This post is part of our Big Company, Small Town series, featuring large companies and the small towns in which they are headquartered.

Few companies are as strongly associated with their hometowns as L.L. Bean, which has been producing outdoor clothing, sporting goods, and brightly colored preppy wear in Freeport, Maine, since 1912. The company's first product, the iconic rubber boot called the Maine hunting shoe, was manufactured in Freeport, and quickly became a big hit despite the fact that most of the first boots sold were returned due to a design defect.

In the past 95 or so years, both L.L. Bean and Freeport have come a long way. The company store, which began in a basement, grew significantly over the years, despite the fact that most of Bean's $1.5 billion in annual sales come through its ubiquitous mail-order catalog. The store has been open 24 hours a day since 1951, with a few exceptions for the deaths of John F. Kennedy and the founder, Leon Leonwood Bean.

Today, the company dominates the very small town of Freeport, population 7,800. It's much more than just a store, as its multiple buildings, parking lots, and outdoor patios and sculptures define the town itself. L.L. Bean has become more of a campus than a store, with different buildings for clothes, hunting and fishing gear, bikes and boats, and a discount outlet, as well as outdoor spaces dedicated to demonstrations of equipment and live musical performances.

I'm a libraphile (is that the word?) and I began filling my children's shelves with books years before I had even purchased my first pregnancy test. By far my favorite image in any book is the overleaf of Blueberries for Sal, a bucolic and all-blue illustration of Sal and her mother. They are canning blueberries in a 40s-era kitchen, complete with hand-cranked egg beater, polka-dot curtains, and a cast-iron wood cooking stove. Every time I gaze at that picture I believe for a second that I will go downstairs and preserve something in one of the old-fashioned Ball jars I found at a garage sale.

Alas, it never quite happens that way, but just reading the book makes me feel connected to the farm-wife ideal. Much like a wander through today's grocery store aisles. As Kim Severson mentions in today's New York Times, she feels smug when she puts a bag of Cascadian Farm organic French fries in her grocery cart (she calls is "greenwashing" and the marketers call it "an authentic narrative"): "a gentle image of a field or a farm ... suggest[s] an ample harvest gathered by an honest, hard-working family." And in creating these images for us, in selling us the hard-working farm family, marketers know that just for a minute we've left our wired, fossil-fuel-guzzling lives for a hand-hewn pine kitchen table in that log house in Maine.

In short, we're being sold our ideal lifestyle in a box, bag or can.

Apple finished the day at $57.27, down X$1.70. Today saw some good news for Apple. Covered already was the good news in Maine, providing Apple a strong place in exposing students to its product and generating a nice bulk purchase deal with the Maine education system.

Also of recent note is that Intel will start shipping the new "Yonah" chips that will make their way into future iMacs, MacBooks, and other Apple computers. Over previous years Apple continuously struggled with suppliers to get updated processing chips, it must be a breath of fresh air over at Cupertino for it to be raining new versions of chips.

Businessweek took a close look at the Apple/Foxconn situation, weighing in with a unique suggestion of their own: that Apple create its own factory in China that it can more closely control. No matter what Apple's investigation shows, a lot of eyes are carefully watching to see how they'll handle this.

[Disclosure: I own Apple stock at the date of this post]

What greater way to spread the Apple brand than dump it in front of 32,000 students and 4,000 teachers throughout some 241 schools? While also securing a $41 million contract?

Sadly, it's just one drop in a very large PC dominated market. Apple education has a long way to go before it becomes the player it once was. Yet it's still encouraging to know that know 70,000 teachers and students are using the platform.

The very well publicized Maine school system rolled out Apple laptops back in 2002. It was, at the time, heavily criticized. Now articles quote that the districts keep the laptops at the end of their lease instead of discarding them, and the program constantly generates lots of positive material for Apple. It's good to see it is continuing, and one hopes we'll see another district pick up the platform.

[Disclosure: I own Apple stock at the date of this post]