RIVER CITY JOURNAL: MEMORIEIS OF A HOMETOWN THAT TIME FORGOT

There you were, sitting through another meeting, when one of the reporters mentioned that the Smithsonian, the repository of American artifacts in our nation's capital, is adding an ATM to its vast collection.

Who would have thought that the country's foremost museum of U.S. history and lifestyle would be interested in a machine that dispenses money and eliminates the need for human contact? It turns out the particular ATM headed for the Smithsonian is from an Ohio bank and was one of the first ever put into service.

This thought struck you: The Smithsonian is getting an ATM to put on display the very same year your hometown bank is getting its first-ever ATM for real people to get real money out of.

Is that a coincidence, or what?

Here's the lowdown. Your favorite hometown is discovering how fast-paced the world has become. Until recently, it managed to exist as a pretty fair holdover of the era of American life popularized and imitated by the family sitcoms of the 1950s.

It was, until recently, a place where neighbors were neighbors, where doors weren't locked at night, where the butcher at the supermarket knew what kind of pot roast you wanted, where the mailman could give you some tips on your wilting tomato plants, where your favorite hometown weekly newspaper printed the news but you went to the beauty shop for the real scoop, where you visited regularly and frequently in people's homes and drank lemonade and ate freshly made sugar cookies, where meals with real food were prepared three times a day and eaten sitting down at a kitchen table or, perhaps, in the dining room on Sundays, where teachers who saw your child acting up would say something in an attempt to avert an embarrassing situation, where drugs were obtained with a prescription from a doctor, where every high-school-age student smoked at least one cigarette -- and inhaled -- and then threw up and decided to go out for basketball instead, where most but not all juvenile delinquency was nipped in the bud by a constable who threatened to call your father, where you learned about gangs the first time you saw "West Side Story" at the Melinda Theater, where malls were used to pound fenceposts into the ground, where church was something you did at least twice a week and not a building you drove by, where eating an ice cream cone on a hot day was something you called cool, where homework was what you did after school before baseball or Scouts, where divorces happened but mostly to people you didn't know, where Saturday was the day everyone "went to town" even if you already lived in town, where restaurants had waitresses who knew you didn't like cucumbers in your salad because they gave you gas until you had that gall bladder operation, where you could write a check and fill in the amount and the name of the bank, where ministers preached fiery sermons and tried real hard to save souls instead of telling you God was an OK sort of fellow, where you learned good manners at the expense of rapped knuckles and swatted behinds, where people worried about their reputations and made most decisions based on what other people would think, where grieving people could expect an outpouring of loving concern plus enough casseroles and Jell-O salads and fresh-baked pies to open a cafeteria, where crooks were sent to jail and could only date women with reputations when they got out, where a fender-bender on Main Street could draw a crowd, where no one had ever heard of a taco, where your mother would have a lot of explaining to do if you used any profanity in this column.

But then it all changed. Your favorite hometown got its first stoplight. And a McDonalds. And now an ATM. Not that any of these are bad. In fact, they are good, each in its own way.

There is no getting around the fact, though, that your hometown has jumped into the Age of Microwaves, Discount Stores, Fast Food, Red Lights and Plastic Money. And you weren't even looking.

A lot of folks, including the mayor, call it progress. You, on the other hand, see it as the end of that nostalgic time called youth, the old days, back then. The hometown you thought time forgot turns out to be alive and kicking. And ready to dispense money from a machine.

Is this a great country, or what?

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.