“It was the biggest country music concert in history,” the Tribune wrote the day after the first Farm Aid on Sept. 22, 1985. “For more than 14 hours Memorial Stadium on the University of Illinois ...

In Iowa and throughout the Midwest, even century-old farms weren’t spared from the struggles that came in the mid-1980s. Urbana-born, Rantoul-raised Dave Stawick was a news reporter/anchor and farm ...