The benefactor was Warp Techologies, a textile yarn producer and Holly Springs’ first manufacturing company. Explains Co-Founder Marek Alapin: “(Former) Holly Springs Mayor Gerald Holleman calls me up one day. He says, ‘Marek, I’ve got a problem. I don’t have the money to pay the employees. I was just thinking: Would you mind paying your taxes in advance?’”

“And I said, ‘Gerald, for you, I’ll pay my taxes in advance.’”

That exchange was the first of many transactions between the municipality and the manufacturer.

Not long after the payroll bailout, the manufacturer received another call from the mayor.

“‘You know,’ he told me, ‘I got this maintenance man and an old dilapidated truck. He’s got the truck … he’s got the know-how, but I don’t have the money to buy him any tools. Can you lend him some?’”

“‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not going to lend him tools, I’m going to give you my Sears credit card and you go there and buy what you need — they’re yours. I don’t want to worry about who owns what.’”

While offers like that can’t match today’s billion-dollar federal bailouts, they reflect a time in Holly Springs’ history when the town’s financial system amounted to little more than a cigar box and a ledger.

And when cooperation generally trumped competition.

In fact, Alapin’s generosity came in response to the support he received from the mayor to build Warp Technologies, now located in the center of Holly Springs Industrial Park off the N.C. 55 bypass.

“He asked me what I needed to build a plant in his town,” Alapin recalls. “I told him land, water, sewer and a building. At the moment, I have none of these.

“The mayor found a developer who gave us 12 acres free and clear,” he continued, “and then promised to provide water and sewer ‘even if I have to haul it in and out by truck.’”

Next came a big financial investment from a New Jersey textile conglomerate, and Alapin and co-founder Morris Miner were in business.

“We broke ground the day after the 1988 November elections,” Alapin recalls, “and we shipped our first yarn to a customer the end of February. Then we went head-to-head with the big boys and beat them at their own game. We became the industry standard.”

Holleman recalls those days of small-town cooperation with Alapin and Warp Technologies.

“It’s all true,” Holleman recalls. “Marek Alapin and Morris Miner saved our town. Without them, we wouldn’t have survived.”

Still, Warp Technologies faced problems most new businesses encounter.

“One day, Alapin recalls, “I came into the plant and people jumped all over me. We had no water. I called the town clerk, found out they hadn’t received our tax payment. You never saw a guy as mad as me.

“I picked up the phone, called the mayor, and cussed him out. I told him the check was probably in the mail and lost in that lousy post office of his. I told Gerald, ‘you guys are getting too big for your britches.’”

The lights came on, the tax check cleared and life returned to normal for the manufacturer and his company.

“Normal” was rapid growth in sales that meant a series of plant expansions and a work force growing to more than 200 before the textile industry fell on hard times.

“One of the biggest reasons the textile industry is in terrible shape is that Orientals think in long terms while Americans think only in terms of the current quarter. You just can’t be that short-sighted,” Alapin said.

Now 79, Alapin still has an eye on the future. As president of a consulting firm in his name, he’s helped a wide range of companies — including software developers — cope with the pressures of a declining economy.

“The best advice I can give is to be honest to a fault and to be totally, totally open and focus on the future,” he said. As for Alapin’s future?

“I love N.C. State and N.C. sports,” he said. “I was supposed to graduate from State in 1951, but I graduated in 1950. I was a year ahead of myself.”

He still is.