Phil Beckman
Daily Egyptian
While settling into her new office in the old depot, Jill Bratland, director of Carbondale Main Street, occasionally hears the bell ring out on the old Illinois Central train engine and caboose displayed behind the depot. When she looks out, she often sees families playing on the train and children ringing the bell.
Seeing people coming into town and enjoying themselves is what Bratland works hard to accomplish. At Main Street, Bratland's job is to find ways to promote business and bring people into the downtown area. Now she is occupied with fine-tuning the plans for this year's Main Street Pig Out on Sept. 13 and 14.
The old depot offers a new perspective on Carbondale, she said. But being director of a non-profit organization in Carbondale is the last place she expected to be.
"I don't think anyone really knows the road of where they're going to end up," Bratland said.
In May 1999, she graduated from SIUC and her parents had come down and packed up her belongings and were leaving Carbondale - forever, she thought.
"How does it feel leaving somewhere you'll never come back to?" her mother asked as they were driving out of town.
But forever would last only a few weeks.
"The road very quickly led me back to Carbondale," she said
When Bratland graduated, she was set to make use of her public relations degree and marketing minor in the world of corporate public relations.
After leaving Carbondale, she returned to her parent's home in Danville. She interviewed with several big companies and smaller public relations firms in the Chicago area, but she said she was struck by the lack of creativity that is characteristic of corporate public relations and thought she might find a better fit in the non-profit sector.
Bratland's father is a pharmacist who runs his own pharmacy in Danville. Her father had been on the board of directors of Danville's Main Street, and she had volunteered for events and summer concerts when she was in high school.
The Main Street director in Danville told her there was an opening at the Main Street in Lincoln, Ill.
"I applied for that position and was offered the job," Bratland said. "[But] I decided it just wasn't really the right fit for me."
She didn't want to be back in central Illinois, she said. She wanted to be out on her own and wanted the opportunity to set down roots further away from her parents.
Then she got a call from the director of the Illinois Main Street program letting her know that Carbondale Main Street still had a position open.
She came down and, after interviewing, was offered the job. She was immediately thrown into the hectic world of running a non-profit organization, but she said it has been a great experience.
"There is no education better than real experience - real in-the-mud experience."
The road back to Carbondale was as unexpected as pursuing a career in public relations. In fact, for many years, her ambition was to become an astronaut.
Bratland has been a fan of the space program since she was very young and had attended Space Academy in Huntsville, Ala., after seventh grade. But her interest in becoming an astronaut was boosted when Joe Tanner was accepted to the astronaut program in 1992.
Tanner was the son of a Danville doctor whom Bratland's mother worked for as a nurse.
"It was so exciting and heightened my curiosity about [the space program]," Bratland said.
They soon became friends and pen pals and during the next several years, and Bratland and her family had the opportunity to go to Cape Canaveral and watch as Tanner blasted off into space. Later, during her first year of college, he gave her and a friend a behind-the-scenes tour of the Kennedy Space Center.
Despite later majoring in speech communications, she said she tended to avoid speech class in high school. But during her junior year, Tanner came to her high school and put on a slide show after his first trip into space, and he asked that she introduce him. She said that she was deathly afraid standing in front of an assembly of fellow students, and after sitting down her legs felt like jelly.
"I was shaking so bad I could barely pay attention to the slide show," she said.
During spring break of her senior year, while other students were going off to Myrtle Beach, she was heading back to Huntsville for the advanced Space Academy. It was there that she discovered public relations.
During a space flight exercise, she spent six hours in a pool simulating a space walk. But the next six hours she was assigned to be a public information officer, where she narrated the events of the mission to the media. It was exciting, she said, because she still got to be involved in the mission and know what was going on.
"You get to meet the people you'd really like to be," she said, "but you just don't have the 'oompf' or the personal character or desire to be."
Later that year, when she was studying mechanical engineering at Danville Area Community College, she found that mathematics and chemistry were not keeping her attention and that they did not really fit her personality. So, as she looked for another field and saw her social nature shining through more and more, she remembered her experience as a public information officer at Space Academy and realized that in public relations she could still have the opportunity to work with NASA while pursuing her ambitions in a new field.
"There's always, still, in the back of my mind the dream to work with NASA," she said. "The little dream that you keep in the corner of the closet for a rainy day."
A few weekends ago, Bratland and her boyfriend came downtown, and after visiting some of the clubs, they went and sat on a bench in the town square around midnight. They sat and watched the cars drive by; they just sat there being observers without the distractions of a phone ringing or work to do.
The town square offers such a beautiful perspective, she said. With the train tracks behind you and the pavilion, city hall and depot all around, she said you can kind of close your eyes and imagine what it was like when town square was the center of business and community.
"Maybe someone who has lived here all their lives can come and sit on the bench and remember what it was like when they were younger," Bratland said.
Though she never expected to return to Carbondale, she has developed an appreciation and affection for the community.
"I never thought that a town could have that effect on you," Bratland said. "I love Carbondale. I went to school here. It's one of those places that I just want so much good for."
As her life has taken her in unexpected directions, she has come to enjoy seeking out new places. She said she always wondered how her parents always knew all the country roads leading to little towns and back home again. And now, she says, she is the kind of person who loves Sunday drives, who thinks, "I wonder what's down this road."
She said she does not know where her life is going to take her, but that she is excited about the possibilities that lie ahead.
"There are so many things I haven't done, so many places I haven't been," Bratland said.
Reporter Phil Beckman can be reached at pbeckman@dailyegyptian.com
Published on 11/17/05; 12:24:44 PM
