Olde Beau Geste.

• Author: Chapman, Dan
• Position: Golf club developed by Billy Satterfield - Cover Story

Billy Satterfield vows this project will be his final bow, capping a career that has drawn catcalls and applause.

Developer Billy Satterfield loves to tell how he matched wits with Old Man Hanes long ago. It's a good story. And it's vintage Billy.

It was 1957, and Winston-Salem was booming. Satterfield, a 28-year-old plumber and small-time builder, had just bought four pieces of land for a housing development and was set to buy a fifth tract, near Country Club Road, when he ran up against textile magnate Pleasant Huber Hanes Sr.

One Friday, Hanes' agent promised Satterfield he could have the land for $10,000, payable Monday morning. Satterfield arrived with a check only to find that Hanes had agreed to sell the land to somebody else. Satterfield was furious.

"So I go out to see Mr. Hanes at his big house, knock on the door and tell the butler who I am," Satterfield recalls, feet propped on his desk, clasped hands resting atop his belly. "But Mr. Hanes said that we didn't have nothing to talk about."

Satterfield thought otherwise. He talked his way past the butler and confronted Hanes in his study. "I told him my story, how I had bought it on Friday. He said, 'this should teach you a lesson, then. You should get things signed.' And I said, 'Well, isn't your word any good?' I probably used some cuss words, too.

Well, the butler dragged me out the door, but then he dragged me right back in. I said, 'I wish you'd make up your mind.' Mr. Hanes said I was the first man ever to have cussed him. He said he'd sell me the land but make me pay $50 more an acre for it. That's how we started up our good relationship."

Pure Billy. Brash. Impetuous. Cocksure. Profane. He shoots from the hip, unafraid to take on the powers that be. And determined to beat them at their own game.

Over the past 30 years, Satterfield, 62, has changed the face of Winston-Salem as much as anyone has with his real-estate ventures. People called him crazy for believing that the undeveloped land west of downtown would amount to anything. But the pink-cheeked, white-haired man with the Midas touch proved them all wrong.

"I admire Billy Satterfield because he has pulled himself up by the bootstraps and is the embodiment of the American dream," says North Carolina Secretary of State Rufus Edmisten, who has known Satterfield for 20 years and has helped him break many bureaucratic logjams. "Billy means a lot to the state's economy. Billy is already a legend in his own time."

Drive west along Stratford Road, past the Thruway Shopping Center, Knollwood Street, Healy Drive, Hanes Mall and on out to the Bermuda Run housing development. Satterfield's footprints are everywhere. Buildings he developed house Ed Kelly's electronics store, Pfaff's Auto Glass Inc., The Carriage House Restaurant, business after business. And now, there's Olde Beau, Satterfield's crowning achievement, an 856-acre resort and golf club high up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Alleghany County.

But Olde Beau means more to Satterfield than just icing on the cake of a very successful career. You see, he has a chip on his shoulder about never being granted entree into the parlors and clubs of Winston-Salem's elite. No matter how much money or how many successes Satterfield has, some of the Twin City's upper crust consider him an uneducated, nouveau riche buffoon. He's been called "the Antichrist of old money" by one newspaper and much worse by people who don't want to be quoted. So it's ironic that Olde Beau is smack in the middle of the summer playground of folks named Reynolds, Hanes and Gray.

"When he first got started," a longtime city leader says, "it was widely accepted that if it wasn't nailed down, it was Billy's."

Satterfield replies: "That is not true. I never stole a penny in my life. People who say I didn't do the right thing or I ran over somebody or I cheated somebody, well, that's just the price you pay for being successful."

"I'd like to know what I've done to them. I guess I know what it is. It's jealousy. I made a lot of deals that they wanted. Maybe I acted like I was bragging. I'd do some |project~ and say, 'I told you so,' just to rub it in."

It's not just the old-money rich who disdain Satterfield, though. You don't get to be a multimillionaire developer without making enemies. Quite a few people who found themselves in the path of one development or another say that Satterfield never lived up to his...