For Some Teen-Agers, Graduation Is Push Into World of Bosses, Bills
The tall smokestacks of glass factories oversee this weary town, beckoning each new generation into the plants where their fathers spent their lives.
Millville High School is preparing to remit its June quota to the factories, and to the shops and stores that feed on the factory paychecks. The quota is smaller now; more graduating seniors go to college. But many still stay to take their places beside their fathers.
Kevin Scarlato will stay. The 18-year-old was planning to take a bittersweet walk in cap and gown this month to the stage set up on the school football field to collect his diploma and leave a time that he will never recapture, but always remember. His life, as he sees it, now will be a reflection of his father’s: a life of work.
57% Headed for College
About 2.8 million teen-agers will graduate from high school this month. Of those, about 57% will keep going to school in a two- or four-year college. Others will go into the military, raise families or do nothing. And about one in three will leave the graduation ceremony to go to a job.
For those young men and women, high school graduation is a sudden doorway. One day they are in a miniworld of football and friends. The next day, they enter an unforgiving world of bosses and bills and responsibility.
“It’s going to hit them between the eyes,” said Wayne Ingling, one of four guidance counselors for the 1,600 students at Millville High School.
Kevin Scarlato approaches the doorway eyes open, eager. “I’m going to miss school. I’ll miss friends, sports, coaches. But I’m glad to get out. No more homework. No more rules for things like dress codes,” he said.
End of Hard Work
“Graduation does mean something.” He broke into a delighted smile. “It means the end of a lot of hard work.”
Kevin is confident bordering on brash. He made a success of high school: his B-average grades were tops in his vocational class; he played football and track; and his lean, muscular good looks were such that his mother said: “I’ve listened to more than one broken-hearted girlfriend crying on the phone.”
“He’s a smart kid, a pretty good kid,” comes the typical assessment from one of his teachers. Not perfect: his parents have been called to school more than once to hear about minor infractions.
For Kevin, there was never any doubt about what he would do after high school. The pattern was set by his father, and his older brother. Since 1955, the Scarlatos have run the garage and filling station near their home in tiny Cedarville, a small community nine miles from Millville, and have run the heating oil delivery business there.
Kevin would go to an auto mechanic’s school in Cleveland, Ohio, for nine months, and then return to work with his brother and father in the white-gable, three-bay station.
“I like auto mechanics,” he said. “It’s fun. It’s easy. It’s good money.” He picks it up quickly, said his auto shop teacher, Robert Chambers. “Things come real easily to Kevin,” Chambers said.
His career choice was not an offhand decision. Kevin’s mother wanted him to go to college. “This kid has a real quick mind for math,” she said. “My neighbor’s kid is an accountant and he’s done real well.” But Kevin’s decision is an affirmation of respect for the honest work done by his father, and the elder Scarlato quietly notes the honor. He is willing to pay the $10,000 it will cost to send Kevin to the top-rated trade school in Cleveland.
‘College Wasn’t for Me’
“College just wasn’t me,” Kevin said. “It isn’t interesting to me to go to school for 12 years, and college for another four. I had in my mind what I wanted to do with my life.”
And he knows where he wants to do it. “Leave town?” Kevin ponders the question, quizzically. “No, I don’t plan on leaving.”
There are many graduates who decline the leave-home mobility of the age, and choose to stay in Millville and the tiny communities like Cedarville that surround it. “We see so many kids that just stay and become ‘townies,’ ” said Ingling. “It seems like it’s hard to leave Millville.”
As recently as 1979, only one in four graduates of Millville High School planned to continue to college. Of last year’s graduating class, 55% did. Warren Elliott, the principal of Millville High School, who graduated from the old high school three years before the present school was built in 1964, thinks the painful economic downturn of the early 1980s and the disillusioning strike helped change attitudes.
“I think the family now looks at a kid going to college as a way out, as a way to get by the economic troubles,” Elliott said.
But there is no shame in Millville in going from high school to work. Wheaton Glass, the largest glass factory and biggest employer here, sniffs somewhat disdainfully at further schooling. The company has a record of promoting factory workers into management, and for most of their work force, “we would not be looking for people who have a large amount of community college,” said David Slack, chief administrator of the company.
“Anyone who wants a job can get it” right out of high school, said Mike Lascarides, who is in charge of promoting economic development in Millville. The town has brought new industries here, but “in the last two to three years, my problem is not as much providing the industry as providing the work force,” he said.
Still, it was the lure of family, not fortune, that kept Michael Scarlato here. His grandfather had emigrated from Italy, stopped in Philadelphia, and settled in Cedarville to grow vegetables. His father, Anthony, kept up the farm, but then began delivering kerosene--carrying it in pails from the truck--and bought the filling station in 1955.
Mike Scarlato carried on the family business. His son Brian, two years older than Kevin, graduated from Millville High School and is now running the repair shop in the garage while Scarlato runs the three fuel-oil delivery trucks. Kevin’s imminent arrival in the family business is a continuation of the family legacy that touches a chord of pride in the elder Scarlato.
“Sure, I am proud of them. I am proud they want to be with me, and work with me,” said the barrel-chested father, 51.
“I had the privilege of being with my father, of working for 20-some years together. Dad has been dead six years now. I tell you what, I miss him. If I had a problem, I could talk to him. If I had to make a decision, I could ask him. All of a sudden, you’re the top dog, and there’s nobody to talk to.”
Both Mike Scarlato and his wife, Helen, can point from their yard to where they grew up. Helen Scarlato’s father worked in the glass factory. She had dreams of leaving Cedarville. “I always thought of what was out there, maybe in California.” But the demands of raising a family somehow consumed the years.
“Whatever my kids were in, I made sure we backed them up,” she said. She worked in the grammar school cafeteria when they were young, and then shuttled them back and forth to sports practices in Millville when they went to high school. “I’ve been there for them. I’m there in the mornings, there at night.”
Both sons have worked in the garage during summers and weekends, but their parents have not pushed the obligation. “We told our kids to enjoy high school,” said Mrs. Scarlato. “These are the fun years.”
Have they been? Kevin shrugs, then assents. “Sports was the most fun,” he said. “You’re with a group of guys, and even at practice when you’re running, running, running, you always had fun.” At only 165 pounds, Kevin still was tenacious enough to play both offensive guard and defensive end, and was named to the all-conference football team this year.
Football Rivalry
He will, he said, always remember the big game of their championship year. Kevin was a junior, and Holy Spirit, the big parochial school from the adjoining county, was rolling to another in its string of conference titles. It was a team Kevin and his teammates could love to hate. “Spirit’s the only team that hits you cheap every play.”
“They were No. 1 in South Jersey, and we weren’t even ranked,” Kevin said. “They had all the nice, fancy uniforms. They had all the talk. But we knew we could beat them.”
It snowed and rained in the week before the game, but the Millville team grimly practiced as Holy Spirit relaxed. “They weren’t expecting us.” Saturday morning dawned fair and sunny as the teams took the field. “On the first play of the game, we had a 4-foot-11 guy who ran downfield and just crushed a 6-footer on their team. That set the tone for the whole game.”
Millville won 25 to 12, and with it the conference championship. “We rubbed it in their face. It was so fun,” he said. “I’ll remember it forever.”
There are many for whom the big game at high school remains a highwater mark in their life. The challenges of adulthood may be more weighty, but not more dramatic nor exciting.
Will Hold on to Friends
Kevin does not intend to let go of those memories, or of the friends he has in school.
“We’ll stay in touch,” he said with certainty. “We all said we’d like to come back and be at the football games and the track meets, to be around. I won’t be playing but I’ll be there.”
He is less certain about other aspects of his life after graduation. First on the agenda is trade school, Ohio Auto Diesel Technical Institute in Cleveland, which will send him away from home for nine months for the first time in his life.
