1941: My hometown

New England town meetings are very much like the scene in the painting. Suits are not commonly worn, except perhaps by the moderator, and not always then. They traditionally take place in the dead of winter -- although the transplants tend to be too spleeny for that, and have voted in recent years to move them in many towns to June -- and people usually dress in work clothes: in Rockwell's day a leather work jacket would have been very common, if not a red-and-black checkered wool hunting coat. Nowadays it's not uncommon to see town meeting attendeees show up in Grundens.

The town meeting isn't just a meeting -- in towns where this form of government is used, the townspeople themselves are the actual legislative body of the community, and the purpose of the meeting is to approve the municipal budget for the year, line item by line item. The selectmen or town manager who prepared the budget are the executive branch of government, but have no authority to execute the budget until the voters have approved or altered it. Ordinances and other matters of town policy are also debated and decided at these meetings. That fellow in the leather jacket is probably demanding to know why the board cut spending on snow removal again this year when everybody knows the roads outside downtown are completely impassable after a storm and what are we paying taxes for if not to get the damn streets cleared?

Rockwell did, deliberately, make the man in the leather jacket look like Lincoln. Or at least like what Americans in 1943 imagined Lincoln to look like, which is to say, Raymond Massey.

Raymond Massey, ironically, was not American. He was Canadian, who are only sort of American. His brother was Governor-General of Canada for a while.

There is nothing like a town meeting down here in the hinterlands but one small town near where I lived did publish in the local weekly newspaper the detail of finances for the whole year, including disbursements by name. That small town was one of those little towns back in the hills that was once a bustling little place but no more. Fewer than 2,000 people live there now and no one bustles.

Town meeting government never really took hold outside of New England, and it's even fading away here. Most of the larger towns have moved to the council-manager form of government, where the council is the legislative body and the manager is the administrator. That leads to nonsense like we've been going thru here for the last several years, where all sorts of corruption and sleaze has been going on thanks to crooked managers and incompetent councils. Town meetings had a way of keeping that kind of stuff from happening.

I have even read that in some places in New England, possibly in Maine, local governments are trying to un-incorporate themselves, if you follow me. The idea is that they want the state to pick up the slack and do the usual governmental functions that used to be carried out locally by the township or county level. Taxes would be the central issue, naturally, and nobody likes paying them. In fact, in the last (that is, the most recent--I hope) election, a new meals tax was defeated in this county, although all the neighboring jurisdictions have such a tax.

A few towns have done this, but they're towns that have been so completely gutted out by deindustrialization that there's no longer enough of a local tax base to keep them operating.

In some ways, back in the Sixties, the French Quarter where I grew up was a small town -- a postage stamp stuck on the envelope that was all of New Orleans before the explosion of the suburbs. We had mom-and-pop grocery stores and an A & P, plus service businesses like gas stations and locksmiths. Six blocks away, though, was a major shopping district (everybody came to Canal Street to shop) with not only 4 or 5 different multi-story department stores, but also first-run movie theatres, jewelry stores, pawn shops, 2 Woolworth locations plus a Grant's and a McCrory's, newsstands, and the public library. It was as though Mayberry (albeit a rather eccentric one) lay cheek by jowl with Raleigh.

Now, of course, "Mayberry" has been turned into French Quarter Land, a "quaint" "Cajun" theme park devoted to separating tourists (and unlucky locals who park in the wrong place) from their money. I don't go there much anymore.

Benzadmiral said:

In some ways, back in the Sixties, the French Quarter where I grew up was a small town -- a postage stamp stuck on the envelope that was all of New Orleans before the explosion of the suburbs. We had mom-and-pop grocery stores and an A & P, plus service businesses like gas stations and locksmiths. Six blocks away, though, was a major shopping district (everybody came to Canal Street to shop) with not only 4 or 5 different multi-story department stores, but also first-run movie theatres, jewelry stores, pawn shops, 2 Woolworth locations plus a Grant's and a McCrory's, newsstands, and the public library. It was as though Mayberry (albeit a rather eccentric one) lay cheek by jowl with Raleigh.

Now, of course, "Mayberry" has been turned into French Quarter Land, a "quaint" "Cajun" theme park devoted to separating tourists (and unlucky locals who park in the wrong place) from their money. I don't go there much anymore.

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There are still some old line restaurants and a few good jazz clubs though. You have to fight your way in to get to them though.


Sent directly from my mind to yours.

I read a week or two ago that my hometown of Princeton, West Virginia, was the poorest town in the state. I was surprised and saddened to read that, if, in fact, it was true. I do know that the place has had a vacant look to it for the last twenty years as one business after another either moved to the mall or closed. Just about all the business were independently owned, with a few chain and franchises. There had been a G. C. Murphy in the middle of town that was sort of the anchor store in a way. The main industries had left sometime in the 1970s and that devastated the town. I suspect there is a higher than average retired population living there now. But it can be a little misleading.

One thing is that the statistic stops at the city line. There are a couple of car dealerships there, about five miles outside of town across the street from one another. They're easily as big as any around where I live. So someone can afford to buy a new car now and then. There's a very bustling hospitality industry at one end of town but I don't know if that's in the city limits or not, although that is not a well-paying industry. That's also where the Wal-Mart and the Lowe's are, too. Maybe things aren't as bad as they sound. After all, poverty is just a state of mind, I heard.