I’d have to disagree on the honesty thing and getting back the wallet. There was quit a lot of stealing going on, as it was a poor town.
A small town is where someone calls you, you realize it’s a wrong number, but you not only figure out WHO they are trying to call, you most likely know the correct number!
Ha!
This was a particular problem in the small town I grew up in, since all of our phone numbers were 972-43XY or 972-44XY – made for a lot of fat fingered wrong numbers, and you almost always knew that they were trying to call either the 43 number of your XY if you had the 44, or the YX version of your whole number. The people across the street from us were 4441, while the local store was 4414, so they probably got the most wrong numbers of anyone in town.
I grew up in the Ft. Lauderdale area, and living in Tallahassee for four years definitely made me feel like I was in a “small town.” Despite the fact that it’s got a bigger population than the two cities I spent my childhood in, it acts like it desperately wants to be a small town to the locals and a metropolis to the people out in podunk beyond the city borders. It’s bizarre, and I saw a lot of “insider/outsider” behavior among the people I interacted with. I don’t need to live in a big, populated city, but I’d prefer to live in a place where I am either granted some bit of anonymity or welcomed as a resident, not judged as “one of them new people.”
Once visited Hilda, SC. Population 436. The railroad doesn’t come to town anymore, but they left a caboose.
Firehouse, general store/gas station/eatery, and the rest of “downtown” is along 500 yards of road, or less. Fire chief runs the town garage, attached to the post office, where his wife is postmistress, and a pet bird in a cage greets postal customers.
Many folks leave keys in their vehicles. Very small town feeling.
The place where my in-law’s live about 40 km north of Tokyo has a population of 40,000 and is officially recognized as a “town.”
My home town has a year-round population of around 3000, so that’s my first guide.
My daughter is now in a town with a population of 1000 at the most. There are two stores, and its 90 miles to the next town.
To be fair, the Union-Tribune was probably a lot worse when you lived here. I’ve noticed a huge change in quality in the 10+ years that I’ve lived here. They’ve been protested for something or other recently, but they’re really not a bad paper (anymore). It’s no Washington Post, sure, but only one paper is the Washington Post, right? If you don’t get it, you don’t get it. 
You have a good point otherwise. There’s a lot of provincialism and a lot of closed-mindedness here, which would be really out of place in New York or LA or Chicago. But, hell, we’re not even as big as San Antonio anymore, and I like San Diego a hell of a lot more than San Antonio*. YMMV.
- Some days I feel like I would rather live in any of the first three cities, but LA would probably be the only one I could stand–most of the time I ask myself how I could ever leave California and I never really find a good answer.
ETA: I should add that DC feels way more like a big city to me than San Diego does, even though San Diego is quite a bit larger. Of course, I was a kid when I lived in that area, so maybe it seemed more imposing at the time.
I didn’t read it much as a kid, but I’ll take your word for it. Also, to be fair some more, it was two reporters on the UT who broke the Duke Cunningham story (and the UT endorsed the guy). They won the Pulitzer.
Actually, if you read the UT, you are getting the WP, because they use the WP News Service so much. All of the national and international news is from wires (AP) or NYT and WP news services. It seems like they have only about five reporters on staff.
One of the problems is that it’s a city which was practically non-existent before the car. Everyone says that L.A. is a car culture, but there are many urban centers here that don’t require a car at all. San Diego is completely addicted to cars. (I think the buses stop running at 11:00–Welcome to Mayberry!) The people in S.D. who are not provincial get diluted by the distance, so it’s hard for them to make an imprint on the overall culture.
A small town is less than 1k. It might have its own post office, it might not, and it might not have more than one or two families that ranch in the region as permanent population. It doesn’t have its own gas station and it doesn’t have more than one paved road total.
People talk about going into town to pick up groceries or see a doctor or so on, and they mean a few hours down the road (the only road that goes anywhere) to a place with a convenience store and a band-aid station that gets a doctor/nurse team on rotation out of a city with roughly 10k every few weeks. A city with 8-10k population is likely the region’s economic and cultural center, with its own hospital, airport, high school, maybe a university campus, movie theater, and a couple radio stations.
Whenever I go near the Mississippi I’m always a bit amazed at how cheek-by-jowl everything is, and I grew up near the Mississippi (east and west).
If you buy a house and local people cannot identify it until you say something like “I bought the <local long time resident> house” then you are in a small town.
I think it is less a matter of population than of geography; a small town has to be kind of a stand-alone population center. Even then the population should be less than 5K; I think more than 5K but less than 20K makes it a large town but not yet a city.