Word: small-town
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...light out, looking for locals with twangy accents, and it's still a fine, fresh idea. There is plenty of West to go around, it turns out. Frazier pokes about in the Plains states, to the east of the Rockies, letting his own mild adventures and rummagings in small-town museums drift into recollections of the old days. "Indians thought the white men's custom of shaking hands was comical," he reports, enchanted by this odd information. "Sometimes two Indians would approach each other, shake hands, and then fall on the ground laughing...
...starts looking for the proceeds of a famous jewel robbery out West a couple of decades after the theft. His allies and enemies in an ever shifting set of alliances include an aging femme fatale, a spunky tomboy and her ex-con grandfather, a trio of murderous Indians, a small-town newspaper editor and a crooked policeman. The plot and mood are vaguely reminiscent of The Maltese Falcon, except that, yes, there is a treasure...
...Hook, executive director of the National Rural Health Association: "Wal-Marts are the last nails in the coffins of a lot of rural Main Streets." Because downtown retail shops are important employers, their decline can be fatal to the rest of the town's economy as well. Another major small-town employer, the local hospital, is disappearing at the rate of more than 40 institutions each year. A principal cause was the 1983 decision by Congress to eliminate suspected rural subsidies in the Medicare system by reducing payments to small-town hospitals...
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...