Be Aware!

I understood from my father and uncle that in the nineteen thirties and forties roadside signs competed to lure you off the high road and to interesting attractions. But my time on the road was fairly standard fare – Turnersville – 10 miles, an arrow, and in small print underneath, ” Home of Cecil P. Turner”.

Being curious types, with no particular place to go, my friend and I would sometimes take the detour to Turnersville. The distance to Turnersville didn’t take us too much out of our way. We were on our way to adventure, and who knew where you might find it?

Most times, Cecil P. Turner had been the local mill owner, named the town after himself, and the hulking derelict brick mill was all that was left of economic activity in Turnersville. There were thousands of little Turnersvilles in New England back then. They hadn’t been converted to suburban cookie-cutter stamped out identical clones yet. And most of the people living there had grown up there, and their folks had grown up there.

Big Changes On the Horizon

In fact, they were often pretty nice places. A street or two of impressive brick structures on Main Street, lots of neat wooden two-story homes. A movie house, and a sprinkling of small coffee shops and restaurants. Most kids went to high school and then found jobs at the mill. In fact, big changes were sweeping through, and the mill was nearly on its last legs, Vietnam was looming for many of the draft age young men, and the young women were becoming interested in being more than mill workers, mothers of mill workers, and drudges.

Then my friend and I “swept” into town. We were from Boston, New York City, Baltimore, and places even more exotic—road bums, Pius Itinerants, seekers of truth on the highways of America, and similar bull shit. I’m not gilding it too much. In Turnerville, we were hot stuff. My friend Bill had tall tales of the many places in the world he had visited, and I had the guitar and lots of songs.

On the Road Again

We’d stay for a few weeks. Maybe take jobs at the mill. I’d play at the local church coffeehouse. Then something would happen, and we’d decide to head out again, maybe go to Montreal. Sometimes it was a local girl asking if one of us was going to get real serious, or the job proved to be too boring for adventurous types like us. Off we’d go.

Memories

Well, that was then, and this is now. A few years ago, I wound up in Turnerville. It was by accident. As we were eating at a restaurant, the buildings on Main Street seemed familiar; the mill was in the right place, now some kind of “tech innovation center.” But the people were all different. Turnerville was now a cookie-cutter clone, no longer a unique place. The community had had a washing out – the original residents had long ago been supplanted by waves of new folks looking for housing away from the city.

Community is not just people. It’s the continuity of people and institutions. When you have a nearly wholesale replacement, it’s hard for the community to survive. I’m sure that something new would grow in Turnerville, via the local Historical Society, it might remember something of what it was. But it would never be Turnerville again.

So, getting back to what I’d put on a billboard on the highway? It’s a quote from a forgotten Greenwich Village poet, Mother Hibbard. He said, “Be aware, traveler, you’ll never pass this way again.” I’d paste that up as a hopeful and cautionary message. You know, like that Paul Simon song Slip Sliding Away,

Slip slidin’ away
Slip slidin’ away
You know the nearer your destination, the more you’re slipping away.

Well, Onward!