Longtime Sylva merchant Sol Schulman will celebrate his 90th birthday this Friday, March 15. Friends prepared this banner - 45 on each side - for the occasion. Schulman has been in the same building since 1933; none of the merchants on Sylva's Main Street when he started remain. Schulman, who has a downtown street named for him, is a former Sylva Town Board member and was instrumental in organizing the local Chamber of Commerce and first Lion's Club. He has served as president of the Merchants Association, on the Harris Regional Hospital board of directors and on the Wachovia Bank board of directors. He has been named Jackson County Citizen of the Year and is a Western Carolina University Patron of Honor. Throughout his 69 years as a Sylva businessman, Schulman has become well-known for his many charitable contributions, including local high school and college scholarships.
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In a world that seems to change so fast we are no longer able to know for sure our lives will even be similar to the day before when we awake, it is nice to know some things have not changed.
Though it is rare to find, when we do, that stability is hard to describe. But you know it when you see it, hear it, feel it.
Small towns used to have so much of this sameness that those of us who used to be young couldn't wait to escape it. We craved for change; we begged for anything new and different. Sometimes, many times, even to our detriment. It is not that change isn't a good thing. Most of it is. Few of us would regret the day air conditioning became common or crave for outhouses over our nice, warm, indoor bathrooms on a winter night. Just a glimpse of a world in which diseases we might have thought extinct such as anthrax is not a cause to long for the old days. But this week, 69 years after a young man arrived in Sylva and opened his business on Main Street, nine decades after the same man was born, all of us can take just a moment to reflect on how good it feels to know not only that he has been there, but is still there. Same store, same location, same man. |
Sol Schulman