CityView Magazine

24 August 2021 skyline memories BY KIM HAST Y CityView asked readers to share their Skyline recollections. DEBR A GL A S C OCK R ICKS T R OM "I would go with friends on Friday and Saturday nights. It was nice to be up so high and see the city lights. That was the biggest attraction," Debra Glascock Rickstrom, Seventy- First High School, Class of 1974. Laura Alexander Hile's favorite memories of the Skyline included recording artist B.J. Thomas. She was there when the singer who recorded hits like "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" and "Hooked on a Feeling" paid a visit one evening, and she enjoyed a conversation with him. And despite being a place filled with loud music and pulsating lights, "It was a very relaxing atmosphere," said Hile, who graduated from Pine Forest High School in 1977. "It was a neat atmosphere." L AU R A A L E X A NDER HIL E "I always had a good time there. I mean, the music was great, you know. It's always about the music. – Mark Lynch, president of Quality Sound & Video, who was an occasional DJ at the Skyline "The disco ball at the top with the lights really set the tone," Catharine Brown, Terry Sanford High School Class of 1976. Martha Broadfoot Bock, a member of the Terry Sanford High School Class of 1977, who is now executive director of Cape Fear Valley Health Foundation's Stanton Hospitality House, enjoyed the music and the dancing at the Skyline. But she wasn't one of those around when the fluorescent lights would come on around 1:30 in the morning, signaling it was time to leave. "I had a curfew," she said. "I had to be home before it closed." Wayne Carpenter said he had a blast working as a bartender at the Skyline. He remembers one evening when the elevator got stuck between floors, stranding people who were packed in like polyester-clad sardines for an hour. "That's how they always used to come up and how they used to come down," he said. "Max up and max down." "It was kind of nice being up high and being able to see the skyline of the city," Linda Parrous Higgins, Terry Sanford High School Class of 1977. Caro Lee Gainey and Scott Stapleton had only been on a handful of dates when they sashayed onto the dance floor at the Skyline. She was home on a break from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he was home from Syracuse University, where he was on a basketball scholarship. "He had a white leisure suit, a red nylon shirt and stacked heels," she said. "I had my hair cut like Farrah Fawcett, like every other girl back then. It was so exciting to have a rooftop club like that in Fayetteville. It had a lot of good music." The disco era would fade away and the pair would go their separate ways for awhile. But they reunited three years later and were married 43 years before Scott Stapleton died on Dec. 13, 2019.

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