Alterations

Things were different. The world was different. New things were happening in Woodbury Heights.
Over on Route 45 we could go and get hamburgers and French Fries and a milkshake. A new kind of restaurant that sold what was known as "fast food". It was called The Steer Inn, and it was becoming quite a popular place. Hamburgers for fifteen cents, twenty cents for a cheeseburger. We would drive over in the car as a special treat; even Whee-Zee could come along and get a burger of her own. It was fun to go there, and we liked it, but it wasn't the same as going to the Luncheonette and sitting in a booth and getting a submarine sandwich made fresh by somebody you knew.
A convenience store, a Seven-Eleven would open just down the street from school over on Elm. It had sodas and Tastykakes and candy and lots of other stuff; it would be open later than Trackie's and the Pioneer Store, but it would be more expensive and it would lack the friendly slam of a wooden screen door, and there wouldn't be any more penny candy. You couldn't buy pretzels and potato chips by the pound, and the owners weren't there to know your name.
Woodbury Heights is a small place, just a little over one square mile. The houses in our little community were unique, without that cookie-cutter look so prevalent in the "planned communities" that were beginning to surround us. Bungalows, ranchers, Cape Cods and grand Victorians standing side by side, adding character to the various neighborhoods. Every house had an identity all its own; extensions of the families who lived in them, and you knew several families in every part of town.
Developers would come to Woodbury Heights in 1960, and turn a few small sections of town into suburbia; crowding look-alike homes into two areas, creating neighborhoods lacking charm and personal space. They'd come in, tear out all the woods, and plant houses, and give it a name. South Woods East and South Woods West, and hardly a tree left standing in either one.
I'd ride my bike through there, but it wasn't as friendly and the cars were parked in the streets. The homes were bland and stacked up close together, and you didn't know anyone's name. It was a town within a town, a suburban ghetto crammed with people from Chester and Philadelphia and Camden. They were running away from the "coloreds" and the "spics". White flight it was called, and they picked Woodbury Heights as their haven, their Fort Apache to protect them from the dark hordes invading their cities.
I kept to my side of town, preferring to go to Trackie's for a soda or a Milky Way, where somebody knew my name and had a friendly word or two, and the smell of olive oil and vinegar on a Luncheonette sub just couldn't be beat by a hamburger.
I'd ride my bike in the real part of town, where the streets were clear and the houses were my friends, and the trees still stood proud and tall.
Some of my neighbors would be black. They were across the street in another town, and now I pretty much ignored them, but we never felt the urge to flee.
So this was progress in 1960.
I didn't care for it much.
What else was coming, I wonder?