The thread of change: how Duke Kimbrell keeps putting a new spin on King Cotton.

• Author: Payton, Kathy
• Position: W. Duke Kimbrell, chief executive officer of Parkdale Mills Inc.; includes related article - Company Profile

Mae Bender, who has worked for nearly 15 years in the spinning room at Parkdale Mills Inc.'s Plant No. 1 in Gastonia, thought her boss deserved something special.

W. Duke Kimbrell doesn't work out of a fancy office where employees fear to tread. He listens and leaves hid door open, Bender says. So in October she helped organize a surprise appreciation day at which she read a handwritten speech praising Parkdale's chairman and CEO.

"It just came to my mind," she says. "I just felt like it was time to have a day set aside for him."

You can't buy that kind of respect, of course, but it echoes the textile industry's feelings for Kimbrell. Last year, he became the fourth person to win the Samuel Slater Award, the American Textile Manufacturers Institute's highest honor.

Keeping his office door open is only part of it. Kimbrell's ability to keep open the doors of more than a dozen faltering Tar Heel textile mills over the past 30 years has turned him into an industry star.

Under Kimbrell, Parkdale has grown from one mill with $11 million in sales and 200 employees in 1961 to an 18-plant cotton and cotton-blend yarn-making operation with sales topping $400 million and 2,940 workers. By continually investing in new technology, Kimbrell has made Parkdale a solid force in an industry in which 88 North Carolina textile and apparel plants have closed in the past four years. Now, he's positioning Parkdale for the next century under a new generation of management.

Typical of Kimbrell's itch to move with the times is Plant No. 15 in Belmont, where Parkdale spent $25 million on capital improvements in 1990. By replacing ring-spinning machines with computerized, open-end spinning machines, 90 workers are producing 400,000 pounds of yarn a week. Before, it took 250 workers to make 150,000 pounds. Parkdale now employs the same number of people as it did in 1985, when it had 11 fewer plants.

"My personal feeling is if all the rest of the business [owners] had been as forward-thinking and aggressive as Duke, we would not have lost as many [textile] jobs as we have," says U.S. Rep. Cass Ballenger, a Republican from Hickory.

Albert Myers Jr., a retired Gastonia textile executive, says, "Duke is an awfully smart operator. I give him full credit. When he started, he had very little. He didn't even have a pot to you-know-what in."

Parkdale - the first thread mill south of the Mason-Dixon Line - has become the nation's largest yarn spinner. Chartered in 1916, it produced a million pounds when it began operations in 1918. Parkdale now spins more than 250 million pounds a year, most of it for the knitting industry. Parkdale yarn winds up in such brand names as Land's End, Liz Claiborne and L.L. Bean. Sweat shirts and underwear for brands such as Bassett-Walker, Sara Lee and Jockey include the yarn made in one of 18 plants in cities and towns along Interstate 85 from Kings Mountain to Thomasville.

Some might think Kimbrell, who turned 67 on Dec. 28, will take life a little easier. Don't believe it. Sure, he has spent much of the past few years assembling a management team headed by son-in-law Anderson Warlick, the company's president and chief operating officer. Without Warlick, 34, the...