[Laughs] Except for college and the Army, 77 years.
That’s great. [All laugh] Did you go to high
school in Mooresville?
I did. I
went to Mooresville High, class of 1953. The school, at that time, was uptown.
You know where Mitchell [Community College] is now? Yeah, it was in that block.
Do you have any fond memories from life in
Mooresville during that time?
Oh, yeah,
lots. You know, it was a much smaller place, and it was a place where, I think,
kids were freer than they are now to just kind of wander around town and wander
up Main Street and go in and out of businesses, which it seems nowadays, most
businesses don’t want little kids wandering in and doing that [laughs], but we
did that. We walked to school and I remember visiting the hospital, for some
reason, since I only lived a block from the hospital. I thought that was kind
of a cool place to go and wander up and down the halls. It sounds kind of
ghoulish now. [Laughs] I lived in a neighborhood where…when I was real young,
most people in the neighborhood had chickens, which is unheard of now, except
we recently acquired a neighbor out the back who has a rooster. You hear that
rooster crow every morning, that’s kind of neat. And two people on our block
have cows…yeah, that’s right. [Laughs] It’s kind of fun. I lived on East Center Avenue, across from the front of the high school and, at the time, I lived there up until I was about 12 years old. But that’s where the pavement ended. The street continued, but it was two dirt ruts past that corner. It went on out into the country, but that was the end of the street, really.
Most of the things I remember later than that are that I was in the band for eight years. I started in the band when I was in the fifth grade. I took band for eight years, and that was a lot of fun because we had really good bands then and we did a lot of travelling as a result of being in the band. That was kind of fun. It was neat.
What changes have you seen in Mooresville?
Ooh…well,
it’s become…obviously, it’s become more of a fair-sized city than a small town,
because I think Mooresville, now, is…when I was a senior in high school, I
think Mooresville had about 6,000 people. Maybe inside the city limits, there
weren’t quite that many, but probably the town in general had about 6,000
people, and now it has about 70,000, so there is a lot of difference. We had
one high school, two grammar schools…and now there are how many schools? Gosh,
a bunch. Of course, the town has spread out. The original city of Mooresville
was a one-mile circle, with the depot [today’s Art Depot downtown] as the
center point of that circle. And anything outside of that was…there were some
parts of Mooresville that were outside that circle, but the original boundaries
were just a circle. And now, of course, it goes all the way across the
interstate, out north. Mooresville is probably eight miles across, from one end
to the other. Even more than that, if you took out some of that stuff down on
the lake [Lake Norman]. It’s a big place. A lot of different industry. No more
textiles; all kinds of other stuff, including NASCAR, bottled water…until
recently, a brewery [laughs]…a wind tunnel. Well, we’ve got some interesting
stuff here now, you know? We’ve still got the ice cream company [Deluxe Ice
Cream Company, founded in Mooresville]. What else? You know, all those NASCAR
guys are very interesting. People are trying to make hydrogen-powered cars here,
[and] electric cars. All kinds of interesting, high-tech stuff going on. I
think the biggest difference [is] there really is the different kinds of people
that we’ve had here, because when I was growing up, most of the people who
lived here were like me – they’d been here a long time. And now, you know,
people from all over the world [are] living here. And I think that makes a much
more interesting community than what we had. Although, what we had was fine,
too.
Did you ever imagine Mooresville being as
big as it is now?
No, I really
didn’t. You know, I…when I first was working in the car business, I thought,
you know, Mooresville might get to 12,000 or 15,000 people someday [laughs], because
that seemed like that was pretty big, and that you would never have imagined
that it would be bigger than Statesville.
Because Statesville was where everything sort of was for a while. And
Statesville was, at that time, maybe 20,000 [people] and you just didn’t think
about Mooresville or anything in South Iredell being bigger than Statesville –
whoa! [Laughs] But I heard recently –within the last couple of weeks – that the
two zip codes that are Mooresville is just a little over 70,000 people now. And there are more in the new zip code than
there are in the old zip code – 28117 has got more people than 28115. But no, I
never thought it would get that big. I really didn’t. Of course, I never
thought North Carolina would have ten million people, either, in my lifetime.
Wow. It’s not just Mooresville – it’s the whole area.
What have been some of Mooresville’s
“greatest moments” in your opinion?
Oh, heavens.
I remember a big impromptu celebration that occurred the day that we got the
news that Japan had surrendered in World War II. Within a couple of hours, people
just immediately showed up uptown, running uptown in the street, waving flags,
throwing toilet paper [laughs], which probably was a very scarce commodity. I
think it was pretty wasteful to do that, but people were in a pretty
celebratory mood at that point. But that, you know, that’s the first thing I remember
that was really, really exciting to me because World War II started just as I
began first grade, so it was…it was something we all lived with for about four
or four and a half years there. That was kind of interesting. Well, I think some of the best moments were also when we started to attract some businesses that could add a lot of jobs to the local area because it was obvious that the textile industry wasn’t going to continue in the same scope that it had been and I think it was kind of exciting to see that happen and be a little bit involved in that because that started something. There again, that’s been more successful, I think, and a lot of it’s that we really didn’t expect it to be. And it was kind of exciting to also finish high school and graduate. [Laughs] That was an exciting moment. And it was exciting, too, when the band won some awards, because as I said, I was in the band for a long time and we competed in local and state contests. The band did pretty good, we did pretty well. And I got a lot of enjoyment out of that. In fact, when we were…when I was probably about 12 or 13, the band got to go on a trip to New York to play at the International Convention of Lions [Club] International, and that was kind of fun, you know. That was the high spot of my travel up to that time. [Laughs] That was a big deal. We had a lot of fun doing that.
I had a lot of fun in high school. We had a good crowd of people who enjoyed having fun. Somewhat like your father did, and my boys. [Laughs] You know, that’s the most I remember. I mean, I think that it’s been exciting and interesting to see Mooresville grow and see the kinds of people that have ended up here, and the fact that even though it’s gotten to be as large a city as it has, that it still has some of the small community atmosphere. We don’t notice that so much as people who come here from other places notice it. They appreciate that about our community more than, I think, than a lot of us older folks who have been here a long time do, really.
Do you think that small-town feeling is in any danger with the recent growth?
Yeah, I think it probably is. I don’t think that that sort of atmosphere can continue in the kind of society and the kind of world that we have now. I think that there are places where it might hang on for a while, but we’re all so interconnected with Facebook, internet. I heard a guy talk last week about the “TGIF Society”: Twitter, Google, Internet, and Facebook. [Laughs] The TGIF Society, and that’s, you know, nothing’s a secret and we know everything so quickly after it happens, all around the world. You know, the small community atmosphere, I think, is probably not going to last too long in places like Mooresville. It’s growing too big.
What kinds of things do you see in
Mooresville’s future?
I see the
town continuing to grow. You know, as I said earlier, I never would have
thought that it would get this big. But I think there’s still some growth to
happen because people are still attracted to this area to locate businesses and
locate industries. Of course, as you know, Mooresville and Iredell County in
general have been #1 relocation sites for industry for several years, or
they’ve been near the top or #1 for several years. It’s going to continue to
grow, and I think it will bring a lot of interesting people here, and make a
lot of interesting jobs for people who are already here, and make a lot of
interesting contacts for them. It’s going to be a different world. It’s going
to be a lot more diverse than it’s been for most of our lives, but a lot more
interesting. I wouldn’t mind hanging around to see a little more of it, but I’m
not sure how that’s going to work out. [Laughs] Hmm. I think about some of these guys – every time I go to a Rotary meeting, I always am near Bill Young. Bill Young is exactly within a day of ten years older than me. His birthday is one day before mine, each October. And you know, when that guy was nineteen years old, he was on the beach at Iwo Jima. And Mitchell Mack was in the Navy, running around the world doing things that same time, you know? What those guys have been through and what they’ve done is just so impressive. When I think of all the things that have happened during their lifetimes, and then when I look at myself – I’m getting a little older – I guess I’ve seen a lot, too. It’s been interesting. It’s a neat place to be. You know, I…I guess I never would have really thought that I would spend my whole life in Mooresville. I would have expected to go somewhere else at some point in my life. At one point, I even considered staying in the Army more than my required two years. [Laughs] But that didn’t work out. It’s been a fun place to be. If we could just get rid of these really hot summers. [Laughs]
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