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ASHEBORO — The crane is gone from Dixie Drive.

For weeks, you saw it from at least a mile away in either direction along Asheboro’s main drag. You’d crest the slight hill beside Asheboro High’s Lee J. Stone Stadium, and there it was — 40 feet in the air, two words as big as any billboard.

VOTE AGAINST.

That didn’t happen this week. And that’s a big deal in the Piedmont Triad’s version of Mayberry.

It had been a long time in coming — 58 years, four months and five days to be exact — when local voters, by a 5-to-1 margin, put the kibosh on any kind of alcohol selling within Asheboro.

The famous day: March 25, 1950, a time of Harry Truman, Howdy Doody and some newfangled thing called color TV. Since then, five alcohol referendums have come up, and five alcohol referendums have failed.

Asheboro was North Carolina’s largest dry municipality. Until Tuesday.

The city’s ban to sell beer, wine and alcohol got bumped from the books in a 60-40 split. The turnout? Fifty-four percent of all registered voters, more than half of whom voted early.

It helped that the pro-alcohol folks raised more money, were better organized and brought in an A-team of talent. For the first time, dozens of local leaders dumped their cloak of anonymity and encouraged everyone to vote yes.

But it also helped that Asheboro has changed, too.

The numbers tell you that. But so will a visit Tuesday to a church, a school or a library. There, every few minutes, you’d find someone casting a vote that they believed would change Asheboro’s destiny — as well as their own.

Emmett Marine, 56, a retired call-center manager: “Let’s get into the 21st century — or even the 20th century. I’m from Chicago, and this just shocks me.”

Barbara Skelly, 38, a special education teacher: “Look at our economy. I see how many homes that are for sale or homes that are for rent. Asheboro is a good city. But I don’t want it to dry up. It’s time for a change.”

And Christina Villa, 18, a 2008 Asheboro High grad heading to UNC-Charlotte to study nursing.
Tuesday was her first vote ever.

“I think it will help our city grow, and I don’t believe it’ll hurt our small-town feel,” she said, her 16-year-old brother, John, nearby. “That small-town feel doesn’t depend on alcohol. It depends on the people, the community and the friendships you have.”

Sure, Rich Powell’s pro-alcohol cartoons are funny. But the battle for booze in this longtime bastion of the conservative South has been nasty.

Pro-alcohol supporters have been called un-Christian. Anti-alcohol supporters have been called uneducated. And according to one anonymous flier, a vote for alcohol is a “Vote For DEATH.”

You get the idea.

Asheboro, some say, has become unhinged by a vote that could split the city. But people on both sides believe the city needs to come together. Asheboro has too much at stake.

Forget the dismal economic figures. Park yourself at the Employment Security Commission near downtown Asheboro where people flock to find a job. There, the dismal economy gets a hardened face: Jeri Schutz.

She’s 37, an Asheboro mother of three. She’s looking for a job.

“It sucks — point blank,” she said Tuesday afternoon from the parking lot about the economy. “Our economy is so bad a tank’s worth of gas is a whole day’s work.”

Can selling alcohol boost Asheboro’s economy? Can it transform a city, founded on textiles and furniture, into a tourist mecca, bracketed by a trifecta of the N.C. Zoo, the Seagrove potters and the Uwharrie National Forest?

We’ll see. But there’s no doubt Asheboro has changed. You saw that Tuesday night after the vote as at least 100 people — from college students to gray-haired CEOs — partied along Sunset Avenue.

Cars honked. People whooped. A woman hip-shaked in a Hula-Hoop.

You even heard someone have the audacity to yell: “Goodbye, Mayberry!”

Well, Mayberry isn’t gone. And Asheboro, reminiscent of Andy Griffith’s feel-good TV world, will remain. But will it improve? Again, we’ll see.

But there’s no doubt about it. The crane is gone. Asheboro is different. And there’s a new famous day in its history: July 29, 2008.

They’ll remember this one for a long, long time.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com