Word: townes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...print again. The Adair County Free Press of Greenfield, Iowa, is just about ready for its 100th birthday next week. Same newspaper, same family of editors, no sellout to a chain, no fortunes made or lost, circulation steady at 3,200 in a county of 9,500 and a town of 2,200. The back issues form a tapestry of small events, a century of stories of children's birthdays, club meetings, 4-H calves, men and women going off to war and, always, the terrors and joys of the Great Prairie weather. Good people, good earth, both granted dignity...
...Will the paper be around another 100 years?" he wonders. "Will the town be recognizable in 2089?" He thinks so, but he is 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...
...learned the printing trade in those years and also the discipline of small-town culture, so burdensome to Minnesota writer Sinclair Lewis but only occasionally irritating to me. I often took my place feeding the ink-caked flatbed press that would lunge back and forth printing the pages. Each press run took nearly three hours, sheet by sheet. There was no escape. All eyes bored into my back. Patience was required, craftsmanship demanded, good humor expected. On hot summer nights, after taking the papers to the post office, I would stand with my Uncle John at the makeup stone...
...Himalayan town of Dharmsala, India, the base of the exile government. Tibetans danced and sang in the streets...
This was my first crisis. Winning teams burden their fans with emotionally taxing tasks like check- ing the out-of-town scoreboard. But I was afull-fledged teenager now, and I was ready for thepsychological strain of a pennant race. In 1984and 1985, the Mets came tantalizingly close, yettheir second-place finishes were acceptable. Afterall, they weren't supposed to be any good. Theyplayed well. They tried hard...