Support one of the last bastions of non shitlib journalism

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3830066&forum_id=2#34927040)

She graduated from high school early to chase opportunity far from Kingman, Ind. A decade later, she starts to see what she left behind.

By Michael M. Phillips

KINGMAN, Ind.—It took months for Caity Cronkhite to get up the nerve to go home again.

Ms. Cronkhite, 27 years old, had stormed out of Indiana after graduating from high school a year early, searching for horizons wider than a town of 500 residents could offer.

She found a life in the San Francisco Bay Area, where her friends were sometimes jarringly different from people back home. And despite the distance and time away, she couldn’t leave Kingman’s dramas behind—who was on food stamps, who got arrested, who overdosed. She found herself still admired by some for getting out, and vilified by others who resented her angry exit.

In the yawning divide between America’s urban and rural communities, Ms. Cronkhite struggled with the push and pull of both.

Ms. Cronkhite and her boyfriend arrived in Indianapolis this summer on the red-eye from California. Her father drove them the 80 miles to Kingman. They stopped at Cracker Barrel for breakfast, like old times. They followed Kingman’s main street, still and quiet in the way of no-stoplight towns whose best days are past.

They passed the Oasis ice cream stand, where Ms. Cronkhite ordered chocolate soft-serve cones as a child. They drove by the Fountain Trust Co., which sponsored the bagpipe band Ms. Cronkhite joined in high school to embellish her college application, part of her escape plan from the dismal prospects that hobbled many in her rural generation.

Two miles out of town, they went by the spot where Ms. Cronkhite waited for the bus that took her to schools she felt discouraged her ambition. “All growing up, if we were too smart or too successful or too anything, there was always someone ready to say, ‘Don’t be so proud of yourself,’” she said.

Ms. Cronkhite had left with a chip on her shoulder. Driving past the landmarks of her childhood, she wondered if she could ever move home again.

Did she still hate Kingman? Did Kingman still hate her?

‘You’re not going’

The Cronkhites raised Caity, their only child, in a white farm house on 86 acres of grazing and alfalfa land, fields they rented to a local farmer.

Kingman was too small to support its own public schools, so Ms. Cronkhite commuted a half-hour to Covington, Ind., a town of 2,500. The Cronkhite farm sat at the end of the No. 9 school-bus route. Ms. Cronkhite was the first student picked up each morning and the last dropped off each afternoon.

Quick and eager, she was labeled a gifted student, only to discover, she said, that meant receiving less attention from teachers. When she asked for challenging work or encouragement, she said, some teachers warned her about being too big for her britches.

Beginning in middle school, her parents sent her to summer academic programs at Purdue University, where she learned how other students could take advanced-placement classes for college-credit at their high schools.

Before her freshman year at Covington High School, she wrote in her diary: “I do want to get out of here as soon as possible, & everyone knows it.”

The teenager set her sights on the Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics, and Humanities, a state-sponsored boarding school for bright high school juniors and seniors. Her mother was immovably opposed.

Martha Cronkhite had aspirations for her daughter. When Caity was still in grade school, Mrs. Cronkhite had bought a painting of a young woman in a bonnet, her hand raised to her brow, gazing across a field, seemingly in search of something more.

Yet Mrs. Cronkhite didn’t want to lose her girl so soon. “You may as well not fill out the application,” she said. “You’re not going.”

Ms. Cronkhite was inconsolable. “They always tell you that you can do anything you put your mind to, & I’ve put my mind to this,” she wrote in her diary that summer. “…I want this desperately & have been wishing & working & praying for it since I was 11. I just pray, God, that you help me with this.”

Looking back, Ms. Cronkhite said, she was partly driven by what she feared would happen if she stayed in Fountain County.

“I don’t remember a time when my area wasn’t a hotbed for meth labs, and then right after that it was opioids, and then the Great Recession hit and all of the little factories closed, and all the jobs went,” Ms. Cronkhite said. “My formative years have been spent watching bad thing after bad thing happen.”

Fountain County’s population, which nearly reached 20,000 in the late 1970s, has since fallen to less than 16,500. Kingman and the rest of the county used to rely on factory jobs across the state line around Danville, Ill. Over a span of decades, several of the big employers closed or shrank, a fate common to Midwestern industrial centers. The casualties included the General Motors Co. foundry and a railcar plant.

Danville’s population has fallen by nearly a quarter since 1970, to 32,000. The number of jobs in the county around Danville dropped 8% between 2003 and 2016, according to data from Emsi, a labor-market research firm.

As Danville’s fortunes declined, so did Fountain County’s, along with the chances that a high-school education was enough to reach the middle class. Just 14% of Fountain County residents have college degrees.

A ticket out

With no chance at boarding school, Ms. Cronkhite decided to graduate a year early from Covington High, in 2008. School administrators at first resisted. The school gave in, the family said, but at a price. Despite her top grades, she would be barred from contention for class valedictorian.

She sought activities she hoped would help her compete with college applicants from bigger schools, including bagpipes.

Ms. Cronkhite had her eye on Harvard and the University of Chicago, but she received acceptance letters only from Indiana schools: Purdue, Indiana University and DePauw University. Out-of-state rejections piled up.

Then came a fat envelope from Carnegie Mellon University. The acceptance letter included a handwritten note: “We love your background and hope you’ll join us this fall.”

After Ms. Cronkhite arrived at the Pittsburgh campus, she found herself ill-prepared. Math classes felt impenetrable. She struggled through biology tests her classmates found easy. “I don’t even understand what I don’t understand,” she recalled telling a friend while crying in her dorm.

Everyone she met seemed to have more money and more opportunities. Some skied in Aspen in winter and flew south for spring break. Californians interned at Google and Facebook. She felt, she said, like “I was their token white-trash friend.”

Big-City Feeder School

Seven in ten of Carnegie Mellon’s alumni live in one of these large metro areas.

Percentage of Carnegie Mellon University alumni by metro area

Pittsburgh

New York

San Francisco*

22.4%

13.6

10.4

5.9

Washington

Boston

Los Angeles

Philadelphia

Seattle

Chicago

San Jose

3.8

3.8

2.9

2.8

2.4

2.2

Source: Emsi *Includes Oakland, Calif.

Ms. Cronkhite had won a partial scholarship and worked a dorm security job, staying on campus during vacations to earn extra money. She spent one Christmas break sleeping in a security office and showering in the gym, even though her parents had offered to pay for a flight home.

“I just didn’t want to go back and face all the sadness,” she said. Nor did she want to admit to anyone back home that she was struggling.

Ms. Cronkhite found her talent in her junior year, when she discovered that Carnegie Mellon offered a technical writing program. She became its only major in the Class of 2012, which earned her the stage to speak at the English Department graduation ceremony.

She landed a writing job with Salesforce, a customer-relationship management software company, and moved to the Bay Area. She jumped to Airware, which produces drones for commercial use, and, a year ago, she became a freelance writer. “I don’t know what it is,” she said, “but I really love writing a good user manual.”

She found a rent-controlled one-bedroom in Oakland, Calif., for $1,500 a month and hung her Carnegie Mellon diploma on the wall.

Old wounds

In early 2015, Ms. Cronkhite wrote a 5,300-word essay about her battles with the Indiana public schools, an outpouring of frustration and resentment from “an angry, forgotten, gifted student in an educational system that asked nothing more of me than that I fail.”

She posted the essay on the blog site Medium, she said, to spotlight the disadvantages faced by rural youth. “My academic background at a low-ranking, rural public school in a backwater town wasn’t good enough for admissions committees to take a chance on me,” she wrote of her many rejection letters.

Ms. Cronkhite didn’t think people at home would care or even notice. Her mother knew Fountain County better. After she read the post, she thought, Oh goodness. What is this going to stir up?

“How dare you blame our community for your misfortune,” one woman responded after the essay surfaced on Facebook. “How dare you belittle the people of the place I call home.”

A Covington teacher wrote: “I am going to pray for you tonight. After reading your article it seems as if you have underlying emotional issues that you have been dealing with for quite some time. It is sometimes easier to blame others for our shortcomings rather than look deep inside our own soul.”

One Covington High graduate identified himself as “a proud member of the Covington Community that got rid of a stuck-up, self-absorbed, whiny child.”

Some people empathized with Ms. Cronkhite and praised her candor. But the vitriol of her critics was hard for her to take. She called her mother, crying. “I can’t even come back to Kingman because they just don’t want me there anymore,” she said.

“You were born and raised here just like they were,” her mother replied, “and you have a right to your feelings, too.”

During a visit home for Thanksgiving in 2015, she met her friend Holly Allen for drinks at Noble’s Bar & Grill. Ms. Allen, 27, had played flute in the Covington High School band, alongside Ms. Cronkhite, who played clarinet.

Ms. Allen was pregnant at 19. She and the baby’s father, an Iraq war veteran, parted ways after several years together. When Ms. Cronkhite graduated from Carnegie Mellon, Ms. Allen enrolled in beauty school.

Holly Allen holds her daughter Piper at home in Hillsboro, Ind.

Holly Allen holds her daughter Piper at home in Hillsboro, Ind. PHOTO: AJ MAST FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

At Noble’s, a man bought them pickle shots, a mix of pickle juice and vodka. Ms. Allen shared her financial worries with Ms. Cronkhite. She had lived on food stamps. After graduating from beauty school, she couldn’t afford the $150 to get her license.

Ms. Cronkhite returned to California depressed about Kingman. She had fallen hard for the Bay Area. She felt her own politics sliding left, merging with her surroundings. She liked the racial diversity and gay pride parades.

To her disappointment, she found that the inclusiveness didn’t extend to white, small-town America. Friends at work one day called her over to ask about Cracker Barrel. “It’s just like a chain restaurant we go to treat ourselves,” Ms. Cronkhite said.

A co-worker jumped in: “It’s this really white-trash restaurant that overweight Midwesterners go to.”

Then came the invitation to join some friends at Butter. The San Francisco bar is decorated as a sendup of rural white America, complete with the front end of a Winnebago RV. The menu included such cocktails as the Whitetrash Driver, vodka and SunnyD; Bitchin’ Camaro, spiced rum and Dr Pepper; and After School Special, vodka and grape soda.

“It was, all of the sudden, in my face,” Ms. Cronkhite said. “Things at home we thought were nice or parts of our culture were treated with open scorn and disdain and like a joke.”

She sensed bigotry where she had sought tolerance and animosity where she thought she had found a welcome. The more she saw big-city small-mindedness, the more she softened on Kingman.

Her ambivalence about the Bay Area deepened after the 2016 presidential election. More than 85% of San Francisco County voters cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton ; in Fountain County, Donald Trump got more than 75%.

When Mr. Trump won, she watched her Bay Area friends reel in dismay and spew anger at those parts of the U.S. that had delivered his victory.

She posted a message on Facebook urging more dialogue between the coasts and the center of the country. “I am part of the problem,” she wrote. “I could have made a difference; I could have engaged civilly with the people I grew up with—MY people, for better or for worse—rather than shutting them out and putting myself on an ivory tower.”

To her hometown, she wrote, “Growing up with you gave me insights that my East- and West-Coast friends will never understand, and I’m glad to have those insights. I am sorry that I didn’t try to understand you better.”

Ms. Cronkhite was in a bar in San Francisco when the angry responses began arriving from back home. She ran into the alley and cried.

The wife of her father’s best friend suggested Ms. Cronkhite wasn’t welcome back in farm country.

“We are too busy anyway working our asses off for 12-16 hours every day to feed you ‘coastal’ people and everyone else in this world and I know this may come as a surprise to you, but that even includes Blacks, LGBTs, Muslims, Women and on and on,” wrote Jahn Songer. She and her husband own a local bank, farm corn and soybeans and run a crop-dusting service.

“So keep your elitists’ rear ends in your little office cubicles while we handle the tough, physical things that keep you and your perfect friends alive,” Ms. Songer wrote.

In an interview, Ms. Songer said she viewed Ms. Cronkhite as “an arrogant, spoiled brat” who made “Midwestern people sound ignorant.” Worse still, Ms. Songer said, everyone around the county knew the post was written by Gus Cronkhite’s daughter, a humiliation for a man who had spent his life there.

Ms. Cronkhite called her father to ask, “Is it true? Are you ashamed of me?”

Gus Cronkhite didn’t want to talk about it. Finally, he said, “No, I’m not ashamed of you. I’ve always been proud of you.”

‘Who I am’

On Ms. Cronkhite’s return to Kingman this summer, she brought her boyfriend, Jake Burkhead, a 27-year-old software engineer who was raised in San Francisco. “I want you to understand how hard it was” growing up in a place she had fought to leave, she told him.

When her father picked them at the airport, though, Ms. Cronkhite found herself wanting Mr. Burkhead to like Kingman.

The couple spent an evening with Ms. Allen, the single mom, and Kevin Jeffries, 27, who had played euphonium in the school band.

Mr. Jeffries, an Indiana state trooper, had long believed Ms. Cronkhite was destined for something bigger than Kingman. He studied aviation at Indiana State University and flew helicopters in the Army National Guard. He didn’t want to meet for drinks in Covington because he had arrested several local bartenders and their customers. “The frequent fliers,” he joked.

They decided instead on the Buffalo Wild Wings in Crawfordsville, Ind., where Mr. Jeffries shared news from the police blotter. One friend from Covington High had overdosed on heroin months earlier and passed out while driving. Medics saved him, but the friend overdosed again a few weeks later.

Mr. Jeffries said he feared what would happen next: “I hope I don’t get that call.” He talked about chasing a driver who was swerving drunkenly across the road. They ended up at the man’s house, where Mr. Jeffries had to subdue him with a Taser. It turned out to be someone he had known for years.

“There are a lot of people in Covington who think it’s Mayberry,” Mr. Jeffries said. “You should see what’s going on around here when you’re sleeping.”

That night, Ms. Cronkhite thought about Mr. Jeffries’ stories and saw them not as more evidence of Fountain County’s decay, but as a testimonial to someone who had stayed and was working to make it better.

Her friend Ms. Allen was settled down with a hard-working millwright and no longer overwhelmed by financial troubles. The couple had two children and another on the way. She was doing haircuts and color on the side.

Ms. Cronkhite and her boyfriend had fun camping in Shades State Park. They went with her parents to the Moon-Glo bar across the Illinois line. They ate pork-tenderloin sandwiches.

At home, though, things got confusing. Ms. Cronkhite’s mother, worn down by hard Indiana winters, had persuaded her husband to buy a house in Alabama, not far from the Gulf of Mexico.

Would they be selling the farm? Ms. Cronkhite wanted to know. She couldn’t imagine her father ever leaving Fountain County.

Mr. Cronkhite, 69 years old, grew up nearby, as did his father and grandfather. He was drafted out of high school and served a year in Vietnam. Mr. Cronkhite returned to Indiana to care for his parents, who had made a living in the gas-station business, before becoming a long-haul trucker.

While on the road, Mr. Cronkhite was always eager to return home, where he would meet his buddies at the Marathon gas station for morning coffee. He drove by Niagara Falls dozens of times and never stopped to look at the view.

Ms. Cronkhite’s mother, Martha Cronkhite, was the one who always stopped to look. She was born in Columbus, Ind., and left as soon as she turned 18. She attended a two-year business school in Indianapolis and worked her way up the ladder at a shopping-mall company.

Mrs. Cronkhite, 66, met her future husband at a party in 1987. They were, in some ways, opposites. She rarely indulged in a chuckle. Once Gus Cronkhite got laughing, he would keep it up until he cried.

With her parents’ move now a certainty, Ms. Cronkhite and her boyfriend settled onto the back porch one night and talked about the land that stretched out before them. It turned out, she wasn’t ready to let it all go.

“If I ever have kids, they’re never going to understand this huge part of me,” she said. “I want there to be a reminder of where I come from and who I am.”

Ms. Cronkhite first asked her parents if she could keep the entire farm, an idea that died with the spreadsheet that showed its low yields and high costs.

Instead, her parents decided to sell her about 10 acres, near a grove of poplar, sycamore and cedar. They agreed on the per-acre price Mr. Cronkhite had paid in 1972.

Ms. Cronkhite plans to build a small house on the lot. She doesn’t intend to move back now. But someday she might. “I’m still a rural American,” she said.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3830066&forum_id=2#34926966)

"...And then the rejection letters came pouring in..."

She probably would've been better served by finishing at the normal time with the normal honors and racking up community-college calculus credits or something like that during her senior year. But she seems to have done OK despite this.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3830066&forum_id=2#34950379)

Why the LEFT treats these people differently than urban blacks is beyond me. Oh, white privilege! Fuck libs man, fuck them in the asshole -- actually don't, because that's what gets them ALL to climax.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3830066&forum_id=2#34927334)

To her disappointment, she found that the inclusiveness didn’t extend to white, small-town America. Friends at work one day called her over to ask about Cracker Barrel. “It’s just like a chain restaurant we go to treat ourselves,” Ms. Cronkhite said.

A co-worker jumped in: “It’s this really white-trash restaurant that overweight Midwesterners go to.”

Fuck anybody that talks shit about Cracker Barrel

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3830066&forum_id=2#34927374)

By the way, if she went to IU-B and then moved to Chicago or Indianapolis or whatever she would be much happier. She would be around millions of people just like her and still be able to visit home whenever she wanted. She would also not be living in a rent-controlled Oakland apt.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3830066&forum_id=2#34928356)

she's a PRIME candidate for Chicago (midwestern, prole, has enough IQ/creds to get a job)

she'd find a man, get impregnated, and live in Skokie or something and move her progeny's SES up from lower class finally to something around UMC assuming husband makes some $

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3830066&forum_id=2#34928393)

At IU-B, she would have been around people that had nearby lake houses and shit that would have invited her there, which would have been way more fun for her than sitting and working as a security guard because she didn't want to go home to her shittown and couldn't afford to hang with her fellow students.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3830066&forum_id=2#34928472)

Come to think of it, this is probably why XO is really latching on to this piece. I think most of us resemble this to some degree.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3830066&forum_id=2#34928569)

Her bf is a computer programmer and she works. She's already moved up. If they can't make it in the Bay Area they'll be able to move to a cheaper city and do the same thing. And there is something to be said for people like her who are brave enough to leave home and immerse themselves in a completely foreign place. Her children will be better for it.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3830066&forum_id=2#34928878)

your generic statement is stupid. her children are not better off stepping on needles in the tenderloin. skokie would be fine, but ljl at THAT being the first suburb jew acp jumps to suggesting

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3830066&forum_id=2#34929020)

http://www.unz.com/runz/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3830066&forum_id=2#34951351)

I also LOL at her getting offended by white trash themed parties. I doubt she would have given a second thought at a ghetto themed party in HS or college. now that the shoe is on the other foot she cries out that it is unfair. welcome to the world of american minorities and the shit they had to put up with all the time

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3830066&forum_id=2#34929642)

"After Ms. Cronkhite arrived at the Pittsburgh campus, she found herself ill-prepared. Math classes felt impenetrable. She struggled through biology tests her classmates found easy. “I don’t even understand what I don’t understand,” she recalled telling a friend while crying in her dorm."

CMU technical writing major not as smart as she thinks? Odd case

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3830066&forum_id=2#34929747)

The most CR person in the article is the lady who said she'd be praying for her.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3830066&forum_id=2#34934029)

A hot girl with cash will got some rich guy to pick up the tab (yes, I've seen this happen). Guys without cash are just screwed.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3830066&forum_id=2#34949416)

She would have likely done better, and had a much better experience, had she invested time and a little $ into her appearance.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3830066&forum_id=2#34947918)

This is the flip side of all of those threads about how Minneapolis is socially difficult to break into for the typical biglawyer. Sure it might be, but on the other hand, if you're already upper midwest culturally, I assume you'll find plenty of people just like you (small town kids made good).

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3830066&forum_id=2#34951050)