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The Press: Bumpkins' Biographer

The businesslike Chicago Journal of Commerce ("All the News a Busy Man Has Time to Read") ordinarily gets few letters from its busy readers. But last week the fan mail was steadily trickling in, as it does every time the Journal's professional-bumpkin columnist, Chet Shafer, 59, writes his annual "winter piece." A South Bend pipefitter called it "one of the finest pieces of prose I have ever seen." An attorney on Chicago's La Salle Street: "You nearly break a country boy's heart."

Columnist Shafer, a wise man in his way, explained: "Those successful men...

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President BARACK OBAMA, at NATO talks involving over 50 world leaders, describing the withdrawal of 130,000 combat troops from Afghanistan, planned for the end of 2014
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