Streator
when it turned 100
Written
by Dan McDonald
Fifty years ago this past
summer, Streator, the place where I’ve always said I grew up, celebrated its one
hundredth birthday.
Our address was route 1
Manville, but Manville had no stores after 1958, had no church after about
1973, and had only 13 houses built near a railroad that had been torn out
sometime before I went to college. It was only people living near us to whom we
said we were from Manville. To most people we said we were from Streator; about 100 miles southwest of
Chicago, and 65 miles northeast of Peoria.
The city had started out as a
village in the midst of farmers. After coal was discovered in the area, a Dr. Worthy Streator led a group of investors to bring
a railroad to the town to help insure that the coal was mined and delivered to locales needing it. Miners from other parts of the United States, as well as immigrants from
southern and Eastern European nations soon made their way to Streator to work the mines. The city, after 1868 was named for the investor who brought the first railway to our town.
The railroads serving our city began growing in number after
1868. The most important railway, serving our town, was the main line of the Atcheson,
Topeka, and the Santa Fe. It became immortalized when the railway was celebrated in this song sung by Judy Garland.
Streator was served by as many as six different railway lines.
Nearby abundant deposits of
silica sand brought glass factories to Streator. By 1960 Streator was described
as the glass container capital of the world. The coal mines were no longer
being mined, but one glass factory employed three thousand people, and a second
employed a thousand people. Other assorted industries included a brick factory,
snow plow and lawn mower factories, and numerous shops which served the auto and agricultural
implement manufacturing sectors. We weren’t a large city, but if you were
willing to work hard, there were decent paying jobs in abundance.
We thought that was the way things were and always would be, that 1968 summer we celebrated our city’s centennial.
Some of us learned things
that year that we had never known. We discovered that for a time George "Honey Boy" Evans had a Streator connection. He wrote show tunes and one of his most famous had became the theme song for our centennial celebration “In the Good Old Summertime”.
A beard growing contest took place in the city's celebration of the centennial. Some grew the full sized beards that were grown in 1868, while others chose the 1890's style of handle bar mustaches. There weren't a lot of beards grown in the late 1960's by older people, but there were beards everywhere in Streator in 1968. We were celebrating our city, characterized by the hard work of miners and manufacturing workers. In Streator we believed, as
much as anyone believed, that with hard work one could expect to build a good life in our home town.
My sister worked for an
attorney in 1968. He carried heartbreak in his soul that summer while Streator
celebrated. He had long been interested in politics, but a kind of nervous disorder
led his physician to recommend that he avoid the stress of political life. The attorney, taking his physician's advice, primarily served
his clients in matters of family, corporate, and tax law. He was of Irish descent and
Catholic. He lived near both his church and business. He would stop at his church for morning mass every day of the week on his way to his law business. In 1968 he was elected to be a Robert F. Kennedy delegate at the Chicago Democratic National Convention. He was elated when Kennedy appeared to
be headed towards victory at the Chicago convention, but then an assassin's bullet claimed the life of the Senator. Few people knew that my sister's employer had worked on a special surprise visit by Senator Kennedy to appear at Streator's centennial. It would have been one of the most exciting events in the attorney's life. While he managed to celebrate our city's first one hundred years, he carried with him in all its celebrations a heavy sorrowful heart feeling in every event what could have been, but wouldn't be.
In 1968, we who grew up in
Streator might have had dreams of going to other places in the world, or dreams of living the rest of our lives in the place we described as home. It would be our choice. We imagined that Streator would always exist as a place where if you were willing to work hard, you would enjoy a decent life. We didn’t know how the next few decades were
going to be different from the first one hundred years of life in our town. Farmers would face crisis years. Farm consolidation would replace the area's hundreds of farmers, with a few dozen. The coal mines were already gone. The railways would soon be delivering fewer passengers and less freight as Americans owned automobiles, flew by air; and the nation's freight was increasingly delivered by the trucks on interstates which bypassed Streator. The vast majority of our thousands of glass factory employees would see their jobs lost to the aluminum and plastic container industries. We would join the names of other cities experiencing the transition of the Great Lakes States transition from that of the nation's industrial center to the nation's decaying rust belt. The streets of downtown, where in high school I cruised when I wasn't at the pizza parlor, would become places where plywood covered windows of shops where people once went inside to buy fine clothing. It would become painful to see that Main Street that once was busy having become a desert of buildings with boarded up windows. In 1968, none of us would have seen those days headed our way. We imagined Streator would always be a place where hard work would allow one to live a decent life. In 1968 we would all have agreed that capitalism worked. In later years, we would wonder if there could be a system which did not come with so much boom when capital entered a town, and so much heartbreak when capital left a town in disarray. We came to understand capitalism not as a force ushering in a utopia, but more as something that just is, like life, joy, sickness, and death. Perhaps there is not really a better system, but seeing a city in ruins when capital has exited a town, those of us from Streator are prone to listen, on occasion for reforms and suggestions. We didn't know in 1968 that our centennial was more of a wake celebrating a past way of life than a wedding party celebrating our future.
