CityView Magazine - Fayetteville, NC
Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/1274183
CityViewNC .com | 11 safe on muscular casters where Dad kept the valuables. It had a canister of tear gas that was designed to deploy if someone cracked the safe. Evidently it was a hair trigger, as it went off in the office one day. ere was the driveway in back off of Old Street that immediately joined the entrance into the First Citizens Bank parking lot. ere was the service elevator at our back entrance that took repairs (and excited children) from ground level to that second-floor window. When we vacated Hay Street, both that elevator and that safe went to e Warehouse on Gillespie Street. My first job was wielding a feather duster for 35 cents an hour. ere is no debate on that rate. I know, because on day one I knocked a bottle of cymbal rouge to the concrete floor, breaking it, and it cost me an hour's wage. irty-five cents. My employer was adept at teaching hard lessons. e death of family businesses happens every day. In our case, it came in 2000 aer Dad called together all of us who had accepted his invitation to join the Board. He told us in that meeting that "the best time to sell something is when someone else wants it." A man down in Dallas, Texas wanted it, and he paid well to get it. We naively believed all that Texas talk about how nothing would change. Everything changed. Everything always changes. All of the experiences of 80 years of business and all of that Scott-McFadyen- wisdom was dismissed by the venture capitalists in NYC who had bankrolled the man from Dallas. In six years' time, McFadyen Music's suitor bankrupted her for the last time. I won't say it broke Dad's heart, but he did openly share disgust over it not needing to have ended that way. He was most pained by the job losses it inflicted on the remaining people Dad had hired and nurtured financially and in other ways during his working life. Of my three children, two of them have envisioned a path into e Real World over the next 10 months. e third one will finish high school in that same timeline. erefore, his path is less clearly envisioned at this point. I am wondering how he would look in a flat-bed truck. Bill McFadyen can be reached at propertybill@nc.rr.com. FayTV.net