HOW SOME THINGS CHANGE – AND YET – REMAIN THE SAME

Brian Korthals/Daily Globe Worthington Turkey Race Team members (from left) Jodi Almberg, Jim Henning, Tammy Anderson and Paul Larson follow Paycheck in flight down 10th Street as they go on to win the Great Gobbler Gallop Saturday afternoon. 

(Ed.'s Note: Over the weekend we ran into a good friend of this blog who had just returned from Minnesota where they had been for a year in a make-work program earning a roofing technician certification. Over breakfast at a local Denny's restaurant, they recounted how old-time residents there still waved the discrimination flag against Mexican-Americans and how they still felt free to say the "S" word (spic) against us without fear of any consequence. It brought to mind an instance where we felt the lash of discrimination in the flesh and we remembered this.)  

By Juan Montoya
Some time back in one of our former lifetimes, we lived and worked in a small southwest Minnesota town named Worthington.

To call it rural would be an understatement. There were perhaps some 13,000 inhabitants not counting turkeys and hogs. In fact, the annual festival (as our Charro Days in Brownsville) was Turkey Days. The folks at Worthington, harking back to when a Campbell's Soup plant was open there, hailed the city as the turkey capital of the United States.

I'm not making this up. There was actually a Turkey Race called the Great Gobbler Gallop where the local turkey (named Paycheck) would race down 10th Street (the main street) against a challenger turkey (Ruby Begonia) from Cuero, Texas, which also called itself the turkey capital of the country.

Then Paycheck and a racing team would make the trek to Cuero to race down their main street. Whoever's team won gave the bragging rights to the town to claim the national turkey town title.
Ah, rural America. You gotta love it.

But I digress.

The local newspaper (The Daily Globe) catered to its rural readership and often (four times a year) featured a Farm Beat section. One of the main features was a story on Century Farms recognized by the state and issued a proclamation and a plaque by the governor. To be recognized as a Century Farm farms must have remained in continuous family ownership for 100 years and be a minimum of 50 acres in size.

Reporters on the staff dreaded the coming of the quarterly issues, but everyone swallowed the bitter pill, bit the bullet, and contributed stories to the issue. It fell on my lot to write a story on a Century Farm located just west of Worthington near the town of Rushmore. Now, Rushmore wasn't your average metropolis. It had perhaps 350 people if you counted the motorists passing on I-90 to the north at the time you did the census.

I went along with staff photographer Bryan Korthals. Bryan was an old hand at The Daily Globe and had done scores (if not more) assignments on Century Farms for the Farm Beat. He was actually a pretty good photog just as Joe Hermosa, Ron Schade, Brad Doherty, and Mickey Torres, were in the Brownsville Herald of old.

We got to the farm and set about to interview the couple who lived there. Their kids were all grown up and gone and they lived alone. The farmer and his wife were in their 70s and he had suffered a stroke which made interviewing him a team project between me and his wife. We were pulling it off when a brother – we'll call him Maynard – came in the house and sat next to Korthals as I took notes.

All of a sudden Maynard interrupted and asked me: "Hey, where are you from?"
I turned around and said, "Texas."
"What's the matter?," Maynard persisted. "Aren't there any jobs in Texas?"

As I turned to look at him, I noticed the farmer's wife was visibly embarrassed with Maynard's intrusions.
"Let me get through with this and we'll talk then," I told Maynard as amiably as I could.

I turned to the lady and asked her a few softball questions. One of them was: "In all these years, what changes have you noticed in Rushmore when you go to town?"

"Well," she answered, "I hardly know anyone anymore." 

"Mexicans are thick as flies," Maynard butted in.
She winced and Korthals smothered a laugh as I plodded on through the interview.

I finally finished taking notes and turned to Maynard, who was sitting smirking smugly at me.

"Now, what is it you wanted to know, Maynard?," I asked.
"How come you're not in Texas working instead of here? Isn't there any work there?," he answered.

"Well, yes Maynard, there is work. But they tell me that you people here don't know how to write and they hired me," I answered with a smile.

He looked at me sideways with a puzzled look and then laughed.
"You know what? I like you. You can come visit any time you want."

We parted good friends and as we drove down the long driveway of the farm Bryan and I burst out laughing and we kept laughing all the way back to the newsroom where the incident became part of the Daily Globe's Farm Beat lore.