CB: You���re cynical, Norman.
NM: No, it���s just that I was at a lot of parties where there were
no kids. Particularly, in a period we���ll get to, you wouldn���t have
wanted kids there. Some of those parties got pretty wild. Not
wild by draconian standards, but a lot of people were getting
drunk, people were barfing, occasionally there���d be a fight. You
didn���t want a kid running around scared stiff by a fight. Usually a
girl with long hair and a certain kind of look in her eyes, slightly
spacey, holding a kid on each hand, would come wandering into
the party. She wouldn���t necessarily get a great welcome. People
wouldn���t be rude to her, but it wasn���t what we were looking for.
So, to return to the beginning, we had three days here. The town
was incredible. Of course, there were no lights allowed at night.
CB: Because of the war.
NM: There was a blackout, and the streets had a mystery, an 18thcentury quality. Occasionally you might see a candle behind a
window shade. It gave you a feeling you were back a hundred years
or more. Certainly the architecture didn���t destroy that impression.
The town looked, surprisingly, a good deal of the way it does now
��� because of the sand, and because nobody in this town could
ever allow any major corporation to come in and sink their roots,
thank God!
CB: And that���s what you love about our local democracy ��� its
grass roots, which grow in sand, give an organic texture to the
community?
NM: Well, it keeps the community from getting too big. I don���t
know that the reason we don���t have high-rises is because the sand
HYLAND
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