It was pretty horrible all right...with its cliques, dictatorial leaders and hostility to individual thought, clear definition and defined concepts.  I'll see what I have for you. I can share two stories right now. When I was writing my valedictory speech at Sayville High, I wrote lines concerning how important individualism was--the freedom of the individual from the dictatorship of the majority.  

  Then when I had graduated, I was shooting baskets in my backyard, thinking about going off to college, where I hoped to find people who could think, who would want to define things carefully as I did.

  All of a sudden I had a thought I still remember to this day--not a blinding flash, more like a clear moment when a curtain was swept aside that had prevented me from seeing for many years.   

   And I remember whispering, "It's all a fraud...a lousy stinking fraud...".   All this began in sophomore English class when I was introduced to "figurative language"--and I knew instantly that unless you rid nonfiction of figurative and approximate terms and usages, you could never say anything useful about reality.   

  I was planning to be a writer, an artist, and had had already written a few short stories at 12...but my lifework really began in earnest that day in English class at Sayville High when I realized none was recognizing the need to map the world in meaningful--architected language...and that day in my backyard, two years later, when I glimpsed the full consequences of what a world without anyone who could think clearly in positions of leadership would consist of.  

   This is Postmodernism...and what perhaps is going on in Sayville, as in central Ohio, rural Florida and the nameless, marginless towns of California is the same thing---no clear understanding of anything, naked order-giving and order-obeying structures without reason or meaning, and nobody bothering to check bad ideas against reality to see if they work or not.  The situation in a small town is worse than in a city because it is so deprived...empty, obviously unjust and falsified...a dictatorship by not very virtuous elites over powerless victims. 

   Sayville was one such place.  If I had not already planned at age 8 to know everything and at 9 to write stories about morally normative "heroes", Sayville would have driven me to it. 

   I remember friends, power structures and injustice...nothing else. I think those less prepared than I was to fight against and through petty tyranny and meaningless orders might easily have turned to horror or fantasy to escape the mental constraints of so frustrating and concept-poor an environment. Sinclair Lewis wrote Main Street early on, Ross

   Lockridge wrote Raintree County about rural Indiana; and we have works by Hemingway, Edgar Rice Burroughs and others that tell us youthful injustice helps a writer with imagination detach himself/herself from the concrete and either imagine a better or a parallel or a measurably worse analogue to their town...The arbitrariness of this backwater US tiny tsardom is the dark background to the happier moments.  I do doubt as you suggest that I was the only one who saw that darkness...the difference is, perhaps, I saw it as the darkness of Western civilization, even in our tiny Sayville-Bohemia--Lake Ronkonkoma corner of it.