There are no palm trees on Myrtle Avenue. This pleases Hollywood location scouts, who frequently dispatch film crews here when they need a backdrop that suggests a town in the American heartland. Indeed, in look and feel, particularly the five blocks that run through Monrovia’s Old Town district, Myrtle seems more representative of rural Iowa than metropolitan Los Angeles.

In Southern California, we are an anomaly,” said Pam Fitzpatrick, an owner of the Dollmakers’ Kattywompus toy store. “But across the country, little old towns like this, they are the heart of America.”

Fitzpatrick was speaking last Tuesday, on yet another day of financial bulletins and incessant, worried talk everywhere, much of it centered on fears that the fiscal meltdown would spread, as the oft-repeated saying went, “from Wall Street to Main Street.” A front page headline in The Times captured the zeitgeist well: “Is now a good time to panic?” Fitzpatrick’s answer was no.

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