Back in my day I walked to school, rain or snow, 3 ½ blocks each way and again at lunchtime. Not like today when Maggie can just roll out of bed and cross the street. And I was always on time.

Some things have changed since I was up here getting my diploma 30 years ago. Back when I was in school we had Watergate and the Vietnam War.

You know what makes me sick?

All this pessimism today!

Sure, some bad stuff was going on back in my day, but the thing that really scared us back then was World War Three. Nuclear war was commonly expected to wipe us all out before “the year two thousand”.

Now we got “Global Warming!” You kids today have it easy. You don’t know what doom and gloom is all about. Back in 1975 the temperature increase they tried to scare us with was about 150,000 degrees. And it was going to happen all in one day.

Not like today when most of you expect to outlive the Social Security system.

In my day the optimists were the ones who thought some of us might actually survive nuclear Armageddon. There were weather maps of how the radioactive fallout from all the major targets would likely blow around that showed that this area had one of the best chances of survival east of the Mississippi.  So the people around here we might luck out and live like cavemen.

Today’s pessimists are shrill pipsqueaks compared to the ones we had. In college I had friends who were so gloomy about the future that they insisted we should never have kids because it would be wrong to bring them into such an awful life and doomed planet. I wonder what those guys are doing today? 

We still have a few people like that, but the good news is that the end of the world scenario is a lot less severe. Now that we made it past the year 2000, the pessimists haven’t agreed on a new deadline. It’s all sort of sketchy.

Graduation is a time for optimism. When my class graduated, we were mostly optimistic and proud, really. Just like you are. Back in 1975 the boogey man of the dread “Year two Thousand” was still far enough in the future that most of us planned our lives as if we still had time to do something worthwhile.

 By New Years Eve of 1999 the looming specter of the Year Two Thousand had withered up to the pathetic Y2K, where our worst fear was that the computers might not work in the morning.

And then when nothing went wrong on January 1^st we felt gypped, because we hurried home from the party early, just in case.

Graduation is a time for you to be optimistic and for your families and teachers to be proud that you have arrived successfully at one of the great rites of passage.

Usually at graduation this podium is occupied by a past Andover graduate that went on to be somebody out in the world. Their message is, growing up in Andover was great! Now it is time for you to get on with it and go out into the world and be make something of yourself. They say  “I did it and you can too.” That’s an optimistic message.

About once every decade or so the graduation speaker is not someone who left, but someone who stayed, or in my case, left and came back. Encouraging you graduates to look for your best opportunity is the proper thing to do at this time.

What bugs me is that it is taken for granted, just as naturally as day follows night, that your best opportunity is somewhere else. This is a very pessimistic vision of the future of Andover. That we have nothing to keep you here.

This is nothing new. My generation got the same message. In our Junior High social studies class our teacher, Carlyle Carmody had us learn what industries all the cities and lager towns in New York State were known for.  We learned that Rochester made photographic film. We learned that Yonkers made elevators and Corning made glass. Andover was the last in the list and the punch line was Andover made nice people.  It was understood that this product was for export and we were told to be proud of how well many Andover graduates were doing in various roles all over the country.

I graduated in 1975. Then to my parent’s horror took a year off to bum around Europe before going to college. I then spent a year at Alfred, three years at Syracuse University, where I met my wife Susan and two years at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale where I got my Master’s degree in, believe it or not, Metalsmithing.

My first and only job after graduation was to work for a year and a half for an artistic metal shop up near Brockport . I made copper candlesticks.

My boss had a wonderful way of making every suggestion I offered into a lecture about how it should be done, not the way I was suggesting. But I learned a lot about business and marketing and keeping my nose to the grindstone, which in my business is more than a figure of speech.

 In January 1984, eight and a half years after graduation from High School, I was married with year old baby. I quit my job moved back to Andover to set up my own shop.

I was very fortunate to have people that welcomed me back and did a lot to help me get started. Karl Wittie, Kyle’s Dad, generously rented me a room in his workshop on Main Street. The same building where my shop is today. Jim and Greta Gram made a wealth of equipment and knowledge available to me at the old Niagara Electron Lab workshop that was on Rochambeau Ave. My family gave me tremendous support.

But for the most part my former teachers, people I knew from Church and other older friends seemed sort of disappointed in me. It was as if saying I was self-employed was just my way of putting a brave face on being unemployed. I was constantly being told of opportunities I should look into, always somewhere other than Andover. These people had my best interest in their hearts. I was doing something that didn’t make much sense to them. I went to art school, but I didn’t go into teaching and now I was trying to make a living selling my art. As everyone knows, artists starve.

My “plan A” had always been to be self-employed.  But I did consider other options. I was offered a job teaching metal art at a university; until they found out I couldn’t also teach weaving. I was also offered a job designing for a company in Texas. I would have taken that one if they had offered it to me while I was there at the interview, but several months later when the call came offering me the job, we were just going out the door to my mother in law’s funeral. That was a time when the value of having family near by was very obvious. Moving that far away from family seemed wrong just then.

My dream job was to be a silversmith at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. A family vacation to Williamsburg when I was 14 did a lot to inspire me to want to be a craftsman.  In 1985, when my work was just starting to sell in a very modest way, we were living with my parents, and had a second baby on the way. I got a call from Williamsburg asking if I would be interested in the job as director of their silversmithing program. I didn’t even ask what it paid. I just said, no thanks.

I didn’t starve and eventually people started to notice that my business plan was working out OK, so they quit bugging me about growing up and getting a real job. Today, Maggie, the third of my six children is graduating from Andover Central School.

Coming back to the small town was not something I did because other plans didn’t work out. It is something I had always planned to do.  I wanted my kids to grow up with the same advantages I had. With houses as easy to buy as they were in Andover, it seemed to me like it was a whole lot easier to get started in a place I already knew I loved, than it would be to take my chances in a more trendy and happening place. I turned down those jobs because I did not want to pull up my roots. And because I wanted the freedom of being my own boss.

Small town kids have some advantages that are not all that obvious. In many ways Andover seems to lack diversity, that cultural buzzword that usually means a mix of ethnic heritage. But kids in Andover grow up with a kind of diversity that runs a lot deeper than skin color or religious tradition.

Most American kids go to large schools where they mainly associate with other kids with similar interests. Their families have more or less the same level of education and income.  In a small school like ours, the athletes and the musical kids, the misfits, the popular kids, the nerds, the brightest and the slowest, the richest and the poorest all know each other. If you have been together since kindergarten you know each other very well indeed.

Since our classes are so small, you are also better at relating to kids older and younger and different than yourselves. Kids coming from a big school, with separate buildings for elementary, middle school and high school. If they then go on to college and graduate school, have been living in a bubble of people all nearly their own age for two decades. Many of these people then find children and older folks pretty hard to relate to. You guys are not going to have that problem.

Many of you are going to college or to the military and many of you will wind up in jobs out there in the world. You now know a small but diverse group of people very well.  What you have learned of human nature from them will serve you well

We all wish you the best. Your families and friends, your teachers, I wish you the best also, that you might find success and fulfillment in your lives after graduation.

A moment ago a lot of people in this audience were getting pretty nervous that maybe I was going to suggest that you stay in Andover. Or that the future of Andover might involve your participation. I am sure that more than a few of you are wincing and saying to yourselves, there’s nothing here for them. We need jobs first. What will they do for a living? Where will their jobs come from?

“Bringing in new business” is a phrase you hear whenever the topic of local jobs comes up. Should we really expect this? Think of where your parents work. Where do the people you know work. Were these businesses, these jobs brought here from somewhere else? A century ago bringing in a new factory was something that might actually happen. Preheater came here in 1928 as a division of a company based in Glasgow, Scotland.  Most international corporations that own some of our local industries bought up local enterprises that began here long ago.

 If you know someone who works at a company that came here from somewhere else, it very likely came here before they were even born. Unless it is one of the few retail chains that have opened a store around here, our businesses, our schools and universities, our public sector jobs and utilities almost all grew right here.

If the experience of the past fifty years is any indicator of the future, new and viable enterprises in Allegany County are much more likely to begin here than they are to move here from somewhere else.

We have problems here, yes, but we also have opportunities. It is out of love and hope for you that you are encouraged to think that your future lies in greener pastures. You are smart. You are capable. On this day you should be optimistic enough to believe in whatever your dreams are. If your dream is to make your future here don’t let the pessimists talk you out of it.

I was interviewed a few weeks ago about my career. The writer started out by saying, “So, when you started you just didn’t know that you can’t make a living in art?” She wanted to know what was my secret.

Don’t we all want to know he secret to success, the secret to happiness, the secret to life, who can tell us the secret?

Like the answer to all of life’s mysteries, the answer can be found in a Country Western song. Several years ago Faith Hill had a hit called The Secret of Life.

The punch line was “the secret of life is there ain’t no secret and you don’t get your money back.”

The point is that the great truths are far from a secret; it is what your parents and your teachers have been trying to tell you all along. Its yelled at you more often than it is whispered.

Pay attention!

Work hard!

Tell the truth!

Treat people the way you would want them to treat you!

Change your oil every 3000 miles.

Successful people don’t get that way by picking the winning lottery numbers. They get up and face the day. The Ten Commandments are no secret. Neither are all those well-worn sayings like “a penny saved is a penny earned” or “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”

Whether you go on to an Ivy League University or go to work on a turnip farm, if you try your best and treat people right you will usually do OK.

I am an optimist about Andover and I really believe in the possibilities for Andover’s graduates. 

The world is still here 30 years after I graduated. Andover will still be here 30 years from now.

Perhaps one of you will offer some words at that future commencement. 

Education is preparation. Now part of it is done, but you are not done learning. We call this gathering today “commencement” because you are now prepared to begin what comes next.

You began school as little children. Now you are men and women. Make this beginning with confidence and optimism. I speak for everyone here when I say how proud of you we are and that we love you. God bless you all.

Stephen Walker and his wife Susan are owners of Walker Metalsmiths Celtic Jewelry on Main Street in Andover. Stephen began his metalsmithing career while still in High School at Andover. The Walkers specialize in Celtic design jewelry inspired by their Scottish and Irish heritage. They are most well known for their Celtic cross jewelry and Celtic wedding rings.