The Great Sand Fracas of Ames County (7 page)

She walked across campus thinking about what kind of trouble she must be in and what the possible punishment might be. And she wondered how she would break the news to her parents, who were counting on her to do well and to help them manage the supper club when she graduated. The Joneses had spent all their savings on enlarging, modernizing, and refurbishing the supper club, turning it into a popular place for locals and tourists alike.

Marilyn had been helping out at the supper club ever since she was three or four years old, and by the time she was in high school, she was waiting on tables and doing all kinds of odd jobs around the place. During the summers she worked there full-time. It wasn't a bad summer job—her parents even paid her a salary. But she would have preferred going out with her friends and spending some time away from the supper club.

She pulled open the main office door, walked up to the counter, and in a quiet voice said, “My name is Marilyn Jones, and I was told you needed to see me.”

“Oh, Marilyn, thank you so much for coming by so promptly,” said the secretary behind the counter, a gray-haired and very friendly woman. “Dr. Sykes is waiting to talk with you. His office is the first one down the hall.”

Marilyn's head was still filled with worry about what she had done wrong as she knocked on the closed door. “Come right in,” she heard.

“I'm Marilyn Jones.”

“I'm Dr. Sykes,” the plumpish, round-faced man on the other side of a rather cluttered desk said. “Please be seated.” He pointed to a chair that sat alongside his desk.

Dr. Sykes took off his glasses, put them on the desk, and then looked right at Marilyn and said, “I'm afraid I have bad news for you.”

Marilyn steeled herself for the worst. Would she be placed on academic probation? Had her partying gone too far, and was she going to receive a reprimand of some type? But what she heard was beyond anything she expected.

“We've just learned that your parents have been killed in a car accident,” Dr. Sykes said quietly. “It happened at nine this morning on Highway 22, just north of Montello.”

“What did you say?” Marilyn asked, hoping she had not heard correctly.

Dr. Sykes repeated, this time a bit more slowly. “Your parents were both killed in a car accident this morning.”

“Oh, no. Oh, no. That can't be true. It must be someone else. Are you sure?” blurted out Marilyn, her blue eyes filling with tears.

“It's true, Marilyn. I stand ready to help you in any way I can—you just need to tell me how.”

“It's not true. It's not true,” Marilyn cried, pounding her hands on Dr. Sykes's desk, knocking one of the piles of papers to the floor. But when she looked into Dr. Sykes's sad face, she knew it was true.

Late that afternoon she tried to call her sister, Gloria, ten years her senior, to tell her of their parents' death and to ask her advice on funeral arrangements and what she should do with the supper club. Since she left for California in 1966 after a big family fight, Gloria had not once called or written to either of her parents or to Marilyn—not on their birthdays, not at Christmas, never. Marilyn thought she had moved to Los Angeles, but that city and the suburbs had no listing for a Gloria Jones.

Three days later, after Fred and Barbara Jones's obituary was published in the
Ames County Argus
, Marilyn received a phone call.

“This is Gloria,” the voice on the other end said, “your sister. I read about our parents dying in a car accident. I won't be coming to the funeral—you probably guessed that.”

“I . . . I was hoping you'd come,” said Marilyn.

“Well, I won't be there. If you are concerned about who gets the supper club, it's yours. I want no part of it. I assume you have an attorney. Have him send me the necessary papers and I'll sign them so you have clear title.” Gloria then gave Marilyn a Los Angeles post office box number and hung up.

And so at age nineteen, Marilyn Jones arranged for the funeral of her parents with services at the Church of the Holy Redeemed, a church that they dearly loved and where Marilyn and Gloria had attended Sunday school. She thought long and hard about what to do with the Link Lake Supper Club and finally decided to drop out of school and take over the management of the place. After all, she knew the ins and outs of the supper club as well as her parents did, having worked there since she was a little kid. She shared this information with the family's attorney, William Glaser, when she met with him to discuss her parents' estate.

“Are you sure that's what you want to do? Running a business is not all fun and games,” cautioned Glaser. “What about your sister? Is she interested?”

“No, Gloria said I can do whatever I want, that it's mine. She said to send the necessary papers to a Los Angeles post office number and she'd sign them giving me clear title.”

“I'll do that and I'll also help you get started managing the place, especially with the legal work. And I won't charge you a dime. Your folks were excellent clients,” said Glaser.

“Thank you, I'll need all the help I can get.”

Now, forty-two years later, Marilyn thought about her parents as she saw the headline “Link Lake Cemetery Walk a Perennial Hit” in the new issue of the
Ames County Argus
.

What a bunch of foolishness
, she thought.
Who cares about a bunch of dead people? Just who in the world cares? Certainly not me.
She knew her parents were recognized on these walks, but she never attended. In fact she disagreed with the whole idea.
When are these people going to quit focusing on the past and begin thinking about the future? It's the future we should be worrying about. Forget the past. We can't do anything about it anyway. But we can do something about the future.

She could never understand or accept that her parents had once been active in the Link Lake Historical Society.
I'm sure they must have had better things to do with their time. I should tell Emily Higgins to remove them from the cemetery tour
.

As Marilyn read the article, it was mentioned that the Link Lake Historical Society's many activities attract people to Link Lake and remind the local citizens of their history and its importance.
How silly. How many people go on a cemetery walk, fifty or so? And half of them live here. How can anyone call that important?

Yet for all her protests that people should forget about the past, a quiet voice in Marilyn's head reminded her that she too wanted to be remembered—that she had made important contributions to Link Lake, like her parents before her. That voice seemed to grow louder with each passing day. She was hoping that her hard work with the Economic Development Council would vault her to the top of the list of Link Lake's most important citizens.

The Link Lake Economic Development Council had met monthly since Marilyn and the mayor organized it in 2008 when the Great Recession was sweeping across the country. Unfortunately the meetings had yielded little. Since the defeat of the council's efforts to bring the Big R restaurant chain to Link Lake, the council had not accomplished much and seemed to be losing steam.

On this cool and cloudy spring day, as she waited for the council's next meeting, Marilyn thought about how she had gotten to where she was. And she thought about how Link Lake had changed since she was a little girl growing up there and working for her parents at the supper club.

She recalled that the stores in town, the saloons, and the churches seemed to be thriving during the late 1950s and into the early 1960s—and the supper club, where she had spent so much time working with her parents, had done very well in those years. She remembered riding her bike past the village population sign that noted eight hundred residents then.

Today as she thought about the economy of the village when she was a kid, she realized it had depended on the farmers living in the area who bought supplies and equipment in town. And she also knew the farmers had depended on the village as a market for their milk and produce. By the 1960s, everything had begun to change dramatically. Farms got larger and more and bigger equipment arrived. The small farms began disappearing and young people left the country for work in the urban areas. Electricity, tractors, grain combines, forage harvesters, hybrid seeds, commercial fertilizers, and chemical pesticides arrived on the farm. Television, indoor plumbing, and central heating made farm life comparable to what city folk had long taken for granted. Today only a handful of active farms remained in the Link Lake community. Marilyn's friend Lucas Drake and his wife owned and operated one of them—a one-thousand-acre corn and soybean operation. Unlike those large commercial farms, Ambrose Adler's farm remained at 160 acres and had embraced almost none of the agricultural and cultural advances that were sweeping across the country. But Marilyn thought Adler was a strange old man who was trying to hang on to the past. She had nothing but disdain for him.

Marilyn remembered when the old gristmill ceased operation, and soon after that, the cheese factory closed. Then it was the hardware store and the lumber yard and feed store that slammed shut their doors. Soon the Link Lake Mercantile stood empty, as did the pharmacy and meat market. The churches struggled to survive. Marilyn recalled attending one-room country school Christmas programs with her parents and watching the little farm kids perform on a makeshift stage—some of them quite good, many not so much. By the mid-1960s all of these schools were closed, and the Christmas programs were no more. Marilyn remembered farm kids in her Link Lake Elementary School classes, bussed in from the country after their community schools closed.

Two small manufacturing industries moved into the village sometime in the 1960s; one made plastic toys—the kind found in vending machines—and the other manufactured premium airplane propellers for the growing private plane owners. But still the village mostly depended on the nearby farmers for most of its economy.

Once again, Link Lake was in transition, even though some of the residents had difficulty accepting the changes. The businesspeople surely were feeling the results of the revolution in agriculture that was occurring. Even the Link Lake Tap felt the pinch, especially during the winter months when the tourist trade was slim to none. But their businesses picked up again in summer as Link Lake moved from a farm service center to a tourist town.

One of the outstanding features of the village was its location on Link Lake, some eight miles long and a mile or two wide and rich with natural beauty, not to mention northern pike, bass, and assorted pan fish. Today it seemed like every month a new condominium appeared on the shores of Link Lake, or a vacation home for the well-to-do from the cities. These developments were good for Marilyn's business, as many of these new people often ate at her supper club.

In some ways, Link Lake's draw for tourist money kept it alive, if not thriving. Some of the former businesses had been able to change with the times. The Mercantile became an antique store. The former pharmacy became the Eat Well Café, the once hardware store a gift shop, the old bank a historical museum, and the lumberyard a furniture and carpet store catering especially to those with high-end second homes on Link Lake and other lakes in Ames County and beyond.

But when the twenty-first century arrived, the business climate in Link Lake was once more severely challenged. The plastic toy factory, without warning, closed and laid off the thirty people who worked there, leaving behind a vacant building. Six months later, the airplane propeller factory closed and another twenty people lost their jobs. Today, Marilyn knew that the only major employers left in Link Lake were the nursing home and the assisted living center, the school system, and her Link Lake Supper Club.

By 2007 the Great Recession had begun to take hold, and Link Lake felt it as much or more than most communities. Many of those former employees of the defunct propeller and toy factories had gotten jobs in the Fox Valley, making the long commute each day, but now they were out of work again, surviving on unemployment payments and food stamps.

Marilyn Jones had seen a 20 percent drop in her income at the supper club as well. But rather than wring her hands and lament the bad luck she and everyone else seemed to be experiencing, she and the mayor called a meeting of the remaining business leaders in the community and organized the Link Lake Economic Development Council.

“God helps those who help themselves,” she proclaimed at an early meeting of the council. “We will bring jobs to Link Lake, no matter what it takes.” She received a rousing round of applause from the group with these words, which at least suggested some hope for the dire situation in which the village was mired. She was unanimously voted chair of the council that same night.

But Marilyn was disappointed that the Economic Development Council had had little success bringing jobs to Link Lake. Indeed, she knew it would not be the council's successes or future plans that most people would remember and talk about, but its failures—in particular the defeat of the council's efforts to bring a fast food business to Link Lake. Up until that fiasco, Marilyn and the other council members had mostly ignored the Link Lake Historical Society or saw it as a social outlet for the older people in the community, who had little else to do than reminisce about earlier days. To a hard-charging businessperson, which was how some people described Marilyn Jones, the Link Lake Historical Society was irrelevant to the community. Marilyn had learned differently in 2009.

Now Marilyn was ready to call a special meeting of the Economic Development Council, one open to the public. She was about to make an announcement to the world, as she would tell everyone something that would have far-reaching positive effects on the community.

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