Hyde's chief recruiter will go seek industry.

• Position: Brief Article

As Hyde County industry hunter, Alice Keeney isn't loaded for bear. Hyde doesn't have an incorporated town, and its most famous feature is Ocracoke, a barrier island 35 miles across Pamlico Sound.

"We have our successes," says Keeney, 48, who recently received the first Gov. James E. Holshouser Professional Development Scholarship from the North Carolina Economic Developers Association. The $3,000 will send her to three annual sessions at the University of Oklahoma's Economic Development Institute. "But here, they take on a different perspective."

For example, Pantego-based Coastal Carolina Cotton Gin Co., which in 1999 built a $3 million gin in Fairfield. The company had built its first gin four years earlier in Pantego in neighboring Beaufort County. At peak harvest, the gins employ 30.

Born in New Bern, Keeney left Eastern North Carolina, earned an English degree at UNC Greensboro in 1975 and completed her master's in education two years later at Loyola College in Baltimore, while working part time at a bank. "I decided there was more fun in banking than teaching."

So, she joined Union Trust Bank in Baltimore in 1977 as a management trainee. By 1995, she'd completed her MBA at Loyola, married, had three children and risen through several Maryland banks and banking jobs. That same year, she followed when husband Arthur Keeney III was named president and CEO of Engelhard-based ECB Bancorp...