By Board Chair Jack Betts

I never knew Moses and Bertha Cone, of course, as Moses died early in the 20th  century and Bertha died when I was a year old. But I've always been grateful to them and to Moses' brother, Ceasar. You see, if they hadn't moved South back in the late 1880s to begin building what became the Cone Mills industrial dynasty-and become the world's biggest producer of denim - I would not exist. It's a longish story, but in a sense, they brought my parents together. It's just one reason Moses H. Cone Memorial Park is important to me.

Flat Top Manor, the marvelous summer home that is the centerpiece of the Blue Ridge Parkway's 3,500-acre Moses H. Cone Memorial Park near Blowing Rock, needs help. The Foundation has committed to raising a lot of money to preserve the house and undertake maintenance and improvement projects all over the park. So we're holding a fundraiser on Saturday, August 6, at another grand place in Blowing Rock, Chetola Resort, to raise money to pay for those projects. We're calling it The Denim Ball, which seems appropriate, as Moses Cone is often referred to as the Denim King.

I confess I care about this for a lot of reasons. One of them is my passion for the Parkway, and Cone Memorial Park is an important part of that. The other is my family's connection to the Cones.

In the depths of the Great Depression, my mother was a school teacher in Anderson, S.C., living at home because teachers' salaries were deplorable in those days. She heard about a company up in Greensboro that was offering qualifying teachers a pretty good deal if they would come and do a little extra work for a little extra money, checking up on Cone millworkers' families to make sure things were OK at home.

So Olive Minor came up from South Carolina to Greensboro to teach at Proximity School, surrounded by mill houses, and got an extra month's salary for her social work visiting students' homes. She met John Betts at a dance, and impressed him by accidentally sitting on his fedora and they laughed about it. After a long courtship, marrying in 1937, and enduring a world war, they finally gave in to my sister's pleas for a little brother, and I was born 70 years ago this week. My parents never had it easy, but they had good lives, and I'll never forget what brought them together in the first place. 

That's just one reason I'm buying tickets for The Denim Ball on August 6. I hope you can, too, or send the Foundation a donation for this good cause.