People in Iowa loved him, they knew he was a small-town boy.

I'm a small-town boy who was on his way to being a family doctor.

You know how it is, small-town boy meets big-time world.

Boyer was a shy, small-town boy who discovered the movies and theatre at the age of eleven.

The others are mostly small-town boys attracted to the romance.

Jeff Higgins, for all his precocity, was still a small-town boy at heart.

Several other stories examine blue-collar life from the more complicated perspective of the small-town boy who's gone to the city.

He's a small-town boy desperate to make the world notice.

"I'm just a small-town boy from Michigan," he said.

But those were places from which a small-town boy with keen mind and burning ambition could witness history.