Good Old Days

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Ramblers Way. All opinions are 100% mine.

I didn’t grow up in a small town, I grew up in Southwest Detroit.  Right near Vernor Highway and Springwells.  Five miles from downtown Detroit.  Three blocks from the major thoroughfare, with a bus stop on the corner of our street.  But it felt like a small town.

We knew all our neighbors, up and down and across the street.  Everyone sat on their porch in the evenings and the kids all played in the street.  You could walk to the store alone at a young age.  Vernor Highway contained a supermarket, a dime store or two (Kresge and another whose name I can’t remember), a stationary store (Brother’s) and many more small “mom and pop” stores.

Recently I drove down Vernor and gone is the supermarket, replaced with a major drug store chain.  Gone are the dime stores and the stationary store, replaced with empty shells of buildings.  As I rode down Navy (the street we grew up on) half of the houses were gone and others were in stages of disrepair.

Is this the result of “urban sprawl” or the result of major box stores over taking the “mom and pop” stores?  Or is this just the natural progression of inner city life?

There was a time when Made in America was the norm and not the abnormal.  We lived not too far from the Ford River Rouge plant and had family members who worked there.  We could smell (oy the stench) of the soap factory of the lard being rendered down.  We knew where our food came from as mom worked for the meat cutters union and we had seen the cutting room floor (ick yuck blech).  We could also smell the sweet sweet scent of the Wonder Bread bakery that would totally make up for the pig fat.

Nowadays, that isn’t so much the case.

What can we do to bring us back to “the good old days”?  And were those the “good old days”?  Or were the “good old days” the days of our parents, or theirs?  Will these be the “good old days” of our kids and grand kids?

Who’s to say?