A grizzled old man outside Dixie Fried Chicken struggled for an analogy to describe the calamity hitting Clewiston. An amputation? No, he said. ``More like getting your heart ripped out.''
Oh, it was a great day for environmentalists, redemption for the governor, a coup for the South Florida Water Management District, good news for most Floridians -- a $1.7 billion deal with U.S. Sugar Corp. to abandon 187,000 acres of farmland and 80 years of growing sugar cane below Lake Okeechobee.
The cane fields had been the nearly insurmountable impediment in the Everglades restoration project.
Without the U.S. Sugar fields, it would have been nearly impossible to fix the drained, diverted and devastated aquifer, conceded Richard Grosso, director of the Everglades Law Center. Grosso was nearly giddy Wednesday.
SWEET MEMORIES
But everyone else's good news came as a grim shock to the town that styles itself, ''America's sweetest town.'' On Wednesday, it was a bittersweet place.
When U.S. Sugar dissolves itself, 1,700 jobs disappear, Mayor Mali Soto Chamness told me. But Clewiston, population 6,500, is losing more than paychecks.
Big Sugar has been at the town's essence since Michigan industrialist Charles Stewart Mott came south and turned a bankrupt refining operation into U.S. Sugar.
Mott, who made his first fortune manufacturing automobile axles, also turned the lovely planned community, laid out in 1925 with wide boulevards flowing out of arching streetscapes, into a true company town. Anyone around Clewiston can toss out Mott's quote: ``We are part of the community and what's good for the community is good for us.''
U.S. Sugar financed the city's pool, library, auditorium, youth center, parks and rebuilt the lovely Clewiston Inn. And, for a time, U.S. Sugar paid workers in scrip redeemable in the company store.
Of course, through much of the 20th century, other mill towns and factory towns and mining towns across America were utterly dominated by a single company.
Some, like Mott's, were famously paternalistic when it came to civic affairs.
IN TOWN'S BLOODSTREAM
But by the 21st Century, single-minded Clewiston was more of an American anomaly. The agreement giving the company six years to shut down local operations hardly seems time enough to disentangle Clewiston. Big Sugar is evident all over town. As if sugar was in the local DNA. The big annual event remains the Sugar Festival. Consider the Dixie Crystal Theater, the annual crowning of the Sugar Queen, or Sugar Realty, out on Sugarland Highway, offering ``the sweetest deals in town.''
The mayor and Butch Wilson, director of the Clewiston Museum, both spoke disparagingly of NAFTA as if the trade deal that opened up U.S. Sugar to foreign competition was a blow to the city itself.
When Wilson spoke of U.S. Sugar -- or Big Sugar, as he called it -- he employed ''we,'' as if the town, the company, the museum and the museum director were all one same entity. Of course, Wilson had worked for U.S. Sugar for 32 years before he was jettisoned in a mass layoff last year -- a warning that Mr. Mott's ethos no longer ruled Clewiston.
''Clewiston is Big Sugar and Big Sugar is Clewiston,'' Wilson said. The town's longtime motto sounded as wistful Wednesday as an old memory.
