He was farmore like Hobbes. Quiet, funny, a little philosophical, but with a loopy streak. The dad in the strip is a direct parody of his own dad. The pediatrician was a friend of both of ours, who really has a practice now in Chagrin.
The back cover of The Essential Calvin and Hobbes is a drawing of the Chagrin Falls triangle, with Calvin The Giant holding the landmark Popcorn Shoppe in his oversized mitts. The Popcorn Shoppe belonged to my scoutmaster.
Cool, thanks.
I currently live in my home town - I live in Hastings, which is in the state of Victoria in Australia.
I really enjoy living here - I was born here and have spent most of my life here. It’s a reasonably sized town, with a population of about 6,500 people. Currently, its experiencing a much needed economic and residential growth surge. There’s a quite a few recent photos here . We have a set of traffic lights and a McDonalds too! (now there’s a sign of civilisation! 
)
I don’t think many famous people have come from Hastings, except for a couple of (AFL) footballers. Oh, and Germaine Greer’s mother is in one of the Nursing homes (my brother-in-law works at one).
I come from beautiful Victorian Geneseo, IL, visible in this picture. It’s got a total in-town population of 6,000 people, but the outer edges have housing editions that take it up to probably 12,000-15,000.
The main streets are lined with big Victorian homes (such as this one) and huge oak and maple trees. The main downtown street (State Street, as seen in the first linked picture) is wide with a big boulevard through most of it. During the Christmas season, they have an event called the Victorian Walk. On this night, they line the sidewalks with luminaries and close off the downtown streets. They have horse-drawn sleighs and living window displays, tours of the historical museum, singing carrollers, the whole bit.
I grew up in the middle of town so I roamed its streets at all hours throughout my childhood without fear of crime. The house I grew up in had locks on the doors, but they didn’t work. My first car’s locks didn’t work, either. When I was really little, you could hear my mom yell out to the kids that dinner was ready and we’d come running in from all over the neighborhood, just like in the old stories.
I’m not interested in living there now, but it was a nice place to grow up.
Well, I think I have you all beat for the “smallest hometown” competition. I grew up in Kirby, VT , a town so small we didn’t even have a “town” per se. We have to this day only 200 yards of paved road in the whole town and a population of 344 (it was about 360 when I was a kid). I went to a one room school for first grade, and would have continued through 3rd but we moved out of town for 2 years. My father is on his 40th year as the chairman of the Town Meeting, which is the biggest social and democratic event of the year - all the wives cook themselves silly and bring their quilting racks, and the men decide on things like grazing rights, whether to allow snowmobiles on town roads, and how much to set the school voucher amount to for the year.
We were 11 miles out of St. Johnsbury, which is the closest large town - at the time it had about 11,000 people, but several plants have since closed, so I’m sure it’s less now.
Nice place to visit, cold, lonely and depressing to grow up in.
Ah, Philomath, OR. So like Twin Peaks, only with meth instead of coke.
Logging town. Surrounded by beautiful forests I used to play in. Near Mary’s Peak, highest point on the Oregon Coast and a lovely place to drive up on the weekend. Home of the Philomath Frolic and Rodeo, which I participated in by riding with the rest of my girl scout troup in the parade for something like three years in a row, in the back of a truck! Current population of 4,399.
Not such a terrible place to grow up, if you could avoid the hard drugs and getting the crap kicked out of you by rednecks. I had my group of friends, most of whom I still keep in touch with to this day. We would drive up logging roads and night and start bonfires, or drive over to Newport to play on the beach and walk along the bayfront, or to Albany (where I was born) to shop in antique stores or have endless cups of coffee in one of their 24 hour truck stop diners. As soon as I was old enough to forage out on my own I moved to Corvallis (home of Oregon State University), and then to Eugene, which is where I consider my home to this day. I miss Eugene something terrible. While living there, though, I occasionally used to drive back to Philomath and Corvallis to wander through the old parks and go for long drives through the deserted back forest roads. The owls are not what they seem… 
I grew up in Bowie, Maryland, s suburb of DC. It was kind of going downhill when we moved away in 1985, but it’s become nicer since.
It’s definitely not anonymous suburbia if you’re into wine. We go there every year around Christmas to go wine-tasting. We love it because there are hotels and tasting rooms within walking distance of the square, so we don’t have to worry about driving.
Blue Ridge, TX. Wow. Uh…
Our K-12 was on one campus sharing a cafeteria when I was growing up. We were class A. I had three of my teachers from about the 4th grade until I graduated. They knew where you lived and your grandmother.
Our school colors are green and white, because in the 1930s or something The University of North Texas donated their green jerseys and equipment to our school. We have one gas station, a post office, an insurace agency, a real estate agency (farm land everywhere, very important.) We have a funeral home. All of this is on the square, which at any time, has more tractors on it than cars/pickemup trucks. We have a masonic lodge, feed store…
New additions: Playground built by prisoners, a !!! Dollar General !!! I planted some new bushes at the city hall. Old grocery store closed down, new one built. Pizza place using the same pizza oven that has been in Blue Ridge for about 60 years. I fixed a natural gas regulator on it when I was in high school cooking pizzas on it.
When I went to school, it was just your average young and old people get drunk all the time type town. We used to go drink beer on the town square with the sheriff on duty. He would let us stay out there and drink beer if we gave him some and we all walked home.
We loved to tie one end of the flag pole rope to the hitch of the truck, hold on to the other end, and get pulled to the top of the pole. Great fun.
I moved away to go to college and it became a meth haven. They ran most of that stuff off. Now I moved back and see the same people I have grown up with.
The town was named Blue Ridge for two reasons: It sits between two ridges and they trap a blue haze that hangs around in the air at certain times of the year, and we have a native grass that grows everywhere that has little blue flowers for most of the year.
Legend has it that there is some Confederate gold buried somewhere around the town. There are a few history books about the area, one of them I think is called Four Corners, having to do with the four corners of Colin, Fannin, Grayson, and Hunt county. We live next to a town called Celeste and that is where Audie Murphy was born. I drive home everyday from work on the Audie Murphy Memorial Highway (US69).
We always were stealing those Highway 69 signs for display in the bedroom.
Toby Keith lives between Celeste and Blue Ridge. If you care, I really don’t.
We have a graveyard that is almost completely made up of children. I really don’t know what is up with that, but apparently the late 1800’s was a crappy time to be a kid.
52 miles North East of Dallas.
Now that you are bored to tears…
Oh yeah, the town of Blue Ridge only has one safe, and it is about 145 years old. It was too heavy to move so it has been in the same downtown building. I used to use it when I worked for the grocery store. It is about chest high. Bonnie and Clyde robbed it at some point when that place used to be the bank of Blue Ridge. There is a write up about it in city hall.
I used to put my game boy in there to keep it from wondering off while I was working.
I can beat you in terms of population: I spent the bulk of my childhood living in Hays, Texas, pop 251 (then, 233 now). It’s mostly white, with a significant latino population, and, IIRC, one or two black families. We moved there when I was 5, from the nearby town of Buda.
The whole of northern Hays County was a bedroom community of Austin, and even now is rapidly becoming suburbs. The city itself is a subdivision incorporated in the 1970s, consisting of 6 roads maintained by the county. It has no schools of its own; we all attended Hays Consolidated ISD, along with kids from Buda, Kyle and surrounding areas. Crime was low, confined to the “bad side” of town (the next street over). For some reason, that was where all the backyard pot-growing and assorted misdemeanoring occured. Our street was the seat of power, such as it was. The next-door neighbor was the JP, and next to him was the mayor. My father reluctantly became a councilman, and mom ran the water co-op and managend its transition into a city utility.
Most folks walked their water bills to our front door. There was one gentleman, and I mean that word sincerely, who owned a ranch larger than the rest of the town combined. His home was at the front of that land, and therefore in the city limits, with city water. He came to the door each month and asked for my mother. Well over 6 feet tall in his boots, the septugenarian cowboy would remove his hat and enter the foyer, then produce an absolutely enormous roll of cash from which he peeled a few bills to cover his account. He drove a white Ford F-250 long bed, recognizeable everywhere for the fact that it never exceeded 45 mph and for the line of cars he trailed behind him on the 2-lane, no-passing roads of the county.
I grew up riding around the neighborhood on my bike. There were several other kids my age there, but most of my friends from school lived across the busy FM road that formed the southeastern boundary of Hays, so riding there was off-limits. My best friend for some time lived in the house behind and to the south of ours, facing the other long street in town. There was a utility pole at the corner of the lots, so fences didn’t meet there, and we had a conveinient passage from one back yard to the other.
My parents moved to a larger place out in the county after I left home, but they still keep touch with their friends from Hays. It’s a nice town, for what it is. I can say that with the exception of a few early Halloweens, I never felt less than completely safe there.
That’s the town of Sonoma. I grew up in Petaluma, about ten miles to the west.
Pacific Grove, CA – an interesting place to be from. The economy is entirely tourist-based (although it’s a bit overshadowed by its more famous neighbors, Carmel, Monterey and Pebble Beach). It’s gorgeous (on the tip of the Monterey Peninsula) but always foggy and the water’s very cold. It was cool growing up with a working lighthouse and foghorn nearby.
It’s famous for being a winter stop-over for migrating monarch butterflies; there’s a parade every year in October, where elementary school kids dress as butterflies and such. Incredibly cute. The town fathers have a distressing tendency to cut down the trees the butterflies live in, so they can build motels for the tourists to come and look at the butterflies.
It’s also famous for being the place where John Denver’s plane crashed.
No famous people were ever born there.
A Summer Place was filmed there, and an episode of Then Came Bronson.
My hometown is Raleigh, MS, population about 1,300. My family has lived in Smith county since 1815, and I lived on a farm that used to be part of a plantation. We even had a slave graveyard. For entertainment, there’s our local tobacco spitin’ contest.
Oh, I thought you were talking about Sonoma. Only thing I’ve been to Petaluma for is the outlets. I did almost hit a vulture with my car near there, though.
Hi ya, J. Spongess: I was born and lived in the SLC area until I was five (Granger/Riverton to be exact).
I consider my hometown to be Payson, Utah. Population about 8k when I was a kid, about 15k now. Most definetly white Mormon-ville, the only black person I met before leaving Utah when I was 21 was a foreign exchange student from South Africa.
Was a sleepy farm town with a traditional downtown made up of mom 'n pop businesses. McDonald’s and McWal*Fart have since moved in and decimated any hint of small businesses.
Despite (or perhaps because of) the heavy religious influence, there were a stunning amount of street drugs available in the 1980s.
I think my HS graduating class was 75 students.
Payson is a stunningly beautiful town, nestled against the Wasatch Front (an arm of the Rocky Mountains.)