Word: sauk
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...extend themselves beyond their means; they are the ones who need to be held most accountable. Mortgage lenders were certainly greedy, but it was also greed that motivated buyers. We always blame someone else for our stupid decisions. Only with true personal accountability will lessons be learned. Dave Meyer, Sauk Rapids, Minnesota...
...Sauk Centre has 3,709 people, a number that has not changed much in 100 years. Says Betty Schmitz of the Chamber of Commerce: "We want growth to keep our children in town." But two of her five have already left, following a pattern set by the young over the past century. Sauk Centre is flat and prairie plain. Despite the scattering of dairy farms and silos and little groves of trees, the landscape rolls open as the ocean right up to the edge of town. Winter lasts about eight months, and at 7:30 on Feb. 7, the birthday...
...grownups had their minds on other issues. The town was still trying to recover from the deaths of two volunteer firemen. The funeral was in the high school, and everyone came. The teachers still had not settled on a new contract, the town of Sauk Centre being one of a handful in Minnesota holding out against higher pay. (During a strike a couple of years ago, "teacher lover" became an epithet thrown at anyone supporting the picket line.) The Main Street merchants were, as always, keeping a censorious eye on anyone seen taking money away from Main Street...
...biggest fear is that Sauk Centre will become part of a kind of credit dust bowl. Probably 60% of the people earn a living from agriculture: farming, feedlots, machinery, the Kraft cheese plant in nearby Melrose. Bruce Buchanan, who runs a food market on Main Street, shook out the dice to see who would pay the bill for the 10:30 a.m. coffee crowd and said of the President's State of the Union address: "Oh, he's great. When he gets done, we'll have the rich and the poor. But he's great." Even a visitor primed...
...Sauk Centre, like most of Minnesota, is a great place for contrasts, for progressive thinking and dug-in resistance, for surprises. The minister of the First United Church-of-Christ is a woman, the Rev. Donna Van Voorhis. Women in Sauk Centre have come a long way since Carol Kennicott, the heroine of Main Street, left home because "solitary dishwashing isn't enough to satisfy me $ --or many other women." Minnesota has a long liberal political tradition, but the state also teems with right-wing extremists like the vigilante group called posse comitatus. The whist players at John's Place...