re: #121 Feline Fearless Leader

I saw that going to school in Pittsburgh after having lived in a small city and a village with nearby industry. I liked Pittsburgh (my parents were living in the eastern suburbs) and ended up living another 25 years there. People I went to school with had been born and raised in Pittsburgh and were dying to get out and supposedly never come back*.

* - I worked in D.C. with people from western PA who worked in D.C./northern VA until they wanted to start families - at which point they moved back to western PA to do so.

When I was a teenager, all the guys I grew up with would talk endlessly about getting the hell out of there. Almost to a man, they ended up living in the same town they grew up in. “Great place to raise a family”, they’ll tell you, forgetting the dangerous and stupid shit we did because we were so bored.

BTW, when I say “small town”, I mean SMALL. The town I grew up in had a about 600 people. We didn’t have enough kids for a High School, so we combined our town and two others, and all the surrounding countryside, and I STILL had a graduating class of 104 kids, 1/4 of whom I’d been in school with since 1st grade. And I was born in 1957, amid the Baby Boom.