All the right moves.

• Author: Whittington, Dennis
• Position: Southern National Bank of North Carolina moves to Winston-Salem, North Carolina - Special Report: The Triad

How Winston-Salem put a full-court press on Glenn Orr to come back to town -- and bring his bank with him.

Glenn Orr laid down the telephone receiver and shook his head. "No," he thought, "they can't do it, nobody can do it." No city could put together an incentive package attractive enough to persuade him to spend the $8 million to $10 million it would cost to move the headquarters of Southern National Bank out of Lumberton.

Orr had been talking that morning in December 1990 with an old friend, Ed Pleasants, chairman of Pleasants Hardware Co. in Winston-Salem. They go back a long way: In 1973, when Orr returned to Winston-Salem to set up Forsyth Bank & Trust, he asked Pleasants to sit on the board of what would grow into a five-branch community bank. When Southern National bought the bank in 1982 and tapped Orr as heir apparent to Chief Executive Officer Hector MacLean, Pleasants stayed on as chairman of the bank's local board.

In 1990, after 35 years guiding the bank his father had helped found in 1897, MacLean retired, turning over the reins to Orr. His promotion set off immediate speculation that Southern National would move its headquarters to a larger city.

Only a few months later, Pleasants picked up his morning newspaper and read confirmation of the rumors: Greensboro was wooing Southern National to move there. The Gate City seemed a logical choice: It has pined for the home offices of a big bank since April 8, 1960, when Security National Bank, a 27-year-old Greensboro institution, merged with American Commercial Bank of Charlotte to create North Carolina National Bank, now NationsBank.

But Pleasants also knew that Orr had spent nearly 20 years in Winston-Salem, first as a military-intelligence officer in the mid-'60s, then as a Wachovia trainee and loan officer and later with Forsyth Bank and Southern National. So he immediately called his friend to see whether Winston-Salem could join the chase.

Orr told Pleasants just what he had told the folks in Greensboro (and would later tell suitors from Raleigh, Charlotte and Columbia, S.C.): He wouldn't ask his shareholders to pick up the whole tab for moving. Moreover, though off the beaten path and not attractive to many young bankers, Lumberton was still home, Orr said. It's where former Gov. Angus W. McLean helped start the former Bank of Lumberton by issuing $15,000 worth of stock. (Hector MacLean, Angus' son, changed the spelling of his surname to that of his Scottish forebears.) And it was the base from which Southern National had grown into the state's sixth-largest bank.

But Pleasants had a ready answer: What if Winston-Salem businesses and individuals pledged $100 million in new deposits? What if the city offered some other incentives, such as reducing rental and parking costs? Would that do it?

That's what I like to hear, Orr told his friend, promising to keep in touch.

"I didn't think anybody could do the kinds of things Ed had talked about," Orr says now. "I wasn't going to sink up to $10 million of the corporation's money to move the headquarters just for the sake of moving the headquarters.

"I told Ed that the new deposits would be a must. We'd need them so we could make a lot of loans and turn the money around. I didn't put much stock in it at first because...