LONG-DORMANT CIVIC CENTER READY TO ERUPT WITH ACTIVITY

Like many volcanos, this one has been a sleeping giant for many years. In fact, it's been quiet so long people have sort of forgotten about it, although everybody who's driven down Broadway has seen it.

I'm talking about the Cape Civic Center, an organization that's existed in this community to help children and families for more than 40 years.

When I first became involved at the Civic Center, it was with a desire to awaken the center from its dormancy with all the fire of an explosive volcano. I didn't want the quiet kind of activity that people can watch and take pictures of. Rather, I wanted the Center to burst upon the scene with a fast and fierce brilliance, overcoming people in its enormancy.

But volcanos have an active, bubbling mass of fire and molten rock within their depths, and of fire the Civic Center had none.

We had no money, we had no programming, we didn't even have a staff. There was no telephone, no utilities; nothing to speak of the majesty of that organization's past except an attic full of old trophies and a disorganized box full of unpaid bills.

Our reorganized board of directors had no idea what to tackle first. We turned on the lights and the telephone, but then we spun our wheels for two years.

How do you ignite a volcano? We didn't know, and board members became disinterested and lost the zeal that was essential to returning the center to its past activeness and central role in the community.

But a couple of us persevered, and we found others willing to seek out new heat sources. Friends willing to help obtain new funding also were found, and programming was reinstated. An after school tutoring program was developed, staffed with education majors from the university looking to gain informal experience teaching students.

And the volcano rumbled.

Then there was Twan Robinson, a well-qualified administrator who knew how to interact with parents and draw in the students. She was a Pied Piper of sorts who did well in a community unfamiliar to her.

More rumblings, and maybe a ground swelling or two.

Unfortunately, Twan left us for a job closer to home, and the ground began to deflate. But then a new heat source was found in the form of Harry Schuler. Harry took over the day-to-day leadership of the Civic Center on a voluntary basis last spring, and the ground has been on fire ever since.

I've been feeling earthquakes in our building at 232 Broadway in recent months, and they've had nothing to do with the New Madrid fault zOne. Rather, they are the result of seismic movement in our cone, precursors to the eruption that is to come.

But the thing about volcanoes is it takes a lot of underground movement before an eruption occurs. We've applied a heat source and have a small group of people working behind the scenes, but the Civic Center was made great through a cooperative effort of many people in this community, and it will take nothing less to get us back to that point.

The Civic Center is on the verge of something great. We are continuing to work toward a goal of becoming a Boys and Girls Club of America member before the end of the year, and our achievement of that goal will be the start of the eruption.

More heat, more gas, more movement is needed before we can reach that point. There's plenty of it in this community, the same community which professes to want to provide our youth with constructive ways to spend their time in a safe place.

I promise you this: If that eruption occurs at 232 Broadway, there could be no safer place for our children to be.