The wonderful foods of the Golden Era

[HudsonHawk]

Small towns used to be, (pre-freeway), much more self-sufficient. They would have amenities which we now only associate with cities. Hotel, fine-dining restaurant, department store, theatre w/stage, clothing stores for men and women, hospital, etc. There might only be one each of these establishments, but the town would have them. An example of this can be seen in the Coen Bros. movie, The Man Who Wasn't There, 2001. Set in 1949 Santa Rosa, California, (nowadays one hour north of San Francisco), the town's department store, hotel, and one white-tablecloth restaurant all figure prominently.

There is probably a formula for calculating whether a town retains some vestige of this self-sufficiency. It likely requires the town to be small enough to not have attracted the national big-box stores and to be remote enough in time-distance from larger communities.

It depended on the size and location of the town. Some small towns had all of those things, but ones I remembered did not. What they did have was a catalogue store, where you could go and order just about anything. It'd arrive in a couple of days or weeks, depending. I saw these all the up until the 1990s. In fact, many small towns embraced the Walmarts and big box stores for that very reason. Finally, one could simply go to the store and buy a pair of shoes. You could even wear them that very day. This was a revolutionary change.

 

[BlueTrain]

I was born in 1946 and so was a child during the 1950s. The impressions and recollections I've given are my own, not those of adults living during that period. I wonder what their recollections might have been. They, of course, would have been thinking of life during the 1920s and 1930s in comparison. My grandmother, on the other hand, was born in 1879 and her thought would also have been different. Although in a few cases the changes might have been sudden, if not unexpected, like the day the railroad shops closed, or the day the turnpike opened, other changes would have been gradual and less likely to have made much of an impression at the time. In some cases, like the last time the passenger train stopped at the local train station, may have been memorable but probably not as regretted as other things, since by then, more and more people would have been travelling by car instead of by train. But that's just a guess.

It did change the dynamics of the town, however, when the passenger service ended. The part of town near the train station became less important and something of a dead end, literally. The businesses located in that two or three block section of town faded away, except for the tavern. Other changes may have been seen as progressive. There were two or three car dealers in town. One was an Oldsmobile, the other a Chevroelt. Surely there must have been a Ford dealer but I don't know where it was. In any event, they all relocated somewhere outside of town, where there was more room. So did the two undertakers that I was most familiar with, also for the same reason. Those moves would have been considered progressive for growing businesses. But for the buildings left behind, it looked sad, even though, in theory, the businesses continued and with the same employees. And those things happened without any influence of a mall or Wal-Mart. So I guess we have to be careful about placing blame when it comes to the downtown decay of a smalltown.

And there's not a single art gallery in the whole county.

 

[Fading Fast]

A variation on the themes above, I grew up in a reasonably small town, but since it was NJ, it was a few miles away fr

I was born in 1946 and so was a child during the 1950s. The impressions and recollections I've given are my own, not those of adults living during that period. I wonder what their recollections might have been. They, of course, would have been thinking of life during the 1920s and 1930s in comparison. My grandmother, on the other hand, was born in 1879 and her thought would also have been different. Although in a few cases the changes might have been sudden, if not unexpected, like the day the railroad shops closed, or the day the turnpike opened, other changes would have been gradual and less likely to have made much of an impression at the time. In some cases, like the last time the passenger train stopped at the local train station, may have been memorable but probably not as regretted as other things, since by then, more and more people would have been travelling by car instead of by train. But that's just a guess.

It did change the dynamics of the town, however, when the passenger service ended. The part of town near the train station became less important and something of a dead end, literally. The businesses located in that two or three block section of town faded away, except for the tavern. Other changes may have been seen as progressive. There were two or three car dealers in town. One was an Oldsmobile, the other a Chevroelt. Surely there must have been a Ford dealer but I don't know where it was. In any event, they all relocated somewhere outside of town, where there was more room. So did the two undertakers that I was most familiar with, also for the same reason. Those moves would have been considered progressive for growing businesses. But for the buildings left behind, it looked sad, even though, in theory, the businesses continued and with the same employees. And those things happened without any influence of a mall or Wal-Mart. So I guess we have to be careful about placing blame when it comes to the downtown decay of a smalltown.

And there's not a single art gallery in the whole county.

A similar thing happened in the town I grew up in. Although, since I was born in '64, I only saw the tail end of it. But my dad was a small business owner and he knew the town intimately and said, as you did, that it "was the thing to do" to move your business to a larger location outside of town. He closed his business as he didn't want to undertake the move or stay in the retail business.

All but one of the in-town car dealers moved to larger out-of-town locations, as did the appliance dealer, the carpet store, the mens clothing store and, off course, the grocery store - and I'm sure others. I even remember some of the restaurants moving to new bigger locations on roads outside of town. Because the town was on the Pennsylvania Railroads mainline, it never lost its station and many trains still stopped daily, but the change to a car culture still seemed to drive (teehee) the change.

And all of this happened well before the Walmarts etc., moved in. In fact, it was the local businesses themselves that moved out to larger locations (I can remember a time when you could see the abandoned in-town store and shinny new, larger version of the same store out-of-town and at the same time - it was kinda weird). Eventually, most of them did loose out to the Walmarts and other chains, but that was well after they had already abandoned their downtown locations.

 

[LizzieMaine]

We were lucky here in that the "car culture" didn't dominate us the way it does in places where interstates and freeways are common. We're at least fifty miles in every direction from the nearest multi-lane highway, and people here don't have the relationships with their cars that people do in other states. Here a car is something you own until it rusts out, and you drive it along poorly-maintained frost-heavey two-lane roads.

Our downtown remained viable until the mid-1990s -- downtown department store, speciality clothing shops, hardware store, dime store, a newsdealer, an independent bookstore, three drugstores, an insurance office, and several inexpensive restaurants. This all remained intact until Walmart arrived -- we had a couple of plazas a mile or so out of the downtown, and the supermarkets there were heavily patronized. But the downtown remained a destination shopping area for locals living in-town right up until the Bentonville Scourge came to town and undercut everybody. It didn't help that they showed up at a time when our local industrial economy was in its death throes, and nobody had much choice but to shop on the basis of rock-bottom pricing.

That Walmart, by the way, was one of the shabbiest I've ever seen. It wasn't much when it opened, but they didn't seem to put much into maintaining it, and by the time they abandoned it in favor of a "super Walmart" in the next town, the building was an eyesore. It was shabby, run down, the parking lot was cracked, and there was a decaying, abandoned Bonanza restaurant at the edge of the lot that sat and rotted for fifteen years before they finally tore it down last winter. The "Walmart experience" didn't really have anything to recommend it here *except* cheap prices.

With no interstates or freeways here, Route 1 runs right thru the center of most towns along the coast -- except for those that built bypasses. There was a wave of this in the 1960s, and I remember the next town over from where I grew up withering and dying literally overnight once the bypass was completed. It became an instant ghost town lined with abandoned stores, punctuated by two abandoned gas stations. It wasn't a pretty sight.

 

[BlueTrain]

Other things happen, too. Bad things, of course.

One small town I'm thinking of, again in West Virginia, sounded very similiar to your small town, except there was no waterfront. The waterfront always sounded so interesting in the Hardy Boy books. Anyway, there was a hotel, a drugstore, maybe two, a pool hall (well, why not?), a movie theater, a nice department store, a G.C. Murphy, a bank, a car dealer, a hospital, a supermarket, a high school and sundry other business to fill in the spaces. Not a bad place at all.

Then things happen. It was a town dependent on mining and the mining industry there went into a decline. There was a flood. G.C. Murphy went out of business. And the local tiny railroad shop was closed. I don't know about the movie theater but the other business mostly remain. The closest Wal-Mart is at least 35 miles away over difficult roads. Once the roads were improved, however, starting probably in the 1970s, people were more willing to drive the distance to bigger towns, even before Wal-Mart came along and when they did, that just gave them more reason to go.

I do not know if the hospital is still open or not but there are doctors in the area. There was never a book store--or art gallery.

 

[LizzieMaine]

A town near here had its entire local economy structured around a paper mill, which closed two years ago and was immediately sold to a wrecking-salvage company, which in turn sold all the machinery to China and destroyed everything else, ensuring that the site can't be redeveloped for industry. Considering that that only tourist attraction in that town is a stained gravestone with a fake legend attached to explain the stain, one wonders just what will become of that community.

An industrial waterfront was and still is a grimy and wonderful thing, full of unique characters. I worked exactly one day in a lunchroom on the docks in my home town when I was eighteen, and when the dinner whistle blew and all these Unique Characters started yelling at me all at once I figured that I was in just a bit over my head.

 

[vitanola]

Now my town was affected by time. By the 1960's, the sash mill had closed. A manufacturer of plumbing products replace it. The Flouring mill had expanded, as had the manufacturer of packaged mixes. A factory opened up which built air conditioners, another one was built to manufacture furnaces, a large supplier of stampings for the automobile industry replaced the tannery, a manufacturer f wire and cable replaced the manufacturer of engines, a manufacturer of military uniforms replaced the men's ready-to-wear plant, several manufacturers of tooling, a paper tube plant, a cardboard box plant, a die casting plant and a kitchen cabinet plant moved into the new industrial park.

By the 1960's our downtown had a Montgomery Wards, a Sears, and a Penneys (smallish stores, the Wards cccupied about 15,000 square feet, Penneys and Sears were both about 10,000 square feet each), a Western Auto, a Krogers, an A&P, two local super markets, three hardware stores, a paint and wallpaper store, three shoe stores, three or four dress shops, two men's wear stores, three hardware stores, a shoe repair shop, two bakeries, two butcher shops, a creamery, several restaraunts, two lunch counters, a moving picture theater, a night club, three drug stores, a hospital, two hotels, two Motels on the southern outskirts of town. Out on the main highway were a Fisher's Big Wheel, an Ames, a drive-in theater, a Ford/Mercury/Lincoln dealership, a Buick/Pontiac/Oldsmobile dealership, a Chevrolet/Cadillac dealership and a Chrysler/Plymouth dealership.

I have been familiar with the town since this time. I remember when Wal-Mart announced their arrival in town in 1992. Wards had already left in the late 1970's. Fishers Big Wheel and Ames announced their closure, and were in liquidation by the time Wal-Mart opened. Two of the supermarkets closed within months of Wal Mart's opening By 1996, the paint store, the shoe stores, and all of the clothing stores but one dress shop, all but one hardware store, the bakeries, the butcher shops, and two of the drug stores were no more. The outlying towns in the county had even more serious losses of businesses.

 

[BlueTrain]

The retail stores, including the old independent ones, the later chains like Sears and Penneys and finally Wal-Mart, plus the automobile dealerships, do not float the economy. It's the other way around. The retail economy rides the ups and downs of the base industries of a locality, whatever it is. Without a base industry, be it agriculture, manufacturing, logging or mining, the retail industry is going to sink. The main difference between Wal-Mart and everybody else is that their boat is bigger, in a manner of speaking. There are some exceptions, usually on a small scale, but that's generally true everywhere in the world. There is also the tourist industry, which only works in a few places, and the related hospitality industry, which also feeds off travellers and usually thrives around major crossroads. There is also transportation which also depends on the base industries mentioned above.

At the national level, one indicator is the balance of payments or trade balance (or imbalance). It works exactly the same way at the local level. In Colorado, for example, all cars are imported. If you live in Colorado, it makes no difference if your car is made in Tennessee, Michigan or Germany. My point is, a local economy cannot survive on retail alone. There has to be more than that.

 

[Trenchfriend]

At the national level, one indicator is the balance of payments or trade balance (or imbalance). It works exactly the same way at the local level. In Colorado, for example, all cars are imported. If you live in Colorado, it makes no difference if your car is made in Tennessee, Michigan or Germany. My point is, a local economy cannot survive on retail alone. There has to be more than that.

Yep, look on the classic example of the cigarette-industry of Dresden, Saxony. In the older days, half of the city lived from the cigarette-production.

 

[BlueTrain]

Solingen in the Rhineland had been known for centuries as a center for manufacturing knives, swords and other things with blades and in fact, still is. But I wonder if that's what everything depends on.

I've mentioned how my old hometown was really centered around a single industry, which was the railroad (or transportation). Yet when it went away, the town and most of the residents remained. It's certainly not a promising place to relocate to, unless you happen to be retired. But it shares the same fate as other towns where industry has moved away or otherwise become highly automated. It's what you call a depressed area. There is a single word that describes the reason things like that happen:

Capitalism.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

Concerning Solingen and the Ruhr Valley generally - although famed for cutlery and, in the old days, armor, the source of the valley's prosperity is the abundance of coal and high-grade iron ore in close proximity (Trenchfriend should chime in here). So as long as steel is needed for any purpose at all, the Ruhr will prosper. Everyone thinks of Krupp as an armaments manufacturer, but the source of Krupp's fortune was railroad hardware. They made track, wheels and rolling stock generally. Even at the height of both World Wars, armaments only accounted for a fraction of Krupp's output. Most of it was railroad hardware. I recommend William Manchester's "The Arms of Krupp," a fascinating read.

 

[BlueTrain]

I was very suprised one day to look out the window here at work and see a mobile crane with "KRUPP" in big letters on the back end. Another well-known (in some circles) armaments manufacters, Skoda, which made big howitizers for Austria in WWI is still in business but now makes cars. I passed up a chance to rent one when we were in Germany a few years go, drawing an Opel instead. Skoda is located in the Czech Republic but was part of the Austrian Empire in 1914. Don't know where their raw materials come from.

 

[Trenchfriend]

These?
http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=krupp+mobilkran&FORM=HDRSC2

 

[BlueTrain]

Yes and we're a long way from Jello. 'sokay.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

Yes and we're a long way from Jello. 'sokay.

These thread titles are merely suggestions, springboards for our far-ranging flights of fancy. Start with jello, end up with Krupp. It makes sense to me.

 

[Zombie_61]

Besides, jello would be a horrible material to build a mobile crane from.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Besides, jello would be a horrible material to build a mobile crane from.

Jello, the other name for german unromantic "Wackelpudding".

 

[ChrisB]

The closest town to where I grew up had a very active shopping district. While you didn't always get what you want, you always could find what you needed. Numerous fires and the advent of shopping malls led to it's demise, and by the 90s most of the stores were vacant. Those stores are once again occupied, but I have a limited need for gourmet cupcakes and antiques.

 

[green papaya]

I remember eating lots of Liver & onions, meat loaf, spaghetti dinners, Chicken ALA KING with chicken peas & carrots, white gravy served over wide noodles.

Also Chicken & Dumplings , fried chicken livers & gizzards, cow's tongues, cow's brains, beef tripe, tuna & gravy on rice

 

[ChrisB]

These thread titles are merely suggestions, springboards for our far-ranging flights of fancy. Start with jello, end up with Krupp. It makes sense to me.

It's the stream of unconsciousness.