Langston reflects on five decades in Whiteville
By FULLER ROYAL
Charlie Langston is going to take things easy for a while. An active business and civic leader since his arrival here in 1962, Langston has sold Langston Realty to longtime employee Jackie Ray.
Langston, a native of Henderson, came to Whiteville with wife Rose as manager of the old Rose’s Store in downtown Whiteville.
He quickly ingratiated himself into the community, joining First Baptist Church, the Lions Club and the Whiteville Merchants Association, later the Greater Whiteville Chamber of Commerce.
Langston met Rose, who is from Orangeburg, S.C., while he was training in a Columbia, S.C. Rose’s Store. They have been married 54 years.
He and Rose moved 13 times with Rose’s.
When Langston moved to Whiteville there were about 250 stores in the Rose’s chain. Rose’s had been around since the 1920s.
For 11 years, he managed the downtown store. In 1973, Roses ordered him to Suffolk, Va.
Like so many other companies, Roses felt that the random moving of managers kept its stores fresh, with new ideas and management styles.
The 11 years that Langston spent in Whiteville were unusually long for any Rose’s manager.
He reluctantly took his family to Suffolk, his 13th and final move for the company.
But, his friendships in Whiteville proved too strong and he resigned from Rose’s after 23 years with the company as one of its most successful managers.
“I wanted to come back here and live,” he said. “And my children (Chuck and LouAnn) wanted to come back here and live.”
Langston said that in his last year at the Whiteville store, they had increased sales to nearly a million dollars in gross sales for the year.
He came home and formed Langston Realty with friend, the late Ed Leatherbury. They set up shop in the building that now houses Terminex on Washington Street.
Leatherbury left and Langston moved his real estate operation to the old George Rogers house, where Wendy’s Hamburgers stands now.
His final move was into the Gore Building in the Courthouse Square.
Langston said he misses the “golden days” of downtown Whiteville with its crowds of people.
“You could tell how big the crowd was by the depth of the boiled peanut hulls in the street,” he said.
In the 1960s, Whiteville was still the center of commerce. Tobacco was big and the summer and early fall played host to literally thousands of farmers and their families who had “tobacco money” to spend.
Langston grew up in Henderson, the headquarters for Rose’s. He was an active Boy Scout and earned his Eagle rank. And while he personally knew store founder P.H. Rose, he had never intended to work with the chain.
“I applied for a job with Rose’s the same day I was to go to Richmond Professional Institute, now known as Virginia Commonwealth,” he said. “I was hired.”
A stint with the U.S. Navy during the end of World War II interrupted his plans.
When his service had ended, he went back to Roses. He trained in and worked for 11 Rose’s stores before beginning in Whiteville.
Rose’s had become an anchor store downtown, selling a little of just about everything from clothing to sporting goods to toys.
In his day, Langston sold alligators, turtles, rabbits and chickens at Rose’s.
It didn’t take him long to create a lot of store traffic.
When he first took over as manager, he had an ice cream special. He hired some boys to distribute 1,000 one-day only coupons for homemade nine-cent ice-cream sandwiches.
He said the girls in the store worked their arms off dipping ice cream. About half of the coupons were redeemed.
Another chain store, Wood’s, was Roses’ leading competitor at the time and was across Madison Street. Langston became friends with its manager, Bob Morris. Woods would later relocate to the Lewis Smith Plaza. Herman Leder bought the old store and expanded into it.
The old downtown Rose’s had 25 regular employees. At Christmastime each year, Langston hired up to 75 high school girls to handle the Christmas crowds.
Langston recalled five girls who would carpool from Nakina each day. “They were my $5 million girls,” he said.
Langston recalled that shoplifters were a constant problem. Among their tactics: they would purchase a cup of iced Coca-Cola and would walk over and place their cup on the jewelry counter.
They proceeded to drop earrings in the syrupy mix when employees weren’t looking.
Langston caught shoplifters hauling expensive phonograph records out of the store in cheap puzzle boxes.
His Rose’s store was also one of the first stores in town to hire a black employee for the sales floor. He lost some customers because of it, but his gross sales continued to climb.
When his bosses told him to raise a cup of coffee from 5 cents to a dime, some customers balked at the idea of paying that much.
One of his regular customers brought in her own cup, about four times what the Rose’s cups would hold. She told the girls to fill up the cup and paid them a dime.
Langston told the girls “Well, she outsmarted us this time. Go ahead and fill it whenever she comes in.”
Langston said his favorite business story involved fellow businessman and friend Abie Moskow.
A woman went to Moskow’s and asked what flip-flops cost. Moskow replied, “$2 a pair.”
The woman said that flip-flops were only $1.50 a pair at Rose’s.
“Why didn’t you buy them there,” asked Moskow?
“Because they don’t have any,” she said.
“Well, ours are a dollar and a half, too, when we don’t have any,” Moskow told her.
Managing the Rose’s Store and later his realty, were only small portions of Langston’s life in Whiteville. He busied himself in numerous civic projects. Langston worked with any committee that needed his help from city recreation to Scouting to church affairs.
“I miss the old Merchants-Farmer’s Exposition,” he said. “It was a wonderful thing for Columbus County and Whiteville. It created a good connection between the merchants and the farmers.”
The MFE was organized once every two years by the Whiteville Lion’s Club and held in November.
It hasn’t been held since the inception of the Whiteville Pecan Harvest Festival.
Langston said the Chamber of Commerce has been one of the best things to come along in Whiteville. When he served as its president, the chamber applied for the All American City Award. Whiteville didn’t win, but Langston said a lot of good things were accomplished in town that helped make it stand out.
Langston said there are plenty of business people he misses from the 1960s. He listed, among others, Gene Sears, Sam. T. Gore and Gola Smith.
“Gola, who ran a small grocery store, always had a sign that said ‘Fat Back, 15 cents a pound’ in her window,” he said.
Langston said his old store manager instincts are still strong.
“When I go in a store, I still want to make changes in the end-counter,” he said. “I find myself picking up things. You still see what you could do better.”
Langston said he enjoyed being a part of the community and that whenever he could, he used the Rose’s store to help various causes. He said that the Rose family was civic minded.
Langston even made sure that the store sponsored a Dixie Youth team.
“It was a wonderful time and it will never be like that again,” he said.
For the immediate future, Langston plans on keeping his office intact at the realty, just to keep his fingers in things a little and to remain active.
And what does Langston like best about Whiteville?
“The people,” he said. “What else do we have?”
