I saw this book in a Texas museum. The small town, early twentieth century setting piqued my interest, given my respect for folks of that era. Looking back, I see that my early childhood experiences were not dissimilar to what’s reflected in the excerpts below. Furthermore, my boyhood placed me among men and women who played an important role in my rearing and who could easily have been characters in Homer’s Place.

Granting the unreliability of early life memories, to my best recollection, the folks and mores which can be inferred from the below are consistent to what I recall in the mining camp before the early 60’s. I invite the childhood friends who read this to contact me if their recollections are dramatically different.

Homer’s Place is not Little Britches, but it reflects much of the same mores and morals of that earlier book and series. And these were conventions readily apparent in an American mining camp far from cities and related conveniences.

Regardless, the novel has a terrific plot which I’ll leave to you to discover.

Excerpts:

“We kids were like chickens in an Asian village. Every adult knew who owned us, and where we lived, and we were aware the entire town indirectly observed and controlled us. It was as if we were everyone’s responsibility, and this was sometimes annoying. But even without the services of a town psychiatrist, or the expensive present day counselors, this community situation made us feel very secure. No one ever snatched us off the street.

“As an example of how it worked, one day when I was in the fifth grade, I was in a large, vacant lot directly behind the Commercial Bank. I sailed a coffee can lid high into the air, immediately lost sight of it in a flash of sun, and like a boomerang, the tin lid came back and struck me squarely on top the head. It was nothing serious, but head wounds do bleed profusely, and very shortly I looked like attempted murder. Blood streamed down my forehead and into my eyes. Before I could panic, the observant bank cashier, Tom Perry, ran from behind the cage to the lot, grabbed my hand, rushed me the half block to Doc Clapper’s office, and then quickly returned to cashiering at the bank.

“There were no forms to complete — abominable health insurance was not even in the imagination stage. Doc shaved the wound, used three metal clamps to hold the wound together, and then personally walked me around the corner to the Majestic [theater owned by his father]. He told Homer of Tom Perry’s quick action. My dad thanked Doc, promptly paid his four dollar fee, and invited Tom to a game of dominoes at the Snooker Parlor. Good Samaritan deeds worked smoothly in 1933 without insurance or fear of lawsuits. It was a matter of looking out for ‘one another.’

….

“Another Winelda [town where the story develops] code or standard was that every kid in town clearly understood, that under no circumstances, was he to be disrespectful toward any adult. To do so would have been a gross miscarriage of courtesy, and Homer and other fathers would have been super quick to correct such crass manners. I don’t recollect how these lessons evolved — certainly not from counsellors, because parents neither wanted nor needed them — but it seemed the families all taught ethics from the same book. No matter what the adult’s station in life, we were always to say ‘Mister’ Patton and ‘Mrs.’ Miller and thank you ma’am, thank you sir — yes sir and no sir. When speaking with adults, the word ‘Yeah’ was never a part of a kid’s vocabulary. A donkey-like ‘Uh huh’ was a close step toward a perilous precipice. The business of saying yes sir and no sir had absolutely no military connotation whatsoever nor did it imply subservience. They were simply the unwritten rules of behavior everyone expected between juniors and seniors. It was a pleasant departure from today’s sometimes crass egalitarianism. The grownups liked or loved us, but we were not to consider ourselves their buddies unless some special rapport permitted it.

….

“So, because the community bonded together when it came to kids, Wineldans were able to turn their offspring loose to figuratively graze from one end of town to the other, and into the surrounding hills. I recall no kid that was killed or maimed, and none ran away or disappeared. If there were some few that were molested, it was the deepest kind of secret. Such a despicable act might well have spawned unmanageable Winelda vigilantes.

“Kids were never told they could not go in Mrs. Dutweiler’s house or to Mr. Wentworth’s barn because Winelda had no real strangers living among them. Everyone was a known quantity. But even in Winelda there were a few cautions. 

“‘I don’t want you riding around the Square in Haywire Dwyer’s car.'”

“Haywire was different from most, and somewhat strange for the times. He was a happy-go-lucky, twenty-eight-year-old who drove a bright yellow Model-A roadster with a rumble seat, chromium plated wire wheels, mud flaps, a coon tail, and an Ah-oo-gaw horn. On weekends he especially liked to drive slowly around the Square with a couple of his boy friends who some might very well have called ‘sissy.’ As they cruised the Square, one of them occasionally yelled to a curbside gawker, ‘Hey, you wanta ride with us.” They were always tickled pink when some young kid frothing for a chance to ride in Haywire’s rumble seat would join them. That insignificant act would energize Winelda’s all-seeing community eye. Word would swiftly pass to the dad, ‘Hey, Emory, yer kid was a riding’ with Haywire’s bunch Saturday afternoon.’ And Emory would seek out little Marvin and make his instructions crystal clear, ‘Don’t you ever again git in Haywire’s car. You understand, Boy?’

….

“I got my ample share of being yelled at and boxed around. Perhaps this will sound strange in this day of abuse issues, but I seldom felt like some poor, mistreated kid. I figured [my father’s] punishments were probably no more severe than what any other kid endured. This was a big people world; consequently, in my kid’s world, I always strived to avoid wrongdoing that would enrage big people. In my view, [my father] wasn’t so bad. A few neighborhood girls had confided in me that on a number of occasions their parents had ordered them to bed without dinner. To me that was indeed bestial; that was abuse of the first order. Mild beatings were decidedly better.

….

“It was a wonderful, simpler time when there were no driver’s licenses, and no niggling sales taxes. Many of the other socialistic taxes were slyly generated to be paid by those who worked, and then handed out to those who didn’t work.

….

“We weren’t choir kids, but neither were we hooligans. Other than a few pranks, none of us ever found ourselves in serious trouble. Come graduation day, Winelda’s kids were well prepared to face either college or the world. We learned to earn our own money, and by doing so we had acquired a work ethic. This gave us all an inner feeling of competency and self-reliance, and we had the basic manners needed for getting along in everyday life. Not one of my forty-three Winelda classmates was a failure as an adult. All could read, all could write an acceptable letter, and none went to prison. Something must’ve been very right with Winelda’s simple lifestyle in the thirties and forties. Unfortunately, American families in the fifties and sixties allowed the government to systematically destroy what some later called the Greatest Generation.”