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Show MARS POPE #1 PAGE 48 five percent of the kids, maybe a little more. I don't know. We just have too many young people that have nothing but leisure time, can't get a job.. And if they don't, sooner or later, a lot of them are going to run into trouble. SG: Do a large percentage of the kids, when they reach age eighteen, leave the area now? MP: Yes, nearly all of our young people leave now. There's nothing to keep them here. A lot of them--well, not so many of them at eighteen, except they go to school. We have a big percentage of our high school graduates that go onto college. Well, when they get through with college, there's nothing for them to come hack to here, and they take a job someplace else. SG: So you're actually developing an older population here, then? MP: Well, it will be eventually. Now, at the present time, it isn't that way because when they opened the potash mill down here, they had to b.ring in miners. They e.mploy ·around 450 people at that time. They're down to about 200 now, and they're going to drop still farther. But families that came in here were nearly all young people, nearly· all of them. There were very few· middle aged. And so that made the average age of our population in this county low. Now the few older people like me have b.een here all the time, hut all our new people are young |
