Goodbye to Main Street

Goodbye to Main Street, a family memoir and sequel to Prairie Son, is one journey divided into two parts. The first half of Goodbye to Main Street is set in the small prairie town where Dennis M. Clausen, the author and narrator, grew up. It depicts the lives of his original family in the middle of the last century after his parents were divorced. It also describes how his father Lloyd Clausen struggled with relationships and wandered into and out of his life, as his mother put it, "still searching for a place where he fit in." His father seemed to be deeply troubled by things that happened to him earlier in his life, but was reluctant to talk about them. Clausen's mother had more obvious challenges to overcome. She had contacted an unusual disease in her infancy that had destroyed her right hip and shortened her left leg. Sitting was difficult for her, and walking for any distance was impossible. The second half of Goodbye to Main Street is triggered by family mysteries connected to the legacy of previous generations that had shaped the emotional lives of his mother and father. These mysteries, first explored in Prairie Son, motivated Clausen to complete his father's journey by researching and connecting with Lloyd's biological family in ways his father was never able to do. Through these and other sources, Clausen began to find answers to the many unanswered questions in his family history. Who was his biological grandfather, the man he only knew through a faded photograph of a young man in a wrestling pose? Why did his biological grandmother keep her child (his father) hidden on the family farm for several months before giving him up for adoption? Why did his father have three different names before he was one-year old? Who was the mysterious "Aunt" Delores, another adopted child and his father's most enduring love, who occasionally appeared in the author's life? Was his father's failure to develop lasting relationships the result of his early childhood experiences in his adoptive parents' home? By researching and connecting with his biological relatives who shared the same ancestral "roots," Clausen completed his father's journey and learned the circumstances that compelled Lloyd's birth mother to give her child up for adoption. In the process, he exposed the actions of previous generations that had shaped his family history, including the tragic events that had destroyed his mother's hip and leg-and who might have been responsible for it. Goodbye to Main Street is also the sequel to Prairie Son (1999), the recipient of the 1997 First Series Award for Creative Nonfiction. After Prairie Son was published, Clausen was contacted by members of other families who experienced similar adoptions in their histories. While interacting with these families, Clausen realized the practice of adopting children to be workers was far more common than he had previously thought. Like his father, these children who were adopted to labor in their adoptive homes struggled later in life with relationships and feelings of never truly belonging anywhere. In time, Clausen came to realize this was his father's story-and the one he chronicles during his own journey through the pages of Goodbye to Main Street.