I grew up in a little town in Southern Ontario, where the population sign read 2200 for as long as I can remember. It had one stoplight, the intersection of which was “downtown,” two competing grocery stores on opposite corners, two banks, a laundromat, a Five and Dime store, a hardware store, a furniture store, a post office, a TV/appliance store, a bowling alley, a pool hall with ancient pool tables, three barbers, a car repair shop, a shoe store, two womens’ clothing stores, two gas stations, two doctors, a hospital, a Canadian Tire, a Stedman’s department store, a library, a hockey arena, three restaurants, an IDA drug store with a soda fountain, a convenience store with a soda fountain and lunch counter, a park that eventually got a swimming pool, four churches, two public schools and one Catholic school, a high school, three bars (one was a Legion hall), a liquor store (anybody remember when it was the Brewer’s Retail and the LCBO?) and a grain mill. Not much else, really. There was a working CN train station a couple of blocks from me, where I used to go visit the guys who worked there. The town was basically an intersection of two train routes. This isn’t really germane to the story, but to indicate how sheltered it was, there were no people of color there until 1973. The folks who weren’t of English, Irish and Scottish descent were Italian, French-Canadian, from the Netherlands/Scandinavia or Polish/Slavic.
The main industries were the gypsum mine and the limestone quarry. Next to that, it was farmers. One farmer became wealthy running a dairy. He bottled milk in his dairy on the far east end of town, and they still operate a dairy bar on the northern outskirts, on the highway into town. They make the world’s best ice cream. I believe that Todd, with whom I went to school, runs it now. The town had a newspaper, with a printing press that must have been a hundred years old when I was a kid. I remember they poured molten metal into moulds to make each letter, in reverse, and set the letters by hand in a frame, rolled ink over it and pressed newsprint on top. You could go to the post office several times a day and find new mail in your mailbox.
It was pretty idyllic for quite awhile. Nobody had to lock their doors until 1975 or so, when the native teens from the reserve started coming into town to steal peoples’ cars and walk into their houses to steal stuff. Before that, there was so little crime that the police station, with its three cops, closed down and moved to another town. The big, old grain mill closed down when they built a giant grain elevator next to the tracks at the end of my street. The other train route went by the other end of my street. People always used to ask us, “how can you sleep with the trains going by so close?” After awhile, you didn’t notice it. Really, the only time you became aware of the trains was at 3 AM on a summer night, with no air circulating in your room, and the trains would be running a few blocks away, pulling forward very slowly, stopping, starting up again to run backwards to smash into another set of cars. Then they’d screech to a stop and repeat the process until they had a big, long train of cars. Then it’d be time to get up. Damned trains.
Because of the limestone bed the town sits on, the water was scary hard. You couldn’t drink it without going “yeccccchhh!” It would leave lime deposits on your pipes and stain your sinks and toilets. Eventually your kettle would become unusable because it had an inch of hardened lime sediment on the bottom. Just inside our back door was a really old water purifier that was always a lime-encrusted sculpture as long as I can remember it. I don’t think it worked. One year they tested the water, and found it to be the second-hardest water in North America, next only to Salt Lake City. Nowadays, decent, soft water is pumped in from the nearest city.
The school where I did grades 1, 2, 6, 7 and 8 was so old that there was surviving grafitti carved into the outside wall from the 1880s. The property backed onto someone’s farm. They had a couple of horses, which would amble up to the fence at recess and lunch, when there would always be kids there to feed them handsfull of grass or apples, or give them sugar cubes through the fence.
Every year, there was a Dominion Day parade (July 1). One year (1967?) my friend Mark and I built a go-kart out of spare wood and buggy wheels, and decorated it all cool, and entered it in the parade. We won a ribbon for it. Then there would be a fair at the park, with a few rides, and food, and musical entertainment, and a beer tent for the grownups.
I don’t think anyone famous has come from there. The closest we got is a guy I went to school across town with, who is now a Member of Parliament. There was a fire at the tire dump outside of town that burned for weeks, sending up a column of thick, black smoke. People still remember that, and there are T-shirts to commemorate it, but it happened after I had moved away. I’ve only been back twice since 1976; once to show my wife-to-be all these places I’ve described, and once when I got my green card and went back for the last time.
It has changed radically in the time I’ve been away. The big field across the street from my house is now the site of a Tim Horton’s. The grain elevator at the end of the street was torn down and is an empty lot. They have cable TV. Only one set of train tracks survives. My best friend from childhood still lives there, and so does his dad. Other than them, I don’t think anybody from when I was a kid is still stuck there… we all escaped. Hopefully, anyway.
We were all over the paths by the 
I don’t think I’ll ever go back.