The author is a person who has often wondered what life was like for those ordinary people usually left unmentioned in the pages of history. Yes, the king rightly asks, "What do the simple folk do?" Writing to portray daily life and the values by which people lived "once upon a time" is an act of imaginative interpretation. Growing up in the decades from mid-1930 to mid-1950 in the City of Saratoga Springs, New York, provided many opportunities for me to see the remnants of the recent and distant past life of the city. Apparent also were the layers of social, ethnic, racial and regional featur...