I'm writing today about a kind of travel that is usually foreign to this blog, the cultural opposite of a trip to the great vacation destinations, the briefest of journeys to a small American city that I had the luck of knowing when I was a boy.

How did I get there? Well, I was recently told by my wife that we would celebrate my birthday this month on a trip to a secret destination for which she had made all the arrangements, and whose location I would learn only in the taxi going to the airport. And this past Wednesday, on that ride to LaGuardia New York, I was first astonished and then delighted to learn that we were going to Jefferson City, Missouri. That town, in the heart of the Midwest, was the cherished boyhood home where I had lived with my parents and sister, the place I last saw when I was fourteen years old and my father announced we were moving to New York.

Jefferson City then had 23,000 people. It is today a city of 39,000.

Now I won't claim that a visit to Jeff City is a big touristic opportunity. But to me at the time it was Athens, London, and Paris all rolled into one -- and would you believe? -- it lived up to every memory I had of it. It is, at one and the same time, a gracious old town of a bygone flavor, and yet also the active capitol of the State of Missouri, with what is surely the most beautiful seat of government in all of America, a soaring structure of Roman columns topped with an immense dome, all overlooking the broad Missouri River.

That capitol, unlike so many others, immediately presents you with a series of serious themes worthy of adults, large museum rooms displaying remarkable, no-holds-barred exhibits on the progress of race relations in the State of Missouri, on the State's involvement in the Civil War, on its frontier history, on its role during all the major eras of the American story.

Most State capitols, like New York's Albany, are boring beyond measure, a dreary collection of offices. But the capitol building of Missouri is breathtaking, exalting; and one of its highlights is a huge lounge the mural "Social History of Missouri" by the renowned native son artist, Thomas Hart Benton. These are the equal of anything done by Diego Rivera, murals that compare with those of the famous Italian masters. They alone would justify a trip to Jefferson City.

They were painted in secrecy in the late 1930s. They are amazingly frank, well ahead of their time, and depict a goodly percentage of the persons in them as African-Americans -- slaves during the time of slavery and poverty-stricken former slaves after the end of slavery, who played such a vital role in the economic development of Missouri. Slave auctions are depicted, slaves pressed into back-breaking work, abolitionists being tarred and feathered for their attempts to free the slaves. Astonishingly, one panel portrays the political boss of Kansas City at that time, the infamous Tom Pendergast, presiding over a meeting of other corrupt politicians receiving cash bribes. Those murals were painted while Pendergast was in power in Missouri (he was later convicted and imprisoned), and the mural was saved from destruction by Pendergast's henchmen only by an outpouring of public approval.
 
On the short airplane ride and train to Jefferson City, I had thought about going quietly to all my former haunts, my home, my elementary school (where I had studied Latin, no less). I planned to visit my junior high school, and the community swimming pool, and the tiny Carnegie Library where I spent so much time, and the beautiful High Street, which is the city's main street almost totally unchanged from the early 1900s, like Walt Disney's small town street in the Magic Kingdom.

It was supposed to be a private visit; but my wife had placed a phone call to the Jefferson City Convention and Visitors Bureau seeking some information -- and thereupon all hell broke loose.

On arriving in Jefferson City, we were met at the station by a group of city officials. Next morning I was brought to radio station KWOS to be interviewed as a returning native son. And from the station I was taken to a reception at the tourist headquarters where, in addition to the presence of some thirty-or-so former classmates, there was a television crew, there were reporters from the local newspaper, there was none other than the Mayor of Jefferson City, John Landwehr, who presented me with the keys to the city. And then, with the television cameras rolling, he gave me a framed proclamation welcoming me back and presenting me with a five dollar bill, the sum I had once claimed was sufficient for a day in Europe.

And that night the local television station carried a long feature on my visit, and the day after that the local newspaper, the Jefferson City News Tribune, carried a front page article on my visit.

In between all those events, an emotional highlight was a visit to the tiny Temple Beth El Synagogue of Jefferson City, built in 1883, the oldest still-functioning synagogue west of the Mississippi. I lingered inside, remembering the times when I attended services with my parents, both of them immigrants to the United States, who received their American citizenship in Jefferson City, Missouri, on a memorable day.

So there, very condensed, was my visit to a small but historic American city. You get there by Amtrak from St. Louis, in a two-hour train ride alongside the Missouri River. It is the most centrally located city in all the United States, and if you want a picture of small town America, you couldn't do better than Jefferson City, Missouri, my very first home town.

I wonder whether any of our big city readers have themselves ever returned to a small American town in which they grew up, and I'd be grateful to hear from them.