Word: towns
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Baby Doc's grip began to falter last November when his security forces opened fire on student demonstrators in the coastal town of Gonaives. Three people were killed. The ensuing protests added momentum to a rebellion among young Haitians who saw little chance for improvement in their lives under Duvalier. The opposition movement was supported by the Roman Catholic Church, which since the 1983 visit of Pope John Paul II had protested Duvalier's indifference to the country's squalor. Last month a new wave of protests swept the country. Although Duvalier's troops and police maintained control of Port...
...slices decisively through rich Iowa farmland, where the dirt is almost as dark as the two-lane asphalt ribbon that bisects the table-flat prairie west of Fort Dodge. The highway dips, then rises gently to Sac City, a town devastated by plunging crop prices, sagging spirits and the near collapse of rural America in the past decade...
...population is down to 2,400, from 3,000 in 1980. Fister's Department Store is out of business. Iowa Public Service has trouble collecting electric bills from nearly bankrupt farmers, and the utility's Sac City office has dropped from six employees to two. Bill Brenney, the town's remaining optometrist, says, "People are spreading payments way out. Accounts receivable are way up." The town's children look elsewhere for jobs, and not even fathers can help sons. Says Ralph Youll, co-owner of Youll Plumbing and Heating: "We've only made money one year in the last five...
...little hope, though, is rolling into Sac City. After numerous meetings with an industrial search firm in Des Moines, the town leaders have turned up a hot prospect for new business: Fibercraft Inc., a division of Equity Automotive Corp. of Delano, Minn. The company will take over a 37,500-sq.-ft. warehouse abandoned in 1982 by Lear Siegler's Noble Division. Starting next month Fibercraft will turn out fiber-glass camping trailers and initially provide 40 precious jobs. In two years the payroll could rise to 100 people. "Everybody's excited," says Marilyn Hobbs, executive director of the Chamber...
Chicago may not always have been receptive to the grandeur of drama, but it has always been a theatrical town--a city of pugilistic journalists and publicity-hunting mobsters, of outrageous politics and a histrionically unruffled electorate. It was probably inevitable, in a city where showmanship has been so much a part of public life, that a feisty, populist stage community would emerge sooner or later. And sure enough, over the past decade, it has, with at least half a dozen companies elbowing their way into national prominence and the best known of them, the Steppenwolf collective, capturing...