Local color. As recently-arrived residents in town, local history is mostly a big blank space for us. Slowly, details and incidents trickle down, filling in the space. Sometimes the details can be alarming; good thing, for instance, our house isn't anywhere near this intersection (one of the principal ones in town leading to the U.'s campus) - and I never would have suspected that somebody tried to blow up City Hall. (There seems to be tantalizingly little Googleable information on this latter incident - I suppose I could actually drag myself to the library and pore through the dead-tree archives.)


Posted by David Fleck at 06 March 2005 08:07 AM
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1993 was an outlier flood year in the Midwest. This fact is common knowledge to anyone who lived in the region at the time, though it may be obscure elsewhere.

Posted by: Jonathan on March 6, 2005 10:55 AM

I remember that flood. Saw it on the news down here in Florida. CNN loved it: disaster in our backyard! Opportunities for many scenes of Flyover Country pathos (the scenes of frantic sandbag-piling, marriages on the roofs of flooded churches, etc.). They could film a segment and fly back to NYC for lunch.

Posted by: Andrea Harris on March 7, 2005 06:36 AM

I remember hearing about the flooding. Still, it's one thing to hear about it and another thing to know about actual damage on the ground (or under water, as the case may be).

My previous best example of this was hearing news reports of the 1996 flooding of the Willamette River, and then moving to a town along its banks... at the local dock, there is a "1996 FLOOD CREST" sign attached to the dock pilings, about 25 feet overhead.

And don't get me started on typhoons.

Posted by: David Fleck on March 7, 2005 07:04 AM

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