Column: A thank you note to the small town of La Porte, Indiana

When my wife heard the La Porte Jaycees wouldn’t be hosting the July 4 Parade this year, she said: “That makes it easier to leave.”

For going on 15 years, we’ve joined our neighbors in putting a blanket down along the parade route. It’s a tradition as hallowed there as the Chicago custom of putting an old kitchen chair on a parking space shoveled out of the snow and calling it dibs.

There is an ordinance saying you can’t mark your parade viewing spot before 10 a.m. on July 3. Violators can be fined and certainly raise eyebrows. Families have kept their spot from one generation to another during the 74 years that drum and bugle corps have marched in La Porte, Indiana (pop. 21,577) on the nation’s birthday.

We were relieved to hear later that the parade was going to continue. Responding to the mayor’s SOS, the Kiwanis Club took it over from the Jaycees, whose membership is declining.

But it won’t be the same for me and my wife.

We bought our house here as a weekend refuge from the hustle and bustle of a trendy Chicago neighborhood. But, reluctantly recognizing we weren’t up to the commute, we sold the house a couple of weeks ago and have begun packing up and saying goodbye to the people and places we have come to treasure.

La Porte visually advertises itself as a place where time stands still.

Midway along the Lincolnway parade route is Mama T’s Diner, which used to be B.J.’s American Cafe. The kitchen is still screened off by a brass teller’s window and letterboxes taken from some postal substation.

It’s not uncommon for customers to join hands and softly say grace before breakfasting on biscuits and gravy. In comparison, restaurants in our Chicago neighborhood, Old Town, play heart-pounding music that preempts reflecting on anything more profound than: “Could the waitress even hear what I ordered?”

Just to the west is the courthouse where a judge refused to accept a plea deal offered to a defendant who killed a horse. An animal’s life is valued in a town where volunteer fire companies from surrounding hamlets drive their siren-blaring rigs in the 4th of July parade.

Further west is Kabelin Ace Hardware, where I bought the parts to make a chuppah, the canopy under which Jews marry. The intrigued clerks made helpful modifications to my design for something they’d never heard of. Afterward, they would ask my wife: “How’s your husband doing with that … that tent thing he’s building?”

We were surprised when a theater group put on a production of “Fiddler On The Roof.” It’s a bittersweet musical about Jews exiled from Anatevka, a village in Czarist Russia. One Mother’s Day we got the last tickets to see Tevya, a poor milkman, ask God — “why?” I wondered how the players could so effectively capture the emotions, the accents, and the gestures of folks who lived long ago and far away.

But now, heading into self-exile, I understand: La Porte is their Anatevka.

May our neighbors never be exiled from their beloved village. There’s Bonnie, Ron and Margaret, who took care of our home as we grew older. Bonnie still phones with the weather report, knowing we fret about the basement flooding. And Kevin, who’d have the snow shoveled before our Friday arrival. And his wife, Claudia, who brought out toys for our grandchildren before we ever met.

As a child, I devoured the “Bobbsey Twins” books set in an idyllic small town. The reality is more complicated and thus more interesting.

A local newspaper once compared the ambiance of La Porte’s pubs. Ratings ran from suitable for children to excellent for viewing bar fights. My favorite is Dick’s, down Lincolnway from the courthouse.

Its owner told the reporter there are no fights in his place, explaining: “I keep a list of names that never get through the front door.”

Yet La Porte doesn’t fit the mold of the narrow-minded, xenophobic small towns that people the novels of Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser.

When mixed-race families were an unusual sight in Chicago we’d see a bearded white grandfather and a Black grandchild sharing a stack of pancakes at the Round The Clock restaurant in La Porte. My appearance makes it clear I’m from someplace else, yet at the Dairy Queen someone inevitably strikes up a conversation. It was the same when a Marine veteran of the Korean War ran a bookstore there. Dubbing me his “liberal friend,” he’d have barred the door if I tried to leave before talking politics.

I’ll miss La Porte, but part of thanking the town is passing the torch to others who may choose to go there. So here’s my best advice for how to first experience the town:

Visit Patton Cemetery on Memorial Day or Veterans Day. It’s an absolute sea of little American flags. It’ll help explain why blankets line Lincolnway like wall-to-wall carpeting on the Fourth of July.

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