FEATURES

Local Trift Store sells Fashionable hand-me-downs
Carolyn Knothe | Staff Reporter

These stores don’t have the glitz and glamour that the clotheing niches in the malls have. There are no mannequins in well-lit windows wearing the latest and most expensive fashions, no swanky wall decorations or wood-paneled floors. Free gifts aren’t bestowed if a purchase exceeds a certain amount, and a floral menagerie of scents doesn’t float through the air around the perfume table.
That’s because these stores don’t have a perfume table, or a well-lit window and they’re not in the mall. Instead of being stocked with expensive clothing designed for the height of fashion, these stores are filled with the hand-me-downs of countless people; clothes that they didn’t want or grew out of. The platoons of T-shirts, pants, dresses and blouses stand at attention and are divided by gender and size, and often color-coded.
Thrift stores are fast becoming a well-known secret way for college students to have an extensive wardrobe and pay a fraction of the price. The clothes that can be rooted out in a thrift store are an original way to make up a wardrobe.
“I like it to be original,” Natalie Noblitt, a senior mass communications major, said. “Like everyone else sees a tie, but I see a belt.”
Noblitt said she shops at thrift stores for pants, t-shirts and jackets.
“I look for things I don’t want to pay what everyone else pays a lot for,” she said.
“I even wear guy’s pants-I have one plaid pair that are so big, but perfect. They fit like hip-huggers.”
Fashion has a persistent way of cycling through the decades, and many of the clothes to be found in thrift stores may be old, but many of the articles can be used in a way to make them fashionable again. Models strut the fashion runways this fall in tweed and plaid, and many of these patterns can be found in the thrift stores.
However, careful fashion sense is required. Some clothing designs, like a turquoise beaded-cummerbund-jumpsuit from the 80s, never come back in style.
“Ladies stuff usually outdates pretty quickly,” said Kayla Fuchs, a sophomore art major. “There’s some stuff you just can’t get away with.”
Since most thrift stores depend on the generosity of people giving away clothes, it isn’t always exactly easy to find the one-of-kind outfits. It requires thinking outside the normal boundaries of clothing-shopping in the little boys’ section to find the best T-shirts, for example.
“You have to be willing to dig,” said Noblitt. “The good finds are usually buried under other stuff.”
Fuchs agreed.
“It depends on when you go,” she said. “You don’t always find stuff. Mostly it’s just about getting lucky.”
Digging through racks of washed-so-often-they’re-thin t-shirts can become tedious, but it’s invaluable to thrift-store shoppers. Going through the clothes one by one, compared to a quick turn of the rack that you might do in a mall store, is the best way to find the quirky, unique or cute clothes. The design or catchy slogan you’re looking for could be behind the next hangar. Persistence and thoroughness is a must in thrift-store shopping, and it often pays off.
“I found a leather jacket for $6,” said Noblitt. “It was total retro-70s and no buttons were even missing.”
The cost of clothes in thrift stores can be huge savings for college students. Usually, the clothes sell for a tiny fraction of their original price, and if they’re in good condition, the deal is incomparable.
“I can get about five things when other people can get only one,” Noblitt said.
“Why pay the price for a thrift store look-alike shirt when you can get it for 25 cents?” Fuchs asked, pointing out that many brands of T-shirts sold in normal stores are designed to look as though they came from someone else’s closet before belonging to your own.
Prior ownership is an issue that turns many prospective shoppers away from thrift stores. But most stores are clean, wash the clothes before they put them on the rack, and shoppers can always choose ‘safer’ articles of clothing to purchase.
“I occasionally get shoes,” Fuchs said. “But mostly I just go for the t-shirts. When you buy someone else’s clothes, you’d be surprised at how many compliments you get.”
And in the end, thrift-store shoppers must learn how to be confident with what they’re wearing, and pull off the tie as a belt, for example.
“I think you have to not really care about what people think,” Noblitt said. “I like  how I can wear things differently.”

Diversity Members speak to Aspiring Teachers about Acceptance
Nicole Ford | Staff Reporter

 The Kiowa Ex-students room is not the usual setting for Dr. Jane Owen’s Human Diversity class, and Amy Giles, Jason Bennett and Anne Kingston aren’t the usual teachers. 
 But on this day, their stories take center stage.
 Amy, sitting at the head table facing the small gathering of students who one day want to be teachers, begins the discussion.
 “I’m intellectual, I study sociology and psychology, I love going to concerts, I’m an artist and I write poetry,” Amy begins.  “And the most inconsequential fact about me is that I’m a lesbian.”
 Just a half-hour before, Amy was rushing to get everything together as Anne and Jason arrived at promptly 9 a.m.  While they are waiting for one of Amy’s few pairs of pants to dry, they discuss sleeping habits.  Amy is content with the eight hours she got the night before.  Jason states, to Anne’s shock, that he generally gets eight hours of sleep in a week.  If he sleeps any more than that, he says, it’s because he’s bored. 
 They traveled the short distance to campus in Anne’s maroon minivan.  The back bumper has a black sticker with a swatch of rainbow color and the words “friend” printed on it.
 Now, fortified with coffee, they face the small class and try to relate their life experiences to the future teachers. 
Amy shares that when she was in the seventh grade, she came out to her friends and family.  Most of her friends were okay with it, and even expected it.  Some of her friends refused to talk to her anymore.  Her mom cried.
“She realized that I was still her daughter, and that I was the same person five minutes after I told her that I was five minutes before I told her,” Giles says.  “We have a good dialogue now.”
Amy, who is from San Antonio, did not have an easy time in school.  She was teased and mocked.  She was threatened and physically harassed.  She saw a gay friend’s head get slammed into the side of a brick wall and remembers that nothing happened to the boy responsible for it. 
Amy recalls one teacher she had in eighth grade, an earth science teacher she got along well with.  Until he found out she was lesbian.
“He kept me after class one day  and told me that it was horrible thing, that I should resist the sinful desire of the devil and seek religious counseling.  He wanted to ‘cure my disease’,” Amy says. 
Amy and her mother had to have a meeting with the school counselor and her teacher. 
“It was a strange thing to realize someone thought I was mentally ill because of who I love.”
Some students are watching Amy with avid interest.  Others are jotting down notes and questions they will ask later.  Some sit quietly.  All are listening.
Owen wants to educate her students about the situations and people they might deal with in their careers as teachers and coaches.  The best way to do that, she says, is to put them face-to-face with real people.
“Textbooks are artificial.  People talking about real experience is more authentic,” Owen says.
Jason Bennett goes back to a point that Amy mentioned earlier; that being gay is only one aspect of the person he is, and that being gay wasn’t a choice he made. 
He says that many people wanted to ask him questions about being gay, and that he found the situations ridiculous. 
“I’m also left-handed.  Would you like to know more about that?”  Jason asks rhetorically.  “What’s to understand?  What’s the big deal about this?  It’s the same emotion, just pointed in a different direction.”
During his talk, Jason places a heavy emphasis on finding and focusing on similarities rather than differences.  He points out that societies that concentrate on differences have failed, and that it is more important to focus on commonalities. 
“You’re trying to figure out who you are and answer ‘How do I fit into the community, the student body, and do it well?’” Jason says.
Jason points out that being singled out for any reason, or made in some way “special”, prevents a person from being a part of the group.  He recalls that things generally went fine for him until his teachers started to treat him differently.  If the teacher treats a student better than the others, he says, that person is called a “teacher’s pet.”  If the teacher treats the student worse, it is made acceptable behavior.
“It singles out a student when they should be considered no better or worse than another student.  You do a disservice to them by treating them differently,” Jason told the group.
Owen wants the students to speak to help clear up any misconceptions her students might have about being gay, to emphasize that it is just a different way of looking at life, and that they’re good people.  Their similarities, she notes, are greater than their differences.
As if to illustrate the point, Anne begins her talk with artwork that her gay child has done, and shows a portrait of her children to the class.  She doesn’t point out which one is gay.
“You can’t tell just by looking,” she says simply.  “They could have hidden it, but we’re a close family, and tell each other the truth.”
Anne will never forget the day her son told her he was gay. 
Amy and her husband arrived home from the grocery store and honked to signal that they needed help with the bags.  Her son was inside, holding a gun to his head and thinking about pulling the trigger.  It was July 7, 1998.  The family celebrates his coming out day every year.
“It was the day he could have died,” she says quietly.
Anne never expected to be sitting in front of a class and talking about being the mother of a gay child.  “I’d rather be here than standing over his grave,” she points out.
Her son went on to college, and became the president of a group that provides support and a safe place for gay and lesbian students.  At her son’s prompting, Anne discovered that there had once been a group on the MSU campus that did such a thing, and she worked with fellow students to restart the group. 
Diversity is a group that works to provide a support system for gay students, and to further gay and lesbian civil rights.  It is firmly stressed at the Diversity meetings that membership in the group is not indicative of sexual preferences.  All three students are active members and officers of Diversity. 
Anne, like her friends before her, stresses that being gay is not something a person chooses.  She makes it clear to the future teachers that how they treat their students is very important.
“You don’t know if something that you say could lead a student to do something with a gun,” she points out.
The class session ends with Amy, Jason and Anne answering questions posed by the other students.  They reiterate the fact that it is important for teachers to treat students uniformly, and that they provide a safe environment for their students to learn in.  Teachers, they point out, can have a strong impact on a child’s life.
Owen says the talk helped her students put a face on their learning, and the advice the student-speakers offered will help when they are in a situation involving a gay student.
Carrie Sullivan, an English major who hopes to teach at the high school level, says she enjoyed the talk and thought it was enlightening, more valuable than just learning from a book.
“They’re not documents, they’re real, living, breathing people,” she says.  “The book studies them as if they’re a different species.”
Amy thinks the session went well, and says that it’s important to continue to educate people and spread a message of acceptance.


Graduation Gatekeeper keeps Watch over Students
Carolyn Knothe | Staff Reporter

With her soft, pillowy hair and quiet, tranquil voice, JaNelle Savage doesn’t seem like someone who would hold the fate of hundreds of students in the palm of her hand.
But she does.
As an Assistant to the Registrar, Savage’s job is to audit prospective graduates’ applications for graduation.
“Where admissions gets them in to the university, I get them out,” she said, chuckling. “All graduates pass through my hands at some point.”
Her office, tucked away behind Veteran’s Affairs in the Hardin Building, is homey and comfortable, with warm colors upholstering an easy chair and a desk neatly stacked with various forms and paperwork. Hidden in a grey metal filing cabinet are the applications for graduation that students have submitted to her. They list the courses a student has taken to fulfill their degree requirements.
“When we get an application, we open up the catalogue and go through it course by course,” Savage explained. “We are accountable to exactly what it says.”
She said she processes 1,000 applications a year, with the easy ones getting done in 15 minutes, but not a lot of them are easy.
“If a student has a lot of transfer hours and substitutions, it could take hours,” she said.
Savage is probably one of the few people in the university who can name the course requirements of many of the degrees from memory, but modestly waves it off as part of her job.
“I still look at the catalogue,” she said.
After an application passes her inspection, it goes into the metal filing cabinet where she keeps it until graduation.
“The closer you get to commencement, the more changes you have to make when they don’t make it,” she said. “I have to even change the seating chart.”
After graduation, she pulls the application out again to make sure that the student took the right classes and earned passing grades during their final semester.
“We tie up the loose ends,” she explained
Unlike some of her generation who wouldn’t touch a computer with a ten-foot pole, Savage has become computer-savvy. Much of her work is done with the help of a computer, although about 20 percent of it is still manual.
“People who have records from before we switched totally to computers do not have theirs on the computer system,” she said. “Also, some degree requirements we haven’t put in the computer yet.”
She and others in the registrar’s office spent years programming requirements into the computer, work that would wear down most people.
But the work isn’t hard for Savage. She’s been working for registrars for years, even when she was a student at MSU getting her business degree.
“I was a student worker in the officer of the registrar,” she said.
During the sixties, Savage was a registrar’s secretary, but after the birth of her son and heeding the call of motherhood, she left MSU and didn’t think she’d ever be back.
“But in 1987, after everyone had graduated from high school, there was a job open and I came back,” she said.
The colorful flowers on her gossamer shirt exactly match the short-sleeved shirt she is wearing underneath it and her voice never wavers nor changes in tension. This is a lady with an amazingly calm demeanor.
  “You just have to like details,” she said, when asked what traits are useful to have when perusing student degree plans. “This job has an accounting feel to it.”
Savage said she works well under pressure, something that serves her well in the graduation auditing business.
“I work well that way, maybe because I’ve done it for so long,” she said, smiling slightly at the admission of her longevity at MSU. “I get stressed and busy but never upset. It just is something that must be done.”
She never tires of seeing the students that she knows so well from their degree plans.
“My favorite thing about the job is the students-they’re so nice to work with. And I love having professors ask questions at the start of things. It helps keep down the surprises later.”
And just like graduating seniors who feel sometimes like they’re walking a stiff tightrope of a life, Savage acknowledges she dances an intricate waltz.
“Sometimes it feels like a circus act where they’re balancing planes on sticks,” she said.
But her hands never drop the sticks and graduating seniors continue to pass through them, year after year.
Mrs. JaNelle Savage
Assistant to the Registrar
940-397-4116