Everyone in Elmwood Springs and thereabouts remembers the day they put the radio tower in Neighbor Dorothy's backyard, and how excited they were that night when they first saw the bright red bulb on top of the tower, glowing like a cherry-red Christmas light way up in the black Missouri sky.

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from the Preface:

In the late forties Elmwood Springs, in southern Missouri, seems more or less like a thousand other small town scattered across America.