Stream Of Consciousness Memoir Of Cary, North
Carolina, 1960-1980
by
H. Kent Craig
©1999
My first memory of Cary has to be the old Winn-Dixie store
on West Chatham Street; I remember riding in a
wobbly-wheeled, rusty shopping cart as my mother pushed me
and it along the aisles that reeked of the odors of life,
the smell of fresh produce, the daunting smell of the
cleaning products section, the dry smell of the dry goods
section, the anchor smell of the meat section, the metal
smell that enveloped the cash registers...
...The old
Winn-Dixie is now Sorrel's Paint & Wallpaper, it's parking
lot virtually gone, taken in the expansion of both Harrison
Avenue and West Chatham, most of Cary's citizens being
mostly newcomers unaware that for the longest stretch of
years that the old Winn-Dixie was "it", in a time when
there wasn't a Food Lion or Harris-Teeter within a
dead-cat's throw of every subdivision....
...Having gone to Miss Shelley's Private School for
my first grade,
because my 6th birthday was in November of 1962 and my
parents didn't want me to fall behind chronologically and
grade-wise with my age group, my second grade was public
school, at the old but to this day still functioning Cary
Elementary School at the end of Academy Street; Mrs. Fox,
who lived and as far as I know still lives at the neat but
slightly hidden house at the corner of East Chatham and
Reedy Creek Road was my teacher; in the heydey of the
"Lassie" TV series, she raised AKC Collies, her sign at her
mailbox at her home still indicating so in faded letters;
Mrs. Fox was the perfect second grade teacher, with the
patience of some one who loved children, with a pleasant
but no-nonsense demeanor, and someone of obvious high
intelligence who could have taught at the graduate or
post-graduate level in college but choose her "audience"
because she loved kids...
...I remember when Cary had
an actual "movie house", not a multi-cine-plex-monster like
it has a couple/three of now; what is now Chatham Street
Auto Parts on East Chatham, between Waldo and Academy, used
to be the old theater....
...I remember when Kildaire
Farm Road used to be a two-lane paved country lane past its
intersection with Maynard Road, Maynard Road being Cary's
"Outer Loop" for years before Cary Parkway was built and/or
Maynard was looped around Cary too in such a loopy fashion
it had to be some local who had become Transportation
Planner for Cary's idea of revenge on the newcomers which
were "ruining" Cary; and I remember when Cornwallis Road,
the last street before Kildaire's intersection with
Maynard, was Cary's eastern most boundary of development,
Cornwallis leading to Pond Street which cut through from
Cornwallis to Maynard, Pond Street housing my best friend
growing up, Tom Robinson, of 912 Pond Street...
...My best friend before Tom, from second grade on
into junior high school, was Billy Pearce, who lived on a
dairy farm where the Kroger grocery store and Fist Union
bank on the right on Kildaire Farms Road is now; many happy
days were
spent exploring the woods and hollows and weirdly different
places on Billy's dairy farm; Billy also had a retarded
sister, Tammy Lynn, who became the namesake of this area's
premier center for humane care of the severely mentally
retarded, The Tammy Lynn Center in Raleigh, because of his
parents' involvement in helping to get the center
established...
...Further down the road from Billy's
place was the actual Kildaire Farm, a dairy farm for
decades before development and this area's first PUD
(Planned Unit Development), named "Kildaire Farms" by
coincidence; its old barn and feed storage building stood
stubbornly for years as a beacon against memory while
shopping centers and new neighborhoods mushroomed up around
them, some entrepreneur making them into antique shops in
an effort to save them, but when the land went up in value
to over $100,000 an acre, that was their
death-song...
...When MacGregor Downs was built a
little further down Kildaire in the early 70's, there was
such a big whoop-tee-do about it, because MacGregor
signaled the irrefutable beacon to all that this area was
becoming what it was always destined to become because of
the presence of nearby Research Triangle Park and the fact
that Durham on the other side of the 'Park had and still
has such an undeserved bad reputation, MacGregor semaphored
with a billion foot-candle light to all that Cary was to
become the highest per-capita income city in North
Carolina, and that was because it became the highest
concentration of scientific and technical PhD's in the
States, and that was because of the nearby RTP; with it's
$200,000+ lots and it's half-million dollar "starter" homes
and some going over seven figures plus with the land, a
time, place, and economic warpzone had been created, and a
part of Long Island and/or Southern California now sat
where once had sat present woods and streams and lost
innocence; Gregory Poole Jr., who had made and continues to
make more fortunes selling heavy equipment that are the
instruments of the developers, made another fortune with
his vision that became MacGregor Downs...
...Even in
town, the last bits of old Cary were being swallowed up;
the remnants of an old dairy long gone off West Chatham
near the old town cemetery save a house that had been
converted to such from its old barn and an open two-three
acre patch of former pasture now overgrown with bamboo, I
noticed had a bulldozer and backhoe parked at their edge,
and knowing that the postage-stamp pasture now awaited its
euthanasia, I rushed home, got my machete, and came back to
harvest some its resident decades-old bamboo as a souvenir,
a piece of which I made into a lead-filled blackjack which
I still have...
...I wish I had more memories to share
with those curious about Cary from the time of 1960 through
1970, but except for Triangle Forest neighborhood being
developed in that time, and isolated small neighborhoods like
Scottish Hills nearby to Triangle Forest, and Pirate's Cove
above the Maynard Road and Walnut Street intersection and
a couple more down Maynard, while Cary's momentum was
starting then, the steamroller of change to come hadn't
even had warmed up yet back then...
...After MacGregor
Downs was built in the early 70's, Kildaire Farms Road past
its intersection with Tryon Road still remained untouched;
where the main entrance to Lochmere Lakeside is now,
Lochmere eventually passing MacGregor in snob appeal,
there's a tree in the middle of the traffic island at the
entrance, and that tree used to be in the front yard of
what I and the other bored adolescent youths in Cary in the
early to mid 70's called "Harry's", short for "Harry's
Whorehouse"...
...Harry's was an old, abandoned farm
where most of the buildings, the original farmhouse, the
barn, the tobacco curing shed, other buildings had remained
more or less intact over the years, being vandalized a
little, the windows broken out and some doors and the
fireplace mantles and some Victorian wooden trim stolen,
but more or less intact otherwise; in the days before Wake
County passed an ordinance banning all discharge of
firearms out in the county unless you owned the land or had
written permission from the landowner, Harry's became our,
the teen-age and early 20's youth of Cary, unofficial
target range; we'd plaster paper targets to sides of the
buildings and shoot away, or we'd prop up cans and such on
bare window sills and try to pick them off; the main house
became so totally shot-out that eventually the beams and
2x4's in the walls started to give way and it started
caving in from its own weight, that and the fact that a lot
of structural wood had been removed by flying lead; when
developers finally took our Harry's away from us, we then
migrated to a site, an abandoned and dry lake bed owned by
North Carolina State University, just down the road from
the Shearon Harris Nuclear Plant outside of New Hill, which
was a good fifteen miles or so from Cary and Harry's; that
site was actually much safer than Harry's, since you were
shooting downhill into a dirtbank which had been the old
dam, but it wasn't Harry's, it didn't have character or
history of Harry's, you couldn't point to certain bullet
holes in certain buildings and identify them as coming from
so-and-so's .45-70-Government buffalo rifle or that old
7x57mm WWI Mauser that I and many other young men of Cary
owned and passed around in a perpetual cycle of
horse-trades...
...Just up the road, near the
intersection of Kildaire and Tryon, was another old open
pasture long abandoned, where there was a junk school bus
that became our favorite long-range target; from a position
up the slope near the road, the bus was an almost perfect
range of 500 yards away, and yes, the bus came to look like
something you'd see in Beirut rather than Cary N.C. over
time, as thousands of rounds blasted holes in its metal
skin; where that bus sat, now sits the main entrance to
Wal-Mart at Crescent Commons Shopping
Center...
...That does jog another couple of memories
from 1960-1970; when I was school-age and we lived on
Bashford Road when Bashford was still in Cary's ETJ
(Extra-Territorial Jurisdiction) limits, my father was a
small-game (mainly rabbit) hunter who kept a pack of
beagles year-round just for hunting season in the fall and
winter, but who would often take me hunting by himself,
just he and I, maybe his favorite "Lady"-dog with us but
oftentimes not even her; I tell this story selectively to
some of Cary's newcomers that I meet from time to time and
they always give me a look like "you're not that
old!" or "quit kidding me!", but I swear it's the God's
honest truth; when I was 7 or 8, in 1963 or 1964, before
all the development in Cary also swept east towards us as
well as south and west of downtown, one fall day my father
and I walked the three miles or so from our house to the
WPTF-AM radio towers, my father bringing his trusty
Remington made under Browning patent 16 gauge shotgun, and
I my trusty .22 Savage-Stevens autoloader rifle, where we
proceeded to find, flush, and shoot almost an entire covey
of quail, my father getting two or three but I bagging the
daily limit of fifteen birds, yes, with my .22
rifle; in all modesty to my ability with weapons and in
deference to the birds I bagged, they were obviously young
birds and hadn't been shot at before, when they "lit" up
they didn't zig and zag like an older bird than had been
shot at before would have, when they took wing they'd fly
in a straight line away from me if usually at a bit of
angle, but it was simply a matter of timing, not
anticipating a counter-feint on their part; now, the
footprint of the fields which protect the WPTF-AM 680 radio
towers are surrounded by new developments, new commercial
property, new industrial property, and zero coveys of
quail...
...Bracketed in that same time frame are also
memories of hiking over from our home at the corner of
Bashford Road and where E. Chatham St. in Cary and
Hillsboro St. in Raleigh met to a friend of the family's
old farm which she no longer worked but lived there while
she commuted to a "city job" and shooting rabbits which
we'd flush from a briar thicket that had grown up and
around a giant oak tree near the edge of one her fallow
fields; you would have to have a first-hand knowledge of
the local geography of which I speak about to appreciate
this point, but eventually that giant old oak tree became a
corporate symbol of Cary's premier shopping center which
was built atop our friend Lillie May's old farm; when they
began building Cary Towne Center and began the leveling of
the gently rolling hills which bespoke of a gentler and
kinder time into the level playing field for mall merchants
competing for part of Cary's new-found wealth, they
deliberately saved that giant old oak, carving an massive
dirt "island" around it in the middle of an asphalt parking
lot sea, building railroad tie-bulkheads and putting up a
spiked wrought-iron fence to keep citizens and me from the
ground from whence I gained unbuyable childhood memories
hunting with my father as an altar to the gods of
conspicuous consumption; when a lightning bolt hit and
finally killed the old oak a few years back, another part
of my childhood died along with it, though whenever I do
walk through Cary Towne Center to go to Eddie Bauer's or
Victoria's Secret or to pick up a quick lunch at its Food
Court, I can't help but remember that I used to hunt for
memories and rabbits on that very ground where I now hunt
for fashions and food...
...Another place that became an ersatz target
range was the old "weigh station" on Old Apex Highway
outside of Cary between Cary and Apex; when US 1 was the
main north-south artery between Maine and Florida, "One"
became Chatham Street in Cary and Hillsboro Street in
Raleigh and vice' versa, and when US 1 was US 1, the old
weigh station was working and vibrant and necessary part of
the theater which was Chatham Street and US One; long
abandoned, the gravel pile just behind it and the rolling
hills further behind opened up to easy walking by the
high-tension powerline right-of-way became a more popular
place to target shoot once they bulldozed and housed-over
Harry's; past the third big hill heading north from the
weigh station under the powerlines was a reasonably large
lake which stretched over eastward to Triangle Forest
neighborhood which for reasons I'll leave to your
imagination we affectionately named "Lake Ass"; an isolated
lake with clean water, the time of the late 70's, common
drug use among many Cary adolescents, teen-age hormones,
you figure it out; "Lake Ass" is now officially
en-ti-titled "Fred G. Bond Metro Park", yes, "...Metro
Park", sigh...
...Just before the old weigh station, where
Chatham Street turned back into US 1, was the famous Knotty
Pine Motor Court; when the top speed for cars on US 1 was
45 MPH on most stretches and in the days before
air-conditioning and major hotel chains locating a roomhive
every few miles on multilane interstate highways, when one
traveled from state to state one often stayed in places
like a Knotty Pine Motor Court, if one was lucky enough to
find such a nice place with window fans and individual
showers and bathrooms for each room and central hotwater
baseboard heating for the winter months and a decor which
would cost more than a large fortune to re-create now if
one would want to; every single inch of wall space in every
single room was heart knotty pine wood originally cut from
old-growth local pine trees, hence the name (du!), lovingly
finished in a medium-tan stain which protected it and over
the years brought out more and more natural luster and
beauty of the wood; I knew Knotty Pine well, because my
father knew the people that owned it and did their plumbing
service work, and because we would often fish in the pond
they owned which was right across 'One from the Motor
Court; I distinctly remember when I was six or seven years
old catching a giant, ancient snapping turtle, which was so
large that even a piece of him wouldn't even hardly rest
atop a five-gallon bucket, at the old pond; Knotty Pine
Motor Court is no more, of course, as you would figure,
it's been bought and sold several times in the past few
years and now sells itself as offering "efficiency
apartments", and the pond across the street is pretty much
silted in...
...Another place of memory of Cary and its
outskirts was Piney Plains Road; at basically a wide
pull-off place on Piney Plains which was a dirt road that
connected Walnut Street to Tryon Road along the backskirts
of creeping Lochmere and Summerwinds developments
eventually in the driveway of another proverbial old,
abandoned farm long since gone there was nothing and there
was everything; suffice to say that it sticks out in my
memories because a whole lot of partying went on
there, a lot of memories were impressed in the pages of my
mind there...
...I'd never forgive myself if I didn't mention
Gloria Ezzel; Gloria was my best friend Tom's girlfriend
when I first met her, and she and I were
boyfriend/girlfriend for a while but nothing ever too
serious, but she's definitely part of that time and place
in my life; she lived in a small, funky house on East
Chatham Street not far from Cricket's Texaco, and I
remember that in the winter of 1969 I first heard
Steppenwolf's "Live" album on her Sears box-style
recordplayer as she and Tom and I blew a little pot and
snuggled together and as three true friends shared a moment
of true intimacy and innocence that can never be repeated
in my life again; Gloria was killed in a single car
accident when she was just twenty or so, hitting a bridge
abutment on a lonely country backroad at 5 A.M. one
drizzly Monday morning...
...Cary's also home to my first fiance', Carolyn
Robinson; I originally met Carolyn at the Flea Market at
the NC State Fairgrounds on Hillsboro Street in Raleigh not
too far from the house where she was selling second-hand
clothes and where I gave her my Craig Plumbing Co. business
card and soon after she showed up at my office one day,
asking me and my father to give her a price on putting the
plumbing in an old building in downtown Cary, what's now
part of Ashworth Commons, where she was going to open up
her "UpStairs Art Gallery"; when Carolyn first met me that
Saturday at the Flea Market, it was love at first site for
her to me, but it took me a while to fall in love with her;
my parents, in the meanwhile, were having absolute shitfits
because Carolyn also happened to be divorced, 34 years old,
had three kids from her then-recently-ended marriage
including a 14-year-old daughter, and rode a Harley chopper
in Nancy Sinatra-style kneeboots, and there I was, an
18-year-old young man still living at home; yes, I
eventually did do some plumbing for her, quit your dirty
thoughts they're not flattering to you, no, we never did
get married, we eventually broke up about a year after
that, yes, I did exhibit some of my artwork in her gallery
during that time, and yes, I did see her a couple of times
after that accidentally in public, where she made quick
but polite exits from my presence...
...What's left of the Cary of my childhood and
adolescence?; not much, I'm afraid to say. There's still
the "big woods" that is compromised mainly of the "sheep
farm" (the old NC State Agricultural Research Station) and
some large tracts of private land which make up about a
500-600 acre tract that's in the middle of an area bordered
by Chatham Street, Maynard Road, Walnut Street, and I-40;
some politicians want to build a giant, 20+ field regional
soccer and sportsfield complex there, but there's many,
many secrets untold that are buried on the sheepfarm land
that were the byproducts of secret Cold War biological
warefare research, so I don't know if they're willing to
acknowledge that still more or less open but still
classified secret secret about the old sheepfarm and then
pay for all the soil decontamination that will cost in the
millions of dollars to have the place cleaned up; the large
privately owned tracts around the sheepfarm, though, well,
it's just a matter of time before they're gone, Cary's
already run sewer and water lines through their deep woods
in anticipation of the inevitable, the inevitability of it
all being as tangible as the memories of a time and place
past which shouts out in my mind "never more"...
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