Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 11, 1994 TAG: 9408030001
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: SALTVILLE LENGTH: Medium
``The town was so numbed by it that an eerie silence has descended nearly everywhere,'' she writes in the preface to her new book, ``Company Town Shutdown,'' just released by Berwick Publishing of Annapolis, Md., where Turnage lives now.
In 1971, she worked at Virginia Highlands Community College in Abingdon. She was recently widowed, with four children and only recently back in the work force when Don Puyear, then president of the school, assigned her the task of setting up a Job Preparedness Center to help the former Olin employees gear up for new jobs.
``Oddly enough, probably because I was proving myself in a new job, I never stopped to consider the impossibility of the assigned task,'' she recalled.
``Two years of rumors had not prepared the people for what was about to happen to them - the loss of more than 900 jobs in a town of 2,500,'' she said. ``More than 70 percent of the community's employable adults suddenly found themselves unemployed.''
Saltville had been a company town, with generations of the same families working at the chemical complex. Its closing drew national attention and was chronicled in places like Life magazine, because it was seen as something that would happen in other places as new environmental regulations raised costs of pollution controls.
Indeed, Turnage said, such events are ``now so common that we as a nation have become numb to the impact and often impotent at getting the town's and people's lives back in order. Even with considerably more time, money, manpower and experience to go by, many communities have failed to recover from the economic blow of an industry's withdrawal.''
She wondered if that was the eventual fate of Saltville, when she came back in the winter of 1993 to visit it, fearing that she might find boarded-up storefronts and drab Christmas decorations.
Instead, she found store windows decked out with seasonal decorations, a new chain grocery store and drug store on Main Street, a bank that had doubled in size, a medical clinic, and young people on the sidewalk ``laughing and talking, oblivious to the fact that, before they were born, news media predicted Saltville would become a ghost town.''
The town had also began to go after the tourist trade with an annual Saltville Festival. The one for this year was held over the July 4 weekend, when Turnage was on hand to autograph copies of her book.
Turnage, who holds a doctorate in higher education from Virginia Tech, had been coordinator of the learning laboratory and director of learning resources at Virginia Highlands when she got the Saltville assignment. She has since worked as a dean at two other community colleges, assistant to the president at Bluefield (W.Va.) State College, project director with the American Association of Community and Junior Colleges, vice president for public affairs at George Mason University, and vice president for university relations at Ohio University.
When she retired in 1992, she began looking through the many boxes of material she had accumulated during her career and found the last one held documentation on the Saltville project.
``I was just absolutely ecstatic as I read through the things in that box and I thought, my golly, I've got a book here,'' she said.
``I had more material than anybody. I had more than the town had, I had more than the college had,'' she said. ``Then I started trying to puzzle the thing out. I mean, I didn't have the slightest idea how to write a book.''
When she moved on to another school, Saltville Town Council had passed a resolution of appreciation for her work at the center which included encouragement for her to someday put the Saltville story in writing.
``That has been my life, as you can imagine, for the last year and a half,'' she said. ``I have been so absorbed in it that I haven't really been retired at all.''
She said the book is actually a case study. ``Saltville's experience may provide guidance for communities in similar crises. That is why this book has been written.''
The book has four parts: the crisis that followed the shutdown, how the community college handled training for new jobs, other community activities in the town's struggle to continue without the support of its only industry, and looking back to see how successful it all was and what has been done since.
Copies of the book can be purchased for $10 (adding $2 for postage and handling) from Berwick Publishing, 912 Berwick Dr., Annapolis, Md. 21403.
by CNB