1984, leaving Champaign

In the fall of 84 I was going nowhere.  I had shopped around my junior college data processing certificate that I had earned three or four years earlier all over town and nobody was buying it.  I had worked in the interim as a bartender and had a stint at the post office, but as the chill winds of late fall began to blow across the prairie I had no job, no prospects, no nothing.

The corn belt had become part of the rust belt, unemployment was rising in the region, downtown a lot of the stores were now empty windows.  If Champaign had been further west tumbleweeds would be tumbling.

I got into something called The Job Club,  It was for people who had been on unemployment for a long time.  The idea was that looking for a job was a full-time job and you had to put in 40 hours a week at it.  So you reported to this place in the morning and they fed you and they provided these resources on how to find a job, and telephones and this guy who went around with a positive mental attitude to raise your spirits, and you know, that kind of crap.  They would have us assemble for pep talks and I guess that would raise us briefly, but once the pep talker was gone we would look around at each other and what a bunch of losers, and I was one of them.

Still I looked through their lists of employers and I made my phone calls and I changed my resume every other day, and nada, and I had been through every possible employer in town and they had all given me thumbs down, so the only thing to do was to leave town.

Leave town?  It had never occurred to me until that moment in the Job Club.  Austin Texas, everybody knew it was a boomtown. I knew a couple people who lived there.  So there it was.  When I had entered the Job Club that morning I was going nowhere and when I left that afternoon I was going to Texas.

It took a little while to take care of all the details. What about all my stuff?  My cat?  It was right after Christmas that I took off.  I had my stuff all boxed up, I had left my keys with a friend who would come in later to be there when Fedex came to put it on their truck and moved it to Texas.  I headed out to the bus stop in the snow with a suitcase in either hand.

The bus was late.  I missed my train to Chicago.  But there was another train in an hour.  I spent Christmas at my parents' house and then I went back downtown to catch the Texas Eagle. The thing is I loved Chamapaign.  All my beer drinking buddies lived there, I had a history of twenty years there. I knew it like the back of my hand.  I hated to leave.  Maybe I didn't have to.

I stopped in the doorway.  I could go back.  I paused maybe five seconds and then I pushed on.  A couple days later I was walking through my new neighborhood on New Years Day and stopped at a convenience store to get an ice cream bar to cool off.