The town of Wall Lake is working to smooth over some bad feelings about racist symbols that are all too public — a couple of Nazi swastikas on the town’s water tower. City Manager Tom Schoeder says the scene was set earlier this summer when someone was circulating racist flyers.
Local cops and deputies say flyers handed out in parking lots in nearby Denison and Storm Lake purported to be from the Klu Klux Klan. “They did trace it back to possibly some kids from the Wall Lake, Lake View area,” Schroeder says.
He says nobody’s come forward to admit they have a connection with the white-supremacist group, but the Nazi symbol of the swastika was painted on the town’s water tower. Both Wall Lake and Lake View have meatpacking plants that employ a lot of Hispanic workers. “We had a couple of swastikas painted on the water tower approximately three weeks ago,” Schroeder says. “We went up the next day and tried to remove them with a paint remover and got most of them off.”
The city manager believes the swastikas were painted by a couple kids looking for notoriety, and he says it wouldn’t be the first time. He’s pretty sure that before the new tower was in place, in the 1960s or early 70s, “there was a few girls’ names painted up there.”
Schroeder says before long the last traces of the hateful graffiti will be gone for good. In September, the tower’s scheduled for annual maintenance that’ll include repainting the outside of the water tower, and reconditioning the inside of the tank. He says the water will be safe to drink during the work.
Wall Lake is a town of about 850 people in Sac County and some townsfolk want the swastikas removed more quickly.