Word: algona
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...speaker is a retired furniture dealer, not a preacher or philosopher. As chairman of the Kossuth County Hospital in Algona, Iowa, he is welcoming some 700 townspeople to a cookie-and-punch open house at the just-completed John and Agnes Dreesman Memorial Addition...
...small towns go, Algona embodies the American Dream. Nestled along the East Fork of the Des Moines River, it is a quietly prospering place for 6,015 men, women and children. And unlike so many other Iowa communities, its economy isn't entirely tied to corn. Algona is the county seat, the home of a Snap-on Tools plant as well as some other light manufacturing, so it is more resistant to the farm recessions that periodically smite neighboring towns...
...very exciting happens ; there. Back in World War II, the town did house 3,000 German and Italian prisoners of war. The POWs are still remembered for the fancy European-style banquets they gave, and for the 50-ft.-wide Nativity scene carved out of concrete, which today is Algona's sole tourist attraction...
...first the community was too stunned to react, clamming up protectively as the TV vans rolled into town. "It was as if we could hide this horror from the outside world as well as from ourselves," says Molly MacDonald, then editor of Algona's weekly newspaper, and Marilyn's lifelong friend...
Shock turned to grief, followed by the hollow ache of the town's terrible loss. For weeks, Algona's ministers counseled their congregations. Funeral director Mike Schaaf, who buried the Dreesmans, organized a grief-recovery seminar, bringing from Des Moines a psychologist specializing in traumatic losses. "If the killing had occurred in a crack-ridden city like New York or Detroit," says Schaaf, "we would have understood. Not in Algona...