Middle Class Niceties Are Vanishing As Fast As The Middle Class
I grew up in an unspoiled little hamlet just north of Santa Monica called Pacific Palisades. In the mid-1970s, it was unfashionable, a vintage backwater frozen in time. The main drag was lined with mom-and-pop stores, greasy spoons, and geriatric clothing shops that sold frilly nightgowns and polyester golf pants. The hippest café in town was Baskin Robbins. It was Mayberry by the Sea. My parents had only been married a few years when they scraped together a down payment on a 1,300-square-foot, three-bedroom, single-story ranch house that cost something like $40,000 in mid-1970s dollars.
Our next-door neighbor was a Mexican-American LAPD officer married to a white lady named Linda, who chain-smoked Pall Malls and barked at her kids from a Barcalounger.
My local preschool was run by kindly grandmas. They would make you open your mouth and say ahhh when you walked in the door and look in your throat with a flashlight each morning to make sure you weren t sick.
Once, the town was abuzz over the grand opening of a brand-new upscale grocery store. My mother, bless her heart, took me to the ribbon-cutting ceremony. What we didn t know was that Gelson s Market moving into town marked the beginning of the end. Now Ben Affleck sends his kids to my old preschool. The mom-and-pop stores on Main Street got torn down a few years ago, along with Baskin Robbins, so that billionaire developer Rick Caruso could build another gleaming Southern California outdoor mall like the Grove and the Americana. The old main drag is now filled with super-luxury stores I can t afford to shop in or even park near.
Peachy Keenan.
You could try Boise, Idaho, but it’s not the same. Parts of Utah surely, but the small towns are largely LDS. My wife grew up in New Canaan, CT. They sold her parents’ house years ago. The buyers scraped it and build at 10,000 sq. ft. monstrosity on the lot. So yeah, it’s going, going, gone I’m afraid.