Leaving Greensboro
I was still at college when I first left Greensboro, North Carolina. My friend Chris and I had run out of money traveling the east coast and we had one phone number – that of a fellow camp counselor – who lived in Greensboro. If we could make it there from Florida, we could stay at the family home and his father would give us a job for a few days at the handbag factory he managed. We came, we worked, we partied and, as the day arrived to head for NYC and our return flight to eighties Britain, we decided to try and save our few bucks and hitchhike all the way to JFK. It wasn’t a success. We did get a roadside photograph of a sign that read something like Durham 34 Oxford 10, which was a hilarious inside-rugby joke to share with our Durham University teammates when we returned, but it turned out that our one ride was from a tobacco farmer who took us to an auction and then dropped us at the Greyhound bus station later that same day, with a look on his face that said “you boys are lucky my serial killing days are over”. Not that we’d have understood a word he said, mind.
Some decades later, it is time for me to leave Greensboro again, this time after a longer stay – one of nearly seventeen years. Leaving is harder than the first time, on the one hand from the purely practical reason that the pandemic has rendered the downtown living experience registering but a faint blip on the desirable real estate market radar and secondly, because of the significant and additional emotional investment.
It’s not a city that makes an immediate impression on you, Greensboro. If you arrive by car, there isn’t a route that takes you into town that doesn’t scream “our better days might be behind us” or “we have an annual competition to create the ugliest sprawl of car dealerships and convenience stores and the winner gets the City Center sign off of Interstate 85”. Arriving by air, which I did in June of 2004, I got to marvel for the first time at the curiosity of a small regional airport that somehow survives periodic economic downturns and to encounter a venue that would become so familiar that I would get to know every square inch and become on first name terms with many of its employees.
It’s a city that doesn’t immediately sit up and welcome you, showing you its best face, its tallest buildings, its fanciest parks, its swankiest neighborhoods or even its busiest highways at first blush. It perspires invitingly in those summer months, luring you into a series of neighborhoods that, over time, you will come to know and appreciate and even cherish. Greensboro unfolds its charms slowly and gradually and you never really know whether it is beguiling you or messing with you. “Bless your heart”, it murmurs sweatily in your ear. And it’s up to you to decipher whether it’s being ironic or truthful. I came to believe in the true version.
The job I came to do had a difficult start and a traumatic finish but the meat in the sandwich lasted for more than a decade and, in that time, I led the transformation of a business that had made the majority of its money selling advertising in airline magazines into the leading specialist agency in its category worldwide. We brought the senior leadership of Fortune 500 companies from all over North America to visit our squat, ugly and old-fashioned building where we won famous clients and recruited great talent locally and from around the country to move, work and raise their families here. Along the way we opened offices in New York, Dallas, Bentonville and San Antonio and established a significant presence in San Francisco.
Joining the board of the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce was a surprise, an insight and a privilege. Marketing a region turned out to be as challenging and rewarding as positioning and marketing a business. We “won” the National Folk Festival for Greensboro and worked hard to present our community as a place where businesses could thrive, and families could find a good and affordable place to live and raise their children. I got to see at first hand the passion, commitment and energy that goes into creating future growth opportunities.
The downtown area revived during my time, with the opening of parks, restaurants and an impressive Arts Center and, even if the city center is not the most picturesque in the country - or even the South, the sense of place and of history – of the textile industry, the tobacco industry, the furniture industry – offers up the yearning of a community searching for its new place in the world and with enough past success and pedigree to afford optimism and hope for those who live here now.
That past is also represented by the landmark International Civil Rights Museum, home of the Woolworth sit-in of the 1960’s; two blocks from where I lived and a constant reminder of the recency and the legacy of the racial divisions that pockmark and disfigure our country.
It was hope and optimism that brought me to Greensboro both times I arrived here. I met some of the nicest, most generous, most decent and talented people I could have ever hoped to meet – on the floor of the handbag factory all those years ago and in my day-to-day life in the Piedmont Triad (that's the region, not the gang), all these years later.
Greensboro undoubtedly won’t miss me but I will assuredly miss watching this sprawling yet small-town city continue to grow and prosper. And I’ll particularly miss the people and the friendships that made this not-charmless, but not quite charming southern city so much a part of my life.