The Sheboygan Falls Five & Dime, Adjusted for Inflation

Shucks, we're not getting very many robocalls these days, political or otherwise. I wouldn't mind hearing a few (just a few) as we did in 2006, (or was it 2004?), if only for the entertainment value. But Illinois isn't remotely in play for the presidency. I noticed a lot more candidate yard signs in Wisconsin, and saw a lot more political ads on TV there, even though recent polls suggest a Clinton '96-sized victory for Obama in the state, that is, 10 points. Could be that I'm not paying as much attention here at home, especially to TV ads.

That's because they don't make 'em like this anymore: "Immorality surrounds us, as never before," and you need me to fix the problem, which I believe moralists have been saying for a long, long time. Or this: guilt by spurious association. Actually, come to think of it, the tenor of political advertising hasn't changed, even though the details are different. So they still do make 'em like this.

I could link to the famed "Daisy Spot," but I hope that everyone's familiar with it, including those of us too young to have been aware of it in 1964. Even before the advent of YouTube, I'd seen it -- as part of a film shown in Mrs. Collins' US history class 30 years ago, though we didn't go into detail about the little girl who was it the commercial.

Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin, is a pleasant little town, at some distance from the nearest Interstate, and from Sheboygan. If Kohler is a "suburb" of Sheboygan, then Sheboygan Falls is positively exurban. While in town, I went looking for the falls, and before long found them, from a vantage point along the Sheboygan River.

Niagara it ain't, but the eight- or ten-foot cascade has its charms, especially on a fall day when you have the view all to yourself. Later, I wandered down the town's main street, actually called Broadway, striving for a sense of that virtuous Main Street the politicos and pundits talk about, as opposed to the perfidy of Wall Street. I also took a short stroll on Pine St., which is another bone fide small-town street name, though perhaps not as much as Elm St.

Anyway, the sense I got was of a small town with many of its stores closed. Not because of the economy, but because it was late on a Saturday afternoon.

Evans was open. It was more like a five-and-dime than anything I've seen in years, except that it carried a lot more stock than the five-and-dimes that still existed in my youth. A five-and-dime on steroids, then. Among other things, it had an astonishing array of games and puzzles, some of which I'd never heard of before. Wish I'd taken notes. But I could see how Evans competes with certain big-box retail behemoths: it puts more imagination into its selection than is possible for a chain of big boxes, dependent as they are on mass merchandising that feeds off a distribution chain from here to the Yangtze River Delta.