sticks for the United States Army. And when the war ended, Bing went back to tennis rackets and for a time ran three shifts a day as the sport gained in popularity. From the 1920s until well into the Carter administration, wherever you went in America and people asked where you were from and you answered honestly, they would laugh and say, Ah! Where they make the tennis racket! And recite the radio jingle,
Bing Bing Bing, the Tennis Machine.
My father always found the reference irritating and the jingle infuriating, as if New Jesper had no other claim to fame. But the truth was, it didn't. Hershey was where they made the candy bars and Milwaukee where they brewed the beer and New Jesper where they made tennis rackets. The Bing racket was high-end equipment, like a Balabushka pool cue or a Purdey shotgun. Old Walter Bing, who managed the company until well into his nineties, never changed the design or the materials that went into it. He disliked plastics and had even less use for aluminum, and so sales fell and by 1980 the company was out of business, a victim of technological progress. The only growth industry in New Jesper was the center of its civic life, the courthouse with its full complement of judges, clerks, and bailiffs, and the army of private lawyers, most of whom lived out of town. The courthouse and its annex was a turn-of-the-century stone pile of a building whose marble floors echoed like a tuning fork. The lights sometimes failed. The elevator was often out of service. My father didn't mind the inconvenience. The building had grandeur. For many years he tried without success to place the building on the National Register of Historic Places. That happened finally in 1999, but by then my father was long gone.
New Jesper was a fine place to grow up in, its streets lined with chestnut trees and elms and oaks. In the summertime you could ride your bike all over town and not see the full sun, only its shafts of light through branches thick with leaves, chestnuts scattered everywhere. At one time the downtown had an oak at each pedestrian intersection, but the merchants complained that they interfered with foot traffic so the city council ordered their removal. A women's group organized a protest, but the protest went nowhere and one by one the heavy trees were removed, leaving the downtown bare as a settlement in Arizona or Utah. Still, the public school system was excellent, staffed mostly by middle-aged women of frosty temperament and high expectations, though few of its high school graduates went on to college. College was not the normal aspiration for the sons and daughters of blue-collar mill workers for whom English was very much a second language. The sons followed their fathers into the mills, and the daughters their mothers into marriage, usually after a stint as a clerk in one of the two downtown department stores. This was before and during the war, in retrospect a dynamic parenthesis in the progress of things in the small towns of the Midwest. The war was much distant, present in newspaper headlines and the conversations of adults at the dinner table, unless a father or a son was away fighting in it, and that was not the case in my family. The terrible details of the struggle were known only to the combatants. Reversals were concealed by the authorities and meanwhile the place names flew by. Saipan. Ploieşti. My friends and I graduated from Cowboys and Indians to a game we called War, heroic leathernecks battling the sly Japanese, surely the main enemy. There were many German-speaking families in our town and no one wished to make their lives more uncomfortable than they already were. I suppose that was the reason, looking back on it. Bloodthirsty Tojo was the greater threat to domestic tranquillity. At any event, in those years New Jesper prospered, the factories running two and three shifts a day. Work was available to anyone who wanted it and wages were high. Everything changed after the war.
MOST
Bing Bing Bing, the Tennis Machine.
My father always found the reference irritating and the jingle infuriating, as if New Jesper had no other claim to fame. But the truth was, it didn't. Hershey was where they made the candy bars and Milwaukee where they brewed the beer and New Jesper where they made tennis rackets. The Bing racket was high-end equipment, like a Balabushka pool cue or a Purdey shotgun. Old Walter Bing, who managed the company until well into his nineties, never changed the design or the materials that went into it. He disliked plastics and had even less use for aluminum, and so sales fell and by 1980 the company was out of business, a victim of technological progress. The only growth industry in New Jesper was the center of its civic life, the courthouse with its full complement of judges, clerks, and bailiffs, and the army of private lawyers, most of whom lived out of town. The courthouse and its annex was a turn-of-the-century stone pile of a building whose marble floors echoed like a tuning fork. The lights sometimes failed. The elevator was often out of service. My father didn't mind the inconvenience. The building had grandeur. For many years he tried without success to place the building on the National Register of Historic Places. That happened finally in 1999, but by then my father was long gone.
New Jesper was a fine place to grow up in, its streets lined with chestnut trees and elms and oaks. In the summertime you could ride your bike all over town and not see the full sun, only its shafts of light through branches thick with leaves, chestnuts scattered everywhere. At one time the downtown had an oak at each pedestrian intersection, but the merchants complained that they interfered with foot traffic so the city council ordered their removal. A women's group organized a protest, but the protest went nowhere and one by one the heavy trees were removed, leaving the downtown bare as a settlement in Arizona or Utah. Still, the public school system was excellent, staffed mostly by middle-aged women of frosty temperament and high expectations, though few of its high school graduates went on to college. College was not the normal aspiration for the sons and daughters of blue-collar mill workers for whom English was very much a second language. The sons followed their fathers into the mills, and the daughters their mothers into marriage, usually after a stint as a clerk in one of the two downtown department stores. This was before and during the war, in retrospect a dynamic parenthesis in the progress of things in the small towns of the Midwest. The war was much distant, present in newspaper headlines and the conversations of adults at the dinner table, unless a father or a son was away fighting in it, and that was not the case in my family. The terrible details of the struggle were known only to the combatants. Reversals were concealed by the authorities and meanwhile the place names flew by. Saipan. Ploieşti. My friends and I graduated from Cowboys and Indians to a game we called War, heroic leathernecks battling the sly Japanese, surely the main enemy. There were many German-speaking families in our town and no one wished to make their lives more uncomfortable than they already were. I suppose that was the reason, looking back on it. Bloodthirsty Tojo was the greater threat to domestic tranquillity. At any event, in those years New Jesper prospered, the factories running two and three shifts a day. Work was available to anyone who wanted it and wages were high. Everything changed after the war.
MOST
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