GREENSBORO — Through most of the 20th century, Greensboro was one of the nation’s great industrial cities.
Our leadership brimmed with corporate CEOs.
We were proud.
We were wealthy.
We mattered.
And somehow, it all unraveled.
Our decline began years before the recession compounded our troubles and blocked our recovery.
Beginning in the 1980s, the great textile companies fought foreign imports and labor.
But they couldn’t fight financial reality.
One by one, Cone Mills, Guilford Mills and the mighty Burlington Industries appeared in bankruptcy courts.
After that, they sold off divisions, closed factories and eventually became parts of other companies.
Tens of thousands of Guilford County and Triad textile workers mourned jobs that would never return.
Without its signature industries, Greensboro has struggled for a decade to find a new path, a new image, a new economy.
Today, we’re not so proud.
We’re not so wealthy.
We clearly don’t have an economic identity that matters.
Rolling with the Stones
In the 1960s, if you didn’t watch "The Ed Sullivan Show" on Sunday nights, you didn’t know what was happening.
And the Rolling Stones were happening. Along with the Beatles, they were frequent guests on the show.
Ed Sullivan had that kind of pull. And major sponsors knew it.
One night, the Rolling Stones played the show and Greensboro’s Burlington Industries was one of those major sponsors.
Burlington appeared week after week with its distinctive commercials and graphics as bold as Sullivan’s stars.
"If it’s anything to do with fabric, we do it at Burlington. And we do more of it than anyone in the world," the announcer said at the ad’s end.
At the time, Cone Mills was the world’s largest denim producer.
Guilford Mills sold more fabric for automotive headliners than any other company.
And generations of Greensboro families worked in those mills — and for other major companies, too.
Dillard Paper was the largest distributor of paper in the Southeast.
Boren Brick and Carolina Steel were homegrown.
So were Jefferson Standard and Pilot Life Insurance.
Burlington Industries built so many plants in the 1960s and 1970s that local architectural and construction companies could hardly keep up.
Jim Melvin, president of the Joseph M. Bryan Foundation of Greater Greensboro, remembers those days well. Melvin was the city’s mayor for 10 years beginning in 1971, and he has likened Greensboro to being "king of the mountain."
But that was then.
Not anymore.
"I really do believe," Melvin said, "we got a little complacent."
"Snowball going downhill"
By the early 1980s, the corporate world was changing.
Nothing mattered but a company’s profit potential.
Textile companies fended off corporate raiders but were left with debt that forced them to sell off mills or divisions.
Greensboro sustained one blow after another.
The slow demise of catalog sales shut down a major Sears customer-service center.
When the Cold War ended in 1991, it meant the demise of hundreds of engineering jobs at Western Electric and General Dynamics, which did technical work on radar systems for the Defense Department.
"It was like a snowball going downhill," Melvin said. "We started losing so many jobs — and good jobs."
The blows kept coming.
International trade agreements allowed such companies as Burlington to move jobs away from North Carolina.
And those same trade agreements began allowing cheap textiles and apparel into the United States.
More plants began to close.
Then the bankruptcies began.
Now, Cone and Burlington are part of another company.
The Target store beside the hulking Sears building is a reminder of changing times.
And Burlington’s steel-skeleton building is gone.
Now, it’s a shopping center.
Time was, Melvin could tick off a list of leaders from local companies who were capable of solving the community’s problems — people who could raise a million dollars at a moment’s notice.
Bill Hemphill, a founder of United Guaranty — the nation’s top mortgage insurance company — was one of them.
In 1999, just before Greensboro’s worst economic declines began, Hemphill addressed city leaders.
In 10 minutes, Melvin said, Hemphill shook the establishment to its core.
"There are forces working on Greensboro," Hemphill said, "that are going to make this a terrible place to live," according to Howard E. Covington Jr. in his book "Once Upon a City."
"Unfortunately, he was a prophet," Melvin said. "All the things he said would happen did happen — and it happened in spades."
Fresh blood, fresh ideas
The glory days are gone.
The Greensboro-High Point metro area’s 9.6 percent unemployment for July puts it in 10th place among North Carolina’s 14 metro areas.
Cities are usually defined by their key industry.
In High Point, that’s furniture. In Winston-Salem, it’s tobacco. Charlotte has banking.
For Greensboro, it used to be textiles and manufacturing.
"We were in a disadvantaged position coming into the most recent economic downturn," said David Ribar, a UNCG professor of economics.
Today, the city has a mix of industries.
While economic developers are out looking for more, it’s the employers Greensboro never lost who ultimately will determine its future, Ribar said.
Health care, aviation, innovation, and a host of small homegrown companies are in line for growth.
Then there’s higher education.
"We are a college town. End of story. Full stop. Case closed," said Kent Chabotar, the president of Guilford College. "We deserve a title as much as anybody."
To Chabotar, "college town" means stable employment, a place of accessible culture, a great place to live and retire.
He said the nearly 50,000 students at five four-year colleges, GTCC and Elon University’s law school can be the bedrock of a place that already is one of the most livable in the nation.
Uniting those colleges with local business can spawn ideas and jobs.
That’s one reason Opportunity Greensboro, a civic development group, is leading plans to build a shared university campus downtown.
But calling this a college town doesn’t have the ring to it that "Silicon Valley" does.
Or "The Air Capital of the World" either — a title currently held by Wichita, Kan., home of Cessna and a proud history of high-profile Boeing aircraft.
Yet some say Greensboro could at least mount a challenge.
Honda Aircraft, which employs roughly 800 people at its Piedmont Triad International Airport campus, could lead that charge.
The company hasn’t even delivered one HondaJet yet, but already the aircraft is the talk of the international aviation world with its innovative design.
TIMCO, right next door, provides a less glamorous but essential role as one of the world’s largest jet maintenance, repair and overhaul companies.
As it builds those industries, Greensboro can take comfort in the fact that it’s well ahead on utilities — despite some disadvantages.
We have no big rivers, no harbors, no natural features that draw commerce.
But Greensboro has one of the best highway systems any city its size could have.
It also has the electric power grid built to handle the insatiable draw that textile mills once demanded.
And the Southeast’s largest oil pipelines.
In the end, our economy could flow from those things.
"That’s one advantage that we haven’t lost and we’re trying to build on," said Ribar, the economics professor.
Gone are the days of Melvin’s time when the city’s leaders had a united vision.
Economic developers want to add more innovative manufacturing, life science and supply-chain companies into the mix.
But the economic developers themselves are part of the problem, said one businessman and former Greensboro City Council member.
"We need to kind of clean house," said Tom Phillips, who served on the council more than 12 years between 1989 and 2007.
"We need some fresh blood in there with fresh ideas."
