Westmar: Change was happening even before college closed

(Editor's note: This is the fourth day of a series taking a look, on the tenth anniversary of Westmar's close, at what has happened to the buildings, how its close has continued to impact Le Mars and how people remember the institution.)

Maybe the most memorable picture of Westmar's economic impact on Le Mars was the first day the Teikyo students from Japan arrived in town.

There was a run on bicycles. Every last one in town was sold: most to Japanese students who wouldn't be able to get their driver's licenses for at least the first year.

When the college closed, though, the economic impact went beyond bikes.

In both visible and unseen ways, businesses felt the pinch.

At the most basic level, population in Le Mars dropped by hundreds.

In Westmar's last year, student population was about 586, and there were about 100 faculty and staff. When it closed, it meant less people shopping around town, less people eating out or having a night on the town.

"There had to be an effect -- anytime you take that number of people out of a community," said Neal Adler who had Adlers Sporting Goods then and was the director of the Chamber of Commerce. "Students gone pretty much over night, but there was an effort to absorb as many of the faculty and staff as we could into the community in different positions and jobs, and I think there was some success in that."

The less tangible side of that is the number of graduates that would have come to Le Mars for school and ended up staying in Le Mars to work, buy a house, raise children.

"And also it brought the opportunity to keep some of our young people here," Adler said.

He attended Westmar himself from 1969-1972 and said that now a lot of his classmates still live in Le Mars.

In the Westmar Alumni and Friends directory in 2002, more than 1,000 people in the were listed as living in Le Mars, nothing to sneeze at.

In 1997, by the time the college announced its closing, it was not a huge surprise to most people in town in the long run. Adler described it as the "drumbeat coming."

"Things had kind of pointed that there were problems and issues," he said.

Still, when the news broke that it was curtain time for Westmar, business owners were wondering what the future would hold.

"I think everybody was concerned that business would drop," said Dave Heeren, who has been selling footwear in downtown Le Mars since the mid '70s at Vollmar's Shoes, which originally opened in 1936. "Also, Westmar had cultural events that drew people to town, and that brought business. I think people were also concerned about that coming to an end."

Heeren said his business stayed pretty stable when Westmar closed. But he did see an impact at another basic level -- employees.

"A lot of it was being able to get extra part-time help," he said.

"It took away a lot of people looking for part time jobs. Now I just have to work a little harder to find help."

And, he said, it's hard to put numbers on how things would have been if Westmar had stayed open.

"Sure, business was stable," he said. "But would it have been better?"

Terry Claussen, who opened his clothing store in downtown Le Mars in 1990, also felt that the impact of the college closing was more intangible.

"I don't know that from a strictly business standpoint that it was that dramatic of an effect, but I always felt that what was lost was the atmosphere," he said. "Maybe it wasn't so much the hugest economic effect as it was an impact on our identity."

Adler also saw that kind of broad-based bearing on the town.

"There was no one living in Le Mars who had known Le Mars without Westmar. There were whole families that for generations had gone to Westmar," he said. "It was something new to everyone."

The biggest loss, he suggested, was the cultural opportunities and the diversity that the campus brought to the community, even the social atmosphere created by ball games and sports matches.

"They had a super strong football team, very good basketball team, wrestling too, and that was a great thing," he said.

But the atmosphere of the college itself had changed over the years, he noted.

"It had become more of a suitcase college; on the weekends a lot of the students went home," he said of the school's later years. "I think that changed, even maybe diminished the effect of, say, the shopping, because if they go home on the weekends, mom and dad are going to buy them stuff at home."

He saw it as somewhat of a generational transition.

"From what I've heard from older people that went to Westmar, they really wanted to be involved in the community, and I think it was maybe a change in the times, not just in Le Mars but all across the country," he said.

Many storefronts in downtown Le Mars have changed in the last decade, and many businesses have changed hands -- with the closing of Westmar only one thing in a larger bucket of factors.

But some have stayed the same. Barber Don Curry, almost a town historian after decades of haircuts in Le Mars, is still filling his chair, cut after cut.

He maintains, though, that every business lost customers when the college closed.

"It completely changed the town, no doubt," he said, pausing to measure a lock of his customer's hair. "Naturally we don't have as much culture now, but the city is doing a pretty good job. We're all doing the best we can with a bad deal."

Adler spoke with similar sentiment.

"It was a good opportunity for Le Mars to show how we can approach adversity. I would say we approached it very positively," he said, remembering the committeee he led to inventory everything on Westmar's campus, from hundreds of chairs down to cups and plates.

It took weeks, he said, and still the volunteers on the committeee kept showing up.

"It's always good to look back," he said. "But I think it's probably more important to look at what we've accomplished since then. It's more important to look forward."