ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, October 27, 1996 TAG: 9610250129
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: SALISBURY, N. C.
SOURCE: MADELYN ROSENBERG STAFF WRITER
There are three products born in this city that Salisburians brag about on a daily basis: Food Lion, Cheerwine and Elizabeth Hanford Dole.
"Food Lion has had a few problems here recently," said John Hanford, Dole's brother who now lives in Charlotte. "I hope Cheerwine and Elizabeth do better."
Last year, while Food Lion fought to regain its image as a clean, caring grocery chain, the makers of wild-cherry flavored Cheerwine introduced two new beverages to the market. Dole, as president of the American Red Cross, toured Florida's hurricane-torn panhandle and helped her husband, Sen. Bob Dole, position himself for the presidency.
And Salisbury, located three hours south of Roanoke, started gaining national press as its name became inextricably linked with Elizabeth Dole's.
"We've had a lot of home-grown success stories," said Mayor Margaret Kluttz. Stanback Headache Powders were invented here. Andrew Jackson studied law here.
"But of course Elizabeth Hanford Dole is our favorite daughter," she said.
Dole's success - as a two-time Cabinet member, Red Cross president and political wife - has meant press queries about this city, especially recently. The librarian at historic Salisbury High School (which Dole attended when it was Boyden High) has been busy digging up information for newspapers like Newsday and the New York Times.
Catawba College, a liberal arts school, received national television coverage as the site of Dole Day earlier this year.
And Bunny Hanford, Elizabeth Dole's sister-in-law, has faithfully mailed precious family photos to national magazines.
In "Unlimited Partners," the autobiography she wrote with her husband, Dole describes Salisbury, a city with a small-town feel, as her personal Rock of Gibraltar. "Washington is full of excitement and professional challenges," she wrote. "But Salisbury is home."
It is also home to 25,500 other people. To doctors and factory workers and teachers.
To Food Lion, which grew from a single grocery store in 1957 to 1,099 today, making some of the city's churchgoing citizens wealthy along the way.
Residents have put their money back into the city, giving it the amenities of a larger locale.
Along with Catawba and a community college, the city has Livingstone College, a predominantly black liberal arts school of 700 students, established in 1879.
Salisbury is the smallest city in America to have its own symphony orchestra. Its art gallery is the temporary home of a Rembrandt exhibit.
And a strong preservation effort has left the downtown looking much as it would have around the turn of the century - with 97 percent of the store fronts full.
The shelves at O.O. Rufty's General Store are heavily stocked - as they were in 1905 when the store first opened. Suspenders hang from the ceiling, counters are cluttered with licorice gum, three kinds of fescue and Squirrel Away (to keep the rodents out of your bird feeder).
Berhardt's Hardware Store was established in downtown Salisbury in 1862 and has been in business ever since. Every year, owner Paul Berhardt displays the biggest pumpkin he can find out front.
This October, it's a 288-pound behemoth, grown by Earnest Willard of Yadkinville.
Strength and beauty
Elizabeth Hanford Dole grew up in a Tudor-style house that is now almost obscured by a towering magnolia tree, its sweet blossoms folded into dormant cones, waiting out the crisp fall air.
"My husband wanted to chop it down," said Mary Hanford, "Liddy's" 95-year-old mother, who still lives in the house. "But I wouldn't let him do it."
The magnolia sheds leaves year round, she said, and John V. Hanford grew tired of raking them. "After he died, I had the responsibility and I thought, 'I might chop down that tree.'''
She couldn't, though.
"Magnolias go with the South," she said, her accent smooth as sweet cider. "And they talk about women being steel magnolias ... women in politics."
It is a suitable comparison for Elizabeth Dole, who grew up in a world of beauty and strength. She was a debutante. Pictures show a young girl with creamy skin in a gossamer, white dress. She was smart - she followed in her brother's scholastic footsteps, attending Duke University (where she was May Queen and president of the student government) and Harvard University, then Harvard's law school. She worked as a lawyer, then joined the White House office of Consumer Affairs where she often stood out, the only woman in a room of dark business suits. She became a member of the Federal Trade Commission, secretary of transportation, secretary of labor.
A soldier for the Republican Party, her name has been bandied about as a possible vice-presidential choice. This year, with the nomination of her husband, whom she married in 1975, some have asked why she didn't run herself.
"I've heard that," said Mary Hanford. "But she has not had any such thoughts. She loves the Red Cross."
John Hanford, who at 73 is 13 years older than his sister, ran the family's booming greenhouse business before retiring a few years back. Now, he is in politics behind the scenes, helping his sister and brother-in-law.
He is behind the scenes in the family's 59-year-old home, too, leaving interviews to "Mother" and his wife, Bunny. "You don't need me, this is girl talk," he joked, before going off to find drapery hooks for the upstairs.
Bunny Hanford, nimble and helpful, is up and down the stairs, in the kitchen fetching Cheerwine and cookies (which she serves with cloth napkins), in Liddy's old room arranging official papers.
Mary Hanford is on the couch at her command post, surrounded by what she calls her rogues' gallery. Everywhere, there are pictures of her family. Over here is a snapshot of her husband with the Rev. Billy Graham's wife, Ruth. On that shelf is her daughter, with Ronald Reagan, with Hillary Clinton, with Queen Elizabeth - a personal favorite.
And on that wall is a portrait of John as a handsome young soldier with caring eyes and a set jaw.
During World War II, Mary Hanford said, "I thought that [picture] was all I would have left."
She remembers clearly the summer John was off fighting in the Pacific while Liddy was away at camp, writing letters home every single day.
"I thought, 'Why she must be having a terrible time,''' Mary Hanford said. Then she caught on. "Liddy knew I went to the mailbox every day," waiting for some word from John. "She wrote me cards every day so I'd have mail."
It is a story she tells to show her daughter's compassion, a quality she saw in Liddy as a little girl and a quality she still sees today.
Mayor Margaret Kluttz speaks of that compassion, too, when she describes Elizabeth Dole's speech to the students in Youth in Action, a pilot program Dole started in 1991 at the Rowan County Red Cross chapter that now bears her name.
Articles on Youth in Action, the Red Cross, Liddy as a cabinet member, Liddy as a 3-year-old with a round face and a furry, white muff, are crammed into 20 scrapbooks that Bunny Hanford lugs into the living room to show visitors.
"Oh, I'm getting behind," says Mary Hanford, the archivist. She wants to see everything happen in these weeks before the election, and record it all later. Each day's mail brings newspaper clippings from all over the country.
She puts down her glass of Cheerwine (``not a big glass, please, Bunny,'') and opens a letter from Omaha, Neb.
There are pictures of Liddy Dole with Jay Leno, with Bob Dole, with Princess Diana.
People, Mary Hanford said, have been "so kind to Liddy."
Giving back
If the Hanfords refer to Elizabeth Dole as "our Liddy," the city she grew up in does, too.
She has given back to this city, community members say. "Good Citizenship" awards fill the shelves in her mother's home. An essay Liddy wrote on fire prevention still hangs in the city's downtown fire station.
Soon the Red Cross, now in an old white house with peeling paint, will move to a new building, courtesy of the Hanford Endowment, which Liddy and John set up in their mother's name.
The Doles stop through here a few times each year - for birthdays and for Christmas.
Often, Mayor Kluttz says, they spend time in the community. Elizabeth Dole invited the students from Youth in Action to attend her mother's birthday party one year.
Lisa Bizzell, 18 and one of Youth in Action's first members, remembers that day well. But more, she talks about the things she's learned through the program - about AIDS and how to help other teens through a hot line.
"If I wasn't in this group, I would not be the person I am now," she said. "For one thing, I was shy."
This year, she was brave enough to speak in front of 2,000 people at the Republican Convention in San Diego. She talked about the merits of the program, which reaches out to all kids but targets at-risk teens - often from single-parent or troubled homes - and gets them helping others.
At Salisbury High School, where she is a shooting guard on the girls' basketball team, "they call me Elizabeth Dole," she said.
That does not mean she has decided whom she will choose in her first election, though, which puts her on par with many in this community. The majority of Salisbury's citizens are registered Democrats, but in the past two presidential and Senate races, they voted Republican.
Brad Blackwell, a student at North Rowan High School and a member of Youth in Action, says he is all Republican, though he wouldn't discuss his presidential choice. (``The Red Cross is nonpartisan,'' he said.)
Someday, he will be pulling for himself. He plans to be North Carolina's governor after going to college and returning to Salisbury for a stint on the School Board.
His confidence is unshakable. Elizabeth Dole, he said, helped toward that end. "Knowing someone from Salisbury has gone that high increased my aspirations to go that high."
It is likely that Salisbury itself had something to do with that, too.
Home-grown history
"Everything draws from its roots," Mayor Margaret Kluttz said, and people are no different. "I truly believe Salisbury has provided a healthy atmosphere for people to grow up in."
The city has its warts and freckles like everywhere else, she said. She still bristles at drug problems, frets over the teen pregnancy rate. There are poor people here, and Kluttz fears the gap between the haves and have-nots continues to grow. There are rich people here; the city's the size of Salem, but it has a mechanic who specializes in Mercedes Benzes.
Overall, though, Salisbury is a good example - a sterling example, Kluttz says - of hometown America. "Some people come back here for strength." Others never leave.
Civic pride grows like the yellow mums that dot businesses and homes all over the city to mark the October Historic Homes Tour, a fund-raiser for the Historic Salisbury Foundation. Apartment buildings are dotted with the flowers, too. So are the tiny houses across the railroad tracks.
People are proud of the city's accomplishments - historic and recent - and they talk like a Rowan County history book.
In the 1700s, in a much smaller America, Salisbury was the center of the north and south, east and west trading paths - the crisscross point for wagon trains and, a century later, for railroads. The largely agrarian economy shifted toward textiles.
War time. The Confederate Army built a prison for Union soldiers in one of the old cotton mills, and between 1864 and 1865, in the midst of food shortages and disease, thousands died there. In the Salisbury National Cemetery, 11,700 unknown Union soldiers are buried - the largest number of unknown soldiers in any national cemetery.
Progress knocked down the prison nearly 100 years ago, but many of the city's oldest buildings still stand, preserved by people who infused money into renovation and new projects - like an early childhood development center - when the state would not.
If there is a third political party in Salisbury, it is the preservationists.
A bumper sticker on the desk of Mark Perry, executive director of the Historic Salisbury Foundation, sums it up: Historic Preservation: The Ultimate Recycling.
The city set up a fund some 20 years ago to buy historic sites and sell them to people willing to restore them. So far, 70 buildings have been saved. In June, Perry spoke about the fund in Roanoke, at the invitation of the Roanoke Valley Preservation Foundation.
Salisbury's downtown buildings are filling up. They have street-level stores and apartments upstairs with long waiting lists. "No vacancies," Perry said.
The historic train station, once slated for demolition, is now the city's showpiece.
"Some people still have the mentality that we should tear down a building and put up a parking lot," Perry said. "But it's not the parking lots people will come to see."
His current mission is to make sure the city retains its identity and doesn't go the way of Pineville, a Charlotte suburb in Mecklenburg County.
"It was totally swallowed up," he said with a shudder. "I don't want what happened to Pineville to happen to us."
Steel magnolias
Every morning at 8, you'll find a group of women at College Barbecue at the corner of Brenner Avenue and Statesville Boulevard.
They gather to talk about life and living, to eat grits and biscuits and gravy (though the Doles are said to favor the biscuits and gravy at the Big Pig) and to drink coffee.
Their political parties vary.
Some have jobs. Some don't. All have an interest in the community.
At a corner table on a Thursday morning in October, four women are divided over the upcoming presidential election: Two want Bill Clinton; one wants Bob Dole; one wants to vote for Ross Perot but probably won't.
All say they would probably vote for Elizabeth Dole, though, were she running - particularly if she ran for vice president.
"It pulls at your heart to have someone from Salisbury in there," said Beth Woodson, who's leaning toward Bob Dole this year.
Barbara Setzer, who works at the Waterworks Visual Arts Center, tells a story about her father-in-law, a man "who wasn't rich or famous, but he cared for the old stone house," a Salisbury landmark. When he died, Setzer said, Liddy Dole visited her mother-in-law with flowers.
"I feel she has values and intelligence," said Katharine Osborne, a retired school teacher. "We females cannot be discounted."
Females have never been discounted here, this community claims. They have always had a presence: as teachers and housewives, volunteers and community leaders.
They have been involved with preservation of the homes and the high school.
They are the heads of the Rowan County Republican and Democratic parties.
Kluttz was named the city's first woman mayor in 1991.
Dole was the first woman to serve as secretary of transportation.
If her husband becomes president, she plans to return to her job as the national president of the American Red Cross.
Mary Hanford clearly believes her daughter can do that, plus serve as White House hostess. (Though she did say that, as long as her daughter and son-in-law both have full-time jobs, ``I've advised them not to take on a house and a yard'').
Not that she doesn't worry about her daughter, especially now that the campaign has heated up and news reports show Liddy Dole in Washington, D.C., one night, Orlando, Fla., the next.
"We can't keep tabs on her, can we Mother?" asks Bunny Hanford, whose role is to keep tabs on a lot of things.
But Mary Hanford certainly keeps track of enough things herself, like her daughter's television appearances. She has a stack of videotapes piled on the television set, bearing labels like "Liddy at Republican Convention," "Liddy and Bob on 20/20," "Liddy with Regis and Kathie Lee."
It is on that show, with the guests seated on high stools, that Mary Hanford noticed her daughter inching her dress down slightly to cover her knees. That made Mary Hanford, who isn't too comfortable with naked knees, feel a little closer to her long-distance daughter. "I thought, `she feels just like I do,''' she said.
Mary Hanford also kept track of when to put out her yard sign: Dole/Kemp '96.
A city ordinance prevented them from going up until a month before the election. As soon as she was able, Hanford placed her sign near her curb on the 700 block of Fulton Street.
"I thought I ought to be first," she said.
LENGTH: Long : 323 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS STAFF Mary Hanford (above),by CNBElizabeth Dole's 95-year- old mother, has been welcoming increasing
numbers of politically curious guests into her Salisbury home.
color
2. The Plaza (top) is downtown Salisbury's tallest building. color
3. - 6. Aspects of Salisbury: (Clockwise from above) Elizabeth Dole
grew up in this Tudor-style house on South Fulton Street, where her
mother still lives. Seventeen-year-old Brad Blackwell is a member of
the Red Cross Youth Action group, founded by Elizabeth Dole, and has
his eyes set on the North Carolina governorship one day. He says he
has been inspired by Elizabeth Dole's accomplishments. When Sen. Bob
Dole is in town, he favors the fare at The Big Pig Barbecue
restaurant. Salisbury Mayor Margaret Kluttz shows off her collection
of Dole signs, which she planned to put in her yard before the
election. color
7. STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS STAFF A formal portrait of a young
Elizabeth by local painter Margaret Bost hangs over the sofa in
Mary Hanford's living room. color
8. - 10. From Mary Hanford's photograph collection come three
glimpses into the life of her daughter, Elizabeth: (clockwise from
left) as a 3-year-old; as May Queen at Duke University; and as a
bride, with her husband, Bob Dole. color
11. STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS STAFF In Salisbury, the past and the
future are comfortably integrated. A constant reminder of the
city's Civil War history, the Salisbury National Cemetery (above)
includes the graves of 11,700 unknown Union soldiers. color
12. Mark Perry (right), president of the Historic Salisbury
Foundation, holds forth inside the newly renovated train station in
the heart of the city. Perry's organization has assured the
preservation of 70 old city buildings. color
13. Breakfast regulars (from left) Barbara Setzer, Beth Woodson,
Laura Thompson and Katharine Osborne gather at Salisbury's College
Barbecue to talk about their community, families and politics.
color
14. color map showing location of Salisbury. STAFF
15. color photo of Elizabeth Dole. KEYWORDS: PROFILE