Satan's Tool

Where U.S. Highway 75 broadens into Main Street, there is Sioux Center, Iowa. Sioux Center is a Corn Belt town of 2,000 people. Of a Saturday evening, shiny new Fords and Plymouths, parked at an angle to the curb, line both sides of the street. Back from the broad sidewalks, the one-story frame and brick buildings house a pair of hash-houses, a Rexall drugstore, a Chevrolet agency, Dejong's Hatchery. There are no traffic lights.

Out behind Main Street, the white frame-houses are scrubbed spotless, and box elders border carefully trimmed lawns. The citizens of Sioux Center bear such names as Gerritsma, Ver Steeg, Van de Garde, Schouten; some 97% of the town's population is of Dutch ancestry. Communicants of the strict Reformed (Calvinist) faith, they keep a tight rein on their youngsters. Main Street has one beer parlor, no state liquor store, no dance hall.

Nightly Except Sunday. Movies have never been popular with the churchmen of Sioux Center. An outsider wanted to erect a theater in 1938, but a popular referendum stopped him. The youngsters took to driving the eleven miles to Orange City's Tulip Theatre. A year ago, the Sioux Center American Legion post leased the Town Hall for a nightly (except Sunday) movie. The resulting uproar split the town squarely down the middle. Merchants liked the trade it brought to town; some citizens thought it kept Sioux Center's youth off the highways. But the Ministerial Association, led by young (30) Rev. Bernard J. Haan, rallied the town's oldsters to the antimovie cause.

Haan, a lean, rock-jawed preacher, refuses to say outright whether he has ever seen a Hollywood movie. But he knows from reports, he says, that they are loaded with "sex, drunkenness and crime ... a hindrance to the Kingdom of God." A cigar-smoker and a bowler, Haan denies that his people are narrow. "We are as broadminded as the Word of God allows us to be. . . . [But] we don't want movie actors and actresses to be the educators of our children."

Last Detail. Sioux Center's five-man town council ducked the issue, put it up for referendum. Once again, "Satan's tool" lost--by 61 votes. But that did not settle the matter. The Legion's lease ran until April 1, and the town council, which had leased the Town Hall to the Legion, was up for election before then. Meantime, the issue of a municipally owned light plant arose, and Sioux Center's high school team reached the semifinals in the state basketball tournament. In the excitement, the antimovie forces failed to line up a slate for the council election.

This week, the new council voted 4 to 1 to renew the movie license for a year. It looked as if the great god Progress might yet bring to Sioux Center's Main Street the last detail it needed to make it the duplicate of Main Streets up & down the land: a neon-trimmed marquee and posters showing Betty Grable's legs.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.