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GREENSBORO — It was February 1960. Cameron Falkener was 8 when the phone calls started to come.

“Cam!’’ his mother yelled from the other side of the house when she heard the ring. “Put that phone down!’’

Cameron did. But not in time.

“We’re going to blow up your house and kill you unless you get those monkeys off the street!’’ the caller told Cameron.

The phone calls scared Cameron’s mother, but they steeled his father. He knew he had a job to do: resolve the civil rights crisis facing Greensboro, his hometown.

Cameron’s dad Waldo knew the students who had started the whole thing. Cameron knew them, too.

Ezell Blair Jr. and David Richmond were friends of his older brother and sister. And Frank McCain had talked to Cameron’s dad about watching out for him if something happened.

Well, something did. The four students from N.C. A&T — Blair, McCain, Richmond and Joseph McNeil — made history by staging a sit-in at F.W. Woolworth on Feb. 1 and asking to be served at the whites-only lunch counter.

At the time, Waldo Falkener was the only black member on the Greensboro City Council and the only black member on the Mayor’s Committee on Community Relations, the panel brought together to negotiate a peaceful settlement between students and representatives from Woolworth.

So, for months, several times a week, the calls came. The threats were always the same: an anonymous voice on the other end of the phone.

“Cam,’’ Waldo Falkener told his youngest son. “These are very tough times, and you have to be strong. It’s not going to be easy.’’

Waldo Falkener had learned to straddle two worlds: white Greensboro and black Greensboro. He was a bail bondsman, a real estate entrepreneur and a sharp dresser known for his dark suits, his polished wingtips and gold watch chain.

Since 1949, he had lobbied the city for equal rights for black people. But as a City Council member — the board’s second black member in history — he faced the wrath of segregation from both sides.

The push for change; the pull of the status quo.

Cameron Falkener saw that unfold from his living room. He saw his dad come home with his face scrunched in thought. And Cameron was scared to death.

Times were tense, history was happening every day.

Cameron felt that every afternoon. He would sit on his front steps on Dudley Street and see the students march past his house on their way back from protesting in downtown Greensboro.

“What is going to bring this to an end is economics,’’ Waldo Falkener told his son.

“What do you mean by that, Dad?’’ Cameron asked.

“When the Woolworth’s people feel it in their pockets is when they’ll make a change,’’ Waldo responded.

Six months later, that happened. Cameron found out when his father walked through the back door.

“Cam, I got some good news,’’ Waldo told him. “The situation is resolved. We done it. We done it.’’

Today, Waldo Falkener is gone — he died in 1992 at age 89 — and Cameron Falkener is 58. He’s a Howard University grad, he’s married and has a daughter at A&T, and he sells medical and dental products.

He lives on Dudley Street in the house where he was raised.

The place feels like a museum. He can pull out boxes and unveil pictures, yellowed newspaper articles and letters his dad received from politicians like President Lyndon B. Johnson. And Cameron can remember those scary phone calls.

But times have changed. All he has to do is step on his front porch — just as he did as an 8-year-old — and look up the street at the statue of what he calls the A&T Four to see that.

“He would be so proud of his city, Greensboro,’’ Cameron says of his father. “He’d realize that it’s possible for anyone to be anything that they would want to be. That would make him extremely happy.’’

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