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Growing up in south Iredell in the 1960s

O.C. Stonestreet | .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Although I was born in Statesville and visited my maternal grandmother here often, I grew up in Mooresville.

I’m taking the year 1960, arbitrarily, as a benchmark for this memoir.

Mooresville’s biggest employer in 1960 would have been the large Burlington Industries Mooresville plant at the southern end of town, the former Mooresville Mills. Out on what we called the N.C. Highway 150 bypass (now Plaza Drive), there were the large Chemspun, Templon and Draymore manufacturing plants. Chemspun and Templon made thread while Draymore made curtains. There was also Cascade Mills and Troutman Shirt Company, in Mooresville, all of these were part of textiles, Iredell’s largest industry.

As payday for the various mills was usually on Friday afternoon, the local supermarkets were flooded on Friday evenings, and then people went “to town” on Saturday. Belk was the largest store downtown and served as an anchor for the business district. There were no shopping centers and few stores on Highway 150 west of town.

There was, however, a movie theater downtown, The State. It remained in business up into the 1980s. The State stood just about where the Joe V. Knox Auditorium in the Charles Mack Citizen Center now stands. It was in 1960 that the Mooresville Town Board gave The State permission to run movies on Sundays. This was an example of what were called “Blue Laws.”

Just after World War II, Mooresville had three movie houses, and in summer boasted of two drive-in theaters, the Mooresville-Davidson, just south of Mount Mourne, and the Carolina Drive-in near where Highways 150 and 152 meet.

Television arrived in this area in 1949 when WBTV in Charlotte went on the air. WSOC followed in a few years, and there was WSJS in Winston-Salem, which you might be able to receive if the weather conditions were just right. And the stations did not provide 24-hour broadcasting. They signed off with the “Star-Spangled Banner” in the wee hours and resumed broadcasting at 5 or 6 a.m. No cable, no color, no hi-def, no satellite dish, just two (three if you were lucky) stations.

The only places with air-conditioning were The State Theater and doctor and dentist offices and perhaps the homes of a few of the well-to-do citizens. What we called “funeral home” hand fans could be found in the backs of church pews.

One other notable thing about churches in Mooresville: the Easter sunrise service. Beginning in the 1950s, Mooresville held a community-wide Easter sunrise service. At first these were held on the mill golf course, then they were held at Hood Field behind First Baptist Church, and when I came along in the band, they were held at the football field behind Mooresville High School. This event was sponsored by the Mooresville Ministerial Association.

Our band was again under the direction of Robert O. Klepfer, Mooresville’s “Music Man.” We sat in the bleachers and played Moravian arrangements of the old Bach chorales. All bundled up, people from most of Mooresville’s churches participated in this annual event, Baptists and Methodists and Lutherans, and so on, white and black, all forgetting minor denominational differences for an hour.

After the service, which four or five ministers led, there was hot chocolate and doughnuts in the school cafeteria. I always felt that this union service was one of the finest things about Mooresville.

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