Jerry's world: one of Asheboro's most successful native sons helps revitalize the city stung by manufacturers' departures.

• Author: Moriarty, Jim
• Position: TOWN SQUARE

Nowadays, you can see 71-year-old Jerry Neal, the least-retired retired man in Randolph County zipping around his roughly 550 acres of red clay and rolling hills in a Mini Cooper that looks more suitable for Charlize Theron in The Italian Job than for the co-founder of RF Micro Devices Inc., a technology company now called Qorvo with annual revenue topping $2.5 billion. As a teenager, Neal often circled around downtown Asheboro in Tommy Hill's '58 Chevy with red leather seats and the reel-to-reel tape deck Neal rigged to give the duo an edge in their pursuit of girls.

"I had my own radio receiver that I'd built, illegally by the way, but I'd recorded all these songs of the day--Brenda Lee, Conway Twitty--so I made these tapes," says Neal, whose family has owned land in Randolph County since the 18th century. "Tommy and me, as we were plying our trade down there, could show them we've got any kind of music you want to listen to. This is actually pretty impressive--a brand new '58 Chevy and this unconventional music system. It gave us an extra edge."

Asheboro was a mill town then, with textile plants and furniture factories that, among other things, churned out the Kennedy rocking chair, named after the 35th president who had at least 14 of them. It was a mill town when 18-year-old John McGlohon, now 92, enlisted in the Army just before Pearl Harbor and spent the war taking reconnaissance photographs, flying the Hump across the Himalayas, mapping the coast of China and capturing a photo from directly overhead as the atomic cloud rose up from Hiroshima. It was a mill town when he mustered out in 1945, eventually becoming fire chief, which, in a place that stored varnish by the barrel, is about as sobering an occupation as heart surgeon.

It was a mill town when Burrell Hopkins opened Hops Bar-B-Q on the corner of Church and Sunset in an old gas station and taxi stand. It was a mill town when civil rights protesters in the 1960s lay down in front of Hops' doorway. And it was a mill town when Jerry Southard, the current owner of Hops, started working there in 1971 when he was 14.

With the exception of Acme-McCrary Corp.'s hosiery mill, the textile and furniture plants moved offshore, or just plain moved, and downtown businesses that supported them headed for the mall. "We were a typical small Southern mill town," says David Smith, mayor of the city that has a population of about 26,000. "And we were typical in that our downtown was in various...