1980-1989

With the selection of Melvin Lenard Cohen as Morganton’s Man of the Year for 1983, the community pays tribute to a young man who has rallied individuals and groups—and the city itself—to work together for both immediate and long-term betterment. His selection returns the Morganton Rotary Club’s designation to its original purpose, of honoring a man for outstanding civic and public service work during the previous year.

Actually, Cohen’s leadership, hard work and promotional enterprise on behalf of downtown Morganton spans the past two-and–a-half years. Still, his enthusiasm, imagination and initiative have been instrumental in recent sweeping changes in Morganton: in fact, the revitalization movement of the inner city and Cohen have become almost synonymous.

A Morganton native and a “super salesman,” Cohen is the City of Morganton’s Main Street coordinator, chairman of the Downtown Revitalization Committee and president of the Morganton-Burke County Merchants Association.

Under his leadership, the city’s rejuvenation efforts have taken flight and brought a new sense of purpose and togetherness to Morganton’s downtown. It was Cohen, for instance, who conceived and spearheaded the first Historic Morganton Festival, a day-long arts, crafts and ethnic foods fair in 1982 and who guided the festival to double its size again last September.

In addition, he has been instrumental in:

Downtown businesses cooperating to put in overhead utility lines underground;

Instituting a Loan Pool whereby inner city businesses could borrow money for renovation at a reduced rate of interest;

Encouraging and coordinating numerous Main Street businesses to renovate their facades to provide a livelier looking downtown shopping district;

Purchasing new Christmas lights last year and initiating the Memorial Christmas Tree on the Courthouse Square this season;

Implementing a training workshop and morale builder for workers in downtown stores;

Initiating last summer’s “Street Scenes” which blocked off traffic and promoted leisurely shopping and live entertainment downtown;

Providing additional free parking in the Caldwell and Belk parking lots downtown;

Developing Main Street Park, its new Park Place eatery and encouraging the Morganton Service league to have a wall mural painted beside the park;

Helping to eliminate downtown merchant’s closings on Wednesday afternoons;

And, staging a more attractive and entertaining annual Morganton Christmas parade.

His salesmanship and hard work, however, are not new. He has been a promoter of sorts all his life and as early as 1960 was elected “Most School Spirited” at the old Morganton High School.

The youngest son of Mrs. Dorothy and the late Si E. Cohen, he was born 41 years ago here in Morganton.

He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and finished his studies in three and a half years, with an A.B. degree in political science.

He worked for Morganton Dyeing and Finishing Co., and after his basic training in the Army reserves he joined Paul Lavitt Mills in Hickory. Later he worked for Fashion and Trend Line Furniture Co., also in Hickory.

He was a co-founder and owner of the now-defunct Woodlyn Hill Furniture Co., here in Morganton, for a time and in 1968 Cohen went to work as a salesman for Van Raalte, a prestigious lingerie firm. Two years later, he became a salesman for Movie Star Lingerie, a volume lingerie house, for whom he still works.

In 1981, Cohen was asked to head up a project of negotiating with property owners in the Morganton Hardware block of West Union Street to transfer overhead utility lines underground. The success of that task led an expansion of the project in other downtown blocks. The following year, he was appointed to the Revitalization Committee and quickly was elected its chairman.

About the same time he was asked to fill a vacancy on the board of the Morganton Merchants. Again, he was elected president, and under his leadership, the first Historic Morganton Festival, among other innovative projects, was begun.

Last April, nine months after Morganton was named a Main Street city in the state’s historic preservation/revitalization program, Cohen assumed his duties as coordinator of the Main Street project.

But downtown revitalization is not Cohen’s only interest. He serves as president of the Morganton Rotary Club this year. In that role, he is working with the Morganton Lions Club to organize a Crimestoppers program for Burke County.

In 1979, Cohen served as president of the Burke County Shrine Club. That year, the club broke all records by raising some $20,000 locally for burned and crippled children.

He also served as projects chairman for all the club’s and units of the Oasis Temple Shrine, headquartered in Charlotte, which serves the area from Greensboro to the Tennessee line. During his tenure, which ended this year, Shrine projects raised nearly $900,000.

And, he was recently selected by six Shrine clubs as their designated nominee to the temple’s board of trustees. He also is expected to be named to head up a new Shrine Circus for the temple, another first for this area.

Cohen is married to the former Brenda Hester of Drexel and they have three children, Stacey , Amy ,and Mitchell.

In a relatively short time Mel Cohen has exhibited such a high degree of civic purposefulness and generated such a dynamic rekindling of city pride, it is both appropriate and appealing for him to be honored.