Perhaps you remember reading, as a child, a book from The Great Brain series, which featured the adventures of a boy named Tom, as told by his younger brother, John. These books were set in a small Utah town, at the turn of the last century: the town is still young, with dirt roads and a one-room schoolhouse, and is still coming together as a community. Tom, who considered himself “a great brain” was clever and unusually adept at picking up on things that it might take the other children – and sometimes, the adults in town – a little longer to pick up on. The books are a little like a cross between Sherlock Holmes (Tom intuits what’s going on, the way Sherlock does) and Tom Sawyer (in the way that the kids play jokes on each other and on adults). I read a few of them when I was a little girl.

When I was in high school, as I’ve mentioned before, I spent summers reading the library from one end towards the other (I never made it through the whole alphabet). My father had an office near the library and, while his receptionist was out of town, he asked me to sit at her desk and answer the phone. There wasn’t much for me to do, since no one ever came to his office – literally, I remember one patient coming in, the whole summer – so I’d go to the library at lunch, check out a stack of books, read through them, then return them a day or two later and take out another armful.

One of the books I checked out was called, Papa Married a Mormon. It was a story about the people who lived in a small Utah town, at the turn of the last century. In particular, it focused on the author, his siblings, his parents – his father was a newspaper editor – and his Uncle Mark (a retired gunfighter who ran a saloon). Later I checked out the sequel, Mamma’s Boarding House, which continues the story of what happens after the father dies, and how the mother carries on. These are charming books, in the line of Cheaper by the Dozen and Belles on their Toes – large families at the turn of the century, the first featuring the father, the second how the mother keeps the family together after the father dies. {The difference is that the John D. Fitzgerald books are about family and community, while the others focus on the parents and the family.) When I stumbled across a copy of Mamma’s Boarding House at a used bookstore several years ago, I snapped it up.

And it was only then that the penny dropped: same author as The Great Brain, same small town, same characters. In the children’s books, the focus is more on the kids and their adventures, and Tom outsmarting the adults, to some extent. The adult books are more about people coming together to form a community, to support each other, to lift each other up. In one chapter, they come together to make an African American couple feel welcome in the church; in another, they band together to punish a man who falsely accuses Native Americans of theft in order to justify shooting them. For a town in the late 1800’s / early 1900’s, this is unusually progressive.

I was flipping around the TV the other night and lit on an IDTV show about a murder that had occurred in a small town in the 1980s: a couple was murdered one night while their teen daughter was at a friend’s house. The officer investigating the murder described finding a photo of the parents and their daughter standing around, nude (the parents were standing, the daughter was doing a handstand between them). The daughter, when interviewed, replied that the parents were nudists and regularly attended a nudist camp around 100 miles away – and the officer made it clear that this made the parents suspect of all sorts of things. (An opinion compounded by the discovery of sex tapes that the parents had made of themselves. Shocking!) The show interviewed the parent’s coworkers at the local plant – everyone in town either worked for this plant or supported people who worked at the plant – and the coworkers commented that the officers gossiped about the nudism and the sex tapes with them. When they interviewed the daughter’s friend – her alibi – the girl pointed them to a boy who she said might have been involved. The show interviewed another girl who had gone to high school with the daughter and her friend, and that girl commented that, when she heard the police were interviewing that boy, it made sense to her: he was strange, he dressed strange, he wore pale makeup and black eyeliner and black nail polish; he was the kind of boy who would do something like kill a couple of secret nudists for no reason. They showed a snippet of the police interview with the boy. He looked like he listened to a little too much Flock of Seagulls but, for a proto-goth, he was pretty tame and seemed like a sweet kid. And, as it turns out, he didn’t do it. The daughter and her friend did it.

And why am I dragging this totally unrelated and pretty unremarkable 1980’s murder into a post describing a book about people living in turn of the century Utah?

When I watched that TV show, I thought to myself, this is small town living at its worst: the insularism, the gossip, the closing ranks against people because they are different and follow customs that you don’t understand. This is why I live in NYC and not in Bellingham, where parents beat their children for dressing like that young man. Or in Redding, where sins became sins only when they stopped being secrets, and the newspaper editors were in league with the powerful to cover up those sins.

Mamma’s Boarding House – and the other books by John D. Fitzgerald – show a different side of small town living, a place where people come together to take care of each other, even when they’re different. When people long for the past, a time when communities came together and people were connected, I hope that what they long for is kind of morals of John D. Fitzgerald’s world and not of the company town from the IDTV show.