"It's a factory town..."

267

"Well ya' know, it's a factory town." That's all my dad ever used to say about Newton.  I never knew what that meant.  Then I moved there.

Newton is 27 miles from Knoxville.  I had rarely ever been there.  My brother had been a radio DJ at the Newton station and It seemed like I only ever was there at night.

Their High School was a class above us, (15,000 versus 9,000 in population) so we didn't play them in sports.  They had a great football team in the 70's and they were home to Tre' Jackson who went on to play at Iowa or Nebraska or somewhere.

Newton and Jasper County (like a lot of south central Iowa) was originally a mining area in the 1800's.  Skip to the 20's and enter Fredrick Louis Maytag I.

Fred Maytag bought a factory in 1925 in Newton and turned it into what would become The Maytag Corporation making the best washers in the world while becoming a Fortune 500 Corporation.  He was one of the few businesses in the US to make money during the depression.  They were hard-nosed with their workers:

Newton entered the national stage in 1938 when martial law was declared during a strike at the Maytag Washing Machine Company. Iowa governor Nelson Kraschel ordered the Iowa National Guard to protect the company with tanks and machine guns ready against the workers. With the backing of four troops (companies) of the 113th Cavalry Regiment, Maytag company beat the strike and forced workers to return to work with a 10% pay cut.

Ouch...


Every aspect of Newton was permeated with "Maytag."  It was the sole provider to the community.  Folks tried to get jobs straight out of high school at Maytag.  Multiple generations worked on the assembly line.  Many of the tasks were simple and repetitive, but boy did it pay well.  Guys would retire a 55 with a huge pension.  Often husbands and wives would retire together with double the huge pensions.  They were a UAW shop so they were constantly negotiating and intermittently going on strike.

In 2001, a decision to cut labor costs resulted in a reduction of the labor force at the Newton plant in favor of newer Maytag facilities in Mexico.  Layoffs at the Newton plant continued through 2005. Whirlpool's acquisition of Maytag in early 2006 led to speculation over the future of Maytag operations in Newton. On May 10, 2006, Whirlpool announced that it would close the Newton plant and corporate offices in the fall of 2007.

There are also the Maytag Blue Cheese brothers...but I'm not going to write about them: Maytag Dairy Farms

The streets of Newton are set up on a North/South, East/West grid system. The East/West roads are "Avenues" and the North/South roads are "Streets."  "1st Street" and "1st Avenue: intersect in the middle of town near the town square. Then the town was divided up into corresponding quadrants.  Example: We ended living at 721 E 4th Street N.  Let's do the graphing...We lived in the North/East quadrant of town, 4 blocks East of 1st Street and 7 blocks North of 1st Avenue...yeah, I didn't get it either at first, but when I did it made perfect sense, and that, my friend, is the first brain-washing technique used by the city of Newton to suck you in to the abyss...

You see the streets at one time were just streets (like Elm and Maple and Market and Main) but then the city fathers thought that was too creative or random or something, so they went to the "grid-system."

That tells you a lot about Newton...at it's very heart, a factory town.

Now, on the plus side: we met great people there and have great friends.  We still love "Panda Garden" and "Cardinal Corner."  My favorite Mexican dish ever is "Senor Tequila's" Seafood Quesadilla. I love Maytag Park and Maytag Pool.  Most importantly we met and absorbed Meagan, Rana & Luke.

But I get ahead of myself...

chris