Ithaca.
Saroyan’s second model for Ithaca is his own boyhood hometown in central California. Growing up in the “Little Armenia” section of Fresno, Saroyan knew at first hand small-town America, with its bakery (selling day-old pies), its grocery store (run by a clerk who fetched goods for customers), the train depot (where young boys waved to engineers as great trains sped by), the butcher shop, the newspaper office, the bus station, the telegraph office, the library, and so on. Ithaca’s high school is modeled on Saroyan’s own Emerson High School, with his own painful memories of studying ancient history and of athletic competitions on the race track with the hurdles (again the imagery of ancient Greece intrudes).
In Saroyan’s mind the two Ithacas merge to become one, not only an archetypal Norman Rockwell small town, but one recognizably real and representative of real American towns during the 1940’s.
Macauley house. Ithaca home of the Macauley family, headed by the widowed Katey Macauley. The modest house stands on a tree-lined street; it has a large, inviting front porch, complete with swing, and friends and neighbors pause, while walking, to chat up those outside the house. Singing is a part of the family’s daily life, as are the long heart-to-heart chats in the kitchen, which was often the center of life in working-class American homes during the period in which this novel is set. The household follows regular hours: the hour when children eat breakfast and dash off to school, the hour when the mail arrives, the afternoon break between school and work, the return, late at night, for a cup of coffee before retiring for the day. It is very much a 1940’s routine, set in a pre-media era, when entertainment was largely self-generated and interpersonal, and interaction was the norm. The Macauley house is more than merely a place in Ithaca; it represents America to soldiers uprooted and sent overseas by the war.
Telegraph office. Part of Saroyan’s genius was to set the dramatic against the prosaic. While Ithaca symbolizes tranquillity, and the Macauley home represents security, the local telegraph office is the door to the wider, more dangerous world beyond rural California. Through it comes the daily news that often transforms the town, as when reports of its sons killed in the war arrive. It is thus not surprising that the telegraph clerk, Mr. Grogan, drinks and takes heart medicine and eventually has a fatal heart attack. His death is symbolic of the frequent bad news that enters tiny Ithaca.