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As spring shows its colors, memories of Alma Pinnix bloom. She made Greensboro more beautiful with her gift for landscaping.

Her masterpiece is the Cone Boulevard entrance to Page High School. Her hard work and creative design — when she was elderly — created such beauty, Page named the street through the campus for her after her death in 1981. Her landscaping touch also made inviting “Treasure Island,” the natural area in front of the school, which is the home of the Page Pirates.

Another posthumous honor came from the Greensboro Beautiful organization: a small but visible park at the busy Westover Terrace and Pembroke Drive intersection.

The park will be more accessible when an abandoned railroad bordering it becomes part of the city’s greenway for walkers, runners and cyclists.

Greensboro businessman John Tasker thought of another facet of Pinnix’s life after reading last Monday’s column about the North Buffalo railroad trestle, under which Cone Mill workers once drove to reach Revolution Mill.

As a boy in the 1950s, Tasker earned money mowing Pinnix’s lawn on Sunset Drive in Irving Park. He remembers her as a real estate dynamo at the time.

With little experience in real estate, she took over husband Hugh Pinnix’s business after his death in 1945. The business sold mill village houses for textile companies across the South. The mills offered to sell the houses at affordable prices to mill workers, who had been renting them.

Pinnix was cautious at first. Her daughter says she signed letters  “A.R. Pinnix” so the mill executives would assume a man still ran Hugh Pinnix’s firm.

“But she was a super salesperson; she loved selling,” says her daughter, Julia P. Elrod of Greensboro. She says her mother annually sold the most tickets for a garden club-sponsored antiques show.

When she and Hugh lived in Gastonia before 1931, she won a new Chrysler for selling the most tickets in a contest.

Once she began to sell mill houses, gender made no difference to the mill bosses. For Cone, she sold 900 houses in one three-month period. The company had 2,000 houses in its Proximity, White Oak, Revolution, East White Oak and White Oak-Newtown villages.

Julia Elrod occasionally rides through the former mill villages. She finds the houses looking better than when mill workers rented them.

During the Depression, Pinnix had supplemented her husband’s income through landscaping and gardening. She had no training. She was a natural.

Each morning, she would go to the train station and hire the day laborers who hung out there. They headed for the homes of clients, many in High Point, including the mill-owning Millis family.

Later, when she retired from real estate, Pinnix returned to landscaping and gardening, this time without pay. When she saw something needing beauty, she stopped and made it happen.

In 1968, her granddaughter, Leigh Elrod Yost, then a Page student who led a campus beautification committee, summoned her grandmother to transform the dreadful, muddy bank at the school’s Cone Boulevard entrance.

Soon, daily passers-by saw an elderly woman wearing golf shoes (for traction) bending over to plant flowers on the steep bank.

“They never saw anything but her fanny,” Elrod, her daughter, says with a laugh.

“My mother would be thrilled, if she knew the street through the campus was named for her,” Elrod says. “She was dedicated to Page High School.”

Pinnix also did free work at the Natural Science Center and other places and won many honors including the chamber of commerce’s Dolley Madison Award.

“She lived until she died,” Elrod says, meaning her mother stayed active. Appropriately, she died while raking leaves.

Without realizing it, Pinnix set an example for young people.

Elrod says one day when her mother was working on the Page entrance, a student yelled: “How much you getting paid?”

She dumbfounded the youngster by shouting, “Nothing.”

“I think,” Elrod says, “ it was a good lesson in life for him.”   

Contact Jim Schlosser at 601-9879 or beale1@clearwire.net