Soup Town: An Arenzville Snapshot
2007 · Proceeds donated to the Side Door Christian Youth Center, Arenzville
Soup Town: An Arenzville Snapshot is Ken's loving portrait of his hometown, Arenzville, Illinois — the village tucked into an elbow of the Illinois River valley and famous for the smoky burgoo it cooks in iron kettles every late summer. The eighty-page book gathers a year's worth of interviews with residents past and present, a handful of historical documents and town ordinances dating back to the 1850s, and Ken's own photographs of the place. It reads less like a formal history than like a long afternoon on the porch: the great fire that wiped out Main Street, the men who drifted in to drink when Jacksonville went dry, the preacher who tried to do away with potlucks, the young man robbed at gunpoint who worried mostly about dying in the restroom, and the earliest burgoos on record. Ken self-published it through Blurb in 2007, sold it at the First National Bank of Arenzville, and gave all the proceeds to the Side Door Christian Youth Center.
"I don't know when I've had so much fun doing a book," Ken said. "I'd be talking to someone about what life was like in the old days and they'd start laughing then I'd start laughing and we sort of forgot what we were doing."
Some of the book's voice is the town's own — neighbors remembering — but some of it is pure Ken. Here, in his own words, is a short prose-poem listing of the ghosts that still walk Arenzville for anyone who grew up there:
You'd be a fool to believe in ghosts, But of course they're real. Spirits of memory… The sound of Tade Lovekamp's clippers rounding the top of a German ear, The sight of A.C. Hart's smoking cigar resting on the post office drop box … Frankie Paul twanging Hank Williams tunes on the porch of the old grocery … The sound of Uncle John Schnitker's laughter … Dutch Bloom's cop cruiser parked with an eye on the main drag … The clink of Marie Peck's walker checking the roses … The creak of Laura Lovekamp's rocker on the porch ... Cloetta's meat-wrapping laughter … Willy scraping the ice off the drive… Newt's truck slowly moving up and down Frederick Street, looking for news… The scrape of Bob Brassel's brillo pad, rubbing Arenzville sand to clean the fish pans….
And here is how Ken set the scene for a newcomer, in the note he drafted for the book's back flap:
The second glacier petered out somewhere near Peoria, but its big brother came a few eons earlier and carved out the Illinois River Valley in such a way to keep Arenzville tucked neatly into a elbow of the fertile farmland. We've stayed thus tucked since 1839 when Francis Arenz of Blakenberg, Prussia, perhaps thought that the surrounding hills reminded him of his homeland. Or perhaps he was just tired of traveling. Prussia is so far away you can't even find it on a map. The village was incorporated in 1853 and our population hovers around the 400 mark, depending on whether or not there's a ballgame that night.