Word: corns
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...which took so steep a tumble in the early 1980s, has recovered lately but only to a level where the surviving farmers look toward anxious stability, not flush times. Good news for American farmers and bad news factor each other out continually. Exports are rising, but the price of corn, for instance, is less than half what it was in 1982, and wheat has fallen 33% since 1980. The Wall Street Journal described the farm issue in a Jan. 8 headline: WHAT WAS A CRISIS BECOMES ONLY A PROBLEM. For every farmer unable to pay his debts, three or four...
...That a new hairdo, Tanya?" he asks one girl. "I like it. You're looking like a stone fox." "Give me some," he says, dipping his hand into an open bag of corn chips that an admiring boy is holding. "I need the quick energy." Walking through the senior lounge, the principal greets Denise Baker, who has just won a $20,000 scholarship, with some approving Clark doggerel: "If you can conceive it, you can believe it, and you can achieve it." Denise loves it. In fact virtually all the kids seem to revel in the style...
...want some help as they weave modern industry and service into the old, faltering heartland matrix of small towns and family farms. These crafty Iowans have stopped feeling sorry for themselves because of the agriculture price collapse and have begun hustling. They make gin and vodka out of surplus corn, and they are thinking about growing strawberries and snails as well as soybeans. There are deer herds in the valleys, and the pheasant population is 2 million, which is not like hogs (13.8 million) or cattle (4.6 million) or even people (2.8 million), but it all means economic diversity...
...Bush talks about debutante parties as if Dubuque were Greenwich, and Gary Hart thinks he can somehow walk away from an indulgent weekend. Pete du Pont promotes school vouchers that just might sink a lot of Iowa community schools already pressed to keep up the high quality established when corn sold high. Though Paul Simon, Richard Gephardt and Bob Dole come from neighboring states, they are power dwellers, long gone from the quiet desperations of Main Street. Anyway, they cannot linger too long. Iowa is January's campground for media on the presidential march...
...mistake to assume that Iowans can simply be reduced to a Grant Wood painting. Gone is the era when John Gunther could confidently declare in Inside U.S.A., published in 1947, "Corn is everything in Iowa." The state is still the nation's leading producer of corn and hogs, but these days only 10% of the labor force continue to work the land. "Many people in Iowa have never been on a farm," says Political Scientist James Hutter of Iowa State University. "I imagine that fewer than half of my students have spent more than a day on a farm...