Sandburg Days: Festival for the Mind 2014

Galesburg, Illinois is a quiet little town, the kind of town that closes down early, or at least sees no good reason to stay open late. On a Thursday night nearing ten o’clock, the occasional car sputters down Main Street—speed limit 35, though it is the major thoroughfare and connects to I-74. Probably those passengers are going to a bar or restaurant that caters to a later crowd or one of the chain fast-food or pharmacy places right there on Main Street, surely not to Stone Alley Books or The Rust Bucket or The Frameworks or One Stop Smokers Shop or Collectors Firearms or any of the places along Cherry or Seminary—those are all LONG CLOSED. 

Many years ago, I attended a Knox College football game. We sat, lay and stood on muddy slopes in a stadium called The Bowl, hollering and hooting and laughing and jeering. But there were maybe only 40 or 50 of us, not enough to disturb even the closest residents.

Yes, Galesburg is a quiet town.

Unless you count the trains.

Cherry St. Bingo Hall
(Photo by Don Evans)

Big booming bass horns blast through the silence at all times of the day and night—Santa Fe and Burlington Northern and AmTrak all moving their loads back and forth through town, never pausing their pace but merely tooting out a courtesy warning, “Here we come again!” It’s not just the horns, either. It’s the wailing engines and the clacking wheels and the dinging gates—steel on steel rising up from the soles of your shoes. Cell phone conversations are halted with the shout, “One sec: TRAIN,” and earplugs are handed out at local hotels. The horns startle at first—it feels like you’re about to get flattened. After a while, it feels more like you’re immune to the diesly bustle, that the trains will ALWAYS miss.

Galesburg is quaint enough, but not that unique. You drive around the Midwest enough, you find smaller towns like this—in Lanesboro, Minnesota; South Amana, Iowa; Cadillac, Michigan; Cedarburg, Wisconsin; French Lick, Indiana. The town centers highlight all the golly gee-ness (chocolate shops, antique and used bookstores, local theatres, wrought-iron signage in cursive) and history (the town square, the courthouse, markers detailing important people and events, little museums). The Rite Aids and Subways and Kentucky Fried Chickens manage to wedge their ways in between ye old pub and the artsy café, though for the most part they are relegated to a commercial strip, along with the hotels, gas stations, pawn shops, electronics stores and so forth. Whatever used to be the main industry has likely gone belly up, the remnants of these heroic, patriarchal businesses found in businesses more modern and more efficient.

But none of those other towns have Carl Sandburg.   

When Grace Paley visited Galesburg, she, like so many other authors on a similar trip, insisted Knox College Director of Creative Writing Robin Metz take her to Sandburg’s birthplace. She twirled the house and museum. Inhaled the air. Walked the streets. She said, “You can feel him here still.”

When you get off the main drag and roam the residential neighborhoods, Galesburg’s character is more

Pat's Barber Shop (Photo by Don Evans)

striking. Pat’s Barber Shop and Tom’s Gun Shop and Danielle’s Sewing and Alterations and Custer’s Auto Repair look just like their neighbor’s homes, only with signs. Some of these small businesses, like some of the homes on the same blocks, look as though they haven’t been relevant in a very long time. An elegant, century-old wrought iron fire escape winds its way around a gigantic milk crate of a back porch.  Mounds of dirt and gravel salute white picket fences. Stray mutts sniff collared and manicured poodles.

You bob and weave between disheveled and lovely in Galesburg, and no matter where you go there seem to be those trains.

Sandburg’s birthplace practically bumps up against a train yard, as it did when his old man, August,

Sandburg Birthplace
(Photo by Don Evans)

worked at the Burlington & Quincy Railroad—ten hours a day, six days a week, with no pay raise in his decades-long career.

Those trains are in Sandburg’s poems, poems like 35 Limited, which reads,

I AM riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains of the nation.

Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air go fifteen all-steel coaches holding a thousand people.

(All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall pass to ashes.)

I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he answers: “Omaha.”

The tiny birthplace gives a very precise sense of what life was like for Charlie, the boy who would

Charlie and Mary's Bedroom (Don Evans)

become the internationally celebrated poet. The little corner that served as Charlie and his sister Mary's sleeping quarters provides more room for the imagination than anything else. The outhouse is still in back, as is Remembrance Rock. The stone path back there is littered with precious Sandburg quotes—walk a minute and you collect more wisdom than in an ordinary year’s stroll.  The museum, next door, efficiently tells Sandburg’s complete story, using artifacts like his old typewriter, handwritten notes, first edition books, school photos, and so many more original items from his time in Galesburg.

The Stone Path (Don Evans)

Galesburg is rightfully proud and protective of Sandburg’s legacy. Every year for the past 19 years, the Sandburg Historic Site Association, along with Knox College and  Carl Sandburg College, has put on a festival. They call it Sandburg Days: Festival for the Mind, and it’s a tribute to this community that they pull together to make this happen, though like so many other tiny arts organizations there are constant troubles with money and participation.

There is barely a corkboard in town that doesn’t feature a poster for the festival, and you find that locals will freely share unsolicited gossip. A waitress at the Best Western off the highway says that grade school and high school here meant digesting a lot of Sandburg, and that many of the kids were thrilled with the fact. A patron at the Beanhive on Simmons Street offers that she met Sandburg biographer Penelope Niven, a regular at the festival, and “she couldn’t be lovelier.” In a 15-store antique mall on Main Street that will shortly be razed in the name of progress, the old guy behind the counter offers that Lonnie Stewart worked here as a hairdresser before going "wherever it is he went," which turned out to be "all over" in pursuit of further training and opportunities en route to a prominent artistic career.  

Lonnie’s Sandburg sculpture rode into town on a flatbed truck as part of a parade to kick off the festival Wednesday. The 9-foot bronze Sandburg, guitar strapped across his back, books under his arm, peered at those along the route. The wizened, energetic Galesburg son almost but not quite offered up a wave, and as he and the rest of the parade vibrated down Main Street anybody around here who hadn’t read or digested the posters now knew what was what.

That was just the beginning. Over the course of four days, there were theater presentations, poetry readings, concerts, lectures and discussions. Penny gave a talk on Sandburg and Lincoln, specifically about how Galesburg influenced Sandburg’s attitude toward Lincoln in those years before he set out to write what turned into a six-volume biography of the president’s life. Penny, more than any other person, got to know Sandburg, spending years digging and sorting and hunting through old letters and manuscripts, talking to every Sandburg connection still inhaling our air, zigging and zagging from Connemara to Galesburg to Chicago. In the course of the four-day festival, she did book signings, lectures to high school kids, workshops for young writers, and everything else short of sweeping the streets.

Penny’s roll-up-her-sleeves attitude is typical of the festival’s spirit. She cares deeply about Sandburg and supports the town’s efforts naturally and honestly. Marc Smith, the legendary creator of the international Poetry Slam movement, is another expert, and he comes annually to put on the Rootabaga Poetry Slam, which he did for the seventh straight year this past weekend. Marc is a veritable jukebox of Sandburg poems and to see and hear him perform is to watch those lyrical lines comes alive. A lot of the Galesburg people like Robin Demott, Chuck Bednar and Tom Foley—a whole collection of erudite and interesting scholars and artists--make it their business to orchestrate, promote and attend all of the activities, as they have for years.

Lonnie spoke at the public presentation of the statue Friday night at what used to a car dealership on Broad Street. He told the story of wrecking his shoulder in a fall at a brickyard, halting progress of his creation and putting all deadlines in peril. After an operation, weeks and weeks of grueling rehab, and a little healing time, Lonnie decided to give it a go. He climbed high, his bad arm propped up and his left hand learning the molding and shaping work formerly the domain of his right. He finished that sculpture with his off hand.

Lonnie’s story reminded me of Sandburg’s Work Gangs, which includes the lines,

Then the hammer heads talk to the handles,

then the scoops of the shovels talk,

how the day’s work nicked and trimmed them,

how they swung and lifted all day,

how the hands of the work gangs smelled of hope.

 And it also reminded me of my friend Jaymes, whom I’ve known eight or nine years through our mutual cigar addiction. I mentioned my Galesburg trip to Jaymes, thinking I would need to pinpoint the town for him. But he surprised me and said, “Yeah, I spent some time there. A pretty long time. Five years.”  When Jaymes was a gangbanging, drug using teenager, he killed a man in a fight and spent nearly the next twenty years in Illinois prisons. Galesburg was one of them. Jaymes is now a hard working, decent person, decades clean and as law abiding as your average citizen. But when he was locked up in Hill Correctional Center, he became part of a public works crew that went out into Galesburg in their red-striped blue pants to paint churches, clean streets, and, once, to pretty up an old CB&Q locomotive that would serve as the centerpiece of the railroad museum. “Yeah, they put my name on a sign—all our names,” Jaymes told me. “Go there and look: it’s there.”

This sense of community, this sense of working hard and working together, this sense of the small and large contributors all playing vital roles in whatever success can be claimed—it comes together during Sandburg Days.

 Over dinner, Robin Metz confided the precarious status of the festival and, indeed, the perpetuation of the Sandburg historic sites. Public money is tight. Institutions are cautious. Enthusiasm shifts to the new rather than historic.

The birthplace was almost closed recently, and exists now on reduced hours. The people working to preserve Sandburg’s legacy are fighting against apathy. The Sandburg birthplace is one of those pilgrimages that too often get relegated to someday status, but for those taking all this for granted….there is no guarantee for tomorrow. People need to come, spend a little money, inject some life into the programming. When the hard decisions come down, those vested with veto power need to remember why they think this is important and have evidence that others share their sentiments.

Chicago Years (Don Evans)

It’s too late this year to do more than recap the latest installment of the festival. But next year…Chicago

needs to put this on its calendar. Sandburg meant as much to Chicago, and Chicago to him, as any other place, and for all of us who cherish his life’s work there is much to learn and savor in Galesburg. It’s an easy three and a half hour trip—once you get clear of Aurora, it’s just you and a smattering of trucks…until you drive into those trains.

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Donald G. Evans is the founder and executive director of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. He is the author of the novel Good Money After Bad and short story collection An Off-White Christmas, as well as the editor of the anthology Cubbie Blues: 100 Years of Waiting Till Next Year. He is the Chicago editor of the Great Lakes Cultural Review. He serves on the American Writers Museum's Chicago Literary Council and the committee that selects the Harold Washington Literary Award.

donaldgevans@hotmail.com