new venture would succeed, Vidler and his family declined to attach their name to it, calling it instead the Fair Store, until 1946. The present, thirty-year-old Vidler's sign is faihful to the dime-store genre, with puffy gold lettering on a cherry-red background. Just inside the front door stands the original upright scale and fortune-telling machine, which, after all these years, still asks only a penny for its thoughts. While grown-ups invest a cent for the answers to such weighty questions as "What is my main talent?" children cadge dimes for a lope on Sandy the mechanical horse or a paper bag of popcorn from the fifties dispenser. Vidler's waves its patriotic spirit with flags flapping out front - always the Stars and Stripes teamed with the Canadian maple leaf (a nod to neighbors up the road), sometimes joined by the Union Jack or the New York State flag, depending on who is	visiting East Aurora. As he has done for years, Ed Vidler (Robert's son and, with his brother Bob and other relatives, current co-proprietor) raises the flags every morning, washes the display windows whenever they need it, and sweeps the floors of the store's long aisles. ?Holy smoke,? he says, "I've probably swept five hundred miles of floor over the last fifty years." On the Fourth of July, Vidler's goes all out, stringing banners and bunting between the upper-story windows and sponsoring both a drill team and the K-POW (Kiddie Parade on Wheels), which rolls down Main Street. True to the old-fashioned nature

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