Small Town USA

It was a fairly big story in a national newspaper for what all would agree is a $30 million question for a small town. In fact, the headline even says '$30 Million Dollar Question Stumps Small Town.'  When you absorb the story, you ponder an even bigger question: how does a town the size of Dixon absorb $30 million in embezzlement and not have the lights go out, never mind who did it.

The small town in the story is Dixon, Illinois, not Tampico, but Tampico enters into it.

The WSJ reported that the municipal finance chief of Dixon, birthplace of Ronald Reagan, was arrested and charged with misappropriating $30 million in town funds since 2006. Rita Caldwell is alleged to have siphoned money off to buy jewelry, maintain her farm for quarter horses, and acquire expensive vehicles, even if they were trucks.

I immediately knew they had gotten something wrong. Nothing to do with Ms. Caldwell, who as most fraudsters are, are often caught when they take a vacation (in her case an extended one, no doubt financed by the town) and someone else starts to wonder about what's now in front of them and why doesn't it make any sense.

No, the WSJ had it wrong that it was Ronald Reagan's birthplace, a fact they presented a correction for the following day. Mr. Reagan was born in Tampico, Illinois, an even smaller town 30 miles southwest of Dixon. In July 2009 Dixon's population was taken to be be 14,493: Tampico's 725.

And of those 725 people I can count at least several cousins, none of whom I probably ever met, even at this stage of my life.  As noted in a much earlier posting, my mother and her two brothers came from Tampico, with her oldest brother Howard having gone to the same one room school house as the young Ronald. There's a picture of the class and my uncle Howard, who I did meet, is in the center, with Ronnie off to the lower left.  Reagan's family moved to Dixon when he was still quite young, but his start, and earliest education, was in Tampico.

One of the cousin's I've kept in touch with, but never met, is a lifelong Tampico resident, as is the rest of his family. Thus, I've got roots in that rural community that comes up on MapQuest as basically large white spaces with a few lines running through it.

Reagan's start there is what the town is all about. Even to the point that my cousin Don sent me a photo of a mural he painted on the side of a brick building in town showing a presidential Reagan and First Lady Nancy hovering over a picture of the White House. Corny, maybe, but not a bad rendition.

Here in the northeast we might find it hard to imagine a full-fledged town that has only 725 people in it. While that never astounds me, having once been in Tampico in the 1950s, what continues to astound me is my cousin's address: 29965 35 E Street.

The house number exceeds the population. That may not be a $30 million question, but I've always wondered what the house next door, presumably 29963, or 29967 35 E Street, looks like.

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