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Every town wants to be known for something. In Texas it’s often a popular farm crop: Poteet has strawberries. Mission has citrus. Luling has watermelons. You get the idea. Longview’s railroad and oil patch history, which is similar to that of many other East Texas towns, doesn’t exactly lend itself to striking imagery fit for a T-shirt. So the city of about 82,000 owes a lot to a local dentist named Bill Bussey, who became interested in hot-air balloons in the 1970s. He began competing in races across the country, and then in 1978 he started the annual Great Texas Balloon Race, which now draws 15,000 to 20,000 visitors. You’ll see the hot-air balloon as a symbol of Longview pride on shirts and murals and…

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