What we lost when Gannett came to town

The grain elevator exploded on a cool April morning in 1987, six years before I was born. My father was testing a clay sample in a lab two miles away when suddenly the dial jumped. He ran outside, thinking that a car had smashed into the building. My mother, doing yard work at home, assumed that the nearby ammunition plant was testing a new explosive.

Dale Alison saw the blast up close. He was 32 years old, and it was his first day as the city editor of The Hawk Eye, a newspaper in Burlington, Iowa.

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