Taking a trip to Russoville
In Elsewhere, a coruscating memoir published in 2012, Richard Russo described his formative years as “an American childhood, as lived in the late Fifties, by a lower-middle class that barely seems to exist any more.” The setting for this slice of lost Eisenhower-era Americana was Gloversville in upstate New York, an East Coast leather town where the money had long since moved out and taken the locale’s animating spirit with it, to the point where the eighteen-year-old high-school graduate reckoned that “you could have strafed Main Street with an automatic weapon without endangering a soul.” The “Main Street” reference carries its own freight of associative cargo.
