Utica: A Campaign Stop, a Hometown, a Fragile Myth

On my desk is a photo of a sign on the brick wall of a village newspaper: “The Utica Herald. . . . The Only Paper That Cares About Utica.”

True enough. In the great world, not much has been written about Utica, Ohio, my hometown, because not much ever happens there beyond the immediate interest of its 2,000 or so souls--until Sunday, when Bill Clinton and Al Gore made Utica an early port of call on their voyage toward the presidency.

And the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, for a few hours, a few column inches, they all cared about Utica.

Why Utica? It is home to the state Democratic Party chairman, true. But Utica is a two-lane road into a seductive American mythology. It is not Boston or Miami or Milwaukee, where sociopathic horrors can hide and play themselves out. From the windows of their bus, Clinton and Gore saw treehouses and hopscotch boards, not gang graffiti.

It is the kind of town that city people drive past and say, almost reflexively, unquestioningly: “Great place to bring up kids.” But it is the kind of town my parents finally left because it limited their kids--its schools too small, its prospects too poor, its vision too narrow.

And now Clinton and Gore, two small-town boys, have stopped their bus there, perhaps hoping to suck out of Utica in a few well-reported hours the secret to the old tug of war between rural and urban America, the conflicting attraction and repulsion, the sense of suffocation and of longing.

Utica was a frontier farm town, founded in 1810, a place where “dinner” is the Sunday noonday meal after church and “supper” is what you eat at night, a town where men and women sink one deep root into the land and leave it there, wither or flourish.

In this century, for a decade or two, Utica did flourish, when the handmade window-glass business put it on the map. My great-grandfather stirred up the first batch of glass at the U.T.K. Glass Co.

I have his shaving mug in the oak secretary that once sat in the parlor of the farmhouse of the maple sugar camp he bought outside of town after the handmade glass business went belly-up in competition with the efficient new glass factories up north. The mug is marked T.S. (for Thomas Swear--he hated his middle name) Blackstone.

My father was a lineman with the Rural Electrification Administration. He used his pole-climbing gear to repair the steeple of the Presbyterian church, across the street from the dry goods store. It was that small; when you said you were going to the pharmacy, people knew where you meant.

We were afraid of nothing, because we saw nothing in Utica to frighten us. In the 1920s, my father’s father carried his pistol to work in one of the glass factories. One night he heard something walking behind him down the railroad tracks. It moved as he moved, stopped when he stopped. Its shadow was huge. My grandfather fired. It was a hog.

The Gypsies came each year, camping at the football field on the edge of town. Generations of sheriffs ran them off. Al Jones, the sheriff my father remembers, had one arm. Cecil Bailey, the sheriff I remember, had one eye, the other lost to firecrackers. He lectured us sternly about fireworks every third of July.

Not much of the outside world got to Utica. The Mystic Theatre closed in 1959, and none replaced it. We tracked Sputnik from the back yard, but the town lived in its own past and its own moment. No one talked much of the what-if in Utica, but of the what-is.

My own history lay all around me. We gathered arrowheads turned up by the plow at the “new” farmhouse built in 1899 by my other great-grandfather, Grandpa Joe. Johnny Appleseed had planted apple trees on that farm, the family said, on his way back to the cider presses of Pennsylvania. I read my history on the family headstones in North Lawn and South Lawn cemeteries, where my father’s father was caretaker.

It was one of the small jobs he did in the years before he died. When he walked home to us at night, the taps on his heavy work shoes struck sparks on the brick-paved streets.

In my school--the one where my grandmother had taught--the cloakroom smelled of mud and hay from the boots of farm boys come to school after morning chores. Pots of African violets sat on the baby grand piano that Mrs. Longwell played as we sang patriotic songs and hymns. Everyone was white and Christian except the Rattenbergs, who did not appear to practice the faith of their fathers; certainly, there was no place in Utica for them to do it.

I read about Harriet Tubman and George Washington Carver, but I never saw a living black person until I was 7 or 8 years old. That was in Columbus, nearly 40 miles west--so far from the radius of our lives that we planned our trips there like NASA planned for spaceflight, packing a lunch, bidding our friends goodby.

Now and then, one or two of my friends’ fathers would drink too much and holler at the kids, and probably worse once they got indoors. City violence is public violence; in Utica, intimately terrible things went on around me, I am sure now, but, if I saw them, I didn’t recognize them for what they were.

My family moved away when I was about 10.

It was, I think now, like leaving Brigadoon, a mirage of a place that exists only for a moment in a century, growing better only in memory. It is the place big-city politicians conjure when they wax bromidic about “family values . . . heartland . . . middle America.”

From the clatter and smog of Los Angeles, it is easy to long for Utica, for the rootedness of family and place, for the racket of crickets and the still, glittering air of snowy fields. It is easy to forget how dispirited it was, how incurious and self-absorbed.

Utica is more a satellite town now. Columbus, once so far away, reached toward it and its green-bellied farms have become little estates for city-sick commuters who think these are good places to live, to rear children.

I went back a couple of years ago, walked into the dark, sweet gloom of Ritchey’s, the town confectionery. Its high-backed, dark-shellacked booths, like England’s coronation chair, have been carved with the penknives of schoolboys--the names of generations of students who sparked and giggled and sipped cherry phosphates on its benches.

The owner remembered my parents, my grandparents, remembered me when I told him my name. Sure, he said . . . your folks said you got married. What’s your name now? Oh, I didn’t change it, I said. It’s still Morrison.

He looked at the woman at the cash register and at the man at the soda fountain. Oh, he said carefully. I’ve heard of folks doing that. You live in California now, that right?

Yes, I do.

And I still feel the need to know the very thing that the Democratic ticket went to Utica for: to divine what it says about me, about all of us, that Utica is the sort of place we both leave and remember with equal gladness.