Opinion: Let us now praise Kum and Go

Charles Baudelaire, the great French symbolist poet of the nineteenth century, famously said that “The form of a city changes faster — alas! — than the human heart.” (La forme d’une ville / Change plus vite— hélas—que le coeur d’un mortel). He was talking wistfully about the loss of certain buildings and neighborhoods in Paris that were being destroyed by the urban renewal during France’s Second Empire. While Grinnell isn’t really a city, and it hardly has the scale of change that Baudelaire witnessed, I feel a certain Baudelairian nostalgia as I observe the loss of one of Grinnell’s signature businesses: Kum & Go.

Well, it’s really just a name change: “Kum & Go” is becoming “Maverik,” and at the filling station on the corner of Fifth and West, the gas stations already have the Maverik name and logo, while the entrance sign still proclaims itself as Kum & Go — a mighty act of resistance to its inevitable removal to the dustbin of history. For those of you who have recently moved to Grinnell, you have no idea what this change means in terms of our town’s loss of an institution that, while not intentionally offensive, provided years of stunned looks and awkward remarks from some of Grinnell College’s finest visiting scholars. Imagine that Oxford University literary critic, that Harvard economist, or that Brooklyn, New York-based National Book Award winner who comes into town to discover, at one of our major crossroads, a “service station” called Kum & Go. The conversation goes something like this:

Nobel Prize Winner: “Wait, that’s a mistake, right? It’s supposed to be Come & Go, right?”

You: “No, ma’am! No sir! It’s spelled exactly as it’s supposed to be!”

Nobel Prize Winner: “But do they know about…. well… you know….?”

You: “I’m sorry, what are you referring to? Doesn’t everyone spell the verb “come” with a “k”?

Nobel Prize Winner: “It’s just that…”

O the embarrassment! O the levity! Now imagine giving directions to a job candidate who’s driving into town from Madison / Minneapolis / Kansas City / St. Louis. It goes like this:

You: “Just drive north on Highway 146, past the KFC and the Dollar General and Hy-Vee — that’s a grocery store — and when you reach Kum & Go, you’re getting really close.

Future Employee: “Excuse me?”

You: “I said Kum & Go. That’s K-U-M …”

Future Employee: “Are you an accredited educational institution?”

And yet they all took the job! And then they started playing the trick on others.

The name “Maverik” decidedly is a comedown. Or, rather, a kumdown. It sounds like the name of a cigarette store — the Marlboro Man — rather than a decent gas station. Really butch. Not playful at all. On the other hand, I suppose the intentional misspelling is an homage to its previous incarnation: the absence of a “c” in “Maverik” perhaps refers to the original, missing “c” in “Come and Go”?

So, as we celebrate the opening of our newest buildings — Renfrow Hall, Hannah House — let us take a moment to remember the mischievous glory that was Kum & Go, the gas station that reminded us that, even in our strivings for transcendence, we still love a certain base campiness.

Kum & Go: It kame, it went, it conquered.