Remembering Main Street: An American Album - Hardcover

Pat Ross is president and owner of Pat Ross & Co., Ltd., a book-producing and communications concern.

This is a trip down the nostalgia superhighway, an intense look at one of the greatest icons in the collective American unconscious--Main Street in Our Home Town. Ross starts out in her childhood town, Chesterton, Maryland, then winds through the 48 contiguous states region by region. Each stop visits a vivid slice of America--non-Disney, homegrown, real. In one town, Ross goes to a local store to see whether it really offers every visitor a Coke, as she has heard; of course, it does, because the towns Ross chooses to explore have preserved much of the look and feel of a simpler time. Ross dips into the local history of each featured town, consulting primary sources at the local level in order to augment the powerfully appealing illustrations with delightful background vignettes. Ultimately, just as Main Street keeps going on--adapting, changing--none of the chapters comes to a conclusion. You might argue that the America these Main Streets evoke never really existed as we recall it, but you'll still warm to all this living Americana. Mike Tribby