News-Record.com

It sounded like a delicious piece of pie in the sky when Greensboro developer Roy Carroll announced months ago intentions of turning the old Wachovia Building downtown into a luxury high-rise of condos, offices and a ground-floor restaurant.

The building has stood vacant for about 16 years. Another potential buyer had backed out of a deal for the building. And there was fear Carroll might too once he saw all that was involved in conventing the building, completed in the mid 1960s.

But Carroll will make believers out of doubters Thursay at 2 p.m. when he holds the official "ground breaking" at the corner of North Elm Elm and West Friendly Avenue. Ground breaking may be the wrong word because Carroll will work with the structure already there. He'll make radical changes,however, including adding balconies for future condo dwellers.

And forget the name Old Wachovia Building. Wachovia moved out in the early 1990s to Renaissance Plaza up the street and has since moved again to the former First Union Towers at Bellemeade and North Greene streets, after Wachovia and First Union banks merged. The name Wachovia prevailed from the merger. First Union Tower is now Wachovia Tower.

The new name of the Old Wachovia will be Center Pointe because of its location across the street from the new Center City Park nearing completion in the block bounded by North Elm, East Friendly Avenue and North Davie Street.

City council member Mike Barber answers his accuser’s question with one of his own.

As someone always under the public spotlight, would he be foolish enough to convert a house in the College Hill Historic District for his law office without seeking approval of the panel that governs the city’s three historic districts?

Ann Stringfield, a leader in the Fisher Park historic district, believes Barber tried to do just that in 2005.

In a comment posted in late August on a blog of a resident of the city’s third historic district, Aycock, Stringfield asks:

“Was it Councilperson Mike Barber who suggested the Historic District program be terminated? If yes, that would be the same Mike Barber who owns property in the College Hill neighborhood and was caught having made multiple significant exterior modifications to his property without getting a Historic District Certificate of Appropriateness...?”

Barber denies he tried to sneak anything past the Greensboro Historic Preservation Commission, which rules on building exteriors and yard changes in the districts. He says he appeared before the commission twice and received necessary certificates for the house built in 1895 at West Market and Tate streets.

Mike Cowhig, a city planner who advises the commission, says problems with Barber’s project arose, but mainly because of complications.

“I think he a didn’t have a clue — and I didn’t either — that when you take a run-down residence and change the use for offices, it opens a real can of worms,’’ Cowhig says.

Extra requirements come into play in districts with “change of use’’ projects. Not only does the preservation commission make demands, but so do zoning and other city departments.

“He ran into some ‘gotchas’ along the way,” Cowhig says. ’

Preservation commissioner David Wharton said he knows of one instance when Barber installed windows without a certificate of appropriateness. Once notified, he applied for an “after the fact” certificate, which the commission approved.

Wharton “eventually got a certificate of appropriateness for everything he did.’’

He says the commission didn’t give Barber VIP treatment. Besides, at the time, he adds, Barber was no longer a county commissioner. As best as Wharton can remember, Barber hadn’t announced for City Council either. Barber was elected last November.

Cowhig says while mistakes and mix-ups resulted, Barber deserves praise for saving a historic house at a most visible place in College Hill. Otherwise, the house might have eventually been threatened with demolition.

Andy Scott, Cowhig’s boss and director of the city's Department of Housing and Community Development, said, “Mike (Barber) is not the strongest supporter of historic districting, but he worked with us on this project.”

Cowhig believes some historic district residents may be upset with Barber for insisting recently during council budget hearings that all city programs be considered for cuts and elimination, including the historic district program.

But Barber says he believes in historic districts. Proof of that, he says, was his decision to buy, save and restore the College Hill house, at a much greater expense that what he would have paid outside the district.

What he dislikes, he says, is the punitive treatment that property owners in districts sometimes endure when they convert an eyesore into something nice. They should be embraced instead.

He also doesn’t like those who want to micro-manage every minute change in districts.

He says he doesn’t know Stringfield, or why she singled him out.

Efforts to reach Stringfield, a former president of the Fisher Park Neighborhood Association, were unsuccessful.

When told that Stringfield, who lives close to First Horizon Park, opposed building the new downtown baseball stadium and complains of game noise, a light went off in Barber’s head. As a county commissioner, he vocally supported the ball park.

“I’m sure she’s no fan of mine,’’ he says, “if she opposed the ball park.’’

If Jawn Sandifer had said yes to that bully of a caddy master,he likely wouldn't have become the lawyer who won a major civil rights case in 1950 outlawing passenger train dining car segregation.

The caddy master for one of the country clubs - it was either the Greensboro Country Club or Sedgefield, Sandifer's wife says - stood outside the black school Sandifer attended and angrily urged the boys to skip school to caddy.

"My husband always said 'no,'" says Elsa Kruger Sandifer. "As a result, the caddy master always called him 'school boy.'"

Sandifer, who grew up a short walk from N.C. A&T State University, wanted out of Greensboro after finishing in the first class to graduate from Dudley High School in the early 1930s.

He went to Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte and then Howard Law School in Washington and never returned to Greensboro except for occasional visits to see family.

His wife says he was bitter about the segregation he endured in Greensboro, especially walking a distance to school with school buses passing him loaded with white children. Or being able to select only from the meager number of books housed in the Carnegie Negro Library that black people were required to use.

Sandifer, who later became a judge in New York City, died last week at 92 in Saratoga, Fla., where he lived in retirement. Death was unexpected because he had remained active. Doctors found a small tumor on his colon, removed it and thought he would be fine. But a heart attack killed him just as he was preparing to leave the hospital.

He lived in Saratoga on Golf Course Road and played golf twice a week with his wife until the week before he died. That was the one positive influence the caddy master had on him. Totting bags for well-to-do white men introduced him to golf.

In the Henderson vs. United State railroad case before the U.S. Supreme Court, Sandifer pointed out the humiliation that black passengers suffered once they crossed the Mason-Dixon line.

"Even if a black person bought in New York a first-class ticket on a train that included dining car privileges," he told the New York Times in a 1995 interview, "once that train left Washington and went south, he or she could not eat in the dining car. You could walk in, every seat could be empty, and there was no room for you. At best, they'd put you beind a curtain."

The High Court agreed, voting unamimously to strike down the law. Four years later, the same court cited Henderson versus U.S. as a precedent in its Brown versus Board of Education case, which abolished public school segregation.

In Greensboro, Sandifer was known as "John," but he didn't like being just another John, his widow says. He changed the spelling to Jawn while at Johnson C. Smith.

His father, Charles, died when Sandifer was four, leaving his wife, Nettie, a chambermaid at a downtown hotel, with eight children. She had help raising them from her oldest child, Herbert, a hotel baker.

Kruger-Sandifer says as best as she can recollect all but one sibling, Edgar, finished college. And Edgar made good, acquiring considerable amounts of land in the Greensboro area.

Sandifer's brother, Paul, led Dudley to its first divisional football championship in 1937 and later became well known as a referee of area high school football and basketball games and an umpire in baseball. Paul Sandifer's feats earned him a place in the Dudley Sports Hall of Fame. He died in 2004.

The average American can only dream of making $140,000 a year.

But considering that today's top corporate executives make that much and more in a week, not including bonuses and perks, it doesn't seem outlandish. Many middle managers make that much or more now.

Of course, $140,000 in the '50s would be worth far more today. But even so, the amount didn't provoke public outrage when the Southern Textile News revealed that Burlington Industries CEO J. Spencer Love's salary in 1955 was $140,000. Only one other executive made more than $100,000. Charles Myers Jr., who would succeed Love as Burlington's chief upon Love's death in 1962, made only $47,500. Ed Zone, one of Love's right hand men who would help mediate an end to the sit-ins in 1960s, made $57,250.

The public reaction to Love's pay was acceptance. While a tyrant as a boss, Love didn't resemble the robber barons of 50 years before, such as Andrew Carnegie. Those guys built large industries and racked in millions for themselves doing so and like like royalty.

Love was also unlike executives today who make millions regardless of performance. If fired, they walk away with "golden parachutes" worth millions.

Bonuses were paid in the 1950s, but no one with Burlington who had a lousy year got one. The executive most likely was fired, with no golden parachute.

The consensus in the 1950s was that Love probably deserved his pay and whatever perks. He founded Burlington in 1923 with a handful of employees and built it by the 1950s into the world's largest textile companies with 147 plants in the United States and abroad.

Burlington Industries spread money around Greensboro for good causes. Residents took pride, too, in a hometown company being a key sponsor of one of the most popular TV shows of the era, the Ed Sullivan Show.

Ed, his shoulders hunched was always promising "a mighty big shew'' tonight, probably made a mighty bit more than Love. Inflated pay always has been part of show biz.

But was Sullivan or Love more vauable that New York Yankee slugger Mickey Mantle, an American icon on the baseball field in the 1950s? The Mick balked at reporting to spring
training in 1956. He wanted more dough than the Yankees were offering.

He finally inked a deal paying him $30,000 for the season. Mediocre Major Leaguers now make that in one game.

Finally, there was Jim Tatum, the Maryland Terrapins coach who led the team to the Orange Bowl (there were only four or five bowls then) at the end of the '55 season.

Tatum had played football at UNC, and Tar Heel alumni began a campaign to lure him from College Park to Chapel Hill for the '56 season.

Articles appeared with the theme come home, big Jim.

He did. It surely took a pile of money as high as the Bell Tower to land him.

But when terms of his contract were revealed, his state salary amounted to $15,000 a year.

Current UNC coach John Bunting, with a lackluster record entering his sixth season, pulls in about $650,000 a year, with his base salary in the $200,000 plus range. The other moeny comes from shoe deals, a TV show and various sources.

Tatum may have had other income, but he also may have had to live on his state pay. Lucrative side deals weren't that plentiful for coaches back then. Nike was still years from being born.

But all things are relative. It's hard to compare eras. Still, mediocrity seems to have it rewards now in ways that would have been unacceptable in the 1950s.

Was that a tear Dick Behrends saw trying to escape former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole's eye?

Behrends, a retired public relations and advertising executive who lives in Greensboro, is president of the 86th Blackhawk Division Association. The division fought in World II in Europe and holds a reunion annually.

The speaker at this year's event, which ended Sept. 9 at the Fairviw Marriott in Falls Church, Va., was Dole, a World War II hero who suffered critical wounds fighting in Italy. He lost the use of an arm.

Behrends had read Dole's book, "One Soldier's Story,'' and was deeply moved.

"The unusual thing about this is that after reading (the book), I took a wild chance and invited him to speak, clearly pointing out that there would be no honorarium," Behrends says in an email. "To our suprise, he accepted."

Behrends, however, thought the association should give Dole some token of appreciation. He went to work in the studio. In retirement, Behrends has become an accomplished sculptor. He specializes in western scenes that are remindful of Frederic Remington's work.

He spent about a month and half working on a sculpture depicting Dole on April 14, 1945, going up Hill 913 in Italy. The second lieutenant in charge of Dole's unit had just been killed. A sergeant gave Dole, also a second lieutenant, the dead officer's field glasses, map case and other items. Dole was now in charge. He was wounded soon afterward.

On a recent morning, a sight from the past appeared on the railroad leading into downtown from the north.

Two shiny black Norfolk Southern diesel engines pulled five Tuscan red passenger coaches, dining cars and business cars, bound for Charlotte.

Two weeks before that, two of the Tuscan reds rolled along a spur track that archs behind buildings between Lee and the South Elm Street rail crossing.

The cars are throwbacks to when private railroads ran passenger trains, with each railroad dressing up fleets in company colors.

Folks who've have been around a few years might remember the purple engines of the old Atlantic Coast Line Railroad (now CSX), which ran from the north to Florida through eastern North Carolina.

Southern Railway's stainless steel coaches, sleepers and dining cars had green trim. It's passenger diesels, and before that its steam locomotives, were painted apple green as they passed through Greensboro.

Norfolk & Western's passenger trains pulled Tuscan red coaches, dining, sleeping and observation cars through the mountains of Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and the Ohio Valley.

One N&W passenger train used to make its way daily down from company headquarters in Roanoke to Winston-Salem, over the Pumkin' Vine line, so named because its mamy twists.

The colorful era of rail riding and watching ended in the 1970s when private railroads turned passenger operations over to federally- subsidized Amtrak.

If you've seen one Amtrak train you've almost seen them all. They're pretty standard, although the locomotive that pulls "The Piedmont" from Raleigh to Charlotte and back daily catches the eye. It's done up in North's Carolina's blue colors and resembles the state flag.

Not all private railroads sent their passenger train equipment to the scrap heap. Norfolk & Western, which in the early 1980s merged with Southern Railway to become Norfolk Southern, saved a small fleet of passenger coaches, dining, sleeping, observation and business cars.

During the 1980s, the Tuscan red cars occasionally rolled behind vintage steam locomotives through North Carolina and Virginia. The occasions were steam excursions sponored by various railroad historical societies.

Norfolk Southern quit the steam excursion business by the early 1990s, but kept some of the cars.

Norfolk Southern spokesperson Robin Chapman says the cars roll for sundry purposes "such as track inspection, rail safety education and marketing. In this particularly case, you saw an an inspection train ridden by NS executives."

The business cars haul railroad executives from place to place along the line. One has a big rear picture window. Executives can sit theater style and watch the tracks after the train passes over them.

Chapman says the cars span the years 1917 to 1954.

They'll be back through Greensboro, located along Norfolk Southern's eastern main line from Washington to Atlanta. But it's hard to say when. The cars don't run on precise schedules as they did when hooked to real passenger trains.

They are a vivid reminder of the hey-day of passenger trains. Railroad went all out to impress those riding the trains and those seeing them from track side.