Word: texarkana
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Texarkana (pop. 60,000) is a Texas farm town that sprawls across the Arkansas border and serves assorted crooks as a distribution center for stolen cars and appliances. Now the city boasts a new source of notoriety: 17 of Texarkana's 24 sq. mi., including some of the better sections, are infested with sleek, fat rats. According to U.S. Interior Department investigators, the town harbors about 900,000 of the rodents-30 times the national average of one rat per two citizens...
...gnawing holes in buildings and contaminating food, Texarkana's rats cause about $3 million of damage a year. With their eleven internal parasites and 18 kinds of fleas, they expose people to rat-bite fever, murine typhus, bubonic plague and other diseases. Yet the city's residents have become appallingly adapted to the rats. As one retired Negro farmer casually puts it: "They play like ants behind my house...
Many of the people of Texarkana are technologically unemployed farmhands who have no conception of sanitation. They persist in tossing their garbage out the back door without remembering that rats, not hogs, are there to eat it. Worse, the city did not collect trash until last week and is still unable to enforce its rudimentary sanitation laws; much of the population cannot afford even minimal fines. As a result, vacant lots have sprouted moldering mountains of rubber tires, empty cans, cardboard boxes and putrefying scraps of food. The rats love...
...office of communications, has not only won a crucial appeals court ruling that citizens' groups have every right to oppose TV-license renewals, but has helped organize local groups to carry on such fights. Rather than risk being dragged before the FCC or into court, KTAL-TV of Texarkana recently agreed in a private contract with one Parker-backed group to end discrimination in its broadcasting...
...East Germantown, Ind., were evacuated when 61 cars of a 110-car Penn Central train were derailed, spraying the area with chemicals that set fires and sparked explosions. In Texas, 13 cars of a Kansas City South ern freight train carrying inflammable liquefied gas were derailed south of Texarkana. Six families were evacuated when a fire seemed likely. No one was injured in the two derailments. But the rolling fright continues...