Sometimes, 94 years really isn’t enough living.

That’s how long Asheville businessman, local columnist and cowboy-hat wearing amateur historian Jerry Sternberg lived before dying on Christmas Day. 

When I talked to Gene Bell about Sternberg late last week, the former director of the Housing Authority of the City of Asheville minced no words about his good friend.

“Ninety-four is still too early,” Bell said. “My wife and I have talked about this whole thing, and 94 was too early for Jerry Sternberg.”

I agree.

Sternberg, who was Jewish, became the best of friends with Bell, who is African American, mainly because the two men see character and not color when they assess other people. And they both fervently believe in the power of education — Bell is the board chair and was one of the founders of the PEAK Academy in West Asheville, which is designed to address the racial achievement gap in Asheville City Schools. Sternberg was an early — and generous — benefactor.

“He was our first large donor, a significant donor to PEAK, and he visited the school several times,” said Bell, who also served on the Asheville City Schools board. “And every time I talked to him, which was frequently, he always asked me how school was going.”

Sternberg was one of three Asheville titans who died in the last couple weeks of December. Sadly, he was joined by funeral home owner and business pioneer Julia Ray, 110 (yes, you read that right), who died Dec. 17; and Leslie Anderson, 74, who played a key role in the revitalization of downtown Asheville. She died Dec. 27.

They all made vital contributions to our community.

I’ve talked with Sternberg and corresponded via email with him for more than two decades. He was always complimentary of my work, although he’d frequently push me to ask more questions, get to the bottom of a story better or include a little more of the city’s history in my work – all great suggestions.

Sternberg was a walking, breathing history book when it came to Asheville, and he wrote columns over the years for the Asheville Citizen Times and Mountain Xpress, where his column was called, “The Gospel According to Jerry.” It was always insightful and entertaining, particularly his most recent series about growing up and living in Asheville as a Jewish person, and I often told Jerry how much I enjoyed his writing.

Always willing to say exactly what was on his mind, Sternberg could be a little imposing.

When Bell and Sternberg first met well over a decade ago, Bell was running the city’s Housing Authority. Sternberg, who was with Asheville attorney Gene Ellison at a local restaurant, was wearing his trademark cowboy hat and western shirt, and upon introduction he immediately started harping on the importance of education.

“Gene told him who I was and that I was running the housing authority, and he said, ‘You got to make sure that poor people get insurance and that they get education — they’ve got to have education,’” Bell recalled. “He said that, and that’s how he and I became the best of friends over the years.”

Of course, there’s more to that first impression.

“When Gene introduced us, (Sternberg) had that big cowboy hat on, and I knew he was Jewish because I’d heard of him,” Bell said. “He just started in on me. Like, ‘Now, what are y’all going to do about getting these kids a good education? Because they deserve a good education.’ And he just went on and on.

“I thought, ‘What the hell is this about?’” Bell said. “I mean, I had heard people that were affluent and had the same passion. That wasn’t it. It was just out of the clear blue sky. And we became buddies from that point on.”

Sternberg became a wealthy man, mostly from commercial real estate, but he was never showy (other than the western wear), probably because he came from very humble roots.

During the Great Depression, Sternberg’s father ran a leather processing and scrap metal business called Consolidated Hide and Metal Company. Located on the river in the early part of the last century, when the riverfront was in no way glamorous, the business was even less so — and particularly aromatic. 

As a kid, Sternberg spent his afternoons salting cowhides so they wouldn’t rot or removing fur pelts from frameworks at his father’s business, as a colleague and I reported in the Citizen Times in 2015. He made 10 cents an hour, which for the 1930s wasn’t bad for a kid doing child labor.

His father also had a rendering plant where lamb fat and other animal parts were boiled down into valuable grease and bone meal. 

“Now we’re talking about something that smelled bad,” Sternberg told me for that Citizen Times story, laughing heartily and noting his father had built the new plant on Riverside Drive, where a children’s gymnastics center took up residence in more recent years. “Daddy sold it out maybe 15 years later and they closed the plant, but the building laid there for 10 years, empty. And every summer you could still smell it.”

Sternberg and his wife, Marlene, have given generously to multiple entities, including PEAK Academy, Pisgah Legal Services, and the Compass Point Village development on Tunnel Road that provides housing to previously homeless people. And probably a bunch more that we don’t know about.

While he staunchly believed in property owners’ rights and the importance of businesses — and at one point kind of went to war with French Broad River advocate Karen Cragnolin — Sternberg was always willing to consider the other person’s viewpoint. He actually ended up siding with Cragnolin when the city wanted to revamp riverside development rules, and they became good friends.

While Sternberg had a pretty epic run, he couldn’t compete with Ray’s longevity.

‘You ask the Lord to bless you each day’

As I noted in a Citizen Times story about Ray in October 2021, Woodrow Wilson was president at the time of her birth in 1914. Born in Marion, Ray moved to Asheville and married Jesse Ray Sr. She worked in the funeral business until 2019. 

In 2021, the City of Asheville proclaimed Oct. 28, her birthday, “Julia G. Ray Day,” and deservedly so. The proclamation offered a solid summary of her life, noting Ray was “one of the pioneers of black business owners in Asheville with establishments on Eagle Street dating back to 1936, including a cleaners and a funeral home that she opened with her husband, Jesse Ray, Sr.”

Ray also was the first African American to serve on the Asheville YWCA Board of Directors, the first African American to serve on the UNC Asheville Board of Trustees, and the first African American woman to serve on the Board of Mission Hospital, the proclamation continued.

When I met her, she was sharply dressed and sharp of mind.

“You ask the Lord to bless you each day,” Ray said. “I can’t help but say it’s just amazing when I wake up and feel just as good today as I did yesterday.”

Her son, Charles “Buster” Ray, the youngest of the four Ray children, told me last week that Julia Ray was “a mother first” and “worked tirelessly with my father in the business.” But she still had time to involve herself in the community. 

“So many things she did without anyone knowing,” said Buster Ray, 69, who lives in Apex, North Carolina. “That’s the way she wanted it.”

Ray said after he left Asheville to attend North Carolina State University on a football scholarship, his mother embraced his goals — and his teammates. After games, they would ask, “Where’s Mama?” Mrs. Ray often made and brought a cake for the teammates, or more accurately, two cakes, because the football players could put away some dessert.

“The extension of motherhood to my teammates was really something special to her,” Ray said. “At her funeral, there were five or six teammates from my college years.”

Mrs. Ray treated many other people the same way throughout her life.

“She just embraced everyone around and shared thoughts and love to everyone,” Ray said.

Bringing downtown back from the precipice

Leslie Anderson was another local institution who seemed to know everyone — and listen to them, whether they were offering kind words about downtown or giving her an earful. As the first director of the Downtown Development Office in Asheville in the mid-1980s, Anderson heard a lot of both, according to her sister, Stacy Anderson.

For you newcomers out there, downtown Asheville in the mid-1980s was largely a ghost town, with boarded-up buildings, streetwalkers making the rounds around the bricked-up Grove Arcade building and a porno theater doing business where the Fine Arts Theatre is now.

“Leslie was the face of downtown development, which meant she got a lot of the pushback, too,” Stacy Anderson recalled, noting that when she would come to visit her sister at Christmas in the ‘80s and ‘90s, they would always shop downtown. “It didn’t matter what she was doing, where she was going, but somebody would stop her and want to talk to her about some issue. It could be on a Saturday afternoon, the Saturday before Christmas, and she would stop and listen to what they had to say — and usually it wasn’t good.”

Anderson said her sister loved Asheville and never stopped believing it could be revitalized, or working to make it happen. So she listened to everybody, including those who interrupted the Christmas shopping.

“She would let them talk and talk and talk and talk,” Anderson said. “And what they didn’t know is that as soon as they left, she pulled out a piece of paper in her purse and would write down what she needed to do on Monday, so she wouldn’t forget to get back to them.”

Anderson said plainly, “I don’t know how many folks there are that have that kind of dedication.

“She really appreciated all of the people downtown, both the landowners and the merchants and the shoppers and the renters — all of them,” Anderson said.

Leslie Anderson grew up in Mandarin, Florida, a community of Jacksonville, and first became enamored with our mountains on a Girl Scouts trip in 1965. She attended Western Carolina University, where she earned two degrees, and never left Asheville.

Anderson worked for the Girl Scouts from 1972 to 1974 and Asheville Parks & Recreation in 1974, rising to superintendent of recreation by 1986, when she took over the Downtown Development office. In that job, Anderson mobilized volunteers and downtown stakeholders and helped establish a public/private partnership for downtown revitalization that became a model for other cities. 

Anderson also taught as an adjunct at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Government, and in 1995 she started her own business, Leslie Anderson Consulting Inc. Stacy Anderson, a vice president with the business, said she and Leslie had decided last year, before Leslie became ill with necrotizing pancreatitis, to close the business as of Dec. 31.

The illness essentially shut Anderson’s body down, and she died from lung failure on Dec. 27.

Stacy Anderson, 68, said her sister always insisted that Asheville’s downtown revitalization took  thousands of people working together, as well as both Asheville and Buncombe County governments working together. But Anderson also maintains that her sister laid a lot of the groundwork that created the environment for downtown to blossom once again.

I told Stacy that it’s safe to say that downtown Asheville would not look anything like it does today without her sister’s work.

“That’s what hundreds of people have been telling me over the past week,” Anderson said with a hearty laugh.

All three of these Asheville residents operated the same way — mostly behind the scenes, and not looking for the glory. They all had a passion for Asheville and Buncombe County, and they wanted to make it a better place to live and work.

They succeeded, beautifully and with panache. Rest in peace, all three of you.

Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. Got a question? Send it to John Boyle at jboyle@avlwatchdog.org or 828-337-0941. His Answer Man columns appear each Tuesday and Friday. The Watchdog’s reporting is made possible by donations from the community. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication/.

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