Last year, when Governor Perdue selected Keith Crisco from Asheboro to serve as Secretary of Commerce in her cabinet, we had to admit that he was not exactly a household name in most of North Carolina.
But his name has held an honored place in my household since … well, that is the story I want to tell you again.
About 12 years ago, just a couple of years after my mother died, I visited Asheboro to give a talk to a civic club. Later, my host, Alan Pugh, took me to see Keith Crisco at Asheboro Elastics Corp. “He has a great business, and you all have some things in common politically,” he said.
As I walked into the lobby of the mill, I saw a giant framed color picture hanging on the wall. It was a blowup of an advertisement for Asheboro Elastics. In the middle of the ad was an older, gray-headed woman seated in a rocking chair, surrounded by a shawl, smiling down towards her hands which were busy crocheting a long strip of elastic.
The woman in the picture was my mom.
First I was shocked to see her, almost as big as life, and looking really alive, active and happy.
What a coincidence, I thought.
Just then, Keith Crisco appeared to explain that he brought out the poster just for me to see. He then explained the history of the ad. Asheboro Elastics wanted to find a way to tell its potential customers that its ultra modern equipment gave it an edge in responding to orders quickly and reliably. So they designed an ad with a “grandmother-type” woman slowly crocheting elastic webbing side-by-side a photo of their modern machinery that could do the job thousands and thousands of times faster.
My mom had just happened to be the model selected for the job.
Seeing the ad brought back all the memories of my mom’s professional life as a model and actress – as it developed for her at an age long after most folks have retired.
First, she broke into television ads, making a little bit of money and having a lot of fun with the production crews – and then watching for the ads as they appeared on TV.
Then, when she was about 75, she was cast in a professional stage production of “Steel Magnolias” – so successfully that when the production was revived several months later, she was called back to play her role again. She didn’t let a little surgery for breast cancer get in the way. The play had to go on, so she recovered very quickly.
Soon after the revival of “Steel Magnolias” came a stroke that took away my mom’s right side mobility and made it very difficult to speak. It meant the end of many things – including, of course, her acting career.
But after a long hard rehabilitation, she figured out a way to get back into modeling, and she landed the job for Asheboro Elastics’ ad.
I remember how proud she was of the photo in the rocking chair. She had lots of copies made for family members and friends. “I could hardly hold the needles, and I surely couldn’t crochet in my condition – but it looks pretty good, doesn’t it?”
It did.
It does.
Keith Crisco gave me a copy of the ad, which I treasure. So, after all this time, she is still there, looking “pretty good,” and saying to me strongly, “Don’t ever stop trying. We can all do more than we might think. And you can never know when something good we do might help someone else now … or years later.”
As it did me, seeing her there in the lobby of the Asheboro Elastics mill.
D.G. Martin is hosting his final season of UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch, which airs at 5 p.m. Sundays. His blog and prior programs can be viewed at www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch. This Sunday’s (Dec. 20 ) guest is Paul Escott, author of “What Shall We Do with the Negro?: Lincoln, White Racism, and Civil War America.”
