Word: greenfielders
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...troubled. So are all the people who still make up a rural culture of farms and small towns from the Appalachians to the Rockies, for all of our history a taproot that nourished the other branches. The crisis of the farms themselves has passed for now, but around Greenfield's town square the economic strain has worsened. A hardware store, a drugstore, a grocery store, a Ford dealership have all closed within three years. County residents are lured to the shopping centers of Des Moines, 60 miles east over smooth highways they helped build...
...Mart is going up in Creston, 20 miles away, and Greenfield's merchants fear the worst. Wall Street traders will hail America's richest man, Sam Walton, and his relentless retailing march across the country. But Walton's new store, dropped in a field of asphalt (one of 1,400 in his discount empire) will suck a bit more of the commercial life out of Greenfield and similar towns in the same radius. Another comfortable old building with arched windows and high ceilings may have to be padlocked. Not so long ago they were all open, and the square filled...
...Free Press, with my brother at the helm, rode the ups and downs of the postwar world. For a while it looked as if Greenfield would grow dramatically. New houses went up by the score. Cattle and hog prices climbed. Grain prices soared as a hungry world sought aid. Chemical fertilizers hyped the yields. New machines snorted through the thick fields. Norman Lear, the movie producer, came around in 1969 to use the Greenfield square as a setting for his film Cold Turkey. The Free Press went Hollywood with relish, interviewing Bob Newhart, Dick Van Dyke and Tom Poston. That...
...another doing good work on good land? Ed Sidey thinks they can, if there is just enough money to keep people apace of the world in education and health care, if the economic base is adequate to support quality churches, parks and streets. The fundamental values still celebrated along Greenfield's streets are as sound as ever, their loss in cities the cause of human devastation, something acknowledged now by most experts...
...Adair County Free Press will continue to tell that story as it begins its second century; a couple more Sideys are coming along. The story will be in the birth notices and the deliberations of the school board, in the obituaries too. Diligent readers, like those in Greenfield, can keep tabs on who starts out on the prairies and who ends up there...