I think Mr. Willard Graham was the first one that set up this Executive
Program in the Commerce School, for weekends, if you're familiar with
that. Executive training. We need to train executives. Well, I got up on
my two feet and said, "Well, now wait. It looks to me like if you could
put courses over here in the School of Education to teach more or less
the free enterprise system and develop textbooks to put courses in the
grammar schools and in the high schools to broaden the understanding of
income taxes, etcetera, etcetera, keep records…" My kids came home and
didn't want to keep any records of anything. When I was a kid, I had to
keep records. Each week I got my allowance, and I had to keep a record
of how I spent it. Save it or spend it, but I had to have my books. At
this time, my kids were coming along. The hell with it. "Oh, no, we need
training." And I said, "I don't think we've got to worry about the crown
princes. After all, we can hire them from New York or some of the
schools that are already doing this kind of thing, but why should North
Carolina have to?" And, "Oh…" Well, it was all obvious that it was set
up, so they put the thing in. Which was all right, it wasn't bad, but
they never had another meeting of the business
executives. In other words, it was to bring everybody down there so they
could say business has been involved and wants it. Bob Hanes was
President of Wachovia at the time, and he got up and said, "Oh, we need
this training, because every time somebody who's running a small
business dies and we're the executor of the estate, why, we have to
provide somebody to the widow to run this guy's business. They're taking
our people, and we've got to have more trained people to run these kind
of things." So you could see it was all set ahead of time. [Laughter] It's what I say about politics.
Now I don't say that this wasn't fine, but we weren't called down there
to develop ideas; the idea had already been developed by Gordon Gray
from Winston and Bob Hanes from Winston. What they wanted to do when
they called the rest of us down there [was] to more or less put our
stamp on a fait accompli, don't you see, or an idea accompli. Now I run
into the same thing other places. I think I want to put this on the
tape. This is interesting. When I was on the airport, the Federal
Aviation Agency came along and said, "You've got to clean out some of
your approach zone." There was a big old tree at the end of this. I went
to see the dairyman that was running this dairy, Walter Coble, and I
said, "Mr. Coble, how about letting us cut your tree down or else top
it?" He said, "The tree isn't hurting me, Mr. Cone, but why should I do
anything to help Greensboro? I can't even sell my milk in Greensboro." I
said, "Why not? What do you mean?" "Well," he says, "you know, my milk
goes down to my brother, George Coble, in Lexington, Coble Dairies,
where the pasteurizing plant is. They've got an ordinance in Greensboro
that no milk can be sold in Greensboro unless it's
pasteurized within the city limits." I said, "I didn't know that." He
said, "Yeah, half the dairies in Guilford County, their milk goes down
to my brother's place in Lexington, but that's forbidden." Ben, my older
brother who recently died, was Mayor of Greensboro at the time, and I
came back to Ben and said, "Ben, did you know this was happening?" He
didn't know it. So he went to his city attorney. "Oh, yeah." The City
Health Department were riding herd over the sanitarians, and they called
in Dr. Harter. Dr. Harter said, "Oh, yeah, we have to be responsible for
the butterfat content and the bacteria content, and my department has to
inspect these pasteurizing plants. And if we had to go to Lexington or
to Biltmore Dairies or wherever, all over the state, why, my budget
would be tremendous. Not only that, but we have to inspect the milk
sheds to be sure the dairies are cleaning up the udders or whatever." My
brother said, "Well, how does Mr. Coble down here ship milk all the way
from Washington to Miami?" "Well, if you want to let other health
departments down in Davidson County take over your responsibility, fine,
but suppose something would happen, and you folks, your City Council, is
responsible." In the meantime, there were two here in Greensboro:
Guilford Dairy is a coop and was in the city, and Pet was in the city.
Well, they had every lawyer in town meet [beat?] on my brother and the
City Council. "Oh, this would be very upsetting, and just think of the
responsibility you're taking on your shoulders if you open this thing
up." Well, boy, they did it, and of course from then on we can have milk
from any of them. But that's an example, you see, of what you run
into.