>
> I never saw a single piece of corn eaten in Iowa, and I never saw a pig
in
> Iowa. All else is rumor.
>
> ][<en

My first college, in a heroic failed effort at a degree, of which I am
reminded  each summer when that Fossett fellow takes off in his balloon,
was in a town named Mt. Carroll, Illinois, ten miles east of the
Mississippi, and Iowa. This was in '59, when the Chicago stockyards were
still the hog butcher to the world and Mt. Carroll was on the main route by
which Iowa's hogs (they never called them pigs; pigs was people who didn't
tuck their napkins under their chins when they sat down to eat) made their
way to slaughter.

It was bad enough that I was a most condescending and precocious little New
Yorker in a school that had probably never seen one before, bad enough that
everyone in the town laughed at my accent and beatnik getups, and bad
enough that I was a frightened 16 year old, of no great self-discipline,
who was being subjected to the restrictions of Robt. Hutchins' and Mortimer
Adler's Great Books theory of education. But what finally drove me back to
the coast where I belonged was the non-stop caravan of livestock trucks
passing within inches of my dorm room window, with their stinking,
squealing, cargos. I mean 24 hours a day for three months. Early on I gave
up my passion for Vivaldi and Bach, recordings of whom just couldn't
compete with the noise from the trucks, and settled for show music, mostly
featuring Ethel Merman, who could certainly hold her own in this company,
and big band jazz.

I can't say I ever actually saw an Iowa pig, except for rheumy eyes peering
through shadows and slats. But I sure heard them, and smelled them, and
heard endless talk of them on the local radio, in the truckstop across the
road from the campus, and at the soda fountain in the Mt. Carroll
drugstore.

Bruce