he would pull a dollar out and call five 9's. He was a good man and lots of fun. I thought he had a wonderful sense of humor and that is what I will remember of him.

    My inlaws still live in Worthington and it os not the same place, but I am not the same person. Life goes on, but I am glad I grew up in Worthington, MN.

    Greg

    Posted by Greg on November 23,2009 | 09:59 PM

    Tim:

    Great article on the both the joy and sorrows of growing up in a small town. As many of the other writers have alluded to your dad Bill was a great guy and fun to be around. I fondly remember referring to Bill and Gene Seleen as pigeon meat when we played golf frequently in the late 60's and early 70's--which is not to say that they didn't occasionally take my money, as you have a few times as well.

    Living in a small town in a much simpler time as we did had its rewards, but it was not enough to cover up the pain that a kid experiences growing up in a dysfunctional home. You've weathered well, have had a great career and inspired countless budding writers and students to put pen to paper. Your parents

    As for Worthington, it's a very different place than when we grew up. Is it better or worse now? Who knows--it is was it is. Immigrants have continued to come to the shores of Lake Okabena to build a new life. Maybe the only thing that's changed is the notion often suggested by one of my cousins "Worthington is the kind of place that everyone thinks they are going to go to heaven." Maybe not so much anymore.

    Talk to you soon

    Greg

    Posted by Greg Andrews on November 30,2009 | 12:47 PM

    What a coincidence. In this issue there was an article about my home town, Buckhannon,WV and one on Worthington Mn where I lived one year when my husband who was with Campbell Soup, managed the "Creamery" or the chicken plant for Swanson Co. We built a house built my Orvile Apple and only lived in it for three months as we were transferred to Omaha, Nb. My memmories are of warm and friendly people and "one hot day" on July 4th and the ice fishing and the betting on the day the old car would go through the ice in the winter. Also, the -23 degree day when you could not get warm.

    Posted by Julia Sweeney on December 22,2009 | 01:19 PM

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