Mountain Memories (pre-flood)
The recent disastrous flooding in the western North Carolina mountains brought back a flood of a happier kind - 40 years of memories of covering the towns and the Floridians who vacationed in them. It began shortly after we arrived in Florida in 1971 to take over what we turned into Gold Coast magazine. We quickly learned that Fort Lauderdale and the nearby towns emptied out in the summer. At least our affluent readers did. And the destination for most was the hills of the Carolinas and north Georgia. It was a logical place for us to follow our audience, and we did not have to go far to get started.
Beginning in the early 1970s, Gold Coast published annual stories about the Carolina mountains and often promoted them on covers.
Just up the street in our Colee Hammock neighborhood in a big walled home lived the Fleming family. Foy Fleming was a community leader, a prominent lawyer and banker. We learned that he took his family, not just in summer but also over the Christmas holidays, to their second home in Cashiers, North Carolina. It has been one of the more popular destinations for Floridians, including the family of former Fort Lauderdale mayor and longtime congressman E. Clay Shaw. We had not yet met Foy Fleming, but we made arrangements to see him in the hills. We got some nice pictures of his family amid their holiday decor. It was the start of regular visits to the area. Hardly a town was mentioned in the recent flood stories that we had not covered over the years.
As we recall, that first story attracted the attention of Betty Mann, who worked in PR for Saks Fifth Avenue. She introduced us to a friend, Helen Tellekamp, from an old Miami family that had frequented Blowing Rock since her childhood. Helen ran a real estate company that operated out of a little office that was noted for its quaintness. We met the next summer and remained friends, and almost annual visitors, over the next four decades. Helen hosted our family on several occasions and introduced us to many friends. They often turned into stories about nearby towns such as Boone, to the north, and even places in the foothills such as Hickory, famous for its furniture stores.
Another place we soon got to know was Highlands, on the western end of the Blue Ridge range. We paid a memorable visit there with Peter Jefferson, a colorful architect out of Stuart. He had a cottage which was charmingly rustic, even by mountain standards. Many of those we covered over the years were full-time mountain people, some of whom had come up from Florida to start businesses. They tended to be in the busier towns, notably Asheville and nearby Hendersonville. One of the more interesting visits was with Hugh Morton, who owned Grandfather Mountain. Morton was wounded as a combat photographer in World War II, and remained in photography for his whole life. He supplied beautiful shots of his mountain and other communities. He was a noted conservationist who made Grandfather a wildlife preserve and protected it from too much development.
The magazine covered Hugh Morton and his Grandfather Mountain in 1980. Morton, a wildlife preservationist, photographed McCormick with one of his pet friends.
The magazine often featured Hugh Morton's photographs - this one is of his Grandfather Mountain.
As our family grew we joined the crowd who made the hills a cool summer retreat. Our daughter and son-in-law eventually bought a place in Bald Rock, high above it all in Sapphire Valley, near the Cashiers area. After several years, they gave it up for lack of time to use it often.
In the 1990s, a reorganization of our company added a group of new stockholder-directors that would do a major corporation proud. Thanks to our chairman, Bob McCabe, in Vero Beach, we were joined by a member of the leading mountain family. He was a Vanderbilt who was not burdened with that famous name, but his family controlled the Biltmore Estate and much of the surrounding town. That connection led to an advertising relationship with Beverly-Hanks, the biggest real estate firm in the area.
Although our editorial was always legitimate and deserved the special sections we ran in the spring and fall, we valued advertising around the stories. It was tough to determine how effective those ads were, mainly because the advertisers rarely tracked response carefully, but we had a few stories that illustrated our influence.
An amusing one was a wealthy Stuart retiree whose wife wanted to visit Blowing Rock after reading our piece. Her husband wound up buying a classic old hotel in Blowing Rock, complete with the problems of maintaining an old wooden structure. He looked us up through Helen Tellekamp and jokingly blamed us for ruining his carefree Florida retirement.
Another time we dropped in on a young man from Miami who had bought a cozy inn in Blowing Rock. He started to complain that he did not think his advertising in Florida would pay off, when in walked a man carrying a copy of Gold Coast.
“This is a setup!” the owner exclaimed. It wasn’t, but we like to think there were more stories like that which never reached our ears. A lot of memories did however, and we wish for the day the flood disaster recedes and the hills return to the mountain escape we knew so well.
