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Show THIS BUSINESS L Jjvwq Iff. Wm SUSAN THAYER jSf WS BACK TO MAIN STREET ted, "but another, it seems to me, is .because we're getting back our respect for the good, old-fashioned kind of free American enterprise that built our Main Streets. We've begun again to admire men and women who have the courage to risk their savings and their time and start a business in the town where they lived instead of asking the government for a job. Right now, of course, millions of men are working for Uncle Sam, and war plants have huge numbers of employees. em-ployees. But the spirit of freedom, independence, and initiative is stirring stir-ring again and Main Street is symbolic of that spirit. Main Street with good, plentiful merchandise for everyday American homes in its store windows, with movies are seeing at almost the same that people from coast to coast time, with banks where people with all sorts of jobs have accounts. ac-counts. "The big cities with their exclusive ex-clusive shops, their night clubs, and their many sights have their place in the scheme of things. But if. tonight we could look into the hearts of millions of Americans now scattered to the four corners of the earth, it would be homesickness homesick-ness for some typical Main Street and for some unpretentious frame house equipped with things found on Main Street we would find most often." "Have you noticed," asked Aunt Matilda the other day, looking far away, "that we're getting back to Main Street?" "What do you mean, 'back to Main Street' ?" I queried thinking think-ing how seldom Aunt Matilda got downtown, now that every pint of gasoline must be used for necessary neces-sary errands. "Yes," she went on, "you see the trend in all sorts of places. They write glowingly of it in stories, they use scenes from it in advertisements, adver-tisements, they talk about it on the radio. There was a time, you remember, re-member, a few; years ago, when a lot of people made fun of small towns. They joked about the main streets of America with their stores and movies and banks and post offices so much alike. Everybody Every-body seemed to want Broadway and Fifth Avenue or the big streets of Paris and London, yes, and even Berlin." "I see what you mean," I said. "Maybe one reason for it is that hundreds of thousands of boys and men from Main Street towns are homesick for them these days. They keep dreaming of the sights and sounds of these streets so similar sim-ilar to each other and so different differ-ent from the jungles or deserts or strange' foreign towns in which they are now stationed." "That's one reason," she admit- |