Chapter 4

So that's how Arlene and I wound up in Bradford.

I think that in the beginning both of us more or less thought we wouldn't be here very long, but I guess we were wrong.

I wound up getting out of the hospital several days later. Although I was on crutches, I wasn't getting around very well, and it just about wore me out to just ride around town to our new house. I recall that she went a little out of her way to show me the high school and around town a little, as that was the first look I'd really had at the place. My initial reaction was that it was a pretty nice place for a town its size, and I've rarely had reason to modify my opinion since then.

I was going to say that Bradford hadn't changed much over the years, and then I got to thinking about it and realized that would be a lie. Bradford has actually changed quite a bit, but it came by little bits and pieces so small we hardly noticed it. It really wasn't until I sat down to start writing this, trying to remember what it was like back then, that I realized just how much has changed since 1954.

Bradford in 1954 was very much a country town – by which I mean that one of the reasons the town existed was to serve farmers in the surrounding area. There were a few small industries, the biggest being one that built pumps and other equipment for agricultural irrigation, so even that had a farm base. There were a couple of smaller industries that made the odd part for the auto industry, but for the most part the town's economy rested on its agricultural base. There were a lot of retail businesses, some of them on the small side, that served the farmers or the population in general. There wasn't much you couldn't get in Bradford so long as it was something that you used on an everyday basis. There were grocery stores, hardware stores, clothing stores, furniture stores, and other stores of about every description you can think of.

If you were a farmer who lived a few miles out of town, you might come to town once a week to do your shopping. You could get your groceries, a new pair of overalls, your animal feed and parts for your combine all in Bradford. Once in a while you might have to go to Hawthorne, the county seat, for something, but that was eighteen miles away and you didn't make the trip unless you had to.

All of that changed slowly over the years, but change it did, and at least in this part of the country the change was pretty universal. A bigger town like Hawthorne could support bigger stores with a bigger selection of stuff than you could get in Bradford, yet the fixed costs of running the store didn't go up as fast as the size did. This is what we called "economy of scale" in the economics classes I was to teach in later years, and the end result was that the diversity of products that you could get here in Bradford slowly diminished. We haven't had a furniture store here for years, and the last clothing store closed about fifteen years ago when the elderly owners decided to retire.

For an example – one that I used in my classes again – when I came to Bradford we had a half dozen grocery stores. None of them were very big and were mostly storefront operations. The big one was the Kroger store; it was a two-storefront operation – the wall between the buildings had a hole knocked in it to make it one store, so it was maybe sixty by a hundred feet. That was a big store for those days and had at least a little of about everything you could want. It didn't have, oh, eight kinds of bread, only two or three, so I guess you'd have to say that the selection was limited. The rest of the stores were smaller, single-storefront operations, so the selection was a little more limited, and they couldn't keep as much of it in stock. Nobody worried about it because that was the way things had always been.

Now, most of these stores were downtown. The only place you had to park was on the street, where there were parking meters to keep people moving along. A couple of the small independent grocers didn't like the way that the bigger Kroger store chain could undercut their prices. They got their heads together and put up a building on a big empty lot on the edge of the downtown area that had a little more space than the Kroger store, and a parking lot with free parking. It was the free and adequate parking as much as anything that soon brought them a big share of the grocery business in town. The story went that they took one look at the completed building and wondered how they'd fill it, but within a year were adding on. It didn't hurt the Kroger store all that much, but the competition drove a couple of the other independent grocers under. I won't go into the ins and outs of how it happened, but we've been down to one big grocery store for a good many years, now. It's been longer than that since we've had a little grocery store downtown, and those buildings that housed them now have other businesses in them, or nothing at all.

The same sort of thing happened with most everything – but slowly, over time, so we barely noticed it until we looked up and wondered where everything went.

At the same time that economy-of-scale thing was working in the agricultural field. When I started teaching at Bradford, I'd imagine that a good half the boys in my classes were wearing those blue Future Farmers of America jackets with the big gold patch on the back. Most of those boys really expected to be farmers sooner or later, but darn few of them ever managed it. When I came to Bradford, the average farm was eighty or a hundred and twenty acres. There were a handful of people who leased land to be able to farm some more, but I doubt if much of anyone farmed over 240 acres. All those little farms meant that there were a lot of farm families, at least a hundred in the school district and probably more. Today, there's only a handful of people making a living from nothing but farming in the Bradford Consolidated School District, and they're having to work a thousand acres or more of their own land or leased land to make ends meet.

Why? That old economy-of-scale thing again. Assume that it takes two farmers a tractor apiece to each farm their eighty acres. One farmer, with a slightly larger, more expensive tractor, can farm 160 acres and get twice the income in the process. There eventually comes a point of diminishing returns, but bigger equipment, though more expensive, can keep shoving that point back.

Back in the old days when I came to Bradford, most if not all those hundred farm families kept cows – six, eight, ten, maybe a dozen but not many more. The milk was handled in those old ten-gallon milk cans you see in the antique stores today, and there were a lot of milk trucks making calls on a lot of farms because the cows had to be milked twice a day, every day. There are still people around who have beef cattle, but milking cows are just plain gone on the small farms. What we have today is a huge barn a few miles out of town where there are over two thousand milk cows. They milk around the clock getting to each cow three times a day. Granted, there are thirty people working there to do it, but that's a lot less than the hundred to two hundred people it took to maintain half the number of cows in 1954.