River City, Iowa: Meredith Willson and The Music Man

Mason City, Iowa, at the northern end of Route Sixty-Five, has a claim that almost no American town can match: it is the real-life original of a Broadway musical that has been performed continuously since nineteen fifty-seven.

Meredith Willson was born here on May eighteenth, nineteen oh two. He grew up on Gold Street, learned to play the flute in local bands, and left for New York as a young man to pursue a career in music. He became a flutist with the New York Philharmonic, worked as a radio conductor and personality, and eventually wrote for film and television. But Mason City never left him.

In the nineteen fifties, Willson sat down to write a Broadway musical set in a small Iowa town in nineteen twelve. The automobile was just arriving that year. Boys played pool in the billiard parlor on the town square. A traveling salesman named Harold Hill could come to town, sell the parents on a boys' band, pocket the instrument money, and plan to disappear before anyone noticed there were no instruments and no band lessons. Willson wrote the book, the lyrics, and all the music himself, an unusual feat.

The Music Man opened on Broadway on December nineteenth, nineteen fifty-seven, and ran for one thousand three hundred and seventy-five performances. It won the Tony Award for Best Musical and spawned a nineteen sixty-two film starring Robert Preston and Shirley Jones. The musical's opening number, called Rock Island, performed entirely as rhythmic speech against a train-car percussive beat, remains one of the most inventive opening sequences in Broadway history.

Mason City celebrated the premiere at its Palace Theater with Hollywood stars in attendance. The town adopted the musical's identity with full commitment. Today the Music Man Square, a recreated turn-of-the-century streetscape in downtown Mason City, houses the Meredith Willson Museum, and the boyhood home where he grew up still stands nearby.

Willson died in nineteen eighty-four. The fictional River City was always Mason City, and Mason City has never let anyone forget it.