All weekend in the tiny Southwest Iowa farm town of Imogene, throughout its annual Shamrock Days celebration — at the Emerald Isle, at St. Patrick’s Church, at the softball field — there were no signs of the pandemic. Not a single mask hid the face of any of the hundreds of revelers. Almost nobody shared vaccine stories. And most importantly, life was back.
Eliud Mwenda, a visiting priest from Kenya, said Mass at St. Patrick’s on Saturday night and afterward went to dinner at the home of George and Laurie McGargill. After that dinner, Fr. Mwenda joined the McGargills to watch the fireworks on the softball field situated at the top of the town. He looked around at the families of all ages that came for the weekend-long festival. “All of these people come together,” he said, struggling with his English, “because they want to make it so that Imogene is not going to die.”
That fear is ever-present in a place like Imogene. Small towns die out here all the time. Imogene is especially vulnerable. The population is about 30. The parish Facebook page claims about 300 members. The Sunday masses I’ve seen have ranged from 35 people to 120.
The crowd at all the weekend’s events was impressive. But George McGargill remembers what it used to be like, when Fremont County and Imogene had many more families, each with many more children. He pointed to the gravel parking lot between the softball field and the church. “St. Patrick’s Academy used to be there,” he told me and Fr. Mwenda. Then, he pointed to the concession stand. “There was even a public school, right there.”
He reflected on what’s been lost during his decades in this farming town, and then turned to Fr. Mwenda and chuckled a bit. “Imogene’s died a lot, Father.”
But it didn’t die in the pandemic.
Small towns, Main Streets, sports leagues, and all sorts of little platoons across America were shut down for months and months in 2020, into 2021. Many of them never recovered. Little Leagues folded, restaurants went out of business, churches never reopened.
In Imogene, though, the Emerald Isle is still going strong. The music stage is planning another concert. The softball field is in better shape than ever (or was before the rainstorm). St. Patrick’s is still kicking.
“We never really locked down,” nearby resident Shaylee told me. Yes, schools were closed from March through June 2020. Yes, some spring sports were delayed last year. And Shamrock Days were mostly canceled in 2020. But Shamrock Days 2021 were dampened only by the rain, and otherwise, they were bursting with life.
I went straight to the ballfield when I arrived on a Friday evening, where the softball tournament, featuring 12 teams, was underway. The ballfield was its own village for two days: Families set up lawn chairs under canopies; dozens of coolers housed Busch Light, White Claw, flavored seltzer, and Capri Sun. Some teams gathered around their own cooler or the bed of a truck. Some families grabbed a picnic table under the pavilion next to the snack bar, which sold hot dogs, hamburgers, Gatorades, and Imogene T-shirts. A giant jumping castle was inflated behind the bleachers.
Saturday morning, about 30 runners gathered in front of St. Patrick’s for the annual 5K, which ran through town, down the Wabash Trace trail, out to the main country road, and then back into town, with the Shamrock painted on the road serving as the finish line, right in front of the Emerald Isle. The softball tournament paused for a moment on Saturday afternoon as a local farmer flew his crop duster overhead and rained ping pong balls onto the field. Dozens of local children scrambled to grab them and win prizes.
The noble efforts to keep the field playable were abandoned an hour later when another rain came in. But the town returned to the field close to sunset Saturday. First, they wrote the names of lost loved ones on paper balloon lanterns, which they lit and set aloft. Rita Laughlin couldn’t hold back tears as she lit the lantern bearing the names of her late parents, Marty and Margaret Laughlin.
Then came the fireworks. “It’s a pretty impressive show, per capita,” promised one father. That was an understatement. In a year when many towns and cities once again canceled fireworks, Imogene went full blast. It was a display worthy of a whole city, but it was put on by this town of 30. It was probably half an hour, with three to five launchers and massive explosions. They did the same thing here last year, too. Plague or not, they were going to live their lives out here in the country.
And they lived their lives much more fully than others did in big coastal cities. For one thing, work for many people here means being alone on a tractor in a 100-acre field. No downtowns anywhere are crowded in normal times. Social distancing comes easy. Most people’s jobs were back to normal by summer 2020.
When the schools were remote-only in spring 2020, that didn’t seem to bring with it the anxiety and stress it might have brought in the suburbs of D.C. and New York. One teacher told me she had to teach remote for three months. “But it wasn’t a lot. We had an online program that I would just hook the kids up, and they just kind of worked through that.”
Rafe Rodewald, a local high schooler who won the Imogene 5K, loved that brief school closure. “It was fun,” he said, agreeing it was basically like having a six-month summer vacation. Other parents of schoolchildren made it clear that they took a laissez-faire attitude toward their children’s schooling. After the remote-schooling spring, “we’d have never known” of the pandemic and the lockdowns “if not for the news,” said Rafe’s father, Alan Rodewald, standing between the Emerald Isle and the grain elevators.
That’s an exaggeration, of course. For one thing, the softball tournament was canceled last summer. Rodewald’s agricultural chemical company didn’t really see any change, but last year, he noticed that the truckers bringing his chemicals were showing up in desperate condition.
“The gas stations were shut down,” which meant no showers and no bathrooms for truckers on the road. “So, we opened it up for all the delivery guys coming in: ‘If you want to take a shower, you’re more than welcome to do it.’ And they were ecstatic over it because everybody else was treating everybody like they had the black plague.” Rodewald let truckers spend the night in the company parking lot. He’d leave the door to their building unlocked overnight.
And while downtowns in New York, D.C., California, and all over the country turned into unrecognizable ghost towns for months, Imogene didn’t look that different. After all, there’s kind of only one business here: the Emerald Isle.
The Isle went take-out-only for a few weeks. This is where they found the outpouring of community support that seems to define the town. “When we did to-go orders, everybody was great,” said Heather Laughlin behind the bar on Saturday. Tips for to-go orders, which had never been common, became standard. People wanted to make sure the Isle didn’t die.
Soon, it reopened. Things weren’t exactly the same. “We developed a new crowd,” was how Heather put it. That is, the over-65 crowd didn’t really show up for many months, but a lot of the 20- and 30-somethings started filling the bar and the tables more. Steadily, over the year, the old crowd came back.
And as you might imagine in an Irish bar in an Irish town whose church is St. Patrick’s, March 17, 2021, was something of a jubilee. “St. Patrick’s Day was good,” Heather said. “And then, there was an outbreak.”
I couldn’t get an exact count of cases from the Imogene St. Patrick’s Day outbreak, but state data show 13 positive cases in Fremont County over a 7-day stretch starting March 19, and this followed a whole week with zero cases.
In that outbreak and others, lots of locals got COVID. Most of the cases were mild. But right next to the cash register at the bar was a Ziploc bag I didn’t notice until Saturday night. It was labeled “Memorial Bands for Mike ‘Whitey’ Teachout.”
Whitey Teachout was born in Shenandoah, the nearest small city, and graduated from Shenandoah High School in the class of 1975. Four years later, at St. Mary’s, Shen’s Catholic parish, he married Shari Wiesen, and they had three children. After farming and holding other jobs, he became a correctional officer at the prison in the nearby city of Clarinda.
In Shen and Imogene and surrounding towns, he was, everyone at the Isle agreed, well-known and universally liked. Then in late October, a coronavirus outbreak hit the Clarinda Correctional Facility. More than 350 inmates tested positive out of a population of fewer than 1,000. Whitey got sick, too. He went on a ventilator, then showed signs of recovery, but took a turn for the worse.
On Nov. 28, the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, Whitey died at age 63.
Jess, Whitey’s daughter, was the one who told me about her father. When she found out I was from Washington, she asked me to attend a law enforcement memorial in D.C. where Whitey would be honored in May 2022. Neither she nor her family could greet mourners at his wake in December, thanks to fears of COVID. As with so many who died during the pandemic, Whitey’s friends weren’t able to gather, to mourn, remember him, and pray for his soul properly. So, two weeks before Shamrock Days, on Saturday night, June 26, owner Kevin Olson closed the Emerald Isle’s kitchen in order to host a party celebrating Whitey’s life.
At the bar over this year’s Shamrock Days, I heard two other stories of COVID’s ravages on the people of Imogene. One patron told me of a businessman in Shenandoah: “About a year ago, he just freaked out with the COVID. And so, he stayed at home. He was having people just bring him groceries like once a week or so. He was in his basement cleaning a gun. I’m assuming he accidentally shot himself in the leg or something,” the story goes. “He did damn near bled out from that. He was down there like three days. And finally, one of the kids checked on him when they hadn’t heard from him. He had had a mini stroke or something like that. And they had to put him in a rest home for a while.”
I heard of another local (I knew him and had last spoken to him in February 2020) who saw the pandemic and lockdowns leading to societal collapse. The anxiety of this was too much, and he just sort of burnt out, dropping out of society.
Others, though, saw the lockdowns as a break from anxiety. “I’m not going to lie,” Alan Rodewald said when I asked how his bout with COVID was. “It was the greatest 10 days I’ve had in a while.” He couldn’t go to work. He felt bad for a day. He lost taste and smell for a week or so.
“To be honest, it was really nice having more time together,” said Becca Castle, whose home is visible from the softball fields. “The kids really liked helping out on the farm.” Becca worked from home for a nonprofit organization and liked it.
Chris Hernandez, another local, thought it was a good corrective on public perception. “I hope it really increases the trades,” she told me. “I think a lot of people have shifted their attitudes on essential workers.”
Kevin Olson at the Isle told me of one long-term change post-pandemic. He used to keep the place open 7 days a week. Now, he realizes that was killing him. These days, the Isle closes on Sunday and Monday. “I’m never going back,” he told me.
This may be the most widespread impact of the whole coronavirus story here: Small-town country living may become even a little bit slower.
Timothy P. Carney is the senior political columnist at the Washington Examiner and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse.
