Ground Zero

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La Plomo, Missouri, was dying.

For almost fifty years it had been dying. A farm town nestled in the rolling paradise of Adair County, La Plomo had been hit hard by the Depression, although it had never been a dust-bowl town. Back then the Santa Fe Railroad stopped at La Plomo a dozen times each day, hauling La Plomo corn, wheat, and soybeans to market.

After the war, La Plomo started to change. The ugly blacktop highways went up. The trains came less frequently. To the north, beyond Grizzy Creek, nearby Kirkland flowered into a center of commerce, but La Plomo remained a modest farm town. It boasted only one business strip, consisting of a drugstore, restaurant, and general store across the street from a simple rectangle of grass on which sat a cabled-down Korean War-vintage jet fighter that had been placed there for children to play on. Such was La Plomo's modest town square.

This incongruously modern touch did nothing to change the basic character of La Plomo life. Fathers still hunted squirrels with their male children. Skinny-dipping in the watering hole was a summer tradition. Square-dancing often led to marriage.

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