Readers Write: Good old days, Charlottesville, charitable gambling, rent controls, travel to Vietnam
I read Michael Nesset ’s article (“The good old days ... were, in ways,” Opinion Exchange, Aug. 13) and was not quite sure how to take it. I, too, grew up in a small town, but my recollections of small-town life in the 1950s and ’60s are not quite so benign or so happy. I, too, remember the soda fountain with the marble-topped bar and daytime baseball games on the radio. I also remember that my hometown was 100 percent white and nearly 100 percent Christian . Needless to say, if you weren’t either of those, you didn’t really belong there, and those who did fit those criteria were eager to let you know that. I think that from the perspective of someone nonwhite or non-Christian, the nostalgia for small-town life is a bad dream. I still see rural areas and small towns maintaining those attitudes, hence the red-blue split between cities and nonurban areas. I can see how the “ make America great again” crowd yearns for the days when white Christian men made the rules and made all of t...