Creston News-Advertiser
Creston, Union County, Iowa
Monday, March 22, 2006, Pages 6A & 7A

MOUNT AYR -- Younger brothers tag along. It's inevitable.

Brent RICKER followed his older brother Burce all the way to Phoenix, Ariz., and back home to Mount Ayr.

Bruce and Brent grew up on a farm four miles west of Mount Ayr on Highway 2. Bruce graduated from Mount Ayr Community High school in 1975, Brent graduated in 1982.

Bruce dated Michelle HOLMES, a girl who had lived in Mount Ayr as a small child and moved back to the community when she was a junior in high school. She graduated from Mount Ayr in 1980. They were married in August 1985.

By the time Brent and Martha were married, Bruce and Michelle had been living in Phoenix for two years.

Bruce went to the University of Iowa and graduated in 1979. He wen to medical school at what is now Des Moines University, graduating in 1983. Michelle got her master's degree in social work from the University of Iowa in 1983, as well.

The couple moved to Phoenix in 1983 so Brent could do an internship there.

"When we moved, I didn't think it would be forever," Michelle said. "I always thought about moving home at some point."

While Bruce and Michelle were living in Phoenix, Brent and Martha were going to school.

"I started out at the University of Iowa," Martha said. "I ended up getting my degree from Mercy School of Nursing."

Brent went to trade school in Omaha, Neb. to study heating, cooling and refrigeration.

"When we decided to go to Phoenix it seemed like an obvious choice," Brent said. "Cooling, you go where it's hot."

"We, of course, encouraged them to come," Bruce said. "We liked it and hoped they would too."

The couples all knew people who had moved to the Phoenix area.

"There were a lot of us who moved down there all at the same time," Brent said. "We all knew other people out there."

The couples would all get together to watch the Iowa Hawkeyes play football.

"At first we had to just listen to the games on the radio," Brent said. "Then with satellite TV we were able to go to a sports bar and watch the games."

Their three sets of parents would come to visit and bring feelings of home, as well.

"My parents were retired," Martha said. "They would come and stay for two and a half months during the winter."

Michelle's mother still worked and so did Bruce and Brent's mother. Their parents were only able to stay for a couple of weeks at a time.

"We came home a lot, as much as possible," Michelle said. "I would come home and stay for several weeks during the summer each year."

"When we lived in Phoenix, I was on staff at nine different hospitals," Bruce said. "Now I'm just on staff at Ringgold County Hospital."

Brent and Martha both agree life is simpler in Mount Ayr.

"It's not such a rat race here," Martha said. "Now I drive two minutes to work."

"It used to take me 55 minutes to drive 12 miles," Brent said. "I don't miss that. Distance wasn't by miles in Phoenix, it was by the time it would take you to get there."

Driving in the city was much different than driving is here.

"You always caught the car ahead of you," Bruce said. "When we moved back, I would be driving to Creston, speeding trying to catch the car ahead of me because I was so used to doing that."

"People would think you were crazy," Brent said. "If you didn't keep up with the car ahead of you in Phoenix, you could be in trouble. But you never wanted to be right next to the car beside you either. You always stayed a little ahead or a little behind them."

Brent owns Ricker Air Conditioning, Heating and Plumbing in Mount Ayr. He also owned his own business in Phoenix.

"I have had fewer employees in my business here than I would have in two weeks down there," Brent said. "There was no loyalty in Phoenix. People worked long enough to get a paycheck then they would stop showing up."

The strong Midwest work ethic worked in their favor while they were in Phoenix.

"Employers love to hire people from the Midwest," Martha said. "If it came down to a person from Iowa and another person who had the same experience, employers would hire the person from Iowa. They just knew we would be good workers."

Bruce has the same experiences in his line of work.

"It seems small, but I had the same stethoscope for nine years," Bruce said. "I would go through two a year in Phoenix. I would take it off and lay it down and someone would come along and take it. People would steal from you with you standing right there."

Bruce and Michelle had their home burglarized five or six years after they moved to Phoenix.

[Page 7A] "I wanted to pack up and come home that day," Michelle said. They threw a patio chair through our window to get in."

Brent and Martha never had their home invaded, but their vehicle was vandalized and Brent had tools stolen from his work truck.

"I had one employee who drive my work truck clear to Texas," Brent said. "The stress of being an employer was terrible out there."

Bruce and Michelle moved back to Mount Ayr first in 1996. By that time, they had three children, Jeron was in eighth-grade, Lindsey in sixth and Blake in third.

"We moved home mostly because of school and family," Bruce said. "We really wanted to have our children go to school here."

Their children were old enough to experience the culture shock of moving from Phoenix to small town Iowa.

"Lindsey couldn't believe we would bring her to a town without a mall," Michelle said. "The boys really wanted to move back here though."

"We just had to ask ourselves if we really wanted to raise our children to to be accustomed to drive-by shootings," Bruce said. "We had an alarm in our house, and the kids had to learn the code and punch it in when they came home from school."

Brent and Martha's children were much smaller when they returned in 1997. Their daughter Jessie was 3 and their twin boys, Jack and Joe, were only 8 months old.

"If we had never had children, I don't know if we would have moved back," Martha said. "We were home for a class reunion, and I ran into the director of nursing at the hospital. She told me there was an opening, so I applied for the job. Three weeks alter we were here."

Brent continued to go back and forth between Phoenix and Mount Ayr while he worked on selling his business and their home. Their home sold to the first people who looked at it, but Brent finally had to give up on selling the business.

"When we came home we expected to know everyone," Martha said. "But we didn't know a lot of people. New people had moved in to replace the ones who had moved away."

"I was surprised by the fact that everybody knew me," Michelle said. "I would go to the grocery store and people would stop and talk to me. Now one knew me in Phoenix."

"In Phoenix, you have four concrete walls around your back yard," Brent said. "That was your domain. We didn't know our neighbors. We never saw them because of the security fence."

All four of the RICKERS agree that as parents the decision to move home was the best one they could have made.

"The kids had a lot more freedom here than they ever would have growing up down there," Michelle said. "We knew if they were out somewhere someone was going to be keeping an eye on them. It takes a community to raise a child and that really happens here in Mount Ayr."

"We really wanted our children to grow up with their grandparents," Martha said. "We wanted to move back while we could still enjoy our parents, not just take care of them."

The RICKERS had to make sacrifices to move home. They all say their house payments are less, but their taxes are higher. Their incomes are lower, but the cost of living is lower, too.

"We're just glad to be out of life in the ant hill," Brent said. "Everyone out there is going fast, they just don't know where they're going."

Transcription by Sharon R. Becker, November of 2012