Thanks to Web, other benefits, some small towns are bucking trends
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BY ART HOVEY / Lincoln Journal Star
STROMSBURG — At first glance, it’s one of many rural counties in Nebraska that the Buffalo Commons crowd would probably put on the buffalo side of the fence.
People who favor putting buffalo back on more lightly populated areas of the Great Plains perhaps already know that Polk County lost more than 10 percent of its population between 1900 and 1910 and more than 25 percent between 1950 and 2000. It’s in a cluster of about a dozen southeastern counties between the Platte River and the Kansas border that achieved their peak population before World War I.
But these sorts of sweeping generalizations don’t tell the whole story. They don’t take into account how many smaller towns have defied depopulation trends.
Take Stromsburg, 65 miles northwest of Lincoln, for example.
The purveyors of rural doom and gloom don’t make allowances for Stromsburg residents Darin Mickey, Jill Westring and Owen Baker, all of whom use the Internet to tend to the desk chores that would otherwise put them and their jobs in places much bigger than a town of 1,240.
They don’t leave room for a “young retiree” category that has three former Stromsburg school superintendents, Elmer Corbitt, Sam Bell and Don Holmberg, living within walking distance of the school they once served.
Those who focus on counties as a whole look past the decisions of Elliot and Marsha Yungdahl, Chad and Stephanie Buzek, and Darin Mickey and wife Lesli to raise children away from the hustle and bustle of Lincoln and Omaha.
“In a small town,” said Lesli Mickey, 34, mother of three and a former Lincoln middle school teacher, “you have a much better chance of knowing what your kids are doing, and who they’re with, and the families they’re running around with.”
Those who treat open spaces and populated spaces as one don’t take the closer look advocated by Randy Cantrell, a rural sociologist at the University of Nebraska’s Rural Initiative.
Cantrell came to this conclusion in September in sifting through reams of census details:
“Between 1990 and 2000, Nebraska’s smaller communities significantly outperformed larger communities in their ability to attract persons in their prime earning years.”
Can this possibly be? Yes, said Cantrell, in a 30-page report packed with maps and graphics.
“On average, communities with populations of fewer than 2,500 saw an increase of nearly 25 percent in the population base 30 to 39 years during the 1990s.”
How about towns with populations above 5,000?
Down 6 percent in that age group.
In explaining his findings, Cantrell said he doesn’t want to be regarded as the warm and fuzzy alternative to harsher interpretations of fact.
If you’re looking for a region in a long-term downward spiral, he said, “you would point at the Upper Great Plains.”
However.
Those trying to take the pulse of communities should look beyond conclusions based on county-level data and the pessimism that comes wrapped in anecdotal evidence.
“I’m just making a pitch to not miss important details,” Cantrell said.
Darin Mickey, enthusiastic Stromsburg resident, father of three and a federal bank examiner, is one of those important details.
“I don’t have to go into Grand Island,” Mickey said, referring to his regional headquarters. “I can do my job from home.”
As the electronic superhighway reaches more rural places, it offers an employment advantage to more rural people that an interstate highway cannot.
In helping cover an area of Nebraska as far west as McCook for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Mickey finds he can attend to most details from his home office.
In leaving Lincoln and a job writing banking software for Information Technology, he discovered being a bank examiner required a lot of travel to nationally chartered banks, but not necessarily to a federal satellite office in Grand Island.
The same scenario applies to Owen Baker, who moved back from Minneapolis without giving up his advertising and marketing career, and to Jill Westring, who works for a Maryland company that trains people to work with the disabled.
Without the Internet?
“Impossible, absolutely impossible,” said Baker, 43, and a fourth-generation Stromsburg resident.
And with it?
“This is my office right here,” he said, waving his cell phone and tapping a laptop computer at the Square Cup coffee shop that he and wife Kari own and operate on Stromsburg’s courthouse square. “This office can go anywhere.”
Stromsburg Mayor Elaine Westring said her daughter has been able to pair faraway duties with a close-to-home stake, with Mom, in the Little Blue River Soap Co.
In her mobile mode, mother said of daughter, “it’s all over the United States” on behalf of a private licensing firm. “She mostly works on the East Coast.”
But back in her hometown, Jill Westring “has bought a house here in Stromsburg. She’s a couple blocks from us,” said the elder Westring.
Baker, a father of four, said he wanted a small-town education for his children. But coming home also boosted the quality of his own life.
“It’s what happens after 5 that makes all the difference,” he said. “Five to ten (p.m.) — those are the free hours that define your existence.”
Being tied up in traffic for two hours after work and heading into the same gridlock again at 6:30 a.m. are not everybody’s ideas of good times.
At the Square Cup, Baker is trying to use soft music, soft lighting and soft chairs to achieve an upscale effect without the urban chaos.
“Give them stuff they like in the city,” he said of his customer-profiling instincts, “and eliminate the crap they don’t like.” Then, “you’ve got a pretty good model.”
As snow whirls through blustery air along Stromsburg’s East Eighth Street, Sam and Glenny Bell sit warm and cozy near their corn-burning stove.
Both 72 and parents of five grown children, they have been going steady since their days at Chester High School in the 1940s.
They have lived in one of Nebraska’s most Swedish communities three times, once when Sam was the school superintendent, from 1967 to 1972, again when he ran a local clothing store, and most recently when they moved from an acreage near Lyons to their retirement home in Stromsburg nine years ago.
“It’s a good town to live in,” Sam Bell said from his end of the kitchen table. “Good folks. Seven or eight good churches. A good place to raise kids.”
As far as he’s concerned, bigger towns have too many stoplights. “One of the nicest things about Stromsburg is that there are no stoplights.”
Glenny (as in Glendora) didn’t settle on Stromsburg without casting an appraising eye on the Fort Collins, Colo., area where a daughter lives.
But Stromsburg’s pull was stronger.
“No,” said a woman who turns out faithfully for aerobics classes at the Viking (Senior Citizen) Center. “I don’t want to lose my friends.”
The Bells have also lived in Aurora, Albion and Axtell, among other places, before retirement.
One of Sam Bell’s fondest memories of Stromsburg is the 20 business people who each put up $2,000 against his clothing store loan.
“A lot of kids our kids’ age would love to come back here,” said Glenny Bell. “But the jobs — there’s no jobs.”
Not everybody finds Stromsburg to be the ideal, and not every business in town succeeds.
The future of The 5th Lane, the local bowling alley that reopened last year, is looking grim again. It’s closed because of a fire but “probably very unlikely to reopen,” said Jesse Barnett, because of family issues.
Meanwhile, Katie Steer, a physician’s assistant at a Stromsburg clinic, is headed north to Alaska later this month, taking husband and former Crete resident Tom back to the far-off state where she grew up.
Steer is outward bound “mostly because I was raised in Alaska and I’m kind of homesick. And there are no mountains in Polk County,” she said. “I’ve been searching for mountains for about three years.”
But she’s not certain she’s making the right decision. At least for the time being, the couple will put their Stromsburg house on the market.
“We love the town, my husband and I both love it. In fact, my husband would stay there.”
They leave behind plenty of others who are convinced they’ve found the right place for the long haul. In many cases, these others came back from far away — or, in Chad Buzek’s case, from 9 miles north of town.
Buzek, 31, and a construction management graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, recently married a classmate from the Stromsburg class of 1992.
The newlyweds bought a house in town, Stephanie brought her math teaching skills north from Fairbury to Centennial at Utica, and Chad embarked on a new career in insurance and lending at Stromsburg’s Heritage Bank.
“I lived in Lincoln for five years while I was going to school,” Chad said. “And all I wanted to do was get out of there.”
He prefers a smaller town, even when neighbors look out their windows to check on the Buzeks’ comings and goings.
“They say, ‘You’re never home,’” he said. “And I feel good about that, that somebody’s watching my house.”
Not far away on the courthouse square, Marsha Yungdahl is filling prescriptions at Yungdahl’s Apothecary and waiting for the day when she and husband Elliot, a Stromsburg native and a Wal-Mart pharmacist, might be able to build their own building.
The Yungdahls moved from Omaha in 1996.
“We decided we wanted to start a family,” she said, “and we decided the better option was to do it in a small town with Grandpa and Grandma to help us out.”
Stromsburg natives Darin and Lesli Mickey acknowledge that life in Stromsburg isn’t for everybody.
There’s no movie theater or major restaurants. The nearest hospital is 7 miles away at Osceola. The nearest Wal-Mart is 20 miles away.
But the Mickeys also have a house that’s much bigger and with a much smaller mortgage than the one they left behind near the intersection of 15th and Superior streets in Lincoln.
And the empty field behind their Lincoln house has long since filled up.
“Now, when we drive by the old house,” Lesli said, “there’s housing there and all the way to the interstate. And it’s crammed together. That stuff I don’t miss.”
Cantrell of UNL’s Rural Initiative watches his numbers and wonders where things are headed.
“If there is to be a change in the economic and social direction of rural America,” he says at the close of his written analysis, “it will start somewhere, and indeed may already have begun. If that is true, it will stand a greater chance of success if we take note of it.”
Reach Art Hovey at 523-4949 or at ahovey@alltel.net.
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