And I Used To Walk To School In The Snow. Uphill. Both Ways.
- 06.16.10
- Getting Old, Life ... in all its splendor!, Rants, hometowns, nostalgia, old age, Rants, small towns
- 6 Comments
Recently, I was waxing nostalgic with a friend about the small town where I grew up and how it’s no longer a small town and that it now, in fact, has a freakin’ Walmart in it. WTF? So, in memorium, I’m going to take a little trip down memory lane. Come along if you will … this won’t take long:
These are postcards, by the way. Even I'm not weird enough to take pictures of the main drag of Nowheresville, USA. I am, however, weird enough to buy vintage postcards of my hometown on Ebay.
No Walmart, but somehow we bought everything we needed here.
Check out the back of this card: "The building housed the Christian Science Exhibit at the New York World's Fair. Afterward it was dismantled and shipped via the Panama Canal to its new home in the beautiful rolling hills of North San Diego County where it was reassembled." I mean, it's cool, don't get me wrong. But to ship it through the Panama Canal in 1940? Not so much ...
The main drag again. One gas station. One grocery store. Several bars. We even had a place called the Egg-o-Mat where you could buy a dozen eggs on the honor system. I could ride my horse to school, y'all.
No post written by some old lady who is totally bitter that her little town full of orange avocado groves got turned into Disneyland a booming metropolis would be complete without an image of what the town looks like today. Unfortunately, the sprawl makes it hard to recreate the pictures above but here’s an aerial shot that gives you an idea:
I like how it looks all post-Industrial Revolution dark and gloomy compared to the cheerful images above.
Okay, I think the rant is over for today. I’ll just leave you with another vintage postcard of where I live now … only this was about a hundred years ago. It makes me think that there might be some old lady somewhere gritting her teeth over the state of this town and how it used to be all sand dunes and flower farms and the pier had a huge salt water plunge where you could play all day for a nickel …. *sigh* Old age is cool.
The only thing they’ve changed in my town since I left is the train station. There never was room for a Walmart. We had to leave town to shop…for anything. I don’t even think anyone ever thought of taking a picture for a postcard. Maybe once they finish the train station we’ll make the map.
I love RB! and our neighbors
wow, the after pictures do look really gloomy and depressing. Once there’s a walmart in town, it’s pretty much over! LOL. I love that image of the main drag and how cool that you could ride your horse to school! BTW, thanks for stopping by on my SITS day.
I miss what my small town used to be – we had a huge (for a tiny town) shopping district, and safe streets and lots of playgrounds. And then the 1-2 punch of the steel industry tanking and the advent of malls killed us.
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Wow, at least your town was big enough to be put on post cards…suppose they could have put mine on postage stamps!
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I grew up in Austin, TX, still my favorite town in the world, but it has changed SO much. Facebook has this group now that is something like “Remember when Austin was?…” where people post old pictures of Austin. I love looking at the stuff and saying “Ahhh.” I guess this really is old age, isn’t it!
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