One could almost feel sorry for them

In the fifties, my father sold stuff on the road: business machines, appliances, shoes, encyclopedias--he could sell shoes to a snake. I lived in a dozen different places before the age of 4, when my family finally washed up in Potsdam, chasing the Seaway boom. When the boom went bust, he saw the North Country as a place to make a stand and put down roots. I'm glad he did; I've never left. Our station manager, Ellen Rocco, came to the North Country in the early seventies, part of the back-to-the-land wave of settlement, and never left. We, and many others here in the rural reaches of the land, form a countercurrent to a way of life in which Americans uproot their families on the average of once in five years. This long-haul view is almost invisible to the media, except as hoked-up Norman Rockwell nostalgia. But there's good news below for those who think NPR suffers from an urbocentric, inside-the-beltway picture of the nation and the world. They're going to have to answer to Ellen!