Lewis’ ‘Main Street’ Town Decides It Pays to Be Dull

Sauk Centre, Minn., is ready to let bygones be bygones. Leaders of the town whose “incredible dullness” bored Sinclair Lewis into writing “Main Street” say they are ready to capitalize on Lewis’ fame and develop historic and other attractions. Some people in the town of 3,700, about 95 miles northwest of Minneapolis, think it’s about time. Al Tingley, owner of the Palmer House Hotel, said he has tried repeatedly to “get this town to wake up and realize Sinclair Lewis gives them the greatest cottage industry in the world.” In “Main Street,” Lewis lambasted the fictional Gopher Prairie, Minn., a stand-in for the central Minnesota town where he was born in 1885. In the 1920 novel, when heroine Carol Kennicott arrived in Gopher Prairie, she found “no dignity in it nor any hope of greatness.” Lewis, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, died in 1951.

--Britain’s Queen Elizabeth showed some horse sense as she toured breeding farms in Kentucky. The queen is in the United States to plan the breeding of five mares, which she boards in Kentucky, said Lord Carnarvon, the queen’s racing manager. This is the third time in five years that she has stayed at Lane’s End farm, near Lexington, where she is a guest of William S. Farish III. Farish is an investment counselor and oilman from Houston who recently played host to President Bush at the farm.

--President Bush still has strong ties to his alma mater--visitors to the Oval Office can’t help but notice on his desk the old mitt he used as Yale’s first baseman, for example. So, it was no surprise that Bush personally typed his answers to questions from the Yale Daily News. Bush told the paper in a story written by senior editor David Halbfinger that “running for public office in Texas is not necessarily enhanced by a Yale education.” Halbfinger wrote that Bush embarrasses liberal Yalies “while the growing number of conservatives have waited for a chance to claim him as their own. Yale women oppose in large number the President’s stand on abortion.” Halbfinger complained that the White House had omitted some questions and changed others before giving them to the President. A question Bush did not see asked: “What’s it like to open the newspaper and find yourself raked over the coals in ‘Doonesbury?’ And by a fellow son of Eli, no less.” Halbfinger was referring to Garry Trudeau, creator of the comic strip that portrays the President as an invisible wimp.