office by one of the furious neighbor ladies in the morning, so afflicted. On the other hand, if you didn't drive, staples could be obtained on your doorstep. The "egg man" came on Fridays from Pennsylvania. The potato chip man (Charles Chips) also from PA at least once a month; "A-rabbers", out of the city, with their horse-drawn carts of Eastern Shore produce, appeared during the summers. The Fuller Brush man came, then Avon started calling; vacuum cleaner salesmen, encyclopedia salesmen, and other vendors might show up at any time. The insurance man appeared when premiums were due and one walked to the bank to transact business with a teller - in times, when indeed, life was far simpler. And when the kids had the flu, mumps, and the chicken pox, Mom waited up until the doctor arrived at the door as late as 9:00 at night. During the '50s, kids were everywhere on bikes; summer nights of sweaty sleep were unbearable in baking-brick-oven row homes, since nobody had air conditioning in either car or home. In the stillness of the day's waning heat, an occasional Evening Bat, from the barn at the meadow on Charles Street, might flitter overhead. Chasing lightning bugs filled the evenings with delightful pastime and mosquitoes; during the days, yards filled with fragrant and colorful blooms were inundated with butterflies that had spent their caterpillar-lives gorging in nearby meadows, and there were abundant populations of bees and baby birds to watch and grasshoppers to catch. In 1953, if you were lucky enough to be a kid then, you witnessed with wonderment the unfolding of one of Nature's extraordinary and mysterious spectaculars - the emergence of Brood X cicadas: "The Great Eastern Brood" - true to its 17-year cyclical mandate. Some parents had been suspicious of the insects as possible vectors of poliomyelitis, finally conquered by the Salk vaccine, announced in March of that year. Admittedly, not everyone (certainly not most adults) enjoys millions of large flying insects clinging to everything in sight - only those with childhood memories of that certain place, at that certain point in time. The postwar expansion of Rodgers Forge owed its genesis, demographics, and character in large part to the residency of a young, upwardly mobile, middle-class mix of blue collar and technical professionals and their burgeoning baby boom families. When the malls finally did come in the mid-1960s with