Cities: I’ll Always Have Paris

Paris, IL (Population 9,077)

It was not any of the great cities of America that changed my life – instead, it was my discovery in 1956 of Smalltown, U.S.A., America in the corn-and-hog belt of the Midwest – the “flyover” country of today. I took a bus south to Paris – Paris, Illinois.

It was then a township of about 10,000 people living in white clapboard houses shaded by maples and elms and fronted by unfenced lawns and pole-perched mailboxes.

In Paris, I felt I was very close to the old Midwest and the pioneers who had turned the wilderness into America’s larder. They seemed to me to have inherited not just the land but the virtues that have been lost or overlaid in the big cities.

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