You Can't Go Home Again - This American Life
www.thisamericanlife.org/126/transcript
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The hand-picking stopped about 15 years ago, and they all went to machines. And that's where the world messed up, by going to the machines.
ri. The nearest big town is Sikeston, population 18,000, 20 minutes away.
Act One, You Can't Go Home Again, the story of two people trying to restore a small town to its former splendor and how the biggest obstacle turned out to be the people whose lives they wanted to improve.
The businesses on Main Street aren't just closed, they're gone, torn down decades ago
People used to come here from all the surrounding towns
Anyway, this town was a good little town to grow up in. But we got married and we went away, went to the big city of St. Louis. And we've been gone, I guess we were gone about 40 years.
And this has been a dream, to come back and build a home here.
The Whartons lived in a house in the suburbs, raised two kids, active with neighborhood associations and the Board of Ed. And they thought, once they moved back to Canalou, they would try to bring back some of the spirit that they remembered growing up here in the '50s and '60s.
This is the story of why they failed, of why people did turn their backs on the Whartons, why three years of using every skill they have, devoting energy, devoting hope, only proved to them that Canalou did not want to be improved, and that something had changed in this small town that would take a lot more than two do-gooders to reverse
She and Kenny moved back to Canalou in October of 1995.
And before long, this 65-year-old retiree, who looks a lot like a youthful Lyndon Johnson, found himself running for mayor.
To understand why Kenny lost, I visited Charles and Kay Southard. Like Kenny, they grew up in a sharecropper's family.
It's Charles Southard's driveway that has the town's one soda machine, but there's lots of other junk in the yard too, an old wagon, broken tables, cans, bottles, and a wide assortment of nondescript rusted out pieces of machinery.
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