Word: albia
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Just last summer three of Brick Kness's grandchildren took over management of the multimillion-dollar corporation that now produces what everybody in Albia, Iowa (pop. 4,000), simply refers to as "the trap." The young Knesses are remarkably similar to their elders. The invention has been handed down from father to son not merely as a business but as a way of life...
...Kness Manufacturing Co. sold 400,000 traps and grossed about $1.5 million at a wholesale average of $3.75 a trap. It was the twelfth straight year that production has increased. While there are not enough zeroes in these figures to dazzle anyone on Wall Street, they are remarkable in Albia. All the more so because the Knesses, defying the collective wisdom of American commerce, neither advertise nor employ salesmen to bring the trap to their customers...
When Brick's three sons, Mike, Lester and Arnold, came back from World War II, the family moved to Albia, some 65 miles southeast of Des Moines, and set up a factory in an old barn. Five railroads then intersected in town, making it a likely place for manufacturing. (Other captains of industry did not flock to Albia, however, and two of the railroads are now gone.) When orders were down, as they often were, the Knesses built houses. They farmed and did some landscaping. They installed toilets and dug septic tanks. They fixed almost any machine that needed...
...ever pressured us to come back here to Albia," Russ says. Asked why he did, he explains, "There's a kind of a tie to the trap. It's pride in what the family has accomplished, in the quality of the product...
...Albia, Iowa...