Word: small-town
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Almost nothing since the end of World War II has so affected the American spirit as the old story of the traumatic transition from small-town community to big-city anonymity: the spread of an isolation and estrangement that make it impossible for a person to know if the man in the next seat or next apartment is worth getting to know or is a homicidal maniac. In the towns, by God, the fund of common knowledge about nearly everyone was richly and sometimes intrusively detailed. The urban milieu has its advantages-individual privacy and freedom-but it can exact...
...small-town banker, Christopher was born in Scranton, N. Dak., 55 years ago. As a teenager, he migrated with his family to California, where he earned a law degree from Stanford. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, then joined the prestigious Los Angeles law firm of O'Melveny & Myers. From the start of his legal career, Christopher was active in Democratic politics. He joined the 1958 gubernatorial campaign of Pat Brown, following Brown to Sacramento as his special counsel. He went off to Washington in 1967 as Deputy U.S. Attorney General. Assignments to help calm...
...hamburger stand business was before the advent of McDonald's. A hodgepodge of state and federal regulations has been erected to protect small banks around the country by keeping out their big-city brothers. The origin of the geographic restrictions goes back to the 1830s, when Andrew Jackson was fighting Nicholas Biddle over the charter of the Bank of the United States. Populist politicians have always fought nationwide banking on the grounds that small-town financial decisions should be made locally. Smaller banks also claim they would be run out of business if large banks from New York, Chicago...
...basic good ole boys or the Kennedys' strident boyos. Nobody in Plains was exactly sure why Jimmy stayed away, but there were theories: possible embarrassment at Billy's high jinks, displeasure at the crude local commercialism, or maybe even advice from his pollsters to down-play the small-town Southern roots in favor of a homogenized national image. Certainly a home visit was a summons to pushing crowds, at least half newsmen; and resident family members found it increasingly impossible to appear downtown. (Miss Lillian: "They all wanted to touch me, and if there's anything...
...welcome center on my left with only three cars in the lot, then the silos and water tank, and finally the nice row of brick stores that have easily endured their freight of souvenirs and the acid marinade of countless photographs to remain as anyone's icon of small-town America. They are not exactly an architecturally distinguished row, but their variety and fantasy of ornament and color make pictures of Reagan's home street in Tampico, Ill., look dour...