Word: clay
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Even on a bleak, late-winter day, the little town of Clay Center, Kans., exudes all the homeyness and warmth of a Norman Rockwell painting. Tidy, freshly painted houses cover the small knoll that rises north of the town square. The homes of the middle class cost about $20,000; those of the poor are timeworn but neat. One of the tallest buildings in town is a barnlike structure built by a woman who gives baton-twirling lessons...
Serious crime almost never happens here; crack and heroin come to town only on TV news shows. Boasts the mayor, Thelma Bisenius: "This is a place where you don't have to lock your door and you can let your children come into downtown alone." Clay Center citizens care about one another, and about outsiders too. The 55-member Rotary Club has raised $30,000 in three years to help administer polio vaccinations around the world. In short, this should be an idyllic place to live. Yet something is wrong here. Clay Center (pop. 4,700) has lost hundreds...
...Clay Center, like thousands of other small communities from Maine to New Mexico, is struggling to avoid becoming a ghost town. The population of rural America is being sapped by an epic postwar migration to cities and suburbs, a trend that has accelerated in the past decade. Each year since 1985, more than half a million rural residents have packed up and moved away, usually in search of employment. While self-reliant, spirited towns like Clay Center are putting up a plucky campaign to bring back jobs and citizens, such communities now find they are threatened by conditions, ranging from...
Founded by land developers as a farming center in the 1860s, Clay Center had hopes of becoming a rival of Chicago. Nowadays the four stoplights that mark the corners of the town's courthouse square often change from green to yellow to red without anybody noticing. Most of the shops on the town square rarely get more than two customers at a time. Shoppers who once bustled along the dusty main strip have defected to the new mall in Manhattan, 40 miles to the southeast, or the Wal-Mart outside Concordia, equidistant in the opposite direction...
Congressman Wilbur Mills, who starred with stripper Fanne Fox at the Tidal Basin in 1974, is a recent prodigal of drink. Many others preceded him. John Quincy Adams complained mightily about House Speaker Henry Clay's roaring drunks abroad in 1814, when they were there for the Treaty of Ghent, ending...