The old factory in the center of town has always been one of two things to the little community of Nashua: its salvation or its scourge.
In good times, the building’s smokestack puffs overtime and its parking lot is full of dusty cars and pickup trucks. In bad times, the factory is dark and deserted, a daily reminder of pink slips and unemployment lines and unpaid bills.
These are bad times.
Unemployment in this northern Iowa town is more than double the state average and several percentage points above the national rate. Its houses are up for sale; its schools are losing students; its church coffers are low. And emblematic of a discouraging economic reality being felt in towns across the Midwest, the sprawling factory that for more than a half-century has employed up to 300 of Nashua’s nearly 1,600 residents has stood empty for almost a year now.
Walk down Main Street–past the once-bustling restaurant that recently closed, past the hardware store that lost an estimated $30,000 in annual business from the now-shuttered factory, past the tumbledown bar where some out-of-work guys order their first Bud Light well before noon–and Nashua’s residents will tell you in plain terms what the nation’s Ivy League-educated economic experts opine on television: Small, rural towns are the very first to feel a recession and the very last to recover from one.
Bill Ruth, a former Marine, tells how the bills in his “bankruptcy pile” are multiplying and how his chronically ill daughter will eventually need the seventh surgery of her 8-year-old life.
A 34-year-old man named John Tegtmeier says he is mowing lawns around town to make ends meet.
A onetime maintenance foreman named Dave Junker gets tears in his eyes as he recalls the day they auctioned off almost everything inside the factory where he worked for more than 40 years and how he taped a handwritten note to his old desk chair that implored “Please don’t sell.”
So even as politicians in Washington and traders on Wall Street debate the extent of the nation’s emergence from economic doldrums–and President Bush on Monday emphasized that strengthening the economy was a critical national goal–in Nashua, a don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it town nestled on the wooded banks of Iowa’s Cedar River, the story couldn’t be more dire.
At the grocery store and the local pharmacy folks openly commiserate about their worries, about the unemployment checks that have run out and the Girl Scout camp they can’t afford to send their daughters to this summer. But talk eventually always turns to the locked-up factory that has housed several business and sustained Nashua since the 1940s but now sits like a silent ghost, taunting them with the memories of better days.
During this recession, manufacturing in the United States took a bigger hit than any other industry, losing more than 1.3 million jobs in 2001, according to a report issued in December by the Center for the Study of Rural Affairs. Iowa lost some 9,300 manufacturing jobs, the state’s first annual decline in employment since 1986, according to statistics from the Iowa Workforce Development.
The dwindling number of blue-collar jobs in the United States–worsened by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and by an increasingly global economy that has driven thousands of jobs to nations where wages and expenses are cheaper– has been disastrous for places like Nashua.
“Manufacturing has been the single largest economic engine in rural areas for many, many decades,” said Mark Drabenstott, the vice president and director of the Center for the Study of Rural America. “And now they are feeling the economic downturn and its lingering effects as much–probably more–than anywhere else in the country.”
Dismal job statistics
It’s easy to see what Drabenstott is talking about. In Nashua’s home county, Chickasaw, and in two neighboring counties unemployment figures are at least double the statewide average of 3.7 percent.
In Chickasaw’s New Hampton, 18 miles northeast of Nashua, a 625-employee Sara Lee plant closed about a year ago. In Butler County’s Shell Rock, 20 milessouth, Hobson Mould Works, a factory that produced industrial plastic moulding and employed 120 people, has stood empty for 16 months. In Floyd County’s Charles City, 11 miles to the northwest, White Farm Equipment–once the largest tractor plant in the world and the employer of nearly 3,000 people–has been torn down.
And then there is Nashua, a town best-known throughout Iowa for being home to the picturesque wedding chapel called the Little Brown Church in the Vale after a refrain in the Christian hymn “The Church in the Wildwood.”
Nashua never has had an excess of jobs. A guy could work as a farmer or a welder or a mechanic or a tractor dealer or a manual laborer. He could live pretty comfortably on $40,000 a year. He could take pride in clocking eight solid hours, five days a week at the factory over on Maple Street.
Over time, the factory has been a lot of things: a hydraulics company; a manufacturer of the big cement tiles used to drain farm fields and ditches; and most recently a production plant for Featherlite Inc., the aluminum-trailer company known for building the NASCAR trailers used by racers such as Jeff Gordon.
As surely as the factory is located in the geographic center of Nashua’s city limits, so has it been at the core of the town’s economy, social structure and family life since it opened in 1948.
In Nashua, it’s easy to find guys like John Tegtmeier.
Tegtmeier’s father worked at Nashua’s factory for more than 30 years, back when it was HydroTile Machinery Co., a plant that did such booming business that for years it ran three shifts, employed nearly 300 people and won a state award in the late 1970s for being Iowa’s largest exporter. In 1991, when HydroTile closed, the senior Tegtmeier and hundreds of others were left without work and the town began to struggle.
But about a year later, when Featherlite bought and reopened the plant — bringing in NASCAR racing legends to pose for pictures and sign autographs for local children — John Tegtmeier and a whole new generation of laborers went to work on the same factory floor their fathers and uncles walked for so many decades.
“It has always just been this place where you count on getting a job and getting a paycheck,” said Tegtmeier, whose brother-in-law also found himself unemployed when Featherlite closed last year and whose high school-age son had figured on being one of the nearly 130 people who worked at the plant too.
“You counted on it, and you took it for granted a little, I guess. It was just always there for us.”
Whenever the factory at 69 Maple St. was thriving, so was Nashua.
Up until the 1980s, the town had a furniture store, a couple of different grocers and a women’s clothing store on Main Street. On Saturday nights, whole families would go into town. While the guys would have a beer and a chat in one of several bars, the women would shop and the children would play.
The story was similar all across Iowa and in other rural Midwestern towns where midsize factories started relocating throughout the 1970s and ’80s in an effort to tap a ready pool of inexpensive labor and an almost legendary work ethic.
“Factories and plants really were consciously moving into places like Nashua in the last three to four decades,” said Tim Fox, the director of the area development corporation in Charles City, a town of nearly 8,000 a 10-minute drive from Nashua.
“For a while it was a really happy marriage,” he said. “The factories got relatively cheap labor and the work ethic of guys who would never dream of calling in sick even if they were, and the towns got a major shot in the arm economically. But then, as these plants have started to go under, towns like Nashua have found themselves hurting in ways they couldn’t have even imagined.”
Big loss to small town
Today, with the nation’s economists saying that manufacturing is one of the few industries simply refusing to rebound from the recession and the Sept. 11 attacks, the spirit of decline is palpable in Nashua. Store after store stands empty on Main Street, and the town’s population–which in the mid-1980s rose to more than 1,800 residents–has dipped to barely 1,600 people, said City Clerk Becky Neal.
“It’s rough,” said Neal, who added that Nashua’s officials are trying to recruit companies to buy the factory and reopen it. “There’s no doubt about that. Still, I hold out hope that things will rebound.”
But even an optimist like Neal can roll off a long list of people hit hard by her hometown’s poor fortunes: There’s the woman who had just opened her dream Main Street eatery when her husband, a factory worker, found himself without a job and the noontime crowds stopped showing up; there’s the owner of the convenience store that sits less than a block from the factory who has seen a nearly 50 percent drop in business without the workers stopping by for sodas and lunches and gasoline.
Then there is the local couple who saved for more than a decade to buy a farm. Now, they are in danger of losing it without the husband’s factory job to bolster the meager income they generate from rock-bottom prices for corn, soybean and beef commodities.
Several weeks ago, Junker, who had been maintenance foreman at the factory for nearly two decades, took a tour of the old building he knows so well. Because he has keys to every building on the property, he drives the three blocks from his home to the factory once a day to check that the roof isn’t leaking and that vandals haven’t broken in.
This day, Junker methodically flips switches for each of the hundreds of lights on the production floor, creating a low, electrical buzz that echoes through the empty space. He walks around, gently touching the few pieces of equipment that weren’t auctioned off and then stops by his old desk. The “Please don’t sell” sign is still taped to his cracked-vinyl chair; the calendar is out of date; the clock is stopped at a few minutes to five.
“I’m old enough to just call it a day,” said Junker, 60. “But there are people around here — the young families — that my heart just aches for. I don’t know what’s going to happen to them. That’s the saddest part of it all.”
It’s hard to rank heartache, but there are few stories floating around Main Street as dire as Bill and Audrey Ruth’s.
Eight years ago the couple, whose primary income came from Bill Ruth’s job at the factory, had a baby girl. They named her Traci and happily brought her home. Then they watched their child get sicker and sicker.
Traci was diagnosed with hypophosphatemic rickets, a rare hereditary disease that causes the permanent softening of bones. As her little legs and arms began to bow she required one surgery, then two. By age 7, she had had six operations, and her parents were hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.
Now, with Bill Ruth unemployed for nearly a year and the family uninsured, the young couple waits until Traci is out of the room before they fully explain how bad things are.
Even if Bill Ruth gets another job that provides insurance, Traci likely won’t be covered because her disease will qualify as a pre-existing condition. In order to get treatment for her, the family will have to routinely make the 400-mile round trip to the Shriners hospital in Minneapolis, a hospital that provides free orthopedic care to impoverished or uninsured children.
“Since Bill has been out of work, we miss a lot of things,” Audrey Ruth said. “We don’t drive to visit our friends who live an hour away on Sunday anymore because we can’t afford the gas. We lost one of our cars because we couldn’t make the payments. We don’t even rent movies once a week anymore.
“But worrying about how you are going to pay to keep your children healthy, that’s worse than anything you can imagine.”
The Ruths, who also have a 4-year-old son named Dustin, have thought about leaving Nashua for a city with more employment options. But they hate to think what their leaving would do — and what their friends and neighbors leaving already has done — to the little community they say gave them good values and a quiet, family-centered life.
Bill Ruth points out his front window to the for-sale signs on neighboring yards; Audrey, who graduated from the local high school with a class of 71 students, worries that Traci’s class only has 18 kids.
But if the Ruths are resigned to some of the byproducts of the current hard times, one weighs especially heavily on them: the effect on their church. Like many of their friends and neighbors, the couple recently found themselves sitting at the kitchen table, reducing the amount they pledge to their church each year.
Area clerics have felt the effects of such decisions. Two pastors of churches with a large number of factory workers in their congregation say they are acutely feeling the economic pinch, while the pastor of the Lutheran church, which didn’t have many factory workers on its membership rolls, says his church’s weekly donations are holding steady.
“What choice to you have?” Audrey Ruth asked. “It’s that or pay the light bill, so we decreased how much we give.”
Maybe, just maybe, optimism
Almost a year after losing his job at the factory, Bill Ruth came home one night from a seasonal job he had found laying drainage tiles in a local farmer’s fields. As he walked through the door, his wife told him she had a little bad news, but twice as much good news. It was the first time in a long time he could remember the ratio tilting in his favor.
The bad news was that the eye doctor said Traci had problems with her eyes. She needed glasses at the very least, maybe surgery.
“Oh, man,” Bill Ruth sighed.
But Audrey Ruth quickly rolled out the good news:
A letter had arrived that day, informing them that the federal government had granted an additional 13 weeks of unemployment benefits to people who lost their jobs when the economy tanked last year.
Even better, Winnebago Industries Inc. — buoyed by the nation’s post-Sept. 11 aversion to air travel and a newfound interest in traveling by the company’s luxury motor homes — had announced it was opening a $12.5 million plant just 11 miles from Nashua. Although it isn’t expected to open until at least the middle of 2003, Winnebago’s factory eventually is expected to employ more than 300 people.
Bill Ruth looked across the kitchen table at his wife, visibly hopeful.
“I’ll head over and get my application in right away,” he said.
For a minute, Audrey Ruth seemed optimistic herself. Then, just as the young mother was asked if she was beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel, Traci limped through the kitchen, and Audrey Ruth let out a bitter laugh.
“Yeah, right,” she sighed, reaching out to hug her little girl. “The only bright light I see on the horizon is the sun setting at the end of another broke day.”
