The Holway Family, Next Door Neighbors
I was so glad that Nyel and I didn’t have to be in Portland until mid-afternoon yesterday. It meant that we were able to go to neighbor Susan Holway’s ‘talk’ at the Oysterville Schoolhouse. We’ve missed several of the others during this Fall Series, mostly because of doctoring issues, and I was especially glad to go to this one.
Sue, of course, is almost a decade younger than I. Plus she lived here full-time and, except for one glorious year, I was only a summer kid. Yet, “her” Oysterville and mine overlap in all the most important aspects – the people who lived here, how no one locked their doors and we walked right in, how everyone shared and helped one another. Her final remarks, a poignant wish that the old Oysterville spirit could be rekindled, will stick with me for a long time. No one could have said it better.
Sydney and Johnny, 1939
Sue’s older brother, Johnny, was the one who was my age. He was just a week younger but, summer by summer, he grew taller and smarter than all the rest of us. Susan mentioned yesterday that, when school consolidation happened, the kids from Oysterville’s one room schoolhouse turned out to be the valedictorians and salutatorians. She might have been talking about her own class, but I could relate to that. Ten years earlier, in my seventh grade class at Ocean Park School, we had considered Johnny Holway and Vernon Andrews geniuses. Especially in math, as I remember.
We had to leave just a tad early so we missed the question and answer period, if there was one. I think I would have asked Sue when she thought Oysterville began to change away from that all-inclusive, neighbor-helping-neighbor village that we both remember. More importantly, I’d have asked her how she thinks we can get it back.
If you get answers to those question, perhaps we can implement them in the rest of the country. I don’t like what I see in the larger community, never mind Oysterville. Seeing the divisiveness everywhere is so sad.