The Only Rubes In Cashmere Are From The City

CASHMERE - Choosing seats for the Monday night City Council meeting, one little old gray-haired lady said to another:

"Let's go down front so we can yell at people."

Great, I thought, little old ladies in a screaming match. It doesn't get much better than that.

Yell at who, I asked.

"Maybe you," Lady One said. "Who are you?"

A reporter, I said. From Seattle.

"Oh, then, yes. We'll yell at you," they said.

As it turned out, it wasn't necessary to identify my place of origin. I had walked into the hall early and a row of people seated along one wall immediately began exchanging glances with me and mutters with one another. A consensus emerged. City person, they said.

Ooh, that hurt. In a town like Cashmere, calling somebody a city person is about the same as saying they don't have enough sense to fill an espresso cup.

How'd they know, I wondered.

It's your coat, a man said.

What's wrong with my coat? Don't they have Gaps here?

No, it turns out, they don't. They also don't have Nordstrom or Kmart or Wal-Mart; Costco or Les Schwab Tires. In fact, except for the gas stations, they don't have any national retail chains. That is a large part of the problem they gathered here in City Hall to discuss.

What they have instead is Liberty Orchards, a local company that makes fruit candy sold under the quaint names of Aplets and Cotlets.

I came to Cashmere to report on a debate over whether the city should rename a couple of streets: Cottage to Cotlet Avenue, Mission to Liberty Orchard Way. This had been reported previously as a demand made by Liberty's president, Greg Taylor, in exchange for which Taylor would not move his company and its 175 jobs out of town.

One-hundred seventy-five jobs makes Liberty the second-biggest employer in town. That's not bad for something that started out 77 years ago as a desperate measure to do something with apples and apricots that were otherwise going to spoil, be thrown into the Wenatchee River and wash away. Losing those jobs, and the tourists and sales taxes attracted by Liberty, would be a huge blow to a town already contracting economically.

Cashmere, like a million small towns everywhere, is bypassed by transportation and communication systems that are, from a local commercial perspective, far too efficient. It is simply too easy for local people to go elsewhere to buy everything they need, and for tourists to leave without ever arriving.

I expected to find a battle between a cowering local populace and a fierce, footloose entrepreneur. It wasn't quite that way. For one thing, Taylor's family has owned Aplets for three generations. For another, he didn't dream up a list of demands, then present them as a ransom note to the city.

After the collapse of one of his main warehouses in last winter's record snows, Taylor began looking to move his business into a location with more visibility and enough room to consolidate all his operations in one place. He found some warehouses along the highway in Leavenworth that looked promising. He says he had no intention of telling Cashmere politicians of his plans. They found out and came to him, asking what they could do to keep Liberty in town, a fact confirmed by Mayor John Hunter.

Taylor's main concern was a state law that forbid putting a billboard advertising his business along the highway.

But the billboard law does allow signs giving motorists directions. Thus, the plan was hatched to rename streets with Liberty's signature products. It seemed a harmless enough ruse on the state Department of Transportation, or it did until out-of-town media began caricaturing the thing as corporate blackmail a la the Seattle Mariners or Seahawks.

So it made some sense when I showed up at the meeting and found that a lot of people thought the real villain was me, not Taylor. They actually cheered when the City Council approved one of the name changes.

No wonder they don't want me around, I thought. These people all seem to be in this together.

Terry McDermott's column appears Tuesday and Thursday. His phone message number is 515-5055. His e-mail address is: tmcd-new@seatimes.com