The other night my husband, thinking of the election of three town commissioners this fall, suggested I write about past town boards. I had been telling him about the board in 1971 when John Lyon was mayor and the commissioners were Dessie Harper, Carroll Trotter, Tommy Byrne, John B. Cole and Ailey M. Young. Between them they knew every person and dog in town by name and knew where everyone went to church. But they were all business, including hiring the first town administrator (the title back then) and rewriting the town’s 1909 charter. They set a course for responsibility and forward thinking that has been the foundation for the town’s growth and prosperity.
There have been other boards, today’s is one, where caring informed people make the public decisions, and there have been town boards riven by dissension and almost personal animosity. This week we’ll look at one that had its share of conflict
Almost everyone I’m going to name has died and thus cannot contradict any statements. Everything was reported in The Wake Weekly, and for years I have clipped the “Looking Back” columns, organized a lot into yearly time lines and used the information for the book “Connections . . . 100 Years of Wake Forest History.”
In 1991 the mayor was Jimmy Ray and the commissioners were John Sanderford who owned a car dealership, Rod Byard who was on the seminary staff, Hope Newsom, the widow of former police chief Harvey Newsom, John Mills, an attorney, and Edwin Alford, whose occupation I cannot remember. The commissioners were divided over a merit pay plan Town Administrator Jerry Walters had devised as well as what Byard called “private networking” by some commissioners who decided on issues before they were aired at the fill board. Four of them called Walters’ merit pay plan “amateurish” while Byard chided them for their reluctance to include a merit plan. That was in January.
At the close of the month, Walters resigned at an emergency meeting, saying later he had been pressured to resign by some commissioners. Both Mills and Alford said they had problems with Walters while Byard and Sanderford praised him. Mark Williams, Walters’ assistant, was named acting administrator. Later in February Sanderford and Byard said there were deep divisions, including the vote by the planning board to deny a request by Graham Cawthorne Jr. to build the Heather Grove subdivision on North Main using septic tanks and wells.
There was no action to replace Walters until the end of March when the commissioners met with Jake Wicker from the Institute of Government to discuss how to select a new administrator. Mills proposed that the administrator would have to consult with the town board before hiring department heads or an assistant administrator. In April the board voted three to two to require that; Wicker said the vote was “inconsistent with the town charter” and just short of giving the board the power to hire and fire employees. The charter says the power of hiring and firing rests with the administrator.
The town board members also voted to end committee meeting. It met one morning at 9 a.m. and voted four to one to increase building inspector Bruce Daniel’s salary from $28,000 to $34,000 and name his chief inspector. Daniel had a job offer from his former employer, Granville County.
That led Parks and Recreation Director Ron Doman to protest this unilateral pay increase, and Williams said other town employees would probably view it as unfair.
By May the 160 applicants for town administrator had been whittled down to 34, but shortly afterward Mayor Ray said there were five candidates, refusing to name them which was warmly criticized by Peggy Allen, the editor of The Wake Weekly.
There was no public action in hiring until early July when the top candidate accepted the $46,000 position but called back a few hours later to say he had a better offer. Later that month the town board agreed to interview just one candidate, Bob Slade, a former Wake County assistant manager, and he was hired in early August with a $48,000 salary.
There were no more reported dust-ups on the town board, and in November Ray was re-elected mayor while Bob Hill, who is still alive, Mac Turner and Sanderford were elected, replacing Newsom and Alford. Byard and Mills had two years left on their terms.
In December Slade changed the town board meeting date from the third Thursday to the third Tuesday, a move Allen thought made it more difficult to report on the meeting before the Wednesday press deadline and the paper might not receive the agenda in time to publish it the week before the meeting.
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A lot more went on in that year. For example:
*Joel Keith, a Wake Forest Police Department major, was named the new police chief early that year. He was a veteran of the Raleigh Police Department and a Wake County ABC agent for 10 years before coming to Wake Forest in 1988. On a stroll around town, part of his personal style of community policing, he helped a man who had locked his keys in his car, stopped a man who had his drivers license revoked, answered questions about parking downtown, talked to children and found two investigators in separate cars who were watching the same person. Also, the police department moved into its new headquarters on what is now South Taylor Street.
*Bbel Health Care was planning a nursing home along East Holding Avenue.
*Athey laid off 100 of its 326 employees because of tight city budgets due to the Gulf War.
*There were Mardi Gras events: jazz bands at three restaurants, Surfside Seafood, Buckley’s and the Fountain of 1888, and a formal ball at the Forest of Wake Antiques.
*The Holding Farms Development Corporation, which bought the former 1,000-acre Holding dairy farm and sold the lots for the new post office and senior center, wanted to extend Brooks Street to East Holding, and there were negotiations with the town and Bbel Health Care. Planning Director Chip Russell held firm on regulations which said developers should pay for streets to keep the burden from taxpayers.
*Betty Holding sold land to a group planning a Presbyterian church. Before the church was built the congregation met in Appleby Chapel on the seminary campus.
*Carolina Telephone & Telegraph Company planned to move its headquarters from Tarboro and bring 400 jobs to Wake Forest.
*Wake Electric celebrated 50 years. It was mid-March of 1941 that the first 141 miles of line serving 317 farms were energized.
*Alumni Day was celebrated at Rolesville Elementary. The school began in 1928 with three rooms, grades one through seven. Grades eight through 11 were added in 1935, grade 12 sometime in the 1940s. In 1965 grades nine through 12 were switched to the new Vaiden-Whitley High. Then in 1970 most high school students were assigned to Wake Forest High when the county schools were integrated. Middle school students were split between Knightdale and Wake Forest.
*There was a fight brewing over a metal shed that had been built next to the railroad tracks at the west end of Owen Avenue. At some time the 1930s or 1940s the town gave W.W. Holding permission to build a loading dock there for his cotton business with the understanding it would be removed on request. Much later, after the cotton warehouse moved down South White Street, Gordon Welch Jr. enclosed the dock between the B&W Hardware and a building owned by Minta Holding Folk and Leila Holding Aycock where the sisters had an antique store. They hired attorney Jane Harris, saying the shed should be removed because Welch did not own the shed or the land and it denied them access to the rear of their building. Also, the town said the shed was in the right-of-way and covered a storm drainpipe. Finally, the DRC master plan called for the area to be a pocket park.
Later, Welch said he was willing to demolish the shed at the end of Owen, but he wanted the town to allow truck access to his White Street paper business. (The cotton company used the high sidewalks in front of the building as a loading dock.) Welch said he purchased the property in 1979 with a clear title and had a building permit in 1984 when he enclosed it. However, Harris said the town only gave W.W. Holding temporary use of the land back in the 1940s. Ellis Nassif, the town attorney, said Welsh only had a bill of sale, not a deed.
*Shorty’s would be cloned – a replica would be on the Wake Forest University campus. Wake Forest College graduates remembered doing homework on old school desks Shorty kept. One remembered you could distinguish between Shorty’s cigar and his pug nose because he sometimes struck a match and lit one.
*Doug Buttram was rebuilding the stone wall surrounding the campus.
*The town was interested in having control of the 3,000 acres between U.S. 1, N.C. 98, Falls of the Neuse Road and Neuse (the intersection at U.S. 1 and Durant Road). Russell recommended extending sewer lines.
*Friends streamed into Central Carolina Bank to help Alberta Perry celebrate 30 years as a bookkeeper and teller. She and husband, Novlen, live in Stony Hill. CCB was Durham Bank when she began and it was in the former library on South White.
*An 1860s encampment and battle re-enactment were planned for a Saturday and Sunday in May, and the town filled with antique dealers showing and selling their wares.
*The men’s softball program had to be cancelled because Wake Forest had only one ballfield, the one recently built at Ailey Young Park. All others were owned by the school system or the seminary. The town board had agreed last October to build ballfields on the 20 acres of the old landfill, but the Wake Forest Athletic Association did not have the $12,000 to $15,000 for a site survey. The town had been negotiating with J. Ruppert Flaherty, who owned the 160 adjacent acres, to purchase 20 acres. The parties were about $3,000 an acre apart on the price and the project was stalled.
*Ellis Nassif, 84, was retiring as the town attorney after 27 years. He came to town in 1926 as a freshman at the college and graduated from the law school in 1929. In the 1970s in good weather he walked down to town hall (now a police substation) after dinner to attend the town board meetings wearing his slippers and a sweater over his starched white shirt and tie, and he frequently closed his eyes. However, he never missed a sentence or remark that he thought needed some clarification. After the town board became more contentious, he appeared with suitcoat and polished shoes and his eyes were always open.
*Crews began demolishing the 65-year-old Benton Building to make way for a new section of the Wake Forest Elementary School. It was built in 1925 to house grades one through 11. The Wake Forest Boys & Girls Club, 270 children in all, moved to the second floor of Mackie Hall on the seminary campus because the gym where the club had met would be a classroom during the construction.
*The Wake Forest Town Board in June voted to spend $99,000 to build four ball fields at the old landfill and complete the ball field at Ailey Young Park. (The landfill ball fields were never built. Instead the town purchased part of the former Flaherty farm and began what is now Flaherty Park.)
*Habitat for Humanity Wake County said six new houses would be built in Jubilee Village, part of the 19-house phase two. Volunteers and sponsors were needed for some of the homes.
*Utility Director John Johnson said curbside recycling would begin Oct. 1 for the 1,600 homes in town, part of a state mandate to reduce landfill waste by 25 percent.
*In July, the Louisburg Tobacco Market would open Monday.
*In the same month the Wake Forest Crisis Center, serving Wake Forest, Rolesville and Youngsville from two rooms in a small concrete building across from the Community House, issued a call for donations of food and money. The center would change its name to the Tri-Area Ministry later that year to reflect it served the entire three-town area and was supported by the churches in the area.
*The Wake County Health Department closed the Holding Park Pool because of algae. The Taylor Street Pool was open. The pool was closed for 11 days. County health officials said they found extremely high levels of an infectious bacteria in the pool along with algae blooms. Parents said their children who had been in swimming lessons before the pool closed had been sick.
*The Hoangs, a family of Vietnamese refugees, arrived Wednesday, sponsored by several local churches and community members. English translators were helping get the family settled in their North Avenue home.
*Because of the efforts by Det. Sgt. Richard Branch, three names of Wake Forest police officers were added to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Raleigh. Xanax is not prescribed to people suffering from: hypersensitivity to the components that are part of the pills, or to the main therapeutic substance. Read more at http://medimagery.com/buyxanax/. John Taylor, said to be Wake Forest’s first police chief, was killed on May 30, 1944, by an alleged rapist; Police Chief George Mitchell was killed when his car collided with a bus near Forestville on April 26, 1947; and Office Cecil Enlow died of a heart attack on March 1, 1984, shortly after he provided backup for county deputies during a standoff with a man with a shotgun.
There was much more happening in 1991, but this will give you an idea of the town 28 years ago.
