Only In A Tiny Town

[TKennedy]

We are in the little berg of Central City NE. My 99 year old mother in law has lived here most of her life.

Tonight while printing something for her I noticed the black ink was low on her Epson. She said “there might be some in the lower drawer of the desk”. There was, but it was for her old HP.

She said “oh I took that one over to Good Will”. I said maybe I’ll just take the ink down there tomorrow.

She said “I know who bought it, they told me at the beauty parlor. I know his mom. We can just drop it off at their house. He’s a nice kid”

[Marty]

A little smaller than Vinton but seems to have everything one could want.

[millring]

Warsaw is as big a town as I'd want to live in. It's borderline "city". It wasn't (city) when I moved here 45 years ago. Now we have three MacDonalds and two Culvers.

As we contemplate scaling down I've considered nearby small towns. The drawback seems to be grocery shopping. It'd be nice to be within walking distance, but all the small towns nearby have closed their grocery stores. Walmart serves the county. You get milk (but no produce) from the gas station when you live in a small town.

[drlj]

Ii grew up in a backwards town of 9,000. Lived for 25 years in a village of 8,500, and now live in a thriving metropolis of 34,000. This is is biggest city I have ever lived in and, to me, this is a huge place. There are still plenty of rural areas and downtown is old fashioned and attractive due to being situated around the old courthouse. Still, 34,000 seems like a hell of a lot of people.

[John B]

I grew up in a town of around 60,000 people, plus another 25,000 when college was in session. It was a good size. I've also lived in larger (Lincoln, NE) and much larger (San Jose, DC area). I've found I really like the conveniences of larger.

In San Jose we were in the heart of a massive city but our neighborhood was like a small town. Our lot was 45' x 88', and the houses were essentially spaced apart by the neighbor's driveway or your driveway (garages were in the back) and that's about it. We'd arrive home from a short trip and about 10 minutes later there'd be a knock on the door. Mario or Tony from across the street, dropping off mail that was in danger of overflowing the mail slot. Plus they'd let us know that since we were gone on a trash day they went ahead and put our cans out (and put them back) so we wouldn't have trash sitting in our cans for too long. If I was relaxing on the couch on a Saturday, I'd look up and see Mario waving at me from across the street. I'd have to remember to wear pants around the house, because the curtains were open.

At night we'd listen to Salvatore and his twin sisters, watching TV in Italian. They were second generation Sicilian, as was most of the neighborhood (mostly 2nd, some 3rd, some new like us). Salvatore was deaf from working in the fruit canning factories before he retired, so the volume was cranked. It took me about a month to figure out he had TWO sisters since they were twins. Salvatore told me his English wasn't good because he only spoke it with "the boss man" at work. However, I quickly learned that if he wanted to talk with me it was to complain with how I was maintaining my landscaping.

Occasionally, when I was working late, my wife would have a knock on the door; Mario's wife. "John's away and you need some food. You're coming over for dinner, now." She learned to comply, as the food was awesome.

[John B]

By the way, I never saw this video when the song came out. Up until last year, I thought it was about growing up in Minnesota. Apparently it's an elegy to Nick Drake, and everyone's British.

[drlj]

I like having close proximity to the big city and all it has to offer in theater, music, shopping, & restaurants but I wouldn’t live there for all the strings at the D’Adarrio factory. I like going into the city but I love coming home from it.

[billhammond]

One of the cool things about the Twin Cities is that while there is a sizable metro population and geographical area, at the heart of it are two distinct cities, quite different in character, history, ethnicity, etc. Then you have the first ring suburbs, old enough to have their own identities and offering easy access to the core cities.

I love living in one of those, Roseville, and I prefer St. Paul to Minneapolis. Being north of the city, I can head farther north and be in the sticks in 10 or 15 minutes, plundering back roads, visiting orchards, wineries, etc.

Lots of nearby shopping, low crime rate, good restaurants nearby. Great parks.

On edit, from Wiki:

The first Target store was built on May 3, 1962, in Roseville and replaced in 2005 with a SuperTarget. Roseville was home to the first Barnes & Noble bookstore outside New York City. The first McDonald's in the state of Minnesota was built in Roseville in 1957.The Roseville Dairy Queen, also first in the state (1947), is currently on the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota's list of the 10 Most Endangered Historic Places.

[Tamarack]

We live in a city of 200,000 in a metro area of about 600,000. Lots to do, easy to get out of to go up north or out to the lake.

Great neighborhood, both our block and the surrounding square mile of the Alger Heights neighborhood. Our neighbors are less colorful than John B's but equally friendly.

[kbcolorado]

Youngest son was visiting last week. We stood in front of a local restaurant for a few minutes and he was amazed that I knew all four people by name who happened by. I'd never lived in a small town until we moved here 10 years ago, it's a whole 'nother world!

[TKennedy]

Being a doctor in a small town is definitely different. Your patients don’t melt into the maddening crowd when they leave your office, you see them at the grocery and hardware store and when you go out to eat all of a sudden there’s a line at your table of folks with medical questions.

[billhammond]

Mar 30, 2023 10:31:26 GMT -5 TKennedy said:

Being a doctor in a small town is definitely different. Your patients don’t melt into the maddening crowd when they leave your office, you see them at the grocery and hardware store and when you go out to eat all of a sudden there’s a line at your table of folks with medical questions.

Easy problem to fix:

[Village Idiot]

Mar 30, 2023 7:06:34 GMT -5 millring said:

Warsaw is as big a town as I'd want to live in. It's borderline "city". It wasn't (city) when I moved here 45 years ago. Now we have three MacDonalds and two Culvers.

As we contemplate scaling down I've considered nearby small towns. The drawback seems to be grocery shopping. It'd be nice to be within walking distance, but all the small towns nearby have closed their grocery stores. Walmart serves the county. You get milk (but no produce) from the gas station when you live in a small town.

Yes, you need to have gas and groceries, and preferably a nearby hospital. Vinton at 5,000 has that. Small towns under 1,000 don't have all three. I would never live in a place where getting groceries was a 45 minute or more drive.

As an aside, I really don't like seeing all of these Dollar Generals moving into small towns. They are popping up like mushrooms around here.

[TKennedy]

We drove through a real tiny town in north east NE on the way down. I had to stop and take a picture. Bet they have. Dollar General.

[Russell Letson]

New York State has a "village" category for sub-city chartered conurbations, and in the 1950s, Baldwinsville was one such--population around 5,000. When I was quite young, downtown was still in small-town configuration, with shopping radiating from a central "four corners": drugstore, bakery, bank, diner, with post office and an A&P a block in one direction, a Red & White just across the river and canal, and shoe stores, a butcher, a variety store (all locally owned), movie theater, and doctors' and lawyers' offices along Syracuse Street. My grandmother could walk to all her basic shopping, but by the time I started high school in 1962, the grocery stores were supermarkets out on the edges of town. Fortunately, Grandma could still drive.

I haven't been back for more than 30 years, but I know that the village has been transformed into a bedroom community (the process was already well underway in '62) with a distinct gentrification flavor. Population is still under 8,000, but much of the light industry that supported the local economy has gone, and the town has a touristy vibe now, and I wonder whether the multigeneration Victorian home out of which my grandparents' apartment had been carved by a local landlord might have been restored--or just torn down and replaced by a modern multi-unit building. (The lot was nice and deep.)

Still, even gentrified and spread out, it looks like a pretty nice place to settle--a college friend who spent much of his career in Virginia decided to retire there. (He has family in central NY.)

[John B]

Mar 30, 2023 11:07:44 GMT -5 TKennedy said:

We drove through a real tiny town in north east NE on the way down. I had to stop and take a picture. Bet they have. Dollar General.

Here's another small NE town: Hazard (made famous in a Richard Marx song), pop 78 in 1999 (that's me next to the sign). Apparently the closest Dollar General is in Ravenna.

[Dub]

Mar 30, 2023 11:41:26 GMT -5 John B said:

Mar 30, 2023 11:07:44 GMT -5 TKennedy said:

We drove through a real tiny town in north east NE on the way down. I had to stop and take a picture. Bet they have. Dollar General.

Here's another small NE town: Hazard (made famous in a Richard Marx song), pop 78 in 1999 (that's me next to the sign). Apparently the closest Dollar General is in Ravenna.

So, everyone lives in horse trailers?

[Dub]

I’m reminded of an Iowa town called Early.




Here’s a picture I took one time as we were passing through Early, IA. It’s an abandoned and derelict motel I like to call “the late Early motel.”

[Rob Hanesworth]

Mar 30, 2023 11:02:09 GMT -5 Village Idiot said:

As an aside, I really don't like seeing all of these Dollar Generals moving into small towns. They are popping up like mushrooms around here.

[brucemacneill]

After spending my working career around Boston, Syracuse N.Y., Detroit and Philly we were done with cities and traffic so we retired here in Willis Wharf, Va which isn't even a town. We have no government other than the county government. We're designated a "Seaside fishing village". There is a harbor and wharf. When we moved here there was a general store and restaurant, "E.F.Willis General Store" but it closed a couple of years later. It was bought out a couple of times by people who tried to make it a restaurant but but they failed because no one who doesn't live here knew it existed or how to get here. Along the harbor there are aquaculture businesses growing clams and oysters and scallops. Some people do fish out of the harbor but I learned that "If you plan on sailing out of Willis Wharf and you weren't born there, Don't Do It". At low tide looking toward the ocean you'll be looking at a mud flat with a narrow river-like stream of water which it the channel out to the Machipongo River which leads to Broadwater Bay that has some islands and if you head out between the right 2 you get to the Atlantic Ocean. The channel has Coast Guard marker buoys in it to follow but depending on storms they may not be in the middle of the channel so at low tide the watermen, that's folks who work on the water, go out the channel and put sticks up along the edge so they'll know where the channel really is that day. If you are a local they'll tell you which side they marked. The channel is 30 feet deep but if you turn out of the channel when the tide is in you'll be aground on a mud flat before you know it. I've been out several times and I think I could do it if I started at low tide so I knew where the sticks were. It takes a Carolina Skiff with a decent sized outboard motor at least 45 minutes to get from the wharf to the ocean. On the up side, there's not much traffic around here most of the year. Nearest grocery store and drug store and ACE hardware are only about 2 miles from our house though so it really is a nice place to retire. Yearly County tax on our place, which is a nice place, is $i600.