Thomas Wolfe was wrong. You not only can go home again, you should. If only for a day.

As part of a story on the economy recently, I visited my hometown of Winthrop, Mass. I lived there for the first eighteen years of my life. A peninsula, it juts out into Boston Harbor just at the start of the north shore. Only one small square-mile, it's home to over 18,000 people, making it the state's most densely-populated town.

And it's having a very, very tough time right now.

Only minutes from downtown Boston (by water), Winthrop is even closer to Logan International Airport. As in, mere yards from some runways. While a convenient location for city commuters, the airport proximity has always kept Winthrop's property values somewhat depressed. Thus, tax revenues have not kept pace with other towns, especially others similarly situated right on the ocean.

As a consequence, Winthrop has come to rely heavily (25 percent) on state aid to supplement the town's budget. This year, as with many other cities and towns, that aid has been dramatically slashed, leaving Winthrop with shortfalls in vital services that it frankly has nothing but deeply painful ways of making up.

But its citizens try.

In January, the library was forced to close. Friends of the Frost Public Library went into emergency fundraising mode and have managed to keep it open at least until a crucial budget override vote is taken in May.

The Senior Center, a haven for many of town's 4000 elderly, has been forced to close its doors save for three days a week. Should the override fail, it will likely close for good.

The town's Fire and Police departments are already operating at dangerously skeletal levels. The Police Chief was laid off last year. The new, acting Chief, Terry Delahanty describes one recent night when two suicide attempts were called in within minutes of one another. He now has only two officers on the street.

"I sent both to one, then the other one came in, and I had to get one of them to the other one as soon as I could," Delahanty explains quietly. "What else could I do? That's the situation we're in right now."

Fire Chief Paul Flanagan's family has been fighting fires professionally for over a century. He's good people; I went to high school with him. And there's pain on his face when he talks about doing ever more, with ever less, his men's safety -- and the town's -- ever in the balance, and ever on his mind.

His firehouse in Winthrop Center desperately needs new windows; they haven't been replaced since horses pulled the town's fire apparatus.

No money.

So Flanagan held a fundraising raffle recently to raise the money himself. No money to professionally install them, so his firemen offered to install them themselves.

"Hey, they're part of this town, too, and they want to pitch in," shrugs Flanagan.

There's a lot of pitching in going on in Winthrop right now. If the May 19 override fails to pass, there will need to be a lot more pitching in.

A lot of voters don't like passing overrides. They haven't done well in Winthrop, either. Six in the past decade; only one passed -- two weeks after 9/11.

And who does like an override? Let's face it, it means paying more money. And many cities and towns -- Winthrop certainly included -- have made some lousy choices and have been unwilling or unable to shake some lousy practices over the years when it comes to managing money.

But guess what?

Elderly people with nowhere else to go still need attention during the day. When your home catches fire, you would prefer a prompt response. When you hear your backdoor being forced in in the middle of the night, you would like to hear that loud siren only seconds after making that breathless call to the police. And when your kids are learning to read, it's a wonderful thing to be able to do like you did and go to the library to take out books to help raise a more literate young adult.

But that's just me.

With an admittedly old-fashioned notion of community, shared sacrifice and an admittedly sentimental attachment to my hometown.

After all, regardless of where one lives now, you only have one hometown. It's not a choice, which makes it a little like family that way. And override or not, it's tough to see family struggle.