The Blue Collar/White Collar Divide And What The Oracle Community Center Has To Do With It

  The Oracle we moved into in 1979 was a blue collar town. Sure there was a handful of mining executives building on hill tops but everyone else was employed in mine work, ranch work or hard scrabble small business.  Even the revolutionary changes wrought by the Rancho Linda Vista art colony were hands on (blue collar) in nature.  (A visit to the workshops of RLV made that abundantly clear.  Dirty hands, weird weldings, strange fabrications on desert paths and the like were the order of the day.)
  At that time Oracle residents lionized "blue collar" excellence - endurance and skills underground and/or in mill or smelter; cement work, block laying, framing, sheetrocking, roofing; heavy equipment operations.  I rarely heard of someone praising IT skills, lawyering, marketing, accounting or executive management and the like.
  In the economy of local respect, wealth didn't figure.  No one was that rich anyway and the few that had some extra bucks gained no particular esteem for it.  One important venture in the 1980's illustrates my point, namely, construction of the Oracle Community Center. 
  A cracked slab was all that had been accomplished by a group formed up originally to build it.  The slab lay fallow along with the dollars raised to complete the building.  In the early 1980's there were board conflicts (which is a story for another time) but the bottom line is locals turned out to put the building up with whatever skills they brought to the project or were willing to learn on the job. 

Glen Johnson

  Pivotal in this effort was Central Arizona College/Aravaipa Campus building trades instructor Glen Johnson.  Glen took the Community Center project on with several of his classes, pitched in himself, and mentored the rest of us.  Kaz and I loved the guy for who he was and what he accomplished.
  We also noted the number of fellow residents who swung into action workday after workday.  With volunteer labor the building ended up costing $15 a square foot (total 2800 square feet), a remarkable and enduring achievement.