Word: rural
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...setting is the deep Midwest -- rural Oklahoma and Kansas, mostly -- in the period before and during the Great Depression. The lies are rascally old friends: that bandits are decent, doomed boys; that bullets don't really hurt; and, of course, that whores have hearts of gold. Charley Floyd has served four years in the Jefferson City, Missouri, lockup for robbing an armored car, but his career really gets going when he and a rodeo cowboy named George Birdwell both try, by storyteller's coincidence, to rob the Earlsboro, Oklahoma, bank at the same time. Meeting cute is what Hollywood calls...
After much rehearsal, he and the master hit the show-biz circuit, breaking in the act at rural fairs and carnivals. Walt steadily improves, and so do his bookings: "We stunned them in Worcester. We wowed them in Springfield. They dropped their drawers in Bridgeport." His self-regard soars as well: "I was Walt the Wonder Boy, the diminutive daredevil who defied the laws of gravity, the one and only ace of the air." He is struck by the fact that his triumphs take wing in the same year, 1927, that Lindbergh flies across the Atlantic: "I didn't know...
Most of these towns have grown up in rural areas where nobody thought much about a working population that needed public transportation, day care and other amenities. Most critical is the housing crisis from bauble to municipal bauble along the glittery necklace of Rocky Mountain resorts. Here, each square foot of real estate today fetches a ransom. Gone to outrageously priced condos are the apartments the help used to rent -- and there is scant room left to build more. The reason is location, location, location: these picturesque hamlets beckon and charm and cost the earth because they are usually isolated...
...renunciation of violence by the I.R.A. Official sources in London, Dublin and Washington believe that the top republican command, including Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, is ready to move away from the armed struggle for both personal and strategic reasons -- even if some of the local commanders, mostly from rural districts in the North, remain unconvinced that it is time to lay down arms. As evidence of the I.R.A.'s change of heart, sources familiar with the insular and suspicious community of Catholic nationalists on Belfast's Falls Road cite the fact that Sinn Fein has begun working the pubs...
...rural town of Ocoyocac, Felipe Eleno, 39, stepped out of a voting booth with his two-year-old son on his shoulders. "I support stability and democracy and tranquillity," he said. "So it's not too hard to guess who I voted for." Jorge Alaniz, a bank employee in Mexico City, was thinking about voting for the P.A.N. but stuck with the ruling party. "I thought Zedillo was a safe pair of hands," he said. "I just hope he can make the economy take off so my kids can have a good future." When Zedillo assumes office...