Tell us about your hometown.

[Not Heidi]

My wife is an East Tennessean, born in Maryville, Blount County and raised in Clinton,* Anderson County. She's as proud to be from Appalachia and Tennessee as anyone you'll meet.

I'm a Southern Californian, born in Santa Monica, Los Angeles County, and raised in Huntington Beach, Orange County. My pride in California is odd to my sisters - 🤷‍♀️.**

Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains is Kathy's favorite place on earth. If she predeceases me, that's where I'll spread her ashes. Huntington State Beach and the Bolsa Chica Wetlands (also in Huntington Beach) are my favorite places on earth. Honorable mention to Angels Stadium; I hope my family can find a way to put my ashes the there - preferably at first base.

Kathy and I've been married 22 years. For our first 15 years, we lived in Charles County, Maryland. I fell deeply in love with Maryland and miss it so much that I cry sometimes. I miss it almost as much as I missed California.

We now live in Huntington Beach.

For the longest time I had a desk display of five tiny flags: California, Tennessee, Maryland, rainbow, and USA. I lost it when we moved home to California. (Easy enough to replace, though.)

Thank you for reading this appreciation of hometowns. What's your hometown? (You don't have to have been born there.) What's your favorite thing about it?

* Originally named Burrville, the name was changed when Burr killed Hamilton.

** But then, I -am- the second weirdest member of my family (father's side). 🤪

[secondwind]

1. Born and raised in New York City.

[Not Heidi]

2. 👍 👋

What's your favorite thing about New York City?

[secondwind]

3. It's hard to choose, there are so many....

The theaters, Broadway, the energy all around us, etc. There are downsides of course, but it is such a vibrant place.

Grew up just two blocks from Columbia University. Upper West Side.

[LisaM]

4. Born in Ann Arbor, MI, grew up a little in Mt. Clemens, then moved

to a small town outside of East Lansing, which was an odd mix of factory workers, farmers, people who worked for the state, and teachers and professors. I liked it and go back sometimes.

Strangely, I still feel attached to Mt. Clemens, though we only lived there three years (the house is still in the family though). It's part of Metro Detroit, where my family has deep roots, and I love Detroit so much it hurts.

I get it about Maryland. I like it there, too.

[alwaysinasnit]

5. Born and raised in San Francisco.

Married 43 years and 2 kids. I've only ever lived in 3 counties in the Bay Area (SF, San Mateo, and Sonoma). I've visited a few places in different states, Canada, and Mexico.

Although San Francisco has many attractions, it has lost some of it's charm for me. It is so congested with traffic at all hours that it takes a bit of time to decompress once you've reached your destination. But I can say that the Golden Gate bridge is awe-inspiring.

https://www.history.com/topics/landmarks/golden-gate-bridge

[Skittles]

6. GI brat no home town

no indeed.......

[yellowdogintexas]

7. My home town is a square mile township in the

rich agricultural part of Western Kentucky. Population 200. There is a fair amount of working farmland within that square mile; Wheat, corn, soybeans and tobacco are the crops.

We did not get street lights until 1957. When we were kids we roamed freely from one friend's house to another. All the old ladies out on their front porches kept our parents advised of our location! It was a great place to be a kid!

There were a number of old homes with lots of shade, a couple of general stores, a post office and one gas station. There was also a very definite racial divide in terms of where folks lived.

The stores and gas station are all gone; folks have to drive from 10 to 20 miles for any shopping.

There is one high school, a junior high and two large elementary schools in the county. Most of the towns are too small to support a school so everybody rides the bus. The county itself has a population of around 11,000.

Nashville is an hour away and Louisville is 3 hours.

I am definitely a country girl in the big city!!

[CTyankee]

8. My home now and for 36 years is New Haven, CT. I absolutely love living here in a very deep blue

state where we have great history and Yale.

I am a 3rd generation Texan and was born and raised in Dallas. When I left for college I never went back except for visits. JFK's assassination there crushed me emotionally.

Full circle, however. My oldest granddaughter has moved to Austin for career and weather purposes. I have deep family roots in Austin where so many members on my father's side lived and thrived.

[TlalocW]

9. Small farming town in south central Kansas

Fewer than 2000 people. I grew up on the east side of town with nothing but wheat fields past the backyard. Sometimes when there was no wheat growing, hot air balloons would land a quarter mile off, and I would walk out and watch the pilots(?) get them folded up and ready for ground transport. Supposedly has a Native American enchantment on it that it will never get by a tornado and never has been though there have been close calls. Next door neighbor was an older couple. The husband had a black walnut tree that would drop tons of nuts on his yard that he would have to clean up with an frozen orange juice can attached to the end of a broomstick, and he had tamed a squirrel enough to the point that it would ride on his shoulder, and he would hand it a nut every now and then while working. My brother and I got a great job in middle school by being set up by my dad. He asked me one summer what I would think if he bought us "a little motorcycle." By that, he meant a mo-ped. I was ambivalent as cars and bikes weren't my thing, but he bought one, and had us ride it in the backyard (we lived on just under an acre) for a year. Then one day I come home, and there's another mo-ped, and Dad is putting large wire baskets on them. Turns out, we're going to be paperboys. Town had three paper routes, and my brother and I had two. Got up at 3, 365 days a year, worked for an hour, and went back to bed. Cops didn't care that we were illegal drivers as the W brothers were good kids. Even though it was cold, and we often hit ice patches, December was the best month because we would get a lot of tips - both monetarily and in the forms of baked goods from customers, and then delivering early Christmas morning was kind of magical because everyone left their house lights on, and it was just your mo-ped's engine interrupting the cold stillness looking at lights. I would drive the whole town. When I (the last kid) graduated high school, mom, grandma, and my aunt moved further south to a town close to mom's even smaller hometown so grandma could be closer to "the farm" that was still in the family.

Don't often go back. I was a super-student nerd, and I only had two really good friends, both were more popular than I was, and one of them was a Greek Adonis who could have dated anyone he wanted to, but like me, he wanted out of the town. We've grown apart, but the non-Adonis still lives there. When I do go back, I try to first head through my undergrad, which my Adonis friend's parents also went to and fell in love over eating German potato salad from a local chicken restaurant, and I'll pick them up a couple of pints. They eat it like ice cream.

[Botany]

10. Not my hometown but my favorite place on earth

[Buckeye_Democrat]

11. This was my Ohio hometown as a kid.

A suburb (which I won't name), with nearby woods and rivers to explore.

Me at around age 9, after catching some catfish (which we ate):


That was during my red-head years, when even the teachers at my elementary school treated me like dirt. (They were nice when I was previously blonde-haired.)

My parents moved there after they grew up in a rural farming community during the Great Depression. I wasn't born until they were in their 40's, and I have a sister who is 21 years older than me.

When we visited my parents' cousins who still lived in the rural area, I realized that the kids from there were much nicer than my classmates. (If they offered me something, it wasn't some dirty trick on the "ugly" red-head.) My classmates all acted like German ancestry was the best, since their ancestors were German-Americans.

[mnhtnbb]

12. I was born in Manhattan

while my parents were living in White Plains in the early '50's. We moved to Chatham, NJ when I was 3 and I have considered it 'home' my whole life. It was a beautiful area with big yards, trees, a pond that was converted to a swim club where I hung out in the summer. Never needed to go to camp. I was on the swim team, diving team, and learned to play tennis on clay courts. We'd take the train into the city (NY) regularly to shop, go to a play, attend a concert when Leonard Bernstein was the conductor. I took ballet and piano lessons during the school year. By the time I was in middle school (5th grade) I was allowed to walk or ride my bike to school if it wasn't snowing or raining. I loved it.

When I was 14, my father retired (at 55) and we moved to Southern California. My parents were from California --my dad was born there--and had come to NYC in 1947 when my dad's company transferred him there. He had bought land in the '30's (after his father died) in north San Diego county and dreamt of retiring to raise lemons and oranges. I hated it. No friends. My parents wouldn't let me ride my bike and I went to school 20 miles away, first a private school for 2 years and then the public high school in La Jolla because my mom arranged an inter district transfer based on the connection she had with the Girls' Vice Principal: they had taught school together during the Depression in the San Joaquin Valley . I couldn't wait to get out of there when I went to UCLA for college.

Stayed in the LA area, living in Westwood or Santa Monica or the Valley through grad school, first marriage, divorce, second marriage. My second husband and I moved with our almost 2 year old in 1988 to St Joseph, MO. Never looked back. Moved to Lincoln, NE in 1994--with by then a second son-- and stayed until we moved to Chapel Hill, NC in 2000. I've been in the Triangle area ever since: 17 years in Chapel Hill, 3 years in downtown Raleigh, and coming up 2 years in Durham in January.

I still consider myself a native of NYC and Chatham as "home". I loved where I grew up, was happy to leave California, never felt at home in MO or NE, and will always be a damn Yankee transplant here in NC. But I am content here. Both sons live near me. I expect to go feet first out of this house. No more moving for me!

[nightwing1240]

13. Born in Kentucky, raised in Ohio

My father was in the army when I was born but originally from the town in Ohio I grew up in and live to this day. It's a very nice area for families and an amish community is nearby. Plenty here to do and see.

[Arkansas Granny]

14. My home town was literally a wide spot in the road in rural SW Missouri.

There was a grocery store, a community building, a cemetery and a half dozen houses. A creek ran through town that was crossed by a low water bridge that had signs on each side that would tell the depth when it was underwater. We lived about a mile away.

The last time I was there the store building was gone, but the community building was still there. Most of the houses I knew had been replaced or just torn down.

[mitch96]

16. Grew up on LonGiland NY but not born there . Very white northern European ethnic community

that firebombed the first Black family that moved in. Very much into a "wealth" ladder of social strata. You did not mix, you knew your "place". The day after I graduated school I was 100 miles away much to the dismay of my mother and friends..
I hated it. I'm not a "NY" kind of guy.
m

[milestogo]

17. Suburban Republicans

[Duppers]

18. Hubs & I envy your wife.

Last edited Sun Nov 6, 2022, 01:03 AM - Edit history (2)

Morristown, TN was my hometown but I've nothing much to say about that thoroughly Republican place other than it's much cleaner than most cities it's size (32K). And it has a neat little airport where Harrison Ford flys into once and awhile. His in-laws live there in a nice home out on Cherokee Lake, the lake where I learned to water ski.

We've lived on the coast of Virginia for many decades but long for those mountains, so we bought a few acres of mtn. top property w/ a fantastic panoramic view of the Smokies in Walland. We feel extremely lucky and were planning to build a home there when my hubby retired. But now the interest rates are so high that we now can't afford to build. We'll wait until they come back down, if we don't croak first.

Many yrs ago we wanted to have a second wedding in Cades Cove. It's such a special place. We totally understand your wife's feelings.

[Wicked Blue]

19. Born in Brooklyn, grew up in Wayne, NJ

Wayne is a large township in northern NJ, just west of Paterson. It's named after a Revolutionary War general, Anthony Wayne. It used to be a 25-minute bus ride from NYC when I was a teenager.

There were a lot of farms when we moved there in 1958. Dairy farms, poultry farms, strawberry farms, and more. Some of our neighbors kept chickens. It was a pretty town, with woods where kids could play safely.

We lived in a neighborhood that originally was a summer vacation community for people from NYC. The first houses were unheated log cabins. By the time we moved there, it had become a year-round place. There was a small lake created by damming a stream, and sand was brought in to make a beach. I learned to swim and ice skate there. We had cold winters, and the lake froze solid from December to March. In junior high school I'd walk home, drop off my books and head to the lake to skate until well after dark.

Wayne had a number of lakes, probably all man-made, that served as focal points for residential developments. The one I lived in was a lower middle class - working class community. Further down the stream was Pines Lake, where the rich kids lived, the kids who got their own sailboats and sailing lessons, and then cars when they turned 17.

The trouble with Wayne was that it was lily-white, racist, and Republican. The homes in one affluent development, Packanack Lake, had covenants prohibiting owners from selling their homes to African-Americans, Italian-Americans and Jews. I didn't know this until I was in college, but it made me sick to my stomach.

We had one African-American kid in my high school, and she had to stand on the bus because nobody let her sit down. She told me kids spat on her too.

My dad invited an African-American co-worker over one day, and afterward several neighbors threatened him and warned him not to do that again.

And then there was the asshole on the board of education who declared that Jews should not be allowed on the board because they were too liberal and spent too much money on schools. My friends and I picketed him at the next school board meeting. Even through I couldn't wait to escape Wayne, I kept my voter registration at my parents' address for years just so I could vote against that POS. Unfortunately, Wayne voters loved him and elected him mayor, then sent him to Congress.

Over the years Wayne got overdeveloped and filled with shopping centers and one of the first big malls, Willowbrook Mall. I haven't been back in decades.

[ProfessorGAC]

20. Chicago Market

Too far to be a suburb.
Industrial city of around 65,000.
Now, it's the commercial center of a county of 700k, 250,000 of whom live within 8 miles of downtown. The city has around 160,000 people today.
My Wife & I are both from there although we didn't meet until after college. We both went K-12 there. She even went to a small university there.
We still live within a half hour of there.
Still lots of process industry & logistics but little discrete manufacturing remains.
It was the opposite when I was a kid.

[malthaussen]

21. Philosophical question: what constitutes a "home town?"

Born and spent the first ten years of my life in one area, spent the next fifty somewhere else, and now I'm somewhere else again and it definitely doesn't feel like "home." But even during the fifty-year span in one area I moved several times.

Is it the place you were born and spent your childhood? Providing the places are not mutually exclusive, and you "spent your childhood" in one area (sorry, Army brats). The place you lived longest? What constitutes a "home" in our nomadic culture?

If you lived in the suburbs of a major city, can you claim that city as your "home town?" Or must you have lived within the city limits to call it yours?

"Home town" might be where you were happiest, although some people are happy anywhere (and some are never happy anywhere).

-- Mal