Life plods along pleasantly in tiny Leamington

"At night you can hear the coyotes," she said. "The stars are beautiful," brighter than in cities because of the lack of light pollution.

Teachers who commute to Delta, professional people and farmers are among the approximately 212 people who live there.

Residents travel to Cedar City for the annual Shakespeare Festival and Park City for the arts festival there.

"Just 'cause we live out in nowhere, we're not hicks," Leslie Rasch said.

Even something as simple as children boarding a school bus can be a lesson in small-town honesty.

"I think there's a little less crime potential," she said. "I'm not saying it's perfect here, because it's not."

One thing that shocked her when the Rasch family moved here 15 years ago from Lake Charles, La. (present population close to 200,000), was a lack of concern about theft.

Every school day, Leamington's children board the bus to Delta, 21 miles away.

"The kids would catch the bus," she said, "and they would leave all their bikes at the corner."

When they return from school, they just get off the bus, hop on their bikes and pedal home.

According to Eva Neilsen, who runs the post office, the town's biggest problem may be people racing along U-132 and failing to obey the lower speed limits in town.

The post office is open six days a week, 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. Customers aren't in the building every minute, she said, "but every once in a while we have a line."

It's a place where kids go trick-or-treating at every house "and you don't have to check your candy for poison," she said. "You don't have to throw out that homemade doughnut, because everybody knows who made it."

In fact, Leamington holds a Halloween dinner every year so the kids will get something nutritious in their stomachs before they set out on their rounds, she said.

During the summer, the children play a lot of outdoor games, catch and raise tadpoles, help with the family farm and swim in the river, Neilsen said.

"One thing that I find interesting is our kids are really active in the school, even though we live so far away," she said.

That brings up a disadvantage to living here. Residents must drive to Delta for some shopping, or the 70 miles to Provo for bigger projects. But they can visit a convenience store and gas their vehicles at Lynndyl, only five miles away.

Leamington's boom time came when the huge Intermountain Power Plant was built at Lynndyl, from the early to the mid-1980s. Jim Rasch originally worked at the plant when he arrived in 1983, then switched to the Ash Grove cement plant east of Leamington.

"Mainly, everybody farms in this little area, but everybody has a second job," he said.