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By Root 1306 0

that wonderful heap of splendor, was torn down in 1966 to make way for an office building. I didn’t realize until I read a history of the city for this book that the Des Moines was not just the finest theater in the city but possibly the finest surviving theater of any type between Chicago and the West Coast. I was further delighted to discover that it had been built by none other than A. H. Blank, the philanthropist with the penthouse apartment that Jed Mattes and I used to visit. He had spent the exceptionally lavish sum of $750,000 on the building in 1918. It is extraordinary to think that it didn’t even survive for half a century. The other principal theaters of my childhood—the Paramount, Orpheum (later called the Galaxy), Ingersoll, Hiland, Holiday, and Capri—followed one by one. Nowadays if you want to see a movie you have to drive out to a shopping mall, where you can choose between a dozen features, but just one very small size of screen, each inhabiting a kind of cinematic shoe box. Not much magic in that.

Riverview Park closed in 1978. Today it’s just a large vacant lot with nothing to show that it ever existed. Bishop’s, our beloved cafeteria, closed about the same time, taking its atomic toilets, its little table lights, its glorious foods and kindly waitresses with it. Many other locally owned restaurants—Johnny and Kay’s, Country Gentleman, Babe’s, Bolton and Hay’s, Vic’s Tally-Ho, the beloved Toddle House—went around the same time. Stephen Katz helped the Toddle House on its way by introducing to it a new concept called “dine and dash” in which he and whoever he had been drinking with would consume a hearty late-night supper and then make a hasty exit without paying, calling over their shoulder if challenged, “Short of cash—gotta dash!” I wouldn’t say that Katz single-handedly put the Toddle House out of business, but he didn’t help.

The Tribune, the evening paper which I lugged thanklessly from house to house for so many years, closed in 1982 after it was realized that no one had actually been reading it since about 1938. The Register, its big sister, which once truly was the pride of Iowa, got taken over by the Gannett organization three years later. Today it is, well, not what it was. It no longer sends a reporter to baseball spring training or even always to the World Series, so it is perhaps as well my father is no longer around.

Greenwood, my old elementary school, still commands its handsome lawn, still looks splendid from the street, but they tore out the wonderful old gym and auditorium, its two most cherishable features, to make way for a library and art room, and the other distinguishing touches—the clanking radiators, the elegant water fountains, the smell of mimeograph—are mostly long gone, too, so it’s no longer really the place I knew.

My peerless Little League park, with its grandstand and press box, was torn down so that somebody could build an enormous apartment building in its place. A new, cheaper park was built down by the river bottoms near where the Butters used to live, but the last time I went down there it was overgrown and appeared to be abandoned. There was no one to ask what happened because there are no people outdoors anymore—no kids on bikes, no neighbors talking over fences, no old men sitting on porches. Everyone is indoors.

Dahl’s supermarket is still there, and still held in some affection, but it lost the Kiddie Corral and grocery tunnel years ago during one of its periodic, and generally dismaying, renovations. Nearly all the other neighborhood stores—Grund’s Groceries, Barbara’s Bake Shoppe, Reed’s ice-cream parlor, Pope’s barbershop, the Sherwin-Williams paint store, Mitcham’s TV and Electrical, the little shoe repair shop (run by Jimmy the Italian—a beloved local figure), Henry’s Hamburgers, Reppert’s Drugstore—are long gone. Where several of them stood there is now a big Walgreens drugstore, so you can buy everything under one roof in a large, anonymous, brightly lit space from people who have never seen you before and wouldn’t remember you if they had. It has