Raise the curtain, peel back the onion, search out all those connections between our town and the English Salisbury it was named for, and what do you find?

A Boy Scout and a polished piece of Rowan County granite, a Rotary Club and a chance meeting with Salisbury architect John Ramsay, a bridge foursome and a new life.

Memories of those connections are surfacing this weekend with 20 visitors from Salisbury, England, here making fresh contacts between the old world and the new.

They arrived Thursday, “anxious to know more about us,” says Salisbury Mayor Susan Kluttz, who sparked the visit when she went to Salisbury, England, with her husband, Bill, last year to participate in that city’s millennium celebration.

Before she left, she invited them to come see us, and now they’ve arrived, bringing along the official dress they wear at council meetings in England and will wear here at the big celebration open to the public at 3 p.m. today at Catawba College.

They’ll wear it again at the city council meeting Monday at 4 and for a program about their city at 4:30 — also open to the public — at the Meroney Theater next door to the council chambers on South Main Street.

But they brought more than special clothes.

They brought their interest in our town and their curiosity about us — and their visit prompts memories of visits past.

“The publicity,” Susan says, “has caused people to call me with stories, and they’re fun for me to hear and we’re so glad to get them that we’re collecting what we can.”

Like the story Dot Busby could tell.

Recalls a visit

Wife of the late Dr. George Busby, she read the Post stories that said the British were coming and called our mayor.

“I don’t know if there’s anybody else still alive,” she told Susan, “who knows that our son, George, took a piece of granite to England in his backpack and presented it to the mayor.”

A piece of granite in a backpack?

Susan knew mayors had gone back and forth, but she didn’t know anything about a piece of granite until Dot called. Nor did she know that architects Anne and Doug Tennent were from Salisbury, England, until Tom and Martha Smith, whose house they designed, mentioned it.

Nor had anyone tied the thread that connected young George Busby’s visit to England and the Tennents’ move to Salisbury until old stories and newspaper clippings surfaced during this visit.

Today’s mayor finds it all — the visits and the connections — so interesting, she says, “that I want to share the visitors here now with the whole city.”

And she wants to learn all she can about what’s happened in the past, starting with a young George Busby, who has been practicing architecture in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., since 1975.

Boy Scout representatives

But he was 14 in the summer of 1957 when he and Earl Wagoner Jr. of China Grove were chosen to represent Rowan at the national and international Boy Scout Jamborees.

“First we went to Valley Forge,” he says, “and then to the international jamboree at Sutton-on-Coldfield in England” near Salisbury, England. So Linwood Foil, who was our mayor at that time, sent greetings, a gift and an invitation.

The gift was a plaque of the Salisbury city seal on a piece of polished granite quarried in Granite Quarry.

“It was 12 or 14 inches square,” George Busby remembers, “and it was heavy.”

“The Scouts,” his mother says, “had to carry everything on their backs, and that thing weighed 20 pounds.”

George had Asian flu during his first week in England that July.

“That was the first time it attacked the world,” he says. “but after I got over the flu, I took the day off from camping and took the train to Salisbury” to present the Rowan County memento to the Mayor, the Honorable Alfred Batt.

But the mayor couldn’t be there, so a town commissioner met him at the railroad station and took him to the Salisbury Cathedral and city hall.

“And we stood on the steps,” he says, and he presented the plaque to “Mayoress” May Batt.

A copy of report

Along with the plaque Mayor Foil had sent a copy of Salisbury’s 1956 annual report, a Rotary kit about Salisbury and greetings from Mayor Foil inviting Mayor Batt to Salisbury. Then they had high tea at the local hotel, and that night he went back to camp.

“And it was memorable,” George says. “I don’t remember a lot of things, but I do remember that.”

He believes his visit to Salisbury, England, with that gift and letter from our mayor, was the first “official” contact between the two cities.

“Definitely,” he says, “it was the first after World War II, though some people might have taken private tours there,” and troops certainly were stationed nearby during the war.” The adjacent Salisbury Plains was a vast military training site.

And the Hon. Mayor and Mayoress Batt wasted no time acting on Linwood Foil’s invitation.

By the end of September they were here, and what a time they had!

Young George still remembers their visit to his family’s home, and Dot has a folder full of clippings that prove they were entertained in fine fashion.

They flew into Charlotte just before noon on Friday, Sept. 27, 1957, after visiting Washington and Salisbury, Md., and, the Post reported, “were whisked here under police escort.”

And then whisked through the weekend.

They were entertained by the Busbys, the Foils, the Walter Woodsons and the English Speaking Union. They went to the opening meeting of the North Carolina League of Municipalities in Raleigh. They presented a copy of the Magna Carta, an engraved silver tray, a scroll of greetings and two rare books to the Rowan Public Library. They were interviewed by the Post and the Charlotte Observer. And they left Tuesday afternoon to fly back to New York and get the Queen Mary home again.

But not before the mayor went to a meeting of the Salisbury Rotary Club where he sat next to the president, who as chance would have it, was architect John Erwin Ramsay.

But the turn of the conversation was no accident.

News of the Hungarian revolt hit the world a couple of years earlier and sympathy for freedom-seeking refugees had been at a peak.

Germans and Austrians, John Ramsay had reasoned, were masters of detail. If one of those displaced people was an architect, might he be interested in a job here, a job that would combine American ingenuity and aggressiveness with European thoroughness and respect for the past?

Unanswered questions

But inquiries got him nowhere.

Neither did correspondence with an Austrian architect. If he considered an English architect, there would be no language barrier.

So he broached the subject to Mayor Batt, who said one of the best combinations for a business team would be an American go-getter and a cautious Englishman.

Did he know one?

Very possibly, he told John.

His wife and Doug Tennent’s wife, Anne, were part of a foursome that played bridge each week.

And Doug had frequently thought of leaving England. He was born in Montreal of English parents who returned when he was 7.

A greater reason was the architectural climate in England which exerted restrictive controls.

A third reason was adventure.

But the family was growing. They had two sons, Peter and David, and a third baby on the way and were putting down roots. They’d just bought a house.

Still, his wife, Anne, also an architect, came from a family with a strong streak of wanderlust in their souls.

Her twin sister and her husband had moved to Australia. A brother was beginning to study in Rome. An uncle was in Canada; an aunt, in Nigeria.

Probably the hardest part of moving was flying here with three children under three.

“I remember it well,” she says, laughing. “It was a nightmare. The stewardess was absolutely horrified.”

But Doug met them in New York, and they came to Salisbury and made a life, putting their own creative stamp on the shape of Piedmont North Carolina through Doug’s work with John Ramsay and later their own Tennent and Tennent Architects.

Anne Tennent, long since a naturalized American, says she feels “like I have two countries, and I enjoy both. Now I prefer to live in America after all these years.”

Sometimes she’s a little surprised at the decision they made back in 1958 to swap one Salisbury for another.

“I didn’t understand how my mother and father must have felt,” she says. “I did not understand at all. And I thought we’d be back ... ”

Wanderlust continues

But nobody’s surprised that the old wanderlust gene is still making itself felt unto the next generation.

Peter, now a lawyer with IBM, is on a tour of duty in Japan. David, an engineer, has travelled widely in Thailand and Puerto Rico. Liz was living in Greece when her son, Douglas, was born. He’s named for his late grandfather who made his family Americans. And Anne and Doug’s fourth and fifth children, Patricia and Margaret, both born in Salisbury, travel widely with their jobs with a mortgage insurance company.

But Liz has returned to Salisbury and works for the city — and guess who helped Mayor Susan Kluttz plan for this weekend’s visit of the English Salisburians?

Being part of Salisbury’s visitors team is special.

“I feel like it’s family coming in this weekend,” Liz says. “I’m the only Tennent child not born in a Salisbury. My two brothers were born in Salisbury, England, and my two sisters were born in Salisbury, N.C. But I was born in Southhampton because my dad had already come here, and my mom moved in with her parents in Southhampton until I was born. Then we came here.”

Another meeting of mayors

And she remembers another meeting of Salisbury mayors.

In July, 1981, Mayor Don Weinhold and his wife, Pat, and children, Melena and Brandt, visited their counterparts in what he called “the mother city,” taking official greetings, a unique bronze sculpture by Luther Sowers, an engraved plaque, history of the city and county, a specially designed medallion and a bound copy of the Salisbury Post’s Bicentennial edition.

The reception they got over there, he said when he got back, “was more than cordial. It approached royalty.”

And, he told the Salisbury city council, over there old is old. The English Salisbury dates to the 11th century.

“They wouldn’t understand our idea of historic preservation,” he said. “They talk about a building being recently refurbished in 1840.”

Councilman ribbed him about coming home where the mayor doesn’t get to wear robes and gold medallions.

But he and Salisbury entertained Mayor Derrick Alford and Mayoress Vida Alford of the city sometimes known as the “Mother of all Salisburys” during a whirlwind four days the following November.

Liz Tennent remembers that. Vividly.

She had recently received her UNC degree in radio and television and started a job at local radio station WSTP.

“And I was assigned to interview the mayor and his wife from England, the Weinholds and my parents.”

Adding her parents to that mix scared her thoroughly even if it reflected another connection of Salisbury mayors that changed her family’s lives.

“It’s a small world,” George Busby says, “and getting smaller all the time.”

Contact Rose Post at 704-797-4251 or rpost@salisburypost.com .