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Small town life: It isn't New York

By Brent McIntosh
I spent the first 18 years of my life living in the same room in same house in the same small town. The odds that my parents will ever move from that town stand somewhere between the odds that Michigan will sweep the football, women's basketball and field hockey national championships next year, and the odds that Bill Clinton's presidency has just been a nationwide bad dream, from which we're soon all going to wake.

Not that I would ever want them to move.Will- iamston, a hamlet outside Lansing, was always good to me, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't love that town. One thing about Williamston, though: It's a little small.

It's not small if you're from the North Dakota or the Upper Peninsula, or if you're from one of those towns where young mens' 18th birthdays are eagerly anticipated because they mean another member of the city council.

On the other hand, Williamston's really tiny if you're from a cultural mecca like Los Angeles, Nashville or Newark. It's minute enough that we considered East Lansing the Big City.

Williamston was the sort of small town where everyone knew everyone else's business. If you were ignorant to the last week's gossip, you could always journey to the bank downtown. The bank served as the center of Williamston's gossip web, with my friend's mother as the ravenous spider.

The speed at which rumors traveled in Williamston was truly breathtaking. I've often thought that the bank was nothing more than a front for the Psychic Friends Network, so quickly did the tellers know the latest gossip.

The tellers often reported that I had a new girlfriend before I was aware of it. It came to the point where my friends would go to the bank to find out who they were dating. If they didn't like the girl, they would spread a rumor that they had broken up with her. In this manner, many an affair came and went with no contact between the participants.

Speaking of affairs, in Williamston dating an exotic woman consisted of going out with either the exchange student or a girl from Haslett, the town next door. It was a sort of betrayal to date a Haslett girl, like consorting with the enemy.

There were classic Haslett-Williamston battles. Neither town had enough people to have any real gangs, so Williamston's hard-rock kids would just have a weekly rumble with Haslett's hard-rock kids at Burger King. We'd all drive our Chevrolets out to watch.

Pretty much everybody in Williamston drove a Chevy. New Yorkers will assume this made it difficult to determine social class of the driver by his car, by whether it's a BMW or a VW Bug. Not true: You could always make class distinctions based on whose old Chevy was being driven by whom.

For example, if you sold me a Chevy you bought new, you're upper class and I'm middle class. But if you bought the Chevy from Billy Joe, then Billy Joe's upper class, you're middle class, and I'm lower class.

The only exceptions are Corvettes. Corvettes have to be sold twice before they cease to be indicators of uppitiness.

Like the cars, the people in my hometown are outwardly pretty homogeneous. Just about everybody's white, which leaves the local racists with a lot of time on their hands. Because there aren't enough minorities against which to discriminate, Williamston racists have to take turns harassing the local Catholics.

I'm kidding, of course, but there are Big City types out there who will believe all this is true and add it to their list of indictments of small-town living, right beside the lack of public transportation and the inability to buy good crack.

The mistake most Big City people make in stereotyping Williamstoners (yes, Williamstoners) is assuming the outward homogeneity is akin to inward similarity.

We may not be famous -- Norm from the first Real World and a couple of European basketball professionals are Williamston High's most famous alums -- but we're not all the same.

Williamston is full of ideological diversity. There are the staunch conservatives, who support Pat Buchanan for president, and the bleeding-heart liberals (Bob Dole) and the socialists, who back Lamar Alexander. There was one communist, but she hasn't been seen since Colin Powell decided not to run. There also used to be one guy who supported Bill Clinton, but the normal people ran him out of town several months ago for being a weirdo.

You gotta love a town with that much common sense. I know I do.

-- Brent McIntosh can be reached over e-mail at mctosh@umich.edu, unless he's at home, where you'll have to send him a telegram.