HITEVILLE, N.C. - Anthony Cribb was sitting in the courtyard of Southeastern Community College when another student, a middle aged woman, stopped to say hey. They exchanged pleasantries: His family is getting by. Her boys are grown.
''Anthony,'' the woman wondered, ''Have you given any thought to what you're going to do after you finish school?''
Cribb, 41, didn't know quite what to say. The truth is he has thought of little else since the day, a year ago July, when the National Spinning textile mill where he worked as a machinist for 23 years, laid him off, along with scores of his colleagues.
The skills on which he built a comfortable middle-class way of life were suddenly obsolete, the need to learn a new trade at mid-life sudden and scary.
And that was only the start. Anthony had no way of knowing then how swiftly the skein of his life, and of the life of Whiteville, would unravel.
Just two months later his wife, Karen, and then his daughter, Amanda, would find themselves out of work, too. Their stitching of men's suits and shirts was no longer in demand - at least not at the blue-collar wages they were paid.
The scene inside the plant that day, with 300 people crying and holding onto each other, still seems unreal to Karen Cribb, even though it replayed itself in Whiteville and surrounding Columbus County over and over in the months since.
Drawn by the lure of much cheaper labor markets in Mexico and overseas, mills and factories in these communities have been shuttered and gone dark, one after another, throwing 2,200 people out of work. The hulks of the mills still dominate the landscape, like remains of a lost civilization.
''We saw how these plant closings have broken up families,'' said Karen Cribb. ''Never did we think it could happen to us.''
In a campaign year in which the debate has focused on how to spend the spoils of prosperity, the Cribbs, and people like them, feel entirely left out of the conversation. They have paid the price for a nation's commitment to free trade - a commitment backed by both candidates - but hear little talk of help for likes of them. The plight of the Whitevilles of America, tiny rents in a robust economic fabric, seem to be no one's national priority.
''Where are all the politicians that are suppose to help us?'' Cribb said. ''It's like they all have abandoned Columbus County.''
What Anthony and his family and friends do hear is an exhortation to retrain for the future. Coming from the mouths of politicians and economists, it all sounds so easy.
It isn't. Anthony has been working furiously to retool ever since he lost his job. He's taking college classes in electrical engineering while supporting his family on a federal unemployment grant, trying to trade his craftsman's feel for the soul of an old machine for the digital intricacies of the new.
But the money is running short, and desperation is edging close. There seem to be no jobs in Whiteville now to match Anthony's new skills. He had his eye on a position at another, more modern, plant in the area, only to learn from the television news that Holtra Chem would be shutting its doors, too.
''He just stared at the screen with his mouth hanging open,'' Karen recalled.
Anthony can't bear the thought of leaving town, but he knows that his hand may have been forced. Not so far off are the gleaming high-rises and bustling businesses of Charlotte and Raleigh and North Carolina's vaunted research triangle. Still, it hardly seems right to him that in 21st century America, the price of progress should be the dismantling of a community, even a little one, and its way of life.
''It would be one of the toughest decisions I would ever have to make, if it came down to it,'' he later said about leaving Columbus County. ''We have ties here. We have our church family here. We sing in the choir.''
Not so long ago, life seemed good in this county, where rickety watermelon vendors sit off country roads and posh homes are tucked on the lake's edge. There was little reason to think about the future, much less worry about it.
There always seemed to be jobs. For years, Columbus County was known for its tobacco crops; Anthony's father was a tobacco farmer. Then textile mills from one-time manufacturing hubs, like New England began moving here for the same reasons the apparel industry is now moving to Latin America. The lack of unions allowed the mills to pay cheap wages here. By the time Cribb was a senior at West Columbus High School, he had a second-shift job at National Spinning, a yarn processing plant in Whiteville. At noon he'd be home from school to help his father in the fields; at 4 p.m he'd dash for his '69 Chevy and head to work.
Cribb met his future wife in a high school study hall. They married (she was 15, and he was 18) and soon had three children (Amanda, now 22, Heather, 18, and Lance, 10). During that time, work was always steady. Cribb, who wears his blondish hair parted neatly in the middle, moved quickly up the ranks at work. He started as a service man, cleaning up bad yarn bobbings, and was eventually promoted to lead the maintenance crew. Whenever he was called at 2 a.m. to fix a machine, Cribb was up and out of the house.
In the meantime, Karen Cribb found work at Jasper Industries, a shirtmaker, where she'd eventually make $12 an hour. The family bought a modern brick home on 22-acres of farmland outside of Whiteville. The immaculate house is filled with baby blue sofas and a large-screen television.
While life was comfortable, Karen Cribb said, ''people had blinders on here. They didn't see that the world around us was becoming more technical."
Disbelief persisted even as the warning signs grew more obvious.
At National Spinning, the plant began shifting to automation a couple of years ago, said Buford Hutchins, the plant manager. Employees like Cribb were warned they should at least try to learn automation.
''The machine that Anthony was working on - we eventually just pulled the plug,'' he said. ''He was one of those unfortunate ones.''
Cribb, a softspoken man, remembers he refused to shake the extended hand of the manager who let him go that day.
''I had worked for this company for 23 years, and now I had no insurance for my family,'' he said. ''By the grace of God, we have been OK.''
At first, he admits, the challenges of the new economy seemed surpassing strange. He remembers standing with his son Lance in a crowd at the old train depot in Whiteville listening to President Clinton speak about the importance of high-speed Internet in rural communities. While Cribb was excited to see a president finally come to Whiteville, he left the event wondering how the Internet was going to put food on his table.
Still he and hundreds of former mill employees - tobacco farmers, machinists and seamstresses - have followed the advice of county leaders like Brantley Briley, the president of Southeastern Community College, who is encouraging people here to come to his school and learn about computer technology. Demsey Herring, the county adminstrator, agrees, saying the county can attract industry only if there is a skilled and ready labor force.
But students say retraining comes with a tremendous cost. Single mothers who made $12 an hour without a high school diploma in the mills are hardpressed to remain in the classroom when rent is due. Cribb sits determined in his computer labs with students half his age and burly men who until spent their lives on the farm or lifting machinery. His wife and eldest daughter were eligible for a federal grant that pays for up to two years of classroom training for people who lost jobs to foreign competition.
The money will run out before work is found. But they refuse to give up hope.
''By April it is all gone,'' said Karen, who is studying to be a nurse. ''We are going to try to stay and graduate even if it kills us."
Anthony and Karen have tried to explain the change to their young son, who wonders why movies and dinners out at ''Jimmy's'' had gone by the boards.
''We'd explain that we are going to school, and hopefully we will see better days ahead,'' he said. ''We said, if God blesses us, we will be doing even better than we were before.''
