According to this article about a book that is about a prolific robbery gang from Philadelphia during the 50s, 60s and 70s, North Carolina and the Piedmont in particular were favorite targets.
They traveled to rob, usually to someplace warm, where tire tracks
and footprints wouldn’t be left in snow and mud. North Carolina was a
favorite target; Kripplebauer saw the state as one big ATM machine.For years, he and his associates picked off homes in Winston-Salem,
Greensboro and Raleigh, so proficient at thievery that the locals gave
them a nickname: the Hallmark Gang, because they stole only the best
stuff – jewels and silver bearing high-quality hallmarks.
The book is Confessions of a Second Story Man: Junior Kripplebauer and the K&A Gang and it sounds like it might be a good read.
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Befuddled 
I’ve been thinking about Winston-Salem’s distant, distant past for the last few weeks. One of my friends mentioned Winston-Salem was bigger than Atlanta in the 1930s, 1940s — W-S used to be the big city in the Southeast. I don’t have any information to back that up, but I’m really curious about it.
My folks grew up here and my mom was telling me that when she was in college (early 60s) W-S was the same size if not bigger than Charlotte. In fact the smart bet back then would have been that W-S would grow to be the economic powerhouse, not Charlotte. Goes to show what happens when a town’s economic infrastructure is hit like W-S’s has been over the last 20 years.
Still I like the direction the city is heading; I think we have good leadership here, especially compared to what I saw in DC.
That’s fascinating. I always thought of W-S as a town fighting for its existence, which to me is more interesting than the other cities out there that have “made it.” I’d love to see a graph of city populations in the southeast over the past decade… maybe the library has that …