Word: towns
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...about his father leaving home, and he sidesteps the question with an ode to his dad's shoes (black-and-white pony skin). Kelly wants to remember Mississippi merry, not Mississippi burning. But one memory sticks: when secondhand books were shipped over from the white elementary school across town, he said, "they'd color in the faces of Dick and Sally so they'd be black when they...
Though the whitewashed grain elevators two blocks from Clay Center's town square are still in use, the county's economy is no longer primarily agricultural. Clay County benefited during the 1950s and '60s from the arrival of manufacturing companies that produced such goods as metalworking equipment and grain-handling machinery. But in the past decade almost 300 jobs have disappeared. Says Mayor Bisenius: "In the past few years we have realized that we cannot exist as a town without something new coming...
Smokestack chasing, as the practice of wooing factories has become known, is rampant in small-town America. Although often portrayed as a response to problems in the farming sector, in many cases the search is an effort to replace the industrial jobs lost in the 1980s, says Kenneth Deavers, a chief economist for the Agriculture Department. Farming and related businesses account for only about one-eighth of rural employment. Attracting new industries to a small town can be tricky. "A lot of these firms are gypsies. They fly from one set of subsidies to another," notes Mark Lapping, dean...
...saving small-town America worth the expenditure of more state and federal money? As U.S. cities face deeper problems, ranging from grime to gridlock, the rural option could become more important, or at least more appealing. In a recent USA Today poll, 39% of the people surveyed said they would prefer to live in a small town. (According to U.S. Census figures, less than 24% of the population dwells in rural areas, compared with 44% in 1950.) At the very least, says former Agriculture Secretary Bob Bergland, "it would be unwise for U.S. public policy to force people to leave...
...Deanna Fuller, who maintains a storefront office next door to city hall, is working on a dozen other possibilities. Already she has assisted in organizing a community campaign to help expand a manufacturing plant that makes grain augers. Editor Ned Valentine, whose family-owned newspaper has chronicled the town's ups and downs for 100 years, is optimistic. Says he: "The difference between towns that survive and towns that don't is attitude, not population." Clay Center may have the moxie to thrive once again, but for hundreds of other tiny U.S. towns, their little spots...