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.
PEAK Academy students prepare to enter the school for the day. Jerry Sternberg, who beieved passionately in the power of education, was one of the school’s earliest benefactors. // Watchdog photo by Starr Sariego
“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 Timesstory 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 Anderson, the first director of the Downtown Development Office in Asheville in the mid-1980s, played a major role in turning downtown Asheville around from largely a ghost town to a blossoming tourist attraction. // Watchdog photo by Starr Sariego
“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/.
SUMMARY: Republican Judge Jefferson Griffin is contesting over 60,000 votes in his race against Democratic Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs, claiming registration and ID deficiencies. A 2-1 NC Court of Appeals ruling, with Republican judges siding with Griffin, allows voters 15 business days to correct issues. Riggs, leading by 734 votes after two recounts, vowed to appeal, warning the ruling threatens over 65,000 lawful votes. Griffin also challenges military and overseas ballots. The GOP praised the decision; Democrats condemned it as partisan. The state Supreme Court, with a 5-2 Republican majority, will likely hear the appeal. Riggs has recused herself.
www.thecentersquare.com – By Alan Wooten | The Center Square – (The Center Square – ) 2025-04-04 13:39:00
(The Center Square) – Two of three judges on a North Carolina appellate decision say Republican Jefferson Griffin’s appeal has merit and ordered the State Board of Elections to recalculate the nation’s only unresolved election from Nov. 5.
On the 151st day since Election Day, the North Carolina Supreme Court Seat 6 race – an eight-year term seat – has yet to be decided. Friday’s announced decision, from oral arguments two weeks ago, gives 15 business days after notice for missing data in registration records of voters to be filled in, and overseas voters not providing photo identification as required by law to do so.
The voters who never lived in North Carolina are to be dropped from the totals.
Those instructions – Justices John Tyson and Fred Gore supported the ruling, Tobias Hampson dissented – could be appealed. And, it doesn’t give a clear indication if Griffin or Judge Allison Riggs will be the winner.
Riggs, the Democrat and incumbent on the bench after appointment by then-Gov. Roy Cooper, has been poised for a 734-vote triumph as the litigation saga plays out in multiple lawsuits and in both state and federal courtrooms. Griffin, a state appellate judge, has appealed every decision against him.
On Election Night, with 2,658 precincts reporting, Griffin led Riggs by 9,851 votes of 5,540,090 cast. Provisional and absentee ballots that qualified were added to the totals since, swinging the race by 10,585 votes.
The majority opinion read in part, regarding equal terms and fundamental rights in free elections, “This right is violated when ‘votes are not accurately counted (because) (unlawful) () ballots are included in the election results’ The inclusion of even one unlawful ballot in a vote total dilutes the lawful votes and ‘effectively ‘disenfranchises’’ lawful voters.”
The majority opinion is covered in the first 36 pages of the ruling; Hampson’s dissent is in the final 30 pages.
Anderson Clayton, chairwoman of the North Carolina Democratic Party, has called the win “decisive.” Jason Simmons, chairman of the North Carolina GOP, said earlier votes in question are “blatant violations of state law.”
In response to Friday’s announcement, Clayton said the court put party affiliation above the rights of North Carolina voters.” Simmons said, “Today’s decision confirms the facts were on Judge Griffin’s side. This a victory for the rule of law and election integrity.”
The state elections board, majority 3-2 Democrats, and Riggs have been aligned in the litigations.
The Supreme Court bench has historically been nonpartisan and partisan, and since going back to the latter, was 6-1 Democrats in 2019. It is 5-2 Republicans today.
The state Supreme Court calendar has already begun, with Riggs still in place until the election is decided. She has been recused from any proceedings involving the election. Similarly, Griffin has not been involved in any at the appellate level.
Griffin protested about 65,000 ballots on multiple counts, and the state board rejected all of them. Most were by 3-2 party-line votes.
The protests the state board denied included registration records of voters, such as lack of providing either a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number. State law for that has been in place two decades, dating to 2004.
Other ballots protested and denied by the state board included voters overseas who have never lived in the United States, and for lack of photo identification provided with military and overseas voters.
by Sarah Michels, Carolina Public Press April 4, 2025
RALEIGH — Juliet Rosa, a survivor of domestic violence and UNC-Chapel Hill student, is “a little bit overwhelmed” by this session’s plethora of gun bills, which include so-called constitutional carry legislation, sentence enhancements for crimes involving firearms and a measure proposing North Carolina as a Second Amendment sanctuary state.
If North Carolina lawmakers pass these bills, Rosa may just pack her bags and leave.
Gun bills aren’t novel in North Carolina, but there weren’t too many major changes until 2023. That’s when lawmakers narrowly repealed a century-old pistol purchase permit requirement over Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto, said state Rep. Pricey Harrison, D-Guilford.
This year, several Republican lawmakers want to continue the trend and allow North Carolinians to carry hidden handguns without a permit, too. While they’re at it, they plan to lower the minimum age to carry from 21 to 18.
If signed into law, North Carolinians would no longer have to take an eight-hour gun safety course, provide a local sheriff a set of fingerprints or demonstrate an ability to shoot a gun before being allowed to carry a concealed weapon.
Stronger gun rights bills have progressed this session despite public and private opposition. Relative quiet from law enforcement groups, lobbying pressure and national politics may be to blame.
The fate of these bills, following a likely veto from Gov. Josh Stein, is uncertain.
But over a dozen Democrat amendments and bills seeking to add safety measures to these bills have failed, hinting at a possible rerun of the pistol permit playbook, which involved strategic absences to give Republicans enough votes to override vetoes on their own.
From pistol permit to constitutional carry
On March 29, 2023, Harrison said Democratic state Reps. Cecil Brockman and Michael Wray “made themselves absent” for a key vote — the veto override of Senate Bill 41, which repealed the requirement to get a pistol-purchase permit from a sheriff before buying or transferring a firearm.
Without their votes, the state House was able to override Cooper’s veto with only Republican support.
“It was very frustrating for us to watch that happen,” Harrison said.
The National Rifle Association and a group called Grassroots North Carolina had been lobbying for the bill’s passage for years. Before 2023, they always hit a roadblock, Harrison said. North Carolina’s sheriff and law enforcement agencies would reliably push back, and lawmakers would heed their warnings.
But in recent years, that obstacle disappeared. The sheriff’s association became more partisan along urban-rural lines and law enforcement got quieter, Harrison recounted.
She’s worried history might repeat itself with this session’s gun legislation.
Under the gun
Between 2022 and 2023, only four states experienced an increase in gun sales: Illinois, New Hampshire and Florida had minimal increases of 1 to 5%.
North Carolina, however, had a 112% increase — by far the biggest surge, according to one analysis. That increase can be traced back to the pistol purchase permit law.
Everytown for Gun Safety policy expert Sam Levy sees that as a sign of what’s to come.
Everytown for Gun Safety is a nonprofit representing gun violence survivors. Last election cycle, they made over $7 million in political contributions and almost cracked the top 100 of contributors nationwide, according to Open Secrets. That included a $500,000 donation to the North Carolina Democratic Leadership fund.
“There’s no question in my mind that repealing the concealed-carry permit will have a similar sort of result, which is a huge spike in the number of guns being carried in public in North Carolina,” he said.
Chet Effler, the president of theNorth Carolina Fraternal Order of Police, told Carolina Public Press in a statement that the organization hadn’t reviewed or researched the session’s gun bills. Instead, Effler said the focus was on “law enforcement specific bills” for now.
Wake County Sheriff Willie Rowe said in a statement that his office is actively monitoring this legislation and “will continue to work with lawmakers to advocate for policies that prioritize the well-being of our community and law enforcement officers.”
Orange County Sheriff Charles Blackwood said he has a rule: Don’t talk about bills until they become law. He doesn’t want to endorse something that may change into something entirely different.
But public safety officers’ relative silence hasn’t stopped lawmakers from speaking on their behalf.
Mecklenburg Democratic state Sen. Mujtaba Mohammed, for one, is convinced that removing concealed-carry permit requirements will make it harder for police to do their jobs, since those carrying weapons may or may not have much training or experience with guns.
“You’re going to kill police officers with this bill,” Mohammed said during a March committee meeting.
Republican state Sen. Danny Earl Britt Jr., the bill’s sponsor, replied that no law enforcement agency had come forward with that concern.
“I firmly believe that good people with guns stop bad people with guns,” Britt said.
Current law states that to obtain a mandatory concealed-carry permit, a person must complete an application under oath at a sheriff’s office, provide two full sets of fingerprints, complete an approved handgun safety course, allow a local sheriff access to records about an applicant’s mental health or capacity and pay an $80 fee. North Carolinians have to be 21 or older to get a permit.
The training requirement to obtain a permit involves a Saturday morning and afternoon and firing the weapon roughly20 to 30 times, Britt said.
“We’re not talking about a robust training program that people go through,” he said. “The training aspect is minimal, at most, and the idea that you have to go through that process we believe goes against everything in the Second Amendment.”
Both the Senate and House versions of the constitutional carry bill are in the House, waiting for the Rules Committee to take further action.
Is the Second Amendment limited?
In 2008, the Supreme Court decided in the D.C. v. Heller case that the Second Amendment protects individuals’ rights to keep and bear arms for self-defense and other lawful uses, Campbell University constitutional law professor Gregory Wallace said.
But it didn’t grant an absolute right.
Nobody could carry any type of firearm, anywhere at any time. Certain people, like convicted felons, couldn’t have a firearm. Certain places, like courthouses and schools, were off-limits. So were military-style weapons too dangerous for civilians. And the court made space for reasonable restrictions on buying and selling firearms.
In 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a New York law that would have made gun owners provide a special reason to carry a concealed firearm in public. The majority opinion stated that for a gun restriction to be permissible, there has to be a historical parallel. The government has to prove that the law is consistent with the nation’s history and tradition of firearms regulations, Wallace said.
“It’s not just black and white,” he said. “It’s a bit complicated.”
Levy said Everytown for Gun Safety’s work is about striking a balance between respecting the right to carry guns and public safety. That balance is often found in responsibility, and understanding the risks and rules surrounding gun ownership, he added.
Democrats have filed dozens of gun-related bills and amendments this session attempting to strike that balance.
They include bills that would make it a crime to leave a firearm in an unlocked, unattended vehicle, require gun owners to report loss or theft of their firearm to local law enforcement within 24 hours and establish “protective orders” to temporarily remove guns from people if they are a danger to themselves or others.
But in the North Carolina legislature, giving a little may be seen as a slippery slope.
None of these Democrat-led efforts have gotten much traction.
“I think there are folks in the Republican caucus who think maybe this isn’t a great idea to have 18-year-olds running around with no training carrying concealed weapons,” Harrison said. “I myself have heard from gun shop owners who are opposed to the bill, even though it makes more business for them, because they think it’s dangerous.”
Brian Sisson, owner of The Range in Ballantyne, is one of those owners. Sisson has noticed delays in getting concealed-carry permits, but he doesn’t think the solution is removing the requirement. Instead, he suggested getting permits “out of the sheriff’s hands” and allowing instructors to run background checks after applicants pass the training course.
“I have concerns that you’re potentially going to have individuals out there who are carrying firearms who don’t know what the law is,” Sisson said.
‘Idiotic and dangerous’
In August 2023, UNC-Chapel Hill went on lockdown for hours. The university’s alert system notified students of an active shooter, who it was later revealed had killed a professor.
The experience pushed Rosa to get involved with Students Demand Action. But Rosa and her peers mostly saw an increase in police presence on campus, which didn’t make them feel more at ease.
“We didn’t really see much meaningful change occur after that to make the campus safer,” Rosa said.
Students Demand Action asked UNC-Chapel Hill to create a translation option for the university alert system after discovering some Spanish-speaking employees worked through lockdown, not realizing they were in danger. The school has been slow to act, Rosa said.
Now, Rosa is seeing the same kind of behavior from the North Carolina legislature, which won’t give Democratic amendments — which include safe firearm storage requirements, extreme risk protection orders and gun-free zones at voting sites, domestic violence and homeless shelters and health care facilities — much attention.
“I know that the issue of gun violence, just from a policy standpoint, can be pretty complex and contentious, but the idea that these permitless carry bills like (Senate Bill 50 and House Bill 5) are the solutions is pretty idiotic and dangerous,” Rosa said.
Survey says
Public opinion on removing concealed-carry permit requirements is fairly low, according to a March survey of about 600 likely voters.
A Cygnal survey found that 56% of respondents did not want North Carolina to allow permitless carry. An additional 17% would allow it, but with some restrictions.
Former Republican majority leader Paul Stam said groups like Grassroots North Carolina tried to put pressure on him to pass gun rights legislation, once calling him and two of his peers “the three weasels” and vowing to “exact retribution” on them for a vote the group didn’t like. It was an empty threat at the time, and the real power was the National Rifle Association, Stam said.
But in 2021, the NRA filed for bankruptcy and hasn’t contributed to North Carolina legislative races since 2022, according to campaign finance records.
“I’m sure the constitutional carry thing is coming from lobbyists, but I don’t really know who they are,” Stam said.
State Rep. Tracy Clark, D-Guilford,has noticed some mail from smaller gun rights groups that say they are tracking her voting record, but nothing too serious.
“I do think that this is a very small minority of Second Amendment rights legislators,” she said.
She thinks the NRA still has somewhat of a hold on some lawmakers. Clark’s a Second Amendment supporter; her husband is a gun owner. She isn’t trying to take anyone’s guns; she wants to prevent future gun violence. But while she’s tried to meet Republicans from that angle, she’s had little success.
But that inability to hold a productive conversation across the aisle could change as the NRA diminishes, Clark said.
“It’s breaking through that barrier to make them realize that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing,” she said.
Other gun bills
The North Carolina Firearms Coalition sent an email to supporters last week about a recent bill: The Second Amendment Protection Act.
The measure would bar state and local law enforcement from enforcing federal restrictions on gun rights.
“We don’t know who’ll sit in the White House after Trump,” the email read. “We don’t know when the next anti-gun tyrant will seize power. That’s why we must strike NOW and pass the Second Amendment Protection Act in North Carolina — before it’s too late!”
If enacted, North Carolina would be a Second Amendment sanctuary state, similar to cities that don’t enforce federal immigration law.
The bill enhances sentences for possessing, brandishing or discharging a firearm while attempting or committing a felony. Several other bills under consideration this session also increase punishments for crimes involving guns.
“It had nothing to do with prevention,” Clark said. “So the title was a misnomer, and it was actually the same title of a bill Pricey (Harrison) and others have been filing for prior years of actual preventative measures.”
During a committee hearing, Balkcom said her bill would target repeat offenders and create “stronger accountability.”
Research shows sentence enhancements don’t work to deter gun violence, said Levy, the Everytown for Gun Safety policy expert. But talking about the need to be “tougher on criminals” and “lock them up” are common refrains from people who “don’t want to have real conversations” about the issue, he said.
“It’s a distraction,” Levy said. “It’s not a real solution.”
