The Great Sand Fracas of Ames County

by Jerry Apps

  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 be
came 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.

  11

  Economic Development Council

  Marilyn walked into the community room at the Link Lake Library with her head high and confidence in her step. “I have good news for you,” she said as she called the regular monthly meeting of the Link Lake Economic Development Council to order. “It’s been a long struggle to bring jobs to Link Lake and put our community on a stronger economic footing,” Marilyn continued. She paused for a moment. She wanted the full impact of her words to be heard by the small collection of businesspeople, large-scale farmers, and other interested people in the community who were in attendance. For the last several years, the only words the council members had heard over and over were “We’re open for business”—to the point that some businesspeople simply didn’t attend anymore.

  “Mayor Jessup and I have had extended conversations with the Alstage Sand Mining Company of La Crosse,” Marilyn said, speaking slowly and loudly enough so all could hear.

  “Yesterday I heard from Emerson Evans, vice president of the company. Alstage engineers found a sizable seam of high-quality sand right here in Link Lake that will prove profitable to us, bring jobs to our community, bring much-needed money to the village’s coffers, and, I must say, put Link Lake on the map.”

  Emily Higgins quickly raised her hand.

  “Why haven’t we heard about this mining company before? Where are they planning to locate their mine? When? And is a mine what Link Lake needs? I’ve heard sand mining can be rather hard on the environment and there are potential health hazards as well,” she blurted out in rapid-fire fashion.

  “Well, Emily,” Marilyn began, trying to avoid showing her disgust with the questions, “the reason you or no one else has heard about this is because the mayor and I just learned yesterday that the mine is a real possibility for our community. We didn’t want to talk about it until we knew for sure that they were interested. Now we know they are.”

  “And what about where and when?”

  “Those answers will have to wait a bit—until we negotiate a bit more with the Alstage people.”

  “When will we know?” asked Emily, her face a little redder than it was before.”

  “Soon, Emily. Soon. Be a little patient, okay?”

  Emily sat down, but from the look on her face, she was clearly not happy with what she was hearing, or how Marilyn Jones had responded to her inquiries. Most members of the development council knew the long, difficult history between Emily Higgins and Marilyn Jones. Each had quite different ideas of where Link Lake ought to be headed and how it should arrive there. Nearly twenty-five years separated the two women—Emily was born in 1930, Marilyn, in 1954. Emily remembered when Marilyn was a little girl helping out her folks at the supper club that they had opened when they moved from Chicago. Emily considered Marilyn a spoiled, mouthy brat when she was a little kid—and had never changed her opinion of the businesswoman who earned a handsome living from the supper club that she now owned. And Marilyn considered Emily an old woman lost in the past and a troublesome menace to any forward-looking ideas the community might explore.

  Marilyn had tipped off Billy Baxter of the Ames County Argus that he might want to attend the meeting, as the council had some important news to share with the community. Baxter raised his hand next.

  “I hate to share my ignorance,” he began, “but I don’t know much about sand mining. About all I know is that ‘fracking sand’ has become quite a valuable commodity. By the way, I use the word ‘fracking’ advisedly as with only a slight slip of the tongue another rather popular F word slips out.”

  Baxter’s last comment evoked a chuckle from the group, which for the most part was nearly completely humorless.

  “I do have some information that the Alstage Sand Mining Company has shared with the mayor and me,” Marilyn replied. “Are you interested in hearing some of it?”

  “I’m all ears,” said Baxter, as he flipped open his notebook.

  Marilyn turned, retrieved her briefcase, and extracted several sheets of paper. She glanced through the notes and then began.

  “This special sand is used for a process called hydraulic fracturing, which is a way of releasing natural gas from shale deposits. The process is not new—it goes back to the late 1940s.” She looked up before continuing. Council members as well as Billy Baxter appeared to want more information.

  “The fracking process, as it is called,” she said with just a hint of a smile on her face, “has recently been used in eastern states such as New York and Pennsylvania as well as in North Dakota, Colorado, and Wyoming. The process uses enormous amounts of a special sand that we have in Wisconsin and have right here in Link Lake. Sand mines are flourishing in La Crosse, Barron, Chippewa, and Monroe counties. And talk about jobs: a sand mining operation near Tomah employs forty-three workers earning $18.00 an hour.” Marilyn put her notes back in her briefcase.

  “The Alstage Sand Mining Company operation here in Link Lake has the potential for being larger than the one in Tomah. We could have as many as seventy-five new jobs coming to our community,” she said.

  Council members were looking at each other and nodding their heads in approval.

  Marilyn summarized, “After several years of misfired attempts of bringing economic development and jobs to Link Lake
, it appears our community is on course for a brighter future.”

  A round of applause greeted the comment. Emily Higgins was not clapping. Lucas Drake held up his hand. “Yes, Lucas,” Marilyn said as she recognized her longtime supporter and friend.

  Drake stood up. “I want to personally commend you and Mayor Jessup for your interest in the future of the Link Lake community and especially for promoting the community’s economic health. Nothing is more important to a community than its economic health—said more plainly, lots of jobs. Everything else must take a backseat. History, environmental concerns, historic preservation—all are of lesser importance. Without a strong economy we have nothing.”

  Members of the Economic Development Council clapped as Lucas Drake sat back down. Emily Higgins shook her head in silent disagreement.

  12

  Ambrose and Gloria

  Ambrose Adler sat on his porch with Ranger and Buster, thinking about what might have been. He remembered that summer day when he stopped at the library after making his purchases at the Link Lake Mercantile. He noticed a new assistant librarian working behind the checkout desk. At first he didn’t recognize her, but then he realized that it was Gloria Jones, daughter of the owners of the Link Lake Supper Club. He remembered Gloria as a skinny, rather unattractive girl, whom he had seen on occasion when he came to Link Lake. A few years ago, he’d read in the Argus about Gloria graduating from Link Lake High School and then attending the University of Wisconsin in Madison with majors in journalism and English.

  Gloria, now twenty-one and newly graduated, had just been hired to work at the library. She had grown up to be a beauty, at least in the eyes of thirty-two-year-old Ambrose Adler.

  “How are you, Ambrose?” Gloria asked when he approached the desk to check out a couple books. Like everyone else in Link Lake, she knew Ambrose by sight, if for no other reason than he was the only person who traveled to town with a team of horses to do his shopping.