Just a little history: Pineview Estates offered homes at $21,500 in 1970

Our family moved to Wake Forest – well, just outside it, down in Forestville – in July of 1970 when the U.S. Census said there were 3,148 people living in town. Now there are about 46,000, give or take. Fifty years sure has made a difference.

The following vignettes and information are gleaned from The Wake Weekly’s Looking Back section, which has disappeared.

Fire gutted the Forest Theatre on July 1, 1966 despite the efforts of firemen from seven departments as well as townspeople who just grabbed hoses and turned them on the fire. The shell still stood in 1970 when in late March the Bank of Fuquay (now Fidelity) purchased the property with plans to build a branch there. The other new building in town was Ira D. “Shorty” Lee’s Wake Forest Medical Arts Building on South Allen Road across from the Wake Forest Branch Hospital.

In April the Wake County Board of Education (which was separate from the Raleigh Board of Education) adopted a plan for Rolesville area students to attend Wake Forest High School their junior and senior years. Since the Rolesville High School was closed in 1965 most students attended the new Vaiden-Whitley High School, now East Wake High. That was the start of a year-long battle.

Also in April there were two new building projects. A.G. Tarn was building four houses in Pineview Acres and the Wake Forest Baptist Church was building a new education building. In Youngsville Dr. Albert Corpening was building his new office on Main Street.

By May the school controversy was building up steam. About 135 angry Rolesville parents protested the new assignments. They wanted children to attend the Rolesville school for grades one through eight (kindergartens were not part of public schools until 1974) while the high school students would go to Vaiden-Whitley. The school board said high school students could also attend Wake Forest. R.H. Forrest said there was the residue of bad feeling from 30 years earlier when town, college, country, mill village and Rolesville students all attended Wake Forest. Rolesville broke off from Wake Forest when there were 60 students and began its own school.

There was another educational storm on the horizon – integration was about to come to Wake County. In 1967 the county school board had decided it would take place in 1970 and began to plan for a trouble-free change. Committees were set up in the three Wake Forest schools – DuBois High School, which included grades one through twelve, Wake Forest Elementary and Wake Forest High. The principals for the local desegregated schools were Maxine Nuckles for Wake Forest Elementary, Richard L. Barfield and Gene Adams at WF-R Middle and E.V. Meadows and W.L. Graham at WF-R High.

And in 1967 five young women who had won the backing of the school board and their families transferred from DuBois to Wake Forest High. “It was indeed a very rude awakening for us. It was a culture shock and more,” Theresa Watkins has said years later. Evonne Peppers, Jeanette Massenburg and Pauline Battle “were forced to return to DuBois for fear of their lives and the safety of their families,” Watkins remembered. She and Rhonda Hood would remain for two years and graduate. Watkins said the majority of the teachers treated them with respect though their true feelings were something else. She mentioned Pansy Sullivan, Ruamie Squires, Annie Bobo and Stella Forrest as being compassionate and sensitive to their feelings. “Many of the students were cordial and some tried to make life easy for us.” By the beginning of their senior year Watkins and Hood found everyone had adjusted and students were comfortable in one another’s presence.

With all the controversy, was 1970 a good year to ask voters to approve school bonds for new buildings? Apparently not. Locally the vote was 385 to 17 against the bonds.

A signal of change came when Carlton Chappell opened his new Ford dealership and garage in the triangle of land at the intersection of U.S. 1 and U.S. 1-A. He had operated the dealership for five years in what is now the NC Surveyors association on South White Street.

In June the Raleigh News & Observer published a special eight-page section outlining the Raleigh and Wake County Fallout Shelter Allocation Plan: “Where to go for protection against radio-active fallout.”

At the end of June Allen Jeffreys, 72, was honored with a dinner and presented with a silver bowl as he retired after 46 years as a janitor at Wake Forest College and Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Kathleen Mackie presented the bowl and remembers Jeffreys used to scrub the cadaver and the buildings when the medical school was on the college campus. Jeffreys said he was born “below Dr. Paschal’s.” He and his wife, Marie, raised two daughters who were then living in Washington, D.C. Jeffrey’s price was watching his grandson, Richard Queen, a professional football player with the Los Angeles Chargers.

In July the president of Athey Products (now repurposed as The Factory on South Main) announced the plan had a $6.3-million contract with the U.S. Army to produce 220 diesel-powered fork lifts.

The paper on July 20 reported that a fire and an alarm that did not work nearly destroyed Ray Tire Service on North White Street.

Bet you did not know Wake Forest had an arm of the Black Liberation Party. Three of its members – Warren Massenburg, Ronny Williams and Margie Gill – went to the town board in July asking for more street lights on North Taylor and Nelson streets, more lighting at the new basketball court (was that under the water tower on North Taylor?), faster trash pickup and another fire hydrant along Nelson Street. At that time, Paul Brixhoff was the mayor and the commissioners were Thomas Byrne, Walter (Buddy) Holding, John Lyon, Dessie Harper and J. Carroll Trotter. Massenburg would return in October to ask why the new street lights still had not been installed.

Also in July, Oscar C. Smith with the Wake Forest Fire Department’s second unit was elected to a ninth term as chairman of the board for the North Carolina Volunteer Firemen’s Association.

A perpetual idea by the North Carolina Department of Transportation, the four-laning of U.S. 1 from Wake Forest to the U.S. 401 intersection in Raleigh, was back on the active list with a cost of $4 million.

In August, George Mackie Jr. started a new business in the former Chappell Ford dealership, Industrial Plastics, which made portable chemical toilets.

The Wake Forest Chamber of Commerce had several goals for 1970 which included sponsoring a calf show for 4-H youth, urge an underpass in the southern part of town, explore the idea of a Fourth of July celebration, encourage more new homes, sponsor the Christmas parade and urge the four-laning of U.S. 1.

Proctor Scarboro, a county commissioner candidate, said he heard complaints because the county school system had not delayed the start of school. Tobacco barning was behind schedule and 60 percent of the labor was school-age children and teens. The county school system had 28,000 students.

In August also, the Rolesville parents offered a revised attendance plan in which grades one through eight would go to the Rolesville school and high school students could choose to go to either Vaiden-Whitley or Wake Forest. The county education board plan call for all middle school and high school students to go to Wake Forest.

In September the school integration plan was so smooth that newcomers were not aware it was happening.

Guy Hill, who served the town as operator of the water treatment plant, supervisor of water and sewer and other town functions like the collection of trash, was given permission by the town board to continue burning town trash rather than burying it.

Fundraising began for a Wake Forest Rescue Squad building on South White Street next to Holmes TV Repair. The Wake Forest Baptist Church dedicated its new two-story education building, and Arlos Tarn, developer of Pineview Estates “between Wake Forest and Forestville,” was selling the new homes – two complete and two underway – for $18,500 to $21,500 depending on whether they had three bedrooms or four.

The town’s zoning board had three vacancies: B.J. Powell and J.W. Warren were retiring, Clarence Smith had died, and only Pearlie Medlin and Carlton Chappell kept their seats.

Just before Halloween, Mallinckrodt held an open house for its new PAP plant, the third expansion since the company located between Wake Forest and Raleigh in 1966. Jim Lyles, Don Griesedieck and Harold Moore were among its employees.

On the same day, the Wake Forest Chamber of Commerce board met to vote on Ira D. “Shorty” Lee’s motion not to allow any Christmas parade units with “political, racial or controversial overtones.” President C.E. Matthews said he had received phone calls from “controversial groups” that wanted to participate, and John Wooten said he had turned down the Ku Klux Klan several years before. The parade would be at 4 p.m. Monday. It would form on North Main, go through the underpass, up White to Elm, then to Brooks and Roosevelt and back to North Main.

Mayor Paul Brixhoff named Collis Lewis the new town clerk and treasurer. Roy Powell, town clerk since 1968, would be an assistant along with Alma Wall and Ola Jackson.

Marie Joyner was honored at the Christmas Dinner. She came to town to be a telephone operator for Home Telephone & Telegraph housed downstairs at Holding Drug Store. After she married Shorty Joyner, she played the piano at the movies the Joyner family ran in the Wilkinson Building at the corner of Wait and South White streets (Las Margaritas is in the basement). She also worked at the B&S Department Store (now Wake Forest Art & Frame and Domino’s Pizza) where she also played Santa.

In mid-December the Burlington Mills Wake Finishing Plant just north of the Neuse River and now a U-Haul depot announced at least 1,300 people had attended the Children’s Christmas Party.

At the same time there was an announcement that a large new industry would locate in town, and two weeks later Huyck Corporation said it had purchased 80 acres at the U.S. 1 and 1-A intersection where its Formex (also later called Weavex) division would build and employ 125 people. The company moved all operations to Canada later and the land is now a car dealership with some small businesses like Aldi’s.

As the year drew to a close the Royal Cotton Mill held an open house for more than 600 people. After the mill closed it was repurposed into apartments.

Lois Barham, who reported the Rolesville news, gave a vivid description of a hog killing because it was that time of year.

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