Remembering Cameron Village! We didn’t go to Raleigh like we did Greensboro when I was a boy but of the few places we did visit, aside from the NC State Fairgrounds and Dorton Arena, Cameron Village stands out. Raleigh, after all, meant The Wolfpack, and we were a Tar Heel family. In those days in #DeepChatham that the NC State (just ‘State’ will suffice) fans far outnumbered the Carolina ones was a given. Perhaps that is still the case, I don’t know. State was first and foremost an agricultural institution and Chatham County was a farming center. I’d venture that considerably more Chatham Central High (my Alma Mater) graduates attended State than Carolina. The number going on to 4-year schools was never that great anyway.
But State had been a basketball powerhouse from the mid-1940s into the 1980s, first with the “Silver Fox” Everett Case, then “Stormin’” Norm Sloan, and finally with the beloved Jim Valvano. Sloan presided over the dominating 1973-74 David Thompson/Tommy Burleson-led NCAA winners while Valvano’s “Heart-Attack Pack” 1983 national champions almost made rivals happy for them (I emphasize “almost”). But it was Case that laid the ground work of building that fan base through the ‘50s and ‘60s with consistent winners, fast-break offenses, and the nationally acclaimed Christmas-time Dixie Classic Tournament. The Wolfpack’s miracle run during last year’s March Madness surely awakened some of the allegiance to the Glory Days once so rampant in the outlands. It is interesting that the heyday of State hoops seems to coincide rather well with that of Cameron Village.
As a “planned residential subdivision with shopping services,” Cameron Village was like no other space to most folks. It bore a magical sense about it, especially during the holidays with the lights and sounds of Christmas everywhere. It was certainly like nothing down in #Bonlee. The layout, with blocks of shopping, easy parking, and homes and apartments all around was frankly, futuristic in a way - not in a Jetson’s way - but maybe a sort of imagined Big Apple kind of way. The design preceded the eventually ubiquitous mall but transcended the shopping strip landing somewhere in an outer limit of imagination - at least for a while in my own dreaming of a world beyond rural North Carolina during the 1960s and early 1970s.
In the mid-1970s I went off to my true fantasy destination of Chapel Hill and the sense of Raleigh as the home of my rival intensified. Duke/dook was an also-ran in most every way at that time - a laughable last-place finisher in all sports and already inhabited by zero folks from down home, unless they were in the hospital. State was the focus of most all of the enmity that bubbled up out of The Southern Part of Heaven in those days. There is great truth in the bumper sticker, “Duke is puke, Wake is fake, but the team I hate is NC State.”
I did return to Cameron Village (now known as The Village District) in the early 1980s and it was the unifying force of rock n roll, blues, and bluegrass that got me there. I didn’t go that often, after all we had The Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill, but a few times shows at The Pier in the Cameron Village Subway drew me east. Great bands played there like R.E.M. (there’s a YouTube of a 1982 show there online - look it up), Sonic Youth, Pylon, The dBs - all wasn’t Alt-Music either, one of my all-time favorite shows there was David Bromberg. I can’t name the artists here but I will mention one more - a 1981? visit to Raleigh by an about-to-be-discovered all-woman band, that thanks to WXYC, the campus station at UNC, I was aware of and had already been dancing to (Chapel Hill danced in the early ‘80s - shoe-gazing had yet to set in). I have friends that have adjacent stories about that show and meeting The Go Gos in a nearby supermarket.
Enough and on to our #OnThisDay…Suffice it to say that I’ve never come to know Raleigh well enough but I ‘get’ that it has its own mystique and grand history. There are folks that I associate with the town that are mighty cool (you know who you are) and the music that has rock and rolled out of there is some of NC’s finest. Fabulous Knobs, Connells, Corrosion of Conformity, The Hanks, and Tres Chicas ring bells right off. To bring it back around I’m always reminded of a fantastic show at The Pier that I missed - For years I have cherished my copy of the most beloved and listened-to Chatham County’s own, “The Bluegrass Experience: Live at The Pier” (1976).
#OTD (November 17) in 1949 Cameron Village (now The Village District) among The South’s 1st Shopping Ctrs, opened in Raleigh. Very popular in ‘50-60s, malls came along and to hurt business in the ‘70s but that same decade saw ‘The Underground’ thrive. Renovations have kept it alive to this day.
Cameron Village Trend-Setter for Raleigh and the South
