Fond memories of a hotel
Hayworth describes his mother's encouragement of his father's business ventures, his father's business philosophy, and his family's ownership of a hotel in the North Carolina mountains. As Hayworth describes the ownership, sale, and eventual demolition of this hotel, he reveals the depth of his connection to it and recalls fond memories of his childhood there.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with David R. Hayworth, February 6, 1997. Interview I-0099. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
This was before you were born, but did
any stories come down through your family about the foundings of Alma
and Myrtle? I know they were founded before your father—your
father didn't found them—but he did buy into them
or buy them early on. Do you—were there any stories about why
he decided to do this? Did he have any assistance in doing this? Did he
have any partners? Were there any—I guess there
weren't any local, state or federal agencies involved in the
founding of these companies; that was really before—
- DAVID R. HAYWORTH:
-
It was before the government tried to tell you how to run your business.
- DOROTHY GAY DARR:
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That's right. Literally.
- DAVID R. HAYWORTH:
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Literally. That's right, literally.
- DOROTHY GAY DARR:
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But, were there any stories about how he came upon these opportunities?
- DAVID R. HAYWORTH:
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Yeah, I can tell you—what I know I'll be glad to
tell you. I'm glad you asked the question. As
we've already stated, he had
established—founded—started Hayworth Roll and
Panel Company, the first and oldest plywood company in North Carolina,
which happened to be located—Grimes Street is right across
from what was then the Alma Furniture Company, which was owned and
operated by Mr. J.P. Redding. He did not have any sons or heirs. Ms.
Alma Redding, for whom the company was named, did not live to be an
adult, I believe; I think—according to my mother, she died at
sort of a school age level, maybe fifteen or sixteen. But anyway,
that's where the name came from, which
my daddy—this is just a little aside, I don't know
why it popped in my mind—but when he bought Alma and then
subsequently Myrtle, he used to call the two companies girls, you know.
Interestingly enough, when he bought Myrtle the question came up,
'Well, what are we going to name the company?' He
said, 'Well, we're going to rename it Myrtle Desk
Company in honor of my mother,' whose name was Myrtle. But
anyway, the reason he bought Alma was because Mr. Redding was getting to
retirement age and wanted to sell his company, having no sons to take
over. And so it was—it came up for auction. So it
wasn't a private sale in that sense of the word. The
significance of that, Dorothy, is the fact that he put in his bid, okay,
and—there was a rather, I guess he was probably one of the
wealthiest people in High Point at that time—Mr.
Wren—and he owned a lot of real estate.
- DOROTHY GAY DARR:
-
This is Tom Wren?
- DAVID R. HAYWORTH:
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No.
- DOROTHY GAY DARR:
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Manliff? Was it M—wasn't there a Tom?
- DAVID R. HAYWORTH:
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Tom Wren, that's who it was. Now, there was another Wren who
was Mr. M.J. Wren.
- DOROTHY GAY DARR:
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Well, they all called him Bud or something.
- DAVID R. HAYWORTH:
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Exactly. Bud Wren. But this was the other one. He was very
wealthy—they both were—but I think he was maybe
more so. And, long story short, he raised my daddy's bid, and
daddy wasn't rolling in money in those days by any matter of
means. He had a prosperous operation and he was making money and all
that, but he wasn't a multi-millionaire; wasn't
anybody in those days a millionaire, I'll say, but Mr. Wren
probably was. So, daddy came home and told mother that he
didn't get the company because Mr. Wren raised his bid, and
mother said, 'You go right back and meet
that bid; don't let that old you-know-what get that company
away from you.' He did, and she always felt that if it
hadn't been, if she hadn't been so supportive and
so anxious to see him succeed that he might have not bought the company.
And so she sort of took credit for him buying the company.
- DOROTHY GAY DARR:
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She had a strong idea that he should? I mean, she felt strongly enough
about it?
- DAVID R. HAYWORTH:
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Absolutely. He was definitely a visionary, and as years moved on before
his sudden death he—his philosophy of business, Dorothy, was
to buy a company and have somebody run it. You see, he didn't
limit himself to, 'Well, I've got this company and
this is it.' And that's exactly what he did with
Alma; I don't know exactly how long after he bought it, but
he pretty soon he hired a man whose name was D.R. Parker, David Rowe
Parker, to be the manager of Alma Desk Company. And I'm sorry
I cannot tell you exactly what Mr. Parker's background was,
but obviously it was in manufacturing or daddy wouldn't have
hired him. And he was a good manager. And down at Myrtle Desk Company he
had a man whose name was Tom Powell, which, of course, is a name that
I'm sure you're familiar with. And then at the
time of his death he had a company called Arnold Lumber Company, and he
hired a man named Claude Cummings to run that company. And he was
heavily involved in a household furniture manufacturer over in
Burlington, and he just had his interests in all kinds of things. In
August of 1927—before he died in February of 1928 he loved
the mountains, and went to Blowing Rock a lot. There was a magnificent
hotel in Blowing Rock named Mayview Manor, and it had been built by a
man from Charlotte who had gotten into financial difficulties. It was
sold at auction, and in 1928 he bought it for $180,000; it
inventoried for a million. A lot of his friends
here in High Point kidded him about buying this white elephant and his
comment, according to mother, was that, 'Any time I can buy
something—' Did I say $180,000? It was
$160,000. Because he said, 'Any time I can buy
something for sixteen cents on the dollar I'll make
money.' And he would have if he'd lived. He had an
awful lot of real estate all on top of the mountain. This hotel was way
up on the top of a mountain and here was the little village of Blowing
Rock down here, and it had the most gorgeous view of Grandfather
Mountain and the Blue Ridge that you could ever imagine;
there's no more beautiful view in western North Carolina than
there was from the sight of that hotel. I went there many, many times as
a child, and my fondest childhood memories were being there at Mayview
Manor. Mother, of course, kept—she inherited the hotel, and
she didn't know anything about running a hotel but she had
sense enough to hire a young man who she believed would be a very
successful hotel manager. That turned out to be the case. This man was
named Milton Chapman and he ran Mayview Manor; managed the Mayview Manor
in the summer, and in the wintertime went to Florida and had a hotel
down there. And he told mother many times that there was no real secret
to running a hotel; all you had to do was make every guest feel they
were the most important guest in the hotel. How simple, but how
important. I think that's interesting.
- DOROTHY GAY DARR:
-
That's one of the major things about a fine hotel is
it's good service and friendly help.
- DAVID R. HAYWORTH:
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Good service, and he believed in having the best chef you could hire to
run the dining room—have food that everybody would want to
come back for.
- DOROTHY GAY DARR:
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So your family continued to own this hotel.
- DAVID R. HAYWORTH:
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Mother owned it.
- DOROTHY GAY DARR:
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Throughout the Depression?
- DAVID R. HAYWORTH:
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Uh-hmm. She really did. And it was amazing—she was amazed
too—but the season in those days was very short; the hotel
opened the first week in June and closed the day after Labor Day, which
is what?
- DOROTHY GAY DARR:
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[Laughter] [unclear]
- DAVID R. HAYWORTH:
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Yeah. They didn't go to the mountains in the fall, the most
beautiful time, for some reason in those days. I don't know
why. I guess people maybe did, but not enough to keep a hotel that had
over two hundred rooms. It was huge, you know; just sort of went around
the crest of the mountain, on the side of the mountain. And St.
John's Gorge and Grandfather were in the distance. But she
kept the hotel all during the Depression, and always said,
'We never made any money but we never lost any.'
And I think that's incredible for those particular years. And
one of my daddy's very good friends—a very
successful household furniture manufacturer—was a man named
Tom Broyhill, and his company was Broyhill Furniture Industries in
Lenoir. This man never went to school a day in his life, but he went to
work in a furniture plant in Lenoir and was obviously very successful
until he could buy his own company. He was the youngest of I
believe—I mean, correction—oldest of six children,
and he sent every one of his brothers and sisters to school; that
included Ed Broyhill who succeeded him. He was the youngest of
six—Tom was the oldest—and, of course, he greatly
expanded Broyhill Furniture Industries and was a legend unto himself.
But his education came from his older brother and I have never, ever
read that in anything I've ever read about Broyhill Furniture
industries. One of Mr. Ed Broyhill's daughters wrote a
history of the company and sent me a copy because she knew of my
connection, you know, with Mr. Tom, not Mr. Ed, and there's
not one word in there of what I've
just told you. Now, how do you like that? If that isn't
erasing history or making it read like you want. She wanted her father,
Ed, to get all the credit and I don't think that bothered him
one bit.
- DOROTHY GAY DARR:
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[Laughter] Sometimes we like to think we
just come about full blown, don't we?
- DAVID R. HAYWORTH:
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Yeah, and Ed's not by himself in that regard. But getting
back to this, Tom Broyhill and my father were very close friends and so
he talked my father into buying half of the hotel. So, anyway, mother
sold her interest to Mr. Tom Broyhill, I think it was in 1939, and the
reason she felt it was wise to do it was because the hotel really needed
a lot of renovation. They felt it was critical to put in a sprinkler
system, and there was a big lake at the foot of the
mountain—where the little village of Blowing Rock
is—which the hotel owned, and that required that they carry
very heavy, expensive insurance in case of some child falling in the
lake and drowning. And bearing in the mind that the country was just
coming out of the Depression and money was not plentiful—I
expect she could well use the money—she sold her interest to
Mr. Tom Broyhill. So from the late '30s on we did not own the
hotel, but we continued to go up there and it existed for several years.
It began—I tell you what my daddy never would have done had
he lived but mother and Mr. Tom Broyhill did, because of it being in the
depths of the Depression. This may explain—no, this
wouldn't explain why the hotel didn't lose
money—but anyway, all this vast amount of real estate the
hotel sat on my daddy would have built a golf course, which would have
been incredible. That was the original owner's plan, and they
chose to sell off the real estate for home sites so that a golf course
was never built. My daddy would have played golf. That's what
took him up there in the first place; they stayed at a hotel down in the
village, whatever the name of it is where there
was golf—you walk out the door and there's the
golf course. But that was never done. So by the late '30s
golf was really coming into its own, and you would go to a hotel that
had, or a resort that had golf. So the hotel in the '40s and
'50s began to go downhill and ownership changed. Mr. Tom
Broyhill died and left the hotel to the Baptist Convention, obviously
for them to sell—he was a very staunch Baptist—and
they sold it to a group of businessmen from Tennessee. It just, you
know, sort of finally was decided to tear it down. And I'll
never forget standing out there on the grounds and listening to the
workmen tear that hotel down.
- DOROTHY GAY DARR:
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Oh, you were there when they were tearing it down?
- DAVID R. HAYWORTH:
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It nearly broke my heart.
- DOROTHY GAY DARR:
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What date was that? Was that in the '50s?
- DAVID R. HAYWORTH:
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Uh-hmm. And fortunately, there was an artist there whom I was not aware
of—whom I did not know—that painted a picture of
the hotel on the mountainside, like you were over on Grandfather looking
back towards the hotel; painted this beautiful, magnificent water color.
And he has an agent—the artist was from Raleigh, most of his
work was in landscapes—I mean, seascapes—but he
just happened to be in the mountains and this magnificent hotel had been
torn down and he [said],'I'm going to paint
this.'
- DOROTHY GAY DARR:
-
Do you remember his name?
- DAVID R. HAYWORTH:
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His name was Walter Kerr. I don't know whether he pronounced
it Karr or Kerr; you know, Governor Kerr, so I'm not sure and
I don't know if there's any connection. I never
met the artist. I never knew him, but his agent just happened to know of
my interest in the hotel and he said—he wrote me and said,
'I have something I know you're going to want to buy.'
- DOROTHY GAY DARR:
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Do you have the painting?
- DAVID R. HAYWORTH:
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Uh-hmm. I have it in my mountain house and it's beautiful.
- DOROTHY GAY DARR:
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Wonderful. How fortunate!
- DAVID R. HAYWORTH:
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I have a photograph of the painting I'll show you sometime.
So, that's a little side light.
- DOROTHY GAY DARR:
-
[unclear] hotel.
- DAVID R. HAYWORTH:
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But, you know, I thought, when I walked in that door I thought I was the
cat's meow.
- DOROTHY GAY DARR:
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Oh, you were.
- DAVID R. HAYWORTH:
-
And I was running around, you know, mother would get me out of the
rooms, so she—and in those days you dressed for dinner every
night, and so she wanted to get me out of the room so she could dress;
she'd send me to go down and talk to all the ladies, and so
I'd go down and show off.
- DOROTHY GAY DARR:
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And be doted on.
- DAVID R. HAYWORTH:
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I'd love to have a picture of myself, but anyway. It was a
beautiful place, and it was an exciting part of my childhood. I loved
it.
- DOROTHY GAY DARR:
-
I can imagine. That's a lot of room to roam.
- DAVID R. HAYWORTH:
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Yes, indeed. It surely was.
- DOROTHY GAY DARR:
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And such a beautiful setting.
- DAVID R. HAYWORTH:
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Wonderful, big ballroom and they'd have a dance every Saturday night; had a separate dining room for
children. Of course, people in those days would take their maids with
them and all that; mother and daddy did, when he was
alive—they always took the nurse along to look after the
children. That was the way of life in those days. But they had a
separate dining room for the children and I would not, I absolutely
refused. I wanted to sit where the grown-ups sat.
- DOROTHY GAY DARR:
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And did you get to?
- DAVID R. HAYWORTH:
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Oh, yeah. You know, I thought that because my mother owned the hotel I
could do anything. Well anyway, I remember always sitting there in the
dining room.