ABSTRACT
Thus would the state guide dispose of Optimo City and hasten on to a more spirited topic if Optimo City as such existed. Optimo City, however, is not one town, it is a hundred or more towns, all very much alike, scattered across the United States from the Alleghenies to the Pacific, most numerous west of the Mississippi and south of the Platte. When, for instance, you travel through Texas and Oklahoma and New Mexico and even parts of Kansas and Missouri, Optimo City is the blur of filling stations and motels you occasionally pass;
the solitary traffic light, the glimpse up a side street of an elephantine courthouse surrounded by elms and sycamores, the brief congestion of mud-spattered pickup trucks that slows you down before you hit the open road once more. And fifty miles farther on Optimo City’s identical twin appears on the horizon, and a half dozen more Optimos beyond that until at last, with some relief, you reach the metropolis with its new housing developments and factories and the cluster of downtown skyscrapers.
