By Deirdre Parker Smith
dp1@salisburypost.com
Nearly 20 years in Rowan County has convinced N.C. Transportation Museum Executive Director Elizabeth Smith that this is home.
Sitting in her office in the Master Mechanics office on the site, Smith works amid the nearly constant sound of train whistles and clacking tracks.
You can hear her coworkers in the offices around her, answering the phone, making plans. She says the best thing about her job is her staff and the volunteers.
“It’s a great group of people. They have good ideas and are able to carry them through. … I can be away and not worry about what’s going on.”
She supervises 18 full-time employees and four part-time workers, along with 80-85 active volunteers.
“Those volunteers do everything, from operating the trains, to school tours, to working on the engines.” And she says the younger people have learned a lot from the men who actually worked at Spencer Shops in its heyday.
The worst part of the job is doing budgets, especially in the current climate. “We learned long ago how to stretch a dollar a long way,” she said. “But sometimes it works out better than we expected.”
The state relies on tourism as part of its economy and supports places like the museum, which gets more than 100,000 visitors a year.
Smith gives credit to the museum’s support group, the N.C. Transportation Museum Foundation, for acquiring exhibits when they become available.
Smith, born in the historic town of New Bern, went to Meredith College in Raleigh, where one of her classmates was Spencer native Kim Everhart Lentz.
After college, she was a tour guide in Raleigh at the State Capitol and the governor’s mansion. When she moved to Spencer in 1990 to be assistant site manager, it was a promotion. Then she became executive director in 1998. She’ll soon have 30 years in as a state employee, but she doesn’t think about retirement.
When she was site manager, she worked with Don Wooten. Her job was to make sure the museum had enough volunteers, that the school tours were organized and that visitors had a good experience.
“A lot of what I learned was from the people who were here in the early days,” including longtime volunteers Julia and C.E. Spear. She learned from folks such as Bill Hatley, Hotshot Williams and Jack Vale.
Larry Neal now has her job and is called chief of museum services and education.
“She’s taught me a lot about being a manager,” Neal says. “She puts a lot of trust in me and my abilities.”
Kelly Alexander, who works with the foundation, gets a lot of credit from Smith for making things work.
Alexander says Smith is “a very kind person. She doesn’t like confrontation and she tries to work things out. That’s the thing I think most about her. She wants to find a compromise.”
It was the museum’s potential that attracted Smith to the job, and her lifelong love of history. “My mother insisted we all learn history.”
Smith’s father worked for Piedmont Aviation, and his uniform is on exhibit.
Her dream is to see the museum continue to grow, “keeping railroading at the forefront” but also with autos, trucks and aviation. Her favorite exhibit is the old flight simulator.
She sees more support locally in the last couple of years, partly due, she says, to Mark Brown, information and communications specialist. “He’s out in the community and getting the word out.”
Plus this year’s “staycation” trend brought more local visitors to the site.
“People in Rowan are so open. I think more people in Rowan are aware of us and where we are.”
She wants to help get museum visitors across the street to restaurants and shops in Spencer. The train ride now covers more of the town, and volunteers are telling more Spencer stories.
The most unusual part of her job is answering odd questions. She gets a lot of people asking for old employee records of people who worked at the shops. But Southern Railway took most of that when the company left town.
Perhaps the oddest question came from someone who asked if he could land a plane on the site.
Although she lived in Spencer for years, she and her husband, Donnie, whom she met in Spencer, moved to China Grove recently, where they’re fixing up his grandmother’s house.
“I still go to church here, at Calvary Lutheran.” She plays handbells and is in the choir.
She’s the chairman of the advisory board for the Salvation Army, a group she appreciates for all its work with hurricane victims.
She enjoys learning the history of Rowan from her friend Kaye Brown Hirst, and they have both been on the N.C. Museums Council.
She loves to read, especially mysteries and historical novels, as well as biographies. “I am fascinated by people and how they become who they are.”
Her favorite book is “whatever I’m reading at the moment,” but she enjoys Anne Rivers Siddons and James Clavell.
And this year, she’ll be chief judge for the election at one of the precincts in China Grove.
She loves to travel. She and her husband took a rail cruise once, Salisbury to Chicago, Chicago to New Orleans and New Orleans back to Salisbury.
She’ll be a grandmother soon, “a new dimension for me,” when her stepson and his wife have their baby.
Judging by the piles of paper in her office, she’s not going to run out of things to do any time in the near future, which is all about preserving the past.