Silver Oak Welcomes You!

A College Is Announced

Garnet and Crystal, Aunt Trixie's oldest daughters and Aunt Ellen's only kid, Mike, had already moved away from home by the time our respective moms started seeing Tom, then myself, and a few years later Amber, as the next wave of low-cost labor. 

By time I started hocking knitting needles and sewing scissors, Garnet was already married and had moved two hours away to West Linden where she was working as a secretary. Crystal, who dropped by A Stitch in Time on occasion to snap her chewing-gum at everyone and stand in the way, was living in a trailer park with a beer-soaked construction worker and their three kids: Scooter, Annie Lynn and Jimbo. 

Mike, on the other hand,  who of all of us was the only one who never did more than a week's duty in the shop, was happily spending his days in Chicago making "independent films" and do a little bit of armed extortion work on the side. Although,  we didn't know about that until later when he got busted and was stupid enough to call Uncle Chester to post bail for him. His shocked parents had thought he was an insurance adjuster. 

If reading labels to old ladies and giving moral support to newly-wedded wives distraughtly attempting to choose a pattern for their first self-sewn Easter dress wasn't enough, Silver Oak was about to change its spots and inadvertently change ours, too

You see, as Silver Oak unfurled its leaves of sophisticated commerce in the 1980s, ambition in the direction of culture was not far-behind. 

The mayor and his crew of art-tie yuppies, all major shareholders in Silver Oak Corp (the firm that owns the village), decided that  a community college would be just the thing to suck in those stubbornly resistant people who had not yet had the unique pleasure of spending down to their last dime on Main Street or eating themselves into a gluttonous stupor at the town's fine dining establishments.

It wasn't a bad idea, considering the next opportunity for adult education lay some 120 miles east in Indian Point. 

There were small, private colleges dotted around but they were expensive and meant for kids from other parts of the nation, kids who spoke like the people on TV and whose parents did have to worry about things like mortgages and car payments. 

No, nobody was considering the locals and it was time they did. Just because you happened to reside in the middle of god-forsaken cornfield didn't mean you should be cut off from bettering yourself. 

Silver Oak Community College was going to be a regional treasure, that was a fact. It was going to be a shining beacon of learning, and the mayor vowed to employ only the best teachers he could get his hands on so that all and sundry would be able to partake of the best education available anywhere. 

You could tell by the teary expression on his face when he publicly announced these historic plans at the Silver Oak Columbus Day Weenie Roast that he was serious. And that, as God was his witness, he truly and sincerely  hoped that all the tractor-jockey yahoos  who were tottering around in Sir Gawain Park half-shnockered on cheap beer and threatening to go down from sun-stroke would know how to appreciate the great things he was going to provide them with. 

All this brouhaha about a community college happened in the early '80s but despite all the pretty words and promises, it took them until 1990 to actually get the facilities open.

As for me, I'd been working at Ron's for about a year and a half by then and was starting to get nervous about my brother being right and that no other employment was going to materialize. I was starting to have visions of myself as a 30-year-old still bleeping cards and restocking shelves and it was keeping me awake at night.

There was no use in going door-to-door in Silver Oak, of course. All the shops were more or less like ours, family-run businesses that didn't have real, paid employees. There was nothing but temp work on offer in Nathan Ridge and the once grand industrial mecca of Howardsville was almost a ghost-town by that time and not even worth the gas of driving over there to poke around. 

Tom was having a hard run of it, doing odd jobs hither and thither. Friends from high school who dropped in at Ron's said they weren't fairing much better and that I was lucky to have what I did. Crystal and Amber were still in school but not for much longer, and the pickings for them when they graduated looked worse for them than they did for us. 

So when the grand opening of the Silver Oak Community College was announced with billboards, leaflets and the promise of betterment for all, interest, and hopes, were accordingly high.