Leaving Winnebago was not easy. There is something about a small town
that holds you. Your life is so intimately interwoven with that of your
neighbor. Existence is so safe, so sane, so sure. Fanny knew that when
she turned the corner of Elm Street every third person she met would
speak to her. Life was made up of minute details, too trivial for the
notice of the hurrying city crowds. You knew when Milly Glaenzer changed
the baby buggy for a go-cart. The youngest Hupp boy--Sammy--who was
graduated from High School in June, is driving A. J. Dawes's automobile
now. My goodness, how time flies! Doeppler's grocery has put in
plate-glass windows, and they're getting out-of-season vegetables every
day now from Milwaukee. As you pass you get the coral glow of tomatoes,
and the tender green of lettuces. And that vivid green? Fresh young
peas! And in February. Well! They've torn down the old yellow brick
National Bank, and in its place a chaste Greek Temple of a building
looks rather contemptuously down its classic columns upon the farmer's
wagons drawn up along the curb. If Fanny Brandeis' sense of proportion
had not been out of plumb she might have realized that, to Winnebago,
the new First National Bank building was as significant and epochal as
had been the Woolworth Building to New York.