Heartland lessons

I became a truck driver for five days last week, chugging 2,600 miles in a huge diesel Freightliner up, across, and then back down the nation's heartland. It was an exhilarating and depressing trip. My assignment was to pick up, from four different sites, more than four tons of old printing equipment. WORLD readers had responded generously to my earlier columns about my dream of establishing here at our offices an operating museum featuring historic tools of the printing craft. In addition to the Linotype I described before, I found two wonderful platen presses (one from the 1800s), several dozen cases of foundry type, a huge imposing table, and dozens of odds and ends. Also offered to us as a gift-but not yet picked up-are two Washington hand presses, whose design dates back to colonial days. I'll mention them again, but they were in the wrong direction for this trip. Instead, I crossed the mountains from Asheville, heading west through Tennessee and Kentucky, and then realized that the fall harvest in southern Illinois and central Missouri was in full swing. As I rumbled into Council Bluffs, Iowa, right across the Missouri River from Omaha, Neb., an unusual single-vehicle accident had stalled all traffic on the northbound interstate. The truck was three times as big as my own, carrying a load of freshly picked and shelled corn to market. But the load was so heavy the truck had split completely across its overladen middle, and the golden grain poured richly across three lanes of traffic. Slightly delayed and then rerouted, I headed on up the Missouri River valley to Tea, S.D., a burgeoning suburb of Sioux Falls, where WORLD reader Mel Hartman had stayed past quitting time to help me load my first press. Then it was back east across my home state of Iowa (including a quick visit in the small town of Holland to my father's gravesite, just a few hundred yards from the grain elevator he once owned), and south along the Mississippi River to St. Louis and then to Vandalia, Ill., for three more equipment pickups. The itinerary left some enduring impressions:

Surprisingly, the big radio stations like KMOX in St. Louis and WHO in Des Moines (where Ronald Reagan used to announce baseball games) have taken on a strong conservative cast. Their schedules are full of Rush Limbaugh, Michael Reagan, and Dr. Laura. But it's an ornery kind of conservatism; too many of Rush's jokes aren't even printable in WORLD. So you have to ask: Why has it been so rare in human history that prosperity has made us better people?