April 20-24, 1975: A Week in New York City
	April 6-10, 1975: A Visit to New York City
	Return to Index for 1975

Later in the Spring, we did an installation at the Northwestern Bank in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and I took the opportunity to stop off in Burlington before going on to the job.

I flew from Chicago down to Greensboro, where my sister met me for the drive over to spend the night at her house in Elon. The picture below was taken as we were coming in for a landing in Greensboro.

I want to show a bit about where my sister is, but the difficulty I have is that between my visit this April and the time at which I am writing this online narrative (mid-2019), a lot has changed, physically, in Elon, Burlington, and North Carolina, with the result that the way one gets to my sister's farm today is much different than it was on this visit.

Let me see if I can use the map at right to explain. Greensboro is west of Elon, so we drove ease on Interstate 85 to get to the exit for my sister's house (the red line at the bottom of the map). So let me show how today, in 1975, one gets to my sister's house; this is the route marked by the blue line. The exit for Elon College (even that name has changed, as Elon College has become Elon University the town has changed its name officially to simply "Elon") puts you on Huffman Mill Road- actually one of the streets which, if you follow it northeast, will take you to Burlington, NC, the larger city just east of Elon.

So just off the exit from the Interstate, you almost immediately have to double back on Garden Road which goes back along the north side of the Interstate and dead ends into South Williamson Avenue. Here, you turn right and head north, go across US Highway 70, continue north and eventually through the center of Elon, and finally, as you continue north/northwest, you will come onto Elon-Ossippie Road (where you reach a red line again) that leads to my sister's farm.

In the first decade of the 21st century, development south of Elon and Gibsonville led to a huge new shopping area along Interstate 85 (Alamance Crossing), and so a new exit was constructed for access to the expressway. At the same time, a bypass was built around Elon, so that so much traffic wouldn't be going right through the center of town and right through the campus. So now, to get to the side of Elon on which my sister lives, you can get off Interstate 85 at that new exit, and take the much-faster bypass around to her side of the college town (green route). This will bring you back to the old route, and you can turn left and once again be on Elon-Ossippee Road.

But this new bypass, and the new, more straightforward, and faster way to get to my sister's house is still decades in the future, so today we'll follow the route that I've learned quite well in the few years that my sister has been living where she is now.

My sister has a really nice farm a quarter mile west of Elon-Ossipee Road. She's been in Burlington since college, and when she married Bob they bought a piece of land and built a house on it. That was in 1972, so they have been here now for going on four years. Their two kids, live at home of course; Ted is 6 and Jennifer ("Jeffie") is 5.

Judy and Bob bought the land and then built a house on it; the only structure they kept when they bought the property was the old red country barn down by the road. That's where the other residents of the Barbour ranch reside; those would be my sister's horses. (There are also other four-legged residents, but those are dogs and cats.

There's an aerial view of my sister's property at RIGHT, but of course it doesn't show the farm as it looked this year. The biggest change between then and now (as I write this) has been the construction of a new, modern, cement-floored barn up near the house, to take the place of the vintage dirt-floored old one. (I will visit here during its construction years from now, and I created an album page for the pictures we took of it under construction.)

I always like visiting my sister and Bob (and the kids, of course), not least because it is a chance for me to get out of my city environment and into a more pastoral one. It's good for the soul.

Now that you have an idea of the rural environent in which my sister now lives, let's get to the pictures that I took on my weekend visit here this time.

When I took this picture, I was standing between the driveway and the old barn, and I am looking pretty much north across what I would all the "lower pasture". Judy has a little pond adjacent to the barn; as I rememberr, it was only 500-600 square feet in area. And there are two of the horses that reside here.

For this picture, I am standing down by where Judy's driveway meets Lowe Road. (Her neighbor's driveway is next to hers down here by the road. At the top of the driveway, behind the stand of trees, is the house that Judy and Bob had built.

Here is my niece, Jennifer, with one of the small horses that Judy keeps on the farm. It is apparent to me that Jeffie is inheriting my sister's love of anything equine, and I am sure that as soon as she is old enough, Jeffie will begin her on life-long love affair with horses. Ted, not so much.

Of course, my sister has her own horses. This was her first one, and as you can see by my sister's outfit and by the ribbons that Jeffie is holding up, Judy not only rides and takes care of her horses, but she shows them as well, and she takes such good care of them, and trains them so well, that they usually come home with ribbons.

Not all of the farm's residents have four legs (or are, necessarily, here for the long term. Meet Tom Turkey, who turned out to be only a temporary resident. (Not what you think- he was hit by a school bus.)

I spent the night with my sister and her family, and on Sunday she took me back to the airport so I could rent a car for the four days that I would be spending at the bank in North Wilkesboro.

Sometimes in this album I've made the effort to show you just where a particular client was located, and I suppose that I could do that on this page as well, except for the fact that the location where I did my work for Northwestern Bank is no longer active. Although I didn't know it in 1975, Northwestern Bank would be acquired by First Union Bank (where I had an account once in Charlotte) in the major aggregation of small banks into larger ones that would begin a decade or so from now and continue into the next millennium.

In fact, the only picture I took during the week I was working in North Wilkesboro I took late one afternoon when I was driving around after work looking for a nearby Baskin-Robbins store. As you can see, this part of North Carolina- the Piedmont (foot of the mountains)- is very pretty. The land itself is pretty, but it's also rural, and that is usually a change for me as I live in a city and do the vast majority of my work in other cities.

North Wilkesboro is itself a very picturesque little town. Located here in Wilkes County, North Wilkesboro only has a few thousand people (although the much larger Greensboro is quite close). Due to the town's proximity to the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains and the numerous tourist venues there, North Wilkesboro has been nicknamed the "Key to the Blue Ridge". The town was founded in 1891 when the Norfolk and Southern Railroad built a railroad line into Wilkes County. The town quickly developed around the railroad tracks. In the 1940s and 1950s, a number of large firms were started here- notably in glass products and home improvement stores. But textiles remains the area's most important industry. The town is also noted as being the place where NASCAR was founded.

After a productive week, I flew back to Chicago, and for once, coming in over the city, the plane followed a route that afforded me the opportunity to get some good pictures. In one good picture of the downtown area, you can see Chicago's major buildings- and also the one I live in (which I have marked for you in the copy of the picture on the right).

I was able to get another good picture looking further north along the shore of Lake Michigan, and I've cropped it so I can show you this panoramic view:

The Chicago Lakefront

Finally, as we turned to the west to fly past the airport to turn around for our landing, I got this good picture of the O'Hare Airport complex:

The fact that when I left Continental Bank to go to work for Cullinane Corporation, a switch that required me to begin travelling very heavily, I didn't feel the necessity to move anywhere, was very much due to the fact that O'Hare Airport is centrally-located and has frequent flights to just about anywhere. This fact has enabled me to be assigned to just about any training or installation project, whereas the guys in the Boston office tend to specialize in doing work in the Northeast (where we in fact do have a lot of clients).

O'Hare International Airport is located on Chicago's northwest side, just beyond the suburb of Des Plaines and some 14 miles from my apartment downtown. Having been built at a time when its area was fairly sparsely populated, it is a large airport, covering over 7500 acres. And it's good for me, because there are flights to everywhere and to over 200 destinations, these flights are non-stop.

Established to be the successor to Chicago's "busiest square mile in the world", Midway Airport, O'Hare began as an airfield serving a Douglas manufacturing plant for C-54 military transports during World War II. It was named for Edward "Butch" O'Hare, the U.S. Navy's first Medal of Honor recipient during that war. Later, at the height of the Cold War, O'Hare served as an active fighter base for the Air Force.

As the first major airport planned post-war, O’Hare's innovative design pioneered concepts such as concourses, direct highway access to the terminal, jet bridges, and underground refueling systems. It became famous as the first officially-designated "World's Busiest Airport" of the jet age, a distinction it achieved in 1963 and which it still holds today (in 1975) and will continue to hold for another quarter-century!

O'Hare is unusual in that it serves as a major hub for more than two of the "major" US airlines in today's "hub-and-spoke" system. This is why there are so many convenient flight so so many locations from here. (Atlanta is really the only other city that is in the same situation.) However, with the recent opening of Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, it may well be that four or five years from now, that centrally-located, more "weather-friendly" (read: no winter storms) airport may eclipse both Chicago and Atlanta in this particular statistic.

You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page.

	April 20-24, 1975: A Week in New York City
	April 6-10, 1975: A Visit to New York City
	Return to Index for 1975