Martin,
I am responding to you directly as your comments hit a chord with me having grown up in Upper Bucks myself. I grew up riding my mini bike in either the cornfields in front of my house or the cow pastures behind it. I could see RT 309 from wherever I was so I didn't need a GPS either.
Regarding the "Mom & Pops", not to defend Walmart here, but if you look back far enough in the history of commerce, you will see these store put the old "general stores" and Feed and Grains" out of business just like Walmart has displaced Main street recently. I think that 25 years from now, when historians are looking at the the genesis of retail, they will put containerized shipping up there with the invention of the cotton gin and the printing press.
Your comment on dying from a simple cut hits home with me as my mother was orphaned by age 6 halfway due to her father, a horse of a man, who came 1/3 of the way around the globe from Poland to make a better life for him and his wife, stepped on a nail in a Pittston mine and died 3 days later from tetnus.
I also think you and I would agree the Mayberry people seem to remember actually took place during the end of the Great Depression. It was a time of great hardship, much more like the Cinderella man than the Hollywood produced Andy Griffith show.
Finally, I remember a Bucks County where if you didn't go to college, you went to the Tech school where you learned a skillset that is now performed by mostly by "new immigrants" to this country.
In one short generation, we have "advanced" to the point where I don't have a car to teach my kids how to drive a stick shift, I have to teach my own kids safe gun handling instead of having the Boy Scouts or the HS Rifle team show them and kids have never seen an animal die to provide food for the family... we are moving forward much quicker than any generation in history. That much I know.