Long ago, in the sepia days between world wars, the Chubbs and the McLaughlins were neighbors on West Court Street in Doylestown.
Harry Chubb was assistant postmaster of the Bucks County borough of 5,000, where he and his wife, Ethel, reared seven children in a three-story twin. In a converted carriage factory next door lived auto dealer George McLaughlin and his wife, Anna, parents of three.
By early 1944, with Hitler's forces still dominating Europe, three of those offspring were neighbors anew in England, stationed there with the U.S. Army Air Force.
Staff Sgt. George B. McLaughlin Jr. - friendly, flame-haired "Bud" to those back home - had gone from intellectual pacifist to ball-turret gunner on a B-17 bomber.
Second Lt. Mary E. Chubb, a lively, bespectacled nurse, was tending the sick and wounded with the Women's Air Corps.
Her kid brother, Second Lt. Donald W. Chubb, a slight, fun-loving B-17 copilot, had just arrived overseas.
All three would die within a seven-week span surrounding D-Day, the June 6 Allied invasion of Normandy.
McLaughlin, 26, perished April 28 on a bombing raid over France. Donald Chubb, 22, died May 8 over the English Channel, keeping his shot-up Flying Fortress airborne long enough for crewmates to bail out before the plane exploded. Mary Chubb, 31, was killed June 14 in a plane crash in England.
And yet, 65 years later, the three remain neighbors of sorts back in Doylestown.
They, along with eight other local sons killed in World War II, are namesakes of a unique, postwar neighborhood - an Ozzie-and-Harriet setting at once steeped in history and brimming with life.
Each of the 11 streets in the borough's Maplewood development is named for one of Doylestown's fallen. But that is not all that sets it apart.
Maplewood arose from an unheard-of plan, hatched by the local Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter, to take the peacetime demand for new housing into its own hands.
In 1946, members of VFW Post 175 formed a development corporation, emptied their $38,000 building fund, and bought a 104-acre farm on the outskirts of town. The corporation laid out streets, had the borough annex the land, and began selling lots to returning veterans.
The project was "believed to be the first and only one of its kind in the nation's history," The Inquirer reported in November 1946.
After a strapped and rocky start, an array of Cape Cods, ranchers, and split-levels slowly began to sprout on the farmland east of Swamp Road. Most early buyers were veterans, but sales soon expanded to the public.
When construction ended in the 1960s, roughly 200 houses lined the 11 streets.
Today, empty-nesters mingle with children on bikes on Maplewood's tidy streets, shaded by onetime saplings grown tall and leafy. A 35-acre park, donated by the VFW in 1959, buzzes at night with baseball games and the shouts of children on the playground.
"Every time I come back to Doylestown, I go there," said Dick McLaughlin, 83, Bud McLaughlin's younger brother. "I knew just about all of the people that the streets were named for.
"It's a unique memorial, and I wonder sometimes why it doesn't get more recognition," said McLaughlin, a retired high school teacher and counselor in Naperville, Ill. "It was dedicated to a large group of veterans, it became a beautiful community, and it gave the veterans who came back an opportunity to have affordable housing."
Homes originally purchased for $10,000 now fetch upward of $300,000, and many are passed down within families. Modest by today's McMansion standards, Maplewood is mostly white-collar, but without the heavy starch.
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