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"Life doesn't change much," says Miner, whose years in Nyssa, a dusty, Snake River farm town, have been closely intertwined with haircuts and sugar beet trucks. In 1949, he started cutting hair and watching beet trucks roll by on Main Street on their way to the Amalgamated Sugar Co. refinery a couple of blocks away.

"You can smell the beets at times," Miner says. "But we that live here figure that smells like perfume."

A block or two down the street, Nyssa Police Chief Dennis Francis, 56, doesn't mind the aroma, either. "Old-timers around here call it the smell of money," he says.

Amalgamated Sugar Co.'s beet processing season -- "the campaign," as it is known -- is scheduled to end Feb. 1 after dominating life in Nyssa since October. The plant will convert 1 million tons of beets into sugar during the around-the-clock campaign, said Nasser Shoaee, 46, plant superintendent.

"Our town wouldn't exist without the sugar factory," says Robin Myers, 39, owner of Mint Alley, a downtown boutique. "I really think this town would dry up if it closed down."

Employment surges
Employment at the grower-owned sugar refinery surges from an off-season crew of 150 workers to about 500 during the campaign, Shoaee says. Most earn $9.14 to $12.26 an hour, he said.

In a Malheur County town where money is sometimes tight, the campaign and preceding harvest season are times of relative prosperity for almost everyone.

"Every available farm wife is driving truck," says Mary Kline, 47, owner of Kline's Hardware, a few doors down from Miner's barbershop. "If you are part of a farm family, you drive when you are needed."

Nyssa, 10 miles south of Ontario and 48 miles west of Boise by farm-to-market roads, probably is best known for sugar beets and Miss Sally's Gentlemen's Club, a downtown strip joint.

The club, one of only two in Eastern Oregon, opened May 30, 1998, and touched off a free speech vs. morality debate that continues to rock the town. Protesters representing some of Nyssa's 22 churches began a marathon sign-carrying campaign four months after Miss Sally's exotic dancers began shedding their clothes on stage.

"They protested almost three years," says a bemused Sally Dufloth, 53, one of the club's three co-owners. "I think they ought to enter the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest protest."

Residents may not agree on nude dancing, but ethnic tensions, at least, appear to be absent, says City Manager Bill Ewing, 59.

Population diverse
About half of the 3,000 residents are Mexican American. Many descendants of Basque shepherds from the Pyrenees Mountains of France and Spain also live in Nyssa, as well as the offspring of Japanese Americans who were interned nearby as farm laborers during World War II, Ewing said.

Nyssa is unique for the degree to which people seem to care for one another, residents say.

For example, when Kline's 17-year-old daughter, Beth, injured her right eye in an accident two years ago, five or six church groups of varying denominations and ethnic backgrounds focused on her in "prayer circles" at least twice weekly, she said.

"I don't think there are that many communities would make that kind of a commitment for somebody in need," said Kline, a Roman Catholic. "It was so comforting to know so many people cared."

Joe Fernandez, 72, recognized that quality when he arrived in Nyssa six years ago from Southern California, the downtown businessman said.

"I fell in love with this town the first time I drove through it," said Fernandez, who resolved to settle in Nyssa even before he'd figured out how to pronounce the name. "All I could think was Nissan; you know, the automobile," he said with a laugh.

Shoaee, Amalgamated's superintendent, was born in Iran and has one employee from Brazil. But most of Amalgamated's workers during the campaign have their roots in Mexico, he said.

Longtime roots
Ewing says most of the Mexican American workers at Amalgamated are longtime residents with established family ties in town. "Most of them are second- or third-generation by now."

"We have a very strong work force, a very strong work ethic," Shoaee said. "Our turnover is nearly zero. We get a lot of our people back every year."

Many work all summer on nearby farms, then join Amalgamated during the campaign as temporary workers, Shoaee and Ewing said.

At least six Nyssa-based, fresh-pack companies sort, box and ship onions, and they provide still more jobs, Ewing says. Nearby growers also produce peppers, asparagus, potatoes, mint and even melons, while a nearby feedlot handles as many as 35,000 cattle and another has 8,000 cattle.

Other Nyssa residents commute to jobs in nearby Nampa, Caldwell or Fruitland, Idaho, or they work in food-processing plants in Ontario, Ewing said.

The origin of Nyssa's name is one of Oregon's abiding little mysteries. According to Lewis A. McArthur in "Oregon Geographic Names," some claim Nyssa is a Native American word for sagebrush. Others contend a frontier-era railroad section hand from Greece named the town after a rural village of his boyhood. Still others insist Nyssa is an acronym for the New York Sheep Shippers Association that dates to a time when the town was an important shipping point.

Town's origins
Nyssa was incorporated in 1903, and when Miner arrived with his parents in 1936, only 800 people lived in Nyssa, he said. A year later, his father had opened the barbershop Miner now owns, the Amalgamated Sugar plant had been built, and the first sugar beet "campaign" was under way. By 1960, the population was 2,611, and adding 364 more residents took another 41 years, he said.

Miner finds nothing odd about his long-ago decision to spend his life in a place with blistering, 105- to 110-degree summertime temperatures, 20-below-zero cold snaps and a torrent of beet trucks on Main Street for five months a year.

"Everybody's got to be someplace," he says reasonably. "Lots of good people here."

Stan Bybee, 64, owner of a crop-dusting service outside Nyssa, seconds those sentiments.

"I wouldn't trade this town," he says. "You've got to live in a small town to enjoy not living in a big one."