The Mainstreeters

Notes from Lynn:

Main Street Auto greeted us as we left U.S. Highway 94 for our first stop in Minnesota. Next came Main Street Real Estate, Main Street Theatre, Main Street Printing, Main Street Café and Main Street Coffee, all on Original Main Street.

Our minivan had entered Sauk Centre (population 3,980), home of the Sinclair Lewis Museum, Sinclair Lewis Park, Sinclair Lewis Foundation, Sinclair Lewis Boyhood Home, Sinclair Lewis Writers Conference, Sinclair Lewis Interpretive Center and Sinclair Lewis Days, a week-long celebration every July that culminates in a beauty contest and a parade on Original Main Street.

This was the same city, thinly disguised as Gopher Prairie, that Harry Sinclair “Red” Lewis excoriated with eloquent realism in his 1920 novel, “Main Street.” It wasn’t just a best seller. It sold more than 2 million books, generated a score of translations and was the first work cited in 1930 when the author was anointed as the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In the prologue, Lewis made sure that people back home got the message. The town is called Gopher Prairie, Minn., he wrote, “but its main street is the continuation of main streets everywhere.” The book indicted small-town life, then regaled by politicans and preachers as a cornerstone of American virtues. One appraisal of “Main Street” says Lewis wrote about “its cruelties, its well-nourished prejudices and cultural bleakness.”

Insulted, a good many Sauk Centrists protested at the time that “Main Street” should kept out of the city’s Bryant Library. They were heard to comment that Harry Sinclair may have grown up in Sauk Centre, but the bookish redhead left town for Yale at age 17 and didn’t come back.

The novelist Pearl Buck, who visited the “sober, comfortable, middle-class house” where Harry grew up, is quoted in a Chamber of Commerce brochure: “I could only see him bursting out of those walls, and out of the town it stood for, loving it so much that he hated it for not being all he wanted it to be and knew it could be.”

We should never underestimate the power of tourism.

I was in a Dublin pub in 1982 when I heard a 24-hour radio reading to celebrate Bloomsday. It was the anniversary of the day enshrined in James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” which had been banned in Ireland for many years.

John Steinbeck is a tourist attraction in his home town, Salinas, where a furious citizenry once tried to keep the town library untainted by “Grapes of Wrath.”

Sauk Centre has long since forgiven the home town boy who made good, even if he made the home town look bad. And he must have changed his mind about Main Street as he went on to write “Elmer Gantry,” “Dodsworth,” “Babbitt” and 20 others. He returned to Sauk Centre twice. In 1947, welcomed by the chamber of commerce and leading citizens, he stood outside the Main Street Theatre for a photograph that documented his redemption. In 1951, the famous writer died in Italy and, as he had requested, the remains were transported 14,000 miles back to Sauk Centre. In the cemetery outside of town, a simple tombstone marks the homecoming of Main Street’s native son.

Life goes on. We learned that on Friday night the town’s high school footballers will take the field with a name that honors the famous book written by a bespectacled, embittered young man who shunned athletics. It’s the nation’s only team called the Mainstreeters.

Notable: Lewis was 17 when let go after he made too many mistakes as an extraordinarily incompetent night clerk at Sauk Centre’s leading hotel. The job lasted only two weeks. The old hotel is now refurbished as the Historic Palmer House, trading on the historic association with historic Sinclair Lewis.... As a boy, Lewis was called by his first name, Harry. His middle name was reserved for his books. As a grownup with thinning hair, bowties and a reputation as a bad drunk, he was called Red.

Notes from Margo:

In Bemidji, Minnesota, home of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, we stopped to see the larger-than-life statues we’d been alerted to by the AAA guide. We were a bit disappointed, because we’ve seen larger statues of them at a roadside attraction in California, and the myths were created by an adman right here in Minnesota. But further down the road, near Bena, we were cheered up by an unadvertised roadside attraction: the biggest trout we’ve ever seen. (Editor's note: An outsize "Thank You" to Todd, for pointing out that the monster fish is a pike, not a trout.)

We crossed the Mississippi River in upper Minnesota – it's really just a small stream. We slammed on the brakes, because really, where else could you jump over the Mississippi if you took a good running start??


Mileage from Trail, Minnesota, to Thorp, Wisconsin: 438 miles

Total mileage: 5,126