Silver Oak Welcomes You!

Prologue: Candy-bar Cash

My dad worked in the sales department at Amber Waves Agricultural Machinery over on Route 17 near Howardsville for about 20 years. That was before "bookkeeping inaccuracies" scythed the heads clean off Amber Waves' share prices, sending half the dads from Howardsville to Pine Falls home for good in 1967.

Dad found work again pretty quickly at J.T. Williams Grain Elevators & Silos in Evanston doing much the same job for a somewhat lower wage. That was until Mr. J.T. Williams bought the farm in 1970 and his kids, who had no interest whatsoever in anything grain-related, sold the company off to another company that had no interest whatsoever in anything employee-related.

He found work again - at much lower pay this time, but it was still a job - for Whistlin' Pig Soda Pop out of Nathan Ridge up north of here as a delivery truck driver hauling crates of Whistlin' Pig to restaurants and Ma & Pa grocery stores all over the middle of the country. That is, until the company was sliced up into tasty pork medallions and served up with cranberry sauce by 'the fuel crisis' in 1973.

And that was, as they say, that.

Dad, who had always believed what he'd been told about America's companies supporting America's workers, and that if you just worked hard enough for just long enough you could make it somewhere was stunned off his nut for a while, making the living room sofa his permanent residence and taking to spending most of the day in his jim-jams.

This - as a side note - is my first clear memory of my father. A man in blue-striped pajamas with mussed-up, greying hair, watching cartoons with my older brother Tom and myself while drinking smelly liquid from a can we'd get yelled at for touching.

I recall Dad laughing at the cartoons more than we did.

As the story has come to be told, this situation would have continued indefinitely if my mother hadn't have collected up all of her mom-wrath into one great fireball and done something in the early spring of 1974.

That something was to grab my Aunt Trixie with her left hand, and my Aunt Ellen with her right - both of whose husbands were either also unemployed or facing unemployment by that time, I've never been quite sure of the details - and staple both of them down around our kitchen table night after night to pool their knowledge until they came up with a concrete way to rescue their children, and themselves, from the looming peril their husbands had put them in.

Until that point, Mom had been a care-free part-time assistant at Donna's Palace of Hair over in New Rome; a job that required nothing more than jotting down appointments in the big book, trading "girl-gossip" with customers and cheerfully dancing a broom across the linoleum.

Mom had never thought her way two steps past Donna's sci-fi metal-domed hair-dryers because she'd never had to. Money was Dad's department and she'd gladly and gratefully let him have it. She often told us that the only reason she'd ever gotten her silly old job in the first place was for candy-bar cash, the term she used when referring to any money that Dad, The Man Of The House, Our Bread-Winner, didn't bring home.

Well, Our Bread-Winner was now chemically bonded to the sofa and beginning to show real talent in the daytime gameshow category of "TV shows, their plots and characters".

Mom waited patiently, but when it became more than apparent that her husband wasn't going to be girding himself in suit and tie and heading out to joust in the job market anytime soon, her eyes narrowed into slits and she refused to speak more than two words at a time to anybody on any topic.

A few months later - when she was speaking in full sentences again but still looked like she had a mouth full of lemon juice - was when she grabbed her equally lemon-mouthed, slitty-eyed sisters by the hand and they sat down to talk turkey.

It was as plain as day. By embryoing themselves up on the furniture like they'd done, their husbands had unmistakably drop-kicked all their responsibilities to their wives and children straight out the front door and couldn't be relied on for anything anymore - other than perhaps hauling the weekly garbage out to the curb on Tuesday nights. And even that the men needed constant reminding to do.

No, they would have to do something. That was a fact. It was up to them to save what needed to be saved. After all, there were small children to feed, shoes for little feet to buy. Something had to be done.

But what?