I’m glad I was born soon enough to see the American small town, if not at its height, at least in the early days of decline into its present forlorn status as a conduit for cars and people, all headed to a big city over the horizon. The small town was not always this stultifying trap for bright young people to escape from; in the years before wartime travel and the scorn of the Menckens and Sinclair Lewises made cities a magnet for farm boys and girls, towns of five to twenty thousand were self-sufficient little cities of their own.

The streets of those Midwestern towns I remember from the thirties varied little from one place to another: there were always a number of brick Victorian building, labeled “Richard’s Block” or “Denman Block,” which housed the chief emporia of the town stores which made it a shire for the surrounding farmlands.

Each store was run according to an exact idea of rules of the game. For example, a hardware store had to be densely hung inside with edged tools, scythes, sickles and saws. It had to be owned by a middle-aged man in a blue apron, assited by one up and coming young man in his middle teens.

The drugstore was a different story, but it was circumscribed by equally strict rules. Here you would ask the white coated and rimless-spectacled druggist for asprin or cold tablets or perhaps paramedical advice.

These towns are by and large gone now, their old stores shut up with dusty windows or combined two or three to make a supermarket or pizza parlor. The business has moved to the big shopping center on the Interstate or on to the city over the horizon, and the depopulated old towns are left to drift along toward oblivion.