THE GREAT DIVIDE.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: Haves and have-nots in North Carolina

New jobs created by technology that destroys old ones widen the gap between the state's haves and have-nots.

Day breaks on the dewy top of Stanley's water tower, then slides slowly down to North Main Street. "A Friendly Place," the big white tank says in black letters, though the streets below are mostly deserted. The young leave early for jobs elsewhere, and gray-haired men with Dale Earnhardt caps on their heads and time on their hands hang around the Hardee's at the other end of town.

When the sun reaches Gate 5 of a mill on North Main, it shines through a glass door on dusty boxes and a worn broom propped against the wall. For 90 years, owners added on to the plant until it rambled over a city block. Now there's a for-sale sign on the lawn. A smaller sign behind it says Belding Hausman Inc., the last owner.

In front of the mill, railroad tracks divide Main Street, then run east along N.C. 27. As the sun climbs higher, follow them to the outskirts of Mount Holly, to Buckeye Technologies Inc., where you'll find Jack Manfredi standing at a panel covered with knobs and dials. Overhead are computer monitors. Outside the control room drones a machine the size of a small office building. Using air and cellulose fiber, Manfredi and a crew of six weave a 10.9-foot swath of material longer than a football field each minute. The material is feathery, but the machine makes 11,000 tons a year. Next door, rising in walls of raw, gray concrete, is a $100 million plant that, when it goes online later this year, can make five times as much. The largest, most-advanced air-laid fabric machine in the world, it, too, will be operated by a crew of seven.

Before its decline began in the 1980s, the looms of the old plant in Stanley, whose last few workers trickled away without ceremony last summer, employed more than 500. Here, in two Gaston County towns three miles apart, is what happened across North Carolina in the last two decades of the 20th century and what lies ahead in the next two -- the continuous, churning creation of new jobs that destroy old ones. Technology is its double-edged sword. Economists call the process creative destruction.

Tar Heel technology sparkles in the Tiffany settings of the Research Triangle Park, which has filled out and matured. In 1980, 70 companies with 17,500 workers were here. Today, 140 companies employ 44,500, whose average annual salary -- $54,145 -- is nearly double the national average. When SAS Institute Inc. set up shop in nearby Cary 20 years ago, it had 20 employees. The software maker, which broke $1 billion in sales in 1999, employs 7,500 worldwide. "When we moved here," co-founder John Sail recalls, "Cary had a population of 22,000. Now it's 105,000."

The scene shifts. It's true that behind the growth of the nearly $1 trillion financial industry of Charlotte and the smaller but substantial banking center of Winston-Salem is one of the pivotal events of the last two decades: passage of North Carolina's 1984 interstate banking law. That cleared the way for Tar Heel banks to romp through the Southeast and Texas, bulking up for their nationwide offensive of the 1990s.

But if deregulation laid the tracks, it was technology -- from computers and the Internet linking far-flung operations to corporate jets bearing CEOs to clandestine deals -- that drove the engine. Twenty-seven years ago, what was then North Carolina National Bank Corp. experimented in Charlotte with its first automated-teller machine. By 1980, it was clear the machine could reduce banking's dependency on human tellers and branches. Today, its 13,278 ATMs are core technology for Bank of America Corp., whose 32 million customers make it the nation's largest commercial bank. "We've lived on the leading edge of technology in our industry," says Hugh McColl, chairman and CEO. When he came to work at a forerunner of his bank in 1959, "a typical computer looked like an oversized refrigerator with blinking lights all over it." Now, he notes, customers bank with handheld computers from their cars.

Drive north from McColl's 60-story headquarters to Charlotte's northern fringe and turn onto a sweeping drive through a buffer of oaks. Here, in First Union Corp.'s Customer Information Center -- 2.1 million feet under one roof, the state's largest office building -- George Orwell comes face to face with Adam Smith. Inside, an operator, one of 7,000 people who work here, glances at a TV tuned to the Weather Channel.

When a customer calls from, say, Trout Run, a small town in northern Pennsylvania, the operator can chat about the weather while her computer calls up the customer's bank account and profile. On her screen, a red, yellow or green cube signals how profitable the customer is. All customers are equal, insist officials at First Union and BofA, which has a similar program. But some are more equal than others. Einstein, the name First Union employees gave the computer, helps screen 45 million calls a year. With it, some analysts estimate, the bank generates $100 million in annual revenue by pampering good customers and selling them services and by sending bad ones -- those with small accounts who write too many checks and call too often to ask how much they have left -- to the end of the line or charging them extra fees.

The changes wrought by technology aren't confined to Charlotte's bank buildings or RTP's research centers. Head west to the hinterlands -- and, remember, it wasn't until 1996 that more North Carolinians lived in urban areas than the country or in small towns -- to Murphy, the mountain hamlet once a Tar Heel synonym for remote.

Here in 1983, a little-known discount chain built its first North Carolina store as it pushed farther and farther from its headquarters in Bentonville, a small town in Arkansas. Computers, bar codes and trucks with in-cab global-positioning satellite receivers allowed it to ripple outward without the managerial and supply-chain disruptions that haunted expansion attempts of less technologically attuned retailers in the 1980s, such as Salisbury-based Food Lion. Seventeen years later, Wal-Mart Corp. operates 110 stores and two distribution centers in North Carolina. Its 33,400 workers make it the state's second-largest employer.

One fall morning as the leaves begin to turn, Mayor Bill Hughes, 62, considers how North Carolina's first Wal-Mart changed his hometown. Driving along Valley River Avenue, Murphy's main drag, he notes that Parker's Drug Store, here since the 1920s, survives. But hardware, grocery and small department stores are gone, and trendy places like Shoe Booties Cafe and The Daily Grind -- pastries and flavored coffees -- fill their spots. An Edward Jones Co. brokerage caters to retirees from out of state. The town's population of 23,000 swells to 40,000 in the summer.

Murphy is booming, its residents complaining about congestion and pressure outsiders put on the tax rate. No longer do most shoppers come into town on Saturday afternoons from Suit, Vest, Hanging Dog Creek and other Cherokee County communities. They pour in all week from across the line in Tennessee and down in Georgia.

"Maybe this would have happened without Wal-Mart," says Hughes, who taught school here for more than 35 years. "A lot of the mom-and-pop stores here were probably already on the way out in 1980. But it certainly speeded things up." He pauses. "Whether that's good or bad depends entirely on who you talk to." Just imagine, he says. When Wal-Mart recently replaced the old store with a new supercenter, it took in $260,000 in a single Saturday, more than some of the mom-and-pop stores did all year in 1980. Just imagine. Others have.

"We didn't have big boxes in 1980," says Steve Bell, whose Greensboro-based Steven D. Bell & Co. has bought, sold, developed and managed more than $1 billion of shopping centers, apartments and offices since the late '70s. "They changed everything." Big boxes, big bucks. In 1980, Lowe's had 214 stores, most about 10,000 square feet, less than a quarter of an acre. This year, Lowe's Cos., from its tech-heavy headquarters in North Wilkesboro, links 638 stores in 40 states with computers, the Internet and a fleet of corporate jets. It will spend $2 billion this year, opening a store a week with a standard format that puts three to four acres under a roof. Its revenues -- $883 million in 1980 -- will exceed $16 billion.

Driving east, on the way to Raleigh, make one last stop. Not in Stanley -- though towns like it, with deserted shells of plants and High Noon-empty streets, dot the state -- but Greensboro. "I am 66 years old, and I am a tough, old son of a bitch. But I couldn't do it." So in September, Chuck Hayes, chairman and chief executive of Guilford Mills Inc., turned around, went back to his office and had a cry, instead of going with his staff to pass out pizza and shake hands as 400 employees at his Fishman Plant shut down their machines for the last time. Hayes had known some of them 40 years.

"I dropped out of high school in the 10th grade to get married, but now we're telling people like me, 'Goodbye, Charlie, we don't want you no more.' That was one of the first two plants me and Murray -- Murray Fishman -- built after Murray and I got together. Textiles was the one area that employed people like me with the least education. Dropouts. But as much as we fought in Washington, on Capitol Hill, to get them to embrace textiles, they said, 'Shove...