Top Ten Community College   
 
 
                                                                                                                                         
                             
    
Have you seen men handed refusals till they began to laugh....
...that they are sick or worn out or lazy....

      

John Walker of the Sioux Falls Argus Leader called one essay 'great craft'. Stephen Barr of the Writer's House in New York, described the writing as "...Poised and polished..." Carol Hunter of the DesMoines Register said it borders on "...great...". Shane Tritsch of the Chicago Magazine said a story about a dying elder was 'evocative and wonderful'. A Cedar Rapids editor called a story 'poignant'. A Dubuque editor said one story "Nailed it!"
I hope one story helps one poor man or one poor woman.
A year ago I placed seventy five of these stories end to end and titled it 'Nowhere to Go'. The thesis felt real, the theme grew without agenda, as if everyone I was writing about was headed nowhere or had experienced that wall that can only be scaled by great effort and will. Someone said once that I'm the go-to guy for stories of the street. I feel the stories of this age are within that space. The essays and poetry concern the people I believe Steinbeck called the heroes of the age.
Try living alone, sleeping under a stairwell, riding the rails, carrying your life in a backpack, asking for a box of food, watching people turn away from your pain. Consider changing the color of your skin, adding an accent, putting on a layer of age, enduring disability, sitting in a wheelchair, arrested falsely and forced to plea bargain.

  The tales about the 1930's when children in Dubuque raced along the railroad to steal lumps of coal for heating their homes are repeating.  People who have lost their employment may never return to the work and lives they knew. The newspaper industry acknowledged, if ever so briefly, what we at the pawn and barber, the missions and the alleys, churches and charities, knew several years ago. These are hard times.

Since the unemployment pain, pawns, foreclosures and lines of hungry folks have swollen to epidemics.  It is a  war. The poor used to wonder where the money came from. Now they know. Ponzi schemes. And now we know that being invisible is a common ailment for every class. And the papers are going out of business.

    
                                                     HARD TIMES  (Adams)

As I came to know the pawn shop owners in Dubuque, I watched the hungry and homeless that populate this world of pawns and loans and heirlooms given up. I came to see the country through a fresh lens. It showed the icons as fakes. Distorted images of news and fakery about which the working poor have much to say are in conversation and story everywhere.

There have been times when I began with a story that was referred to me from a pawn shop or a small business that grew into a chain of stories following that first one. And, it was often the same, "I know no one else would care, but I have a story."

I was on the scene at stabbings and shootings because the people involved asked for me. I began to do stories about black and white issues after I walked into Cadillac Cutz, the first black barber in Dubuque. I became a regular Saturday morning patron but I took notes. The black news has been obliterated in Dubuque. Even the NAACP group has been close to disbanding. A lack of interest, perhaps. I met with the former head of Iowa's Human Rights commission, the first black mayor of DesMoines. He said they didn't have funds to help with what he agreed was a race problem.

My essays have been credited with reopening a local mission, helping a disabled couple with more than a thousand dollars the morning their story was published, inspiring a local church to create an art exhibit for a local, mentally ill man and saving local history for the working and oppressed people of the community.

In the winter of 2010 I was invited to do a weekly radio piece for Cumulus Broadcasting. When a cops and robbers shootout happened outside a local bar; when another local tavern was surrounded Friday and Saturday nights by four squads of local police, the only bar to receive this treatment and the only black venue; when a local cop texted about blowing up that black tavern as a city council met to review the issue; when a pawn customer was shot in the back, when a hundred other stories were given, I pasted them up.

I have pasted up more than five hundred stories and essays since early 2010.

The local paper has turned away from working class, black, alley and tavern to concentrate on its own version of Dubuque. When IBM came to town that was news. When a poor young mother was assaulted downtown it barely received a paragraph on the third page. That concerns me because the people who need to know, the democracy that hinges on knowledge, is suspect. How does a neighborhood protect itself when it takes four days after a shootout for the paper to print the story? And, how does a paper decide to invade Facebook to impinge the humanity of a young mother accused of killing, torturing and then burying her infant? The paper did so little about the national story, the one about bombs in the mail and Wall Street, that my story went to the DesMoines paper. Thank you DesMoines. The locals also rejected an essay of an interview I did with a young man, shorts still bloodied, after a stabbing on Central. The editor said it was good writing but that he wouldn't use it.

The tale called Gutta Town in which a young black man and his friends make a video, put it on You Tube, gather tens of thousands of hits, then the young man is taken to prison because of  the video, concerns class, race and justice. So do the stories of the black women, busted and tossed in jail, left naked and waiting for the judge.

                        


I understand Dubuque has won many awards during the years that I have written this ethnography. Among the city's accolades have been All America Award, 2007; Most Livable Small City, 2009; Moody's Top Twenty for Job Growth, 2010; one of the seven most connected locales by Connected World Magazine, 2010; one of the ten smartest cities on the planet by Fast Company, 2010, which noted that Dubuque would be the first, integrated smart city in America; Planning Excellence Award for Best Practice, 2010; one of the best communities for young people in 2007,2008 and 2010 and the Best Small City to Raise a Family, 2010, by Forbes magazine.

The problem I find with so much image is that under its belly is so much pain. I think it's important. It calls America's name, our values and the invisible class. These are heartland stories. They are stories of America.

I did not intend the writing to have an agenda but have written what I thought was interesting. Anymore, after the city manager, the police chief and the human rights director flattered me with a meeting, I have wondered about the importance of story. I'm sorry the national papers do not attend to this sort of human interest all the time.

Like 'The Fifth Column', it may be that the day's writing, after the gunshots and mortar, still there where I left them  in a bed roll, has been blemished by my involvement in the scenes and people I have written about. It may be, too, that it's better for my having shared a meal with a homeless man, stood with a youth in blood stained shorts after his friend was murdered, watched a poor black woman cry because of an injustice, listened to the unemployed in their foreclosed pain and passed out the food, said a prayer for the dying and the people sitting in a local jail because they were accused of jaywalking.





I have done many things in life, packing hams in the old Union Stock Yards in Chicago; helping run a hog farm in nearby Wisconsin; tacking down shingles and hanging drywall ; driving an eighteen wheeler and twisting it into Chicago alleys; selling grease and oil to little machine shops and big corporations like General Motors; providing therapy to violent perps in a rural court system and teaching in college.


I found the thesis, as rough as it is, for the work of Dubuquestreet, from the contrast between what the local system sells and what the people, working for a dollar, hurting, invisible, behind the headlines, have to say.

Dubuquestreet is non profit except for the sandwiches that the street children may find because readers identified something and opened their hearts. I am complimented and humbled that several national politicians are readers, that writers, editors and even movie people are readers.

More than 700,000 hits in two years.

I have wanted to get the truth on the street. Thank you for reading.   



                                                                                    

                   Twain said he felt the people here were civilized