School’s Out

This was in the 1950s. Our barracks-like, World War II bungalows had been laid out in Pennsylvania farmland seized for dependent families at the Navy bases nearby. Postwar, it became cheap rentals for the urban poor drawn out from Philadelphia to the various industries: LaRosa Foods, Stanford Pressed Steel, and some nameless coffee factory that spewed its sour aroma twice a day into the local air where 200 years before a local militia fought the British.