Silver Oak Welcomes You!

A Stitch In Time

When they opened their doors, A Stitch in Time was sandwiched between a hokey wild-west themed restaurant on one side called Lunch at the O.K. Corral and on the other In the Home But Not Of It, a Christian needs shop with an impressive array of wooden Jesus plaques and just about any home furnishing you might ever want your favorite Bible verse emblazoned on. 

I was quite partial to a shiny lilac toilet seat cover sporting the outline of a dove and a verse about the virtues of tidiness. 

I was five years old. Tastes are notoriously suspect at five years old.

Out the shop windows, you could watch all of the traffic passing by down Silver Oak Boulevard, the main street through town, and we had a clear shot across the street at Tim's Trinkets, a glass-bead and antique junk shop that always had a mysterious, dusty reek to it even when it was new, and whose owner, the eponymous Tim, never would let you touch anything; Framed! a DIY picture frame joint that didn't last out the '70s; and the first few feet of Hog Heaven, a rustic ice-cream parlor notorious for its 12-scoop bonanza called "Piggy Piggy" that they served in a bright pink bowl and you could win a blue ribbon with a picture of a smiling pig on it just for finishing.

Tourists simply couldn't get enough.

Considering the whole region had been pawing the ground for Silver Oak Village's two street-by-four street grid to finally fill up so they could take it all in for themselves after being so maliciously subjected to Silver Oak Corp's lay-it-on-thick marketing campaign for as long as they had, it still came as quite a shocker how insanely popular Silver Oak Village instantly became. At least for everyone who, like my mom and aunts, had crossed their own fingers and the fingers of all of their friends before taking several deep breaths and signing a lease for shop space.

Even after the initial hub-hub of the grand opening quieted down and the newness of the place had worn off, Silver Oak Village continued to pull 'em in in droves – especially once the seasonal festivities and festivals calendar started and they opened up the Thespiana Play House and began offering cheap workshop space to artisans .

And if that wasn't enough, they built a three-story tourist information center on Lancelot Promenade that looked like the witch's house from Hansel and Gretel, put in an RV/ mobile home camping grounds on the outskirts of the Village so they could seriously start marketing to wanderlust-crazed retirees, and took to loudly demanding that all the State Welcome Centers carry a never-ending supply of Silver Oak brochures.

Which they did.

If you've ever been to Silver Oak, or had your mailbox stuffed like a teddy bear with any of the many full-color Silver Oak Tourism brochures, you'll know what I'm talking about. 

No shop owners were more flabbergasted than my mom and aunts. Their idea seemed to have been the right thing at the right time in the right place, and people started coming in again and again, and more importantly, leaving wearing smiles on their faces and swinging bags containing half the store.

According to the official statistics, A Stitch In Time grew in customer base and profit right along with, and sometimes ahead of, the rest of Silver Oak Village, which, around 1980, dropped the provincial sounding "Village" out of its name and continued under the sleeker and classier "Silver Oak".

Accompanying this name change, who couldn't have seen it coming, were a slew of dippy marketing slogans – the one I remember best from that time period being "Silver Oak: The Camelot of the Mid-West".

Dippy slogans or no, after about four years in Camelot and a complete examination of the account books, the three joint owners of A Stitch In Time collectively emitted a sigh of relief and slunk down in their chairs with exhausted, but satisfied grins on their faces. The books told them in unprejudiced figures what they'd felt in their fingers for a while: that although they weren't entirely out of danger yet, the worst was over and their gamble had paid off.  

After that, there was no stopping them.

When, along about the mid-80s, the Christian needs store people suddenly closed up shop and moved to Virginia to be closer to a televangelist they were in thrall to, Mom and my aunts didn't hesitate to sloosh into their much, much bigger unit, padding out their stock and adding to it cross-stitch fabric, hundreds of counted cross-stitch pattern books, an entire Parisian fashion season of crinkly dress patterns in paper envelopes, a forest of fabric bolts suitable for sewing or pre-cut for quilting, sewing baskets and mini-scissors in the shape of nightingales, and an entire phalanx of notions on cardboard wheels.

They were now the biggest shop on Silver Oak Boulevard and were quickly becoming not only one of the most frequented and popular shops in town, but the address for sewing materials for a good 200 miles in any and all directions.