Michael Graff (thanks, Elizabeth): Before he started working in genetic sequencing, Randy Crowell dropped out of high school.
He went down to the mill in Kannapolis, 16 years old, and got a job opening bales of cotton. He made a couple of bucks an hour. He got married a year later, at 17. It was the 1970s, and around these parts, about that time, that was life.
Cannon Mills was the provider for a region, the provider for generations, the largest producer of sheets and towels in the world, the daily home to some 22,000 employees. Around here, about then, good hands got you a job and a diploma got you a pat on the back. Crowell, raised in nearby Salisbury, was destined to work in the mill. When he first stepped inside that 6 million-square-foot titan of textiles just outside downtown Kannapolis, he figured he’d work there forever.
That was just the way it was.
It’s only a piece of land, underneath it all. Three hundred and fifty acres of land, to be exact. Bordered by Main Street and a railroad track and a three-block downtown. In that downtown is the oldest single-screen movie theater in the country still in operation today. The theater might be the most notable thing here, if not for the land.
Rising from it now is the North Carolina Research Campus, a place where geniuses have come to get smarter. It is now a piece of land that employs one scientist who was a leader in sequencing human chromosome 1 in the Human Genome Project and another scientist who is a world leader in studying choline’s effect on the human brain. It is now a piece of land with toys such as a nuclear magnetic resonance machine that, when powered up at 950 megahertz, is the world’s most powerful superconducting magnet. It is now a piece of land where super fruits such as the blueberry are about to become even more super.
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