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Because Philadelphia must be at least 400 miles from Greensboro, a reader poses a good question: Why is Greensboro's Philadelphia Lake
so named.

For those unaware of Philadelphia Lake, it's now mostly a marsh off off Cone Boulevard, near Cleburne Street. Until the 1960s, it was a bonafida lake, though much smaller than brother next door, Buffalo Lake.

The two lakes were separated by an earthen causeway. Cone Mills owned both lakes, and still owns Buffalo. The mills drew manufacturing water from them. A third lake, Lake Jeanette, still there, served as a back-up water source. A pipe line connected the three lakes.

When work began on the housing development now called New Irving Park, and on Mendenhall Middle School, silt and run-off pretty much filled in Philadelphia Lake.

The name became meaningless to everyone except for some grown ups who had played as youngsters around Philadelphia Lake, then surrounded by forest.

The name, though, has come splashing back because of the recent construction of the expensive Philadelphia Lake Townhomes complex. It's along Cone Boulevard bordering the marsh that was the lake. Passersby naturally wonder why happened to the lake and how it got its name.

Lacy Baynes Jr., a retired Cone Mills executive who was once in charge of the company's real estate subsidiary, Cornwallis Development Corp., says the name makes historical since.

He says Cone Mills bought the land for the lake many years ago from the Philadelphia Land & Title Co. Buyer named the lake for seller.

The names of the other two Cone lakes make more immediate sense. Buffalo Lake is fed by a tributary of North Buffalo Creek. Buffalo passes through the former Cone mill villages and plants, only one of which, White Oak, still operates.

Buffalo's dam also stretches along the bottom of a hill below one of Greensboro's oldest churches, Buffalo Presbyterian, at 16th and North Church streets.

Lake Jeanette is named for the wife of the first Ceasar Cone. He with his brother, Moses Cone, built what became Cone Mills in the 1890s and early 1900s. Jeanette Cone lived more than 40 years after her husband died in 1917 in their mansion at Summit and Bessemer avenues. After her death, the mansion was torn down.

But Lake Jeanette flows on as the centerpiece of an upscale residential area known as the Lake Jeanette community.

Barber Russell Hiatt still has some years of cutting to go before catching the late Wade York of Greensboro, who spent almost seven decades with comb and scissors in hand.

"The Communicator," a news letter published by Mt. Airy businessman Gary York, reports that Russell Hiatt, owner of Floyd's City Barber Shop on Main Street in Mt. Airy, is celebrating his 60th year behind the chair.

Floyd's, of course, is the shop Mt. Airy native Andy Griffith used a model for the barber shop in the Andy Griffin Show, the TV series that ran from 1960-68. In real life, Hiatt used to clip Griffith's hair when the actor was growing up in the Granite City.

Hiatt is still eight years behind York, who was forced to quit barbering at age 92 in 1985 after a 68-year career.

York's shaky hands began cutting customers at the King Cotten-Burgess (sic) Barber Shop on what was then East Sycamore St. (now Feb. 1 Place)

His 80-year-old partner, Robert Burgess, made York quit. York died shortly after that. Burgess died in 1994 and the shop stayed opened until the last of its barbers, Clyde Gaither, died in 1996.
Another barber shop later operated there for awhile, but the space has been empty for years. A shoe store will open in the space soon.

Although he couldn't prove it, York boasted of being America's oldest, still practicing barber. He had started in 1918 during World War I when drafted into the Army and assigned to cut hair of soldiers. He says he actually was working before that, giving haircuts to farmers on the porch of his father's farm in Randolph County.

York could never prove he was the nation's oldest barber. No one had surveyed. In 2003, The Guinness Book of World Records conducted a search and found the honor at that time belonged to Peta Vita, 93, of Port Chester, N.Y. He had been cutting hair for 81 years.

Vita died not only after that.

But was Vita really the record holder? The New York Times reported earlier this year Aristides Demetriou, a Cpriot American, had retired after barbering in Cyprus and New York City for 85 years.

The destruction of the old Edmunds Manufacturing Co. under way on in the 1000 block of Battleground Avenue has brought words of sadness but not protests from local preservationists.

At least one of the buildings in the complex, the distinct limestone structure ,dates to the 1920s. It was the office of Greensboro Cut-Stone Works, which apparently shaped granite on the spacious grounds around the building.

The stone works' location made sense. The railroad that connected Greensboro to Mt. Airy, home of the N.C. Granite Co., passed on the other side of Battleground Avenue (then called Battleground Road). The tracks remain but they deadend a few miles to the north. What's now Norfolk Southern Railroad abandoned most of the Mt. Airy line in the 1970s.

Mike Cowhig, a city planner who keeps an eye on historical structures, wishes the limestone building, with its distinct facade, could have been incorporated into whatever developer Roy Carroll plans for the 4.4-acre site. Carroll is buying the property from the Edmunds family, whose company made steel parts there until about two years ago.

"There's a lot of industrial history there," Cowhig says.

As the story Friday about the transaction between Carroll and the Edmunds said, the Mile-High Swinging Bridge at Grandfather Mountain was built at the Battleground site in the early 1950s when Truitt Manufacturing Co. was there. Truitt opened in 1938 and added buildings for its steel fabrication business. Truitt sold to Edmunds later in the '50s.

Charles Hartman Jr., an architect who was the son of the architect who drew the plans for the Jefferson Standard Building, designed the bridge. The structure was shipped in parts to the mountains and assembled by another Greensboro company, Craven Steel Erecting.The bridge has been a tourist attraction ever since.

Carroll said he looked at the possibility of including the limestone building and the other structures into a commercial or mixed commercial-residential project he'll likely develop. But he said he found too much deterioration.

The limestone building, he said, remains in decent shape, but the interior lacks the charm of the exterior. The building, he said, also stands too close to the edge of Battleground.

Mary Lee Copeland wasn't as old as Fisher Park, it only seems as if she had been there since the neighborhood's beginning in the early 1900s.

Her death Tuesday after a brief illness has removed one of Fisher Park's most persistent and vocal warriors.

When threats arose to the neighborhood, which draws its name from the centerpark park split by North Elm Street, Copleland was at the barricades protesting.

"She was there every time to speak at public hearings,'' says Mike Cowhig, a city planner who advises the Greensboro Historic Preservation Commission, which governs the local historic districts of Fisher Park, Aycock and College Hill. "She has been there every step of the way.''

"She was a great and gracious lady and ejected spirit into the neighborhood and neighborhood association," says former association president David Moore, adding later that, "She was always giving an image of what the neighborhood should be."

Copeland and few others began speaking up in the 1970s after seeing the neighborhood headed in the wrong direction. Some years before the city rezoned North Elm Street from downtown through Fisher Park to to allow institutional and multi-family buildings. The idea was to give expansion room for downtown, which in those pre-shopping center days was busy and prosperous.

The rezoning opened the way for squat, ugly, brick apartment complexes, woefully out of touch with neighborhood's old architecture. THe apartments were wedged into lots where homes once stood.

Large homes on the east side of the BLCOK of North Elm came down and office buildings erected. A beautiful house at Elm and West Bessemer was renovated into an office for a chriopractor.

With Copeland in the leadership, the neighborhood declared war when developers proposed an office building next to the park at North Park Drive and Elm Sreet. The old Banner home, which dated to the early days of Fisher Park in the 1900s, would come down for the building.

Copeland's group didn't save the Banner House, but stopped the office building. Williamsburg-style townhouses were built at the site instead. While many park residents wished the Banner house remained, the townhouses have been become an accepted part of the Fisher Park scene.

David Moore said that conflict prompted Copeland and two others to organize the Fisher Park Neighborhood Association. She served on the board for 25 years. The association remains hyper-active, always on the prowl for any intrusion that would harm the mostly single-family character of the neighborhood.

In the early 1980s, Copeland was a leader in the move to make Fisher Park a local historic district, even though the status brought rigid regulations about what property owners could and couldn't do with their yards and home exteriors.

The regulations through the years have angered a few residents who believe they infringe on property rights. But Copeland and most other Fisher Parkers accepted the rules. When they spotted neighbors in violation they knocked on their doors and if no action was taken called city hall.

Fisher Park was Copeland's domain. She lived in a two-story brick house on Magnolia Street on the park's north side. She belonged to Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in the neigbhorhood.

But she didn't limit her preservation interest to Fisher Park. She looked out for the whole city, state and nation.

She was a founder of the Greensboro Preservation Society, now called Preservation Greensboro Inc., formed in the 1960s to save Blandwood Mansion. Rumors circulated of grocery store replacing Gov. John Motley Morehead's mansion. The society rescued Blandwood and over a 30-year period restored it. It is now a National Historic Landmark.

Copeland also served on the Greensboro Zoning Commission, which had a say on what could where in the city.

On the state and national levels, she belonged to the Historic Preservation Foundation of North Carolina and Preservation North Carolina and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Moore said when he and his wife, Agnes, moved to Fisher Park in 1977 the neighborhood's future was so uncertain banks were reluctant to make housing loans.

Thanks to the likes of Copeland that changed. Fisher Park now ranks as one of the city's premier neighborhood.

The choice would have been difficult for Bill Ditto. Pick a word for his tombstone: orthodontist or Marine.

With Dr. William Ditto's death at 83 Monday, Greensboro lost one of its most gung-ho leathernecks ever. He had departed the corps more than 50 years ago, but as the saying goes, once a Marine, always a Marine.

In 1944, Ditto was a member of the Marine Corps 400, the only officers trained outside the corps' officer training school at Quantico, Va. Quantico was too crowded; Ditto and 399 others did their training at Camp Lejeune.

The 375 who completed the training, including Ditto, shipped out to fight in one of World War II's most brutal battles, the invasion of Okinawa.

Of the group, 48 were killed and 168 wounded, one of the highest casualty rates in U.S. warfare history.

In 2001, writer James Dickerson wrote a book: "We Few: The Marines Corps 400 in the War Against Japan." The cover photo showed a tired, battle-scared Marine smoking a pipe. That was Bill Ditto.

In a 2001 interview upon publication of Dickerson's book, Ditto still subscribed to "Leatherneck Magazine." He decorated his cars with eagle, globe and anchor logos. Until an advanced age, he attended the local Marine Corps birthday ball each November. When he stopped attending, he met with a few Marine buddies for drinks to celebrate the birth of the corps in a Philadelphia tavern in the 18th century.

Each morning for years at his house in Hamilton Lakes, he would in Marine fashion hoist the American flag on his front porch, humming the tune to "Colors." He ended by taking a step backwards and snapping a salute. At a retreat ceremony that night, he took the flag now in similar dignified fashion.

When he was in a bus or train station or airport, "Every time I see a Marine, I have to go speak to him," he said.

He had connections at Headquarters Marine Corps in Washington. His pull was such that Gen. Alfred Gray, then the commandant of the Marine Corps, came to Greensboro in the 1980s to speak to Ditto's Greensboro Kiwanis Club.

Ditto knew his World War II history and that of World War I, in which his father, also a Marine, saw combat. And he collected Civil War artifacts, and gave talks about the War Between the States.

And he was pretty good at straightening teeth. He retired in 1991 after practicing orthodontics for 37 years.