When we did our big school project that year, the most stressful day certainly was the draft.
In fifth grade, our defining moment was the state reports. Such was the learning curve in the 1960s, at least in my public school in a comfortable Detroit suburb. It felt as if everything hung on that one undertaking, our first serious foray into the world of encyclopedias and library reference sections. Somehow just writing about that piece of the pre-Internet era evokes the musty aroma of dusty bound volumes. But I digress.
So naturally, when the day came for us to do our lottery-style drawing – nobody got to just name the state they’d research, and there could be no duplicates – we were all mighty anxious. The stakes were high; with about two dozen of us in the class, we knew we’d each have one do-over if we chose, but we couldn’t revert to our original one. Those were the rules.
So naturally, when I drew my slip of paper out of the hat and it said Minnesota, I was aghast, certain the fates had it in for me. Who even knew anybody from, or anything about, that faraway place? I dipped my hand into the hat once again. And there it was: North Dakota. Surely the only one I’d have preferred less.
In the weeks to follow, I would become a mini-expert on the state. It turned out to be kind of interesting, though I’d have been loath to admit that at the time.
So naturally, when the results of the latest best-place poll hit my email inbox this week, they were amusing. This year’s rundown of the “Top 100 Places to Live” from livability.com shows three towns in the Dakotas among the first 30 best ones.
Montana – billed as “The Last Best Place,” a state I called home for several years, though as a fifth-grader I’d scarcely heard of that place either – has three cities in the top 50.
The real surprise: Naperville didn’t turn up on the list. Downers Grove was declared number 51, but that’s the only one around here that made the cut.
Now, if you’ve been paying attention, you know Naperville typically has a fine showing in these online polls. It has been deemed a best place – to raise a family, to establish a home as a young adult, to retire, even to be a “snob” – multiple times in the past few years. Livability.com, which devises ratings on assorted attributes for small- to mid-sized cities, last year declared Naperville ninth nationwide among cities for college grads to call home. And when niche.com released its own list of best cities to live in this year, Naperville snagged berth 21.
Polls are funny things, often tapping methodologies that fall shy of empirical rigor (something we’d all do well to bear in mind as another general election cycle with its crazy quilt of volatile polling figures draws near). Sometimes reflecting the outcomes desired by those who’ve paid the pollsters, many of their reports are best taken with at least a couple grains of salt.
Is this a good place to put down roots, have kids, send them to school and spend your golden years? Plenty of folks might say that adds up to being a really, really good place to live.
The community was among the 2,100-plus contenders in Livability’s evaluation of cities with head counts between 20,000 and 350,000, editor Matt Carmichael told me earlier this week.
“I can say Naperville scored well, but not quite well enough to crack the Top 100,” he said by email.
These surveys only tell us so much. Still, I take a sliver of comfort from the newest news from WalletHub, another cyber pollster, which this week released numbers indicating that while Illinois isn’t one of the happiest spots on earth, at least it’s not among the most miserable. Culling data ranging “from emotional health to income levels to sports participation rates,” the organization declared Utah the happiest state in the Union. West Virginia – which, perhaps not coincidentally, also has heart attack rates three times those in Utah, WalletHub indicated – was named the “least happy” among them.
Guess which state was edged out only by Utah on the happy-ometer? Yep, you betcha: Minnesota.
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Oh, and in case you’re wondering where livability.com found the nation’s No. 1 best place to live this year, drumroll, please: it’s Rochester. Yeah, in Minnesota.
Twitter @scarlman