Word: freeporters
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Glenn P. Naidoo Freeport...
...race of a different kind is just beginning for the world's fastest female marathoner. Joan Benoit, 26, the plucky, pint-size distance runner from Freeport, Me., had seemed a good bet to challenge Norway's Grete Waitz in this year's Olympic marathon, the first ever for women, but on March 20 during a 20-mile run near her home, she noticed a peculiar pain in her right knee...
...goods retailers. Their prosperous successors in the fitness era are such companies as Seattle's Eddie Bauer and Orvis, in Manchester, Vt. The most famous of all came along in 1912 when Leon Leonwood Bean started selling his rubber-bottomed hunting shoes from a Main Street address in Freeport...
Today millions of pilgrims flock to Freeport to visit L.L. Bean's one and only retail outlet. To the catalogue faithful it is a shrine to a Yankee mystique woven from images of integrity, good value and handcrafted quality. Bean's merchandise is not necessarily expensive ($18 for its best button-down striped Oxford-cloth shirts), and it is not elegant. Over the years a kind of reverse chic has attached itself to its sturdy Yankee clothes and shoes: its $40 woodsman's pants, "all wool and a yard wide," say, or the $73 sheepskin-lined boots...
...business with an excellent product becomes wildly popular. To keep up with outrageous demand, the owners eventually expand, mass produce, and create a "label." Things are never quite the same again. Witness the saga of Ray Kroc's old hamburger stand or Mr. L.L. Bean's barn up in Freeport. Steve's resisted the clutches of materialistic expansionism for several years, sticking it out in original digs in Somerville...