By David Rogers BLOWING ROCK, N.C. — You just never know who you are going to run into along Main Street in Blowing Rock…
Growing up in Gastonia, Richard Bryant didn’t get to the High Country.
“Well, my father might have brought us up to Tweetsie once,” he admitted recently, when we ran into him at Bald Guy Coffee, across the courtyard from The Martin House.
Bryant was pushed eastwardly as a young man, graduating from North Carolina State University and not long afterward, in 1984, he founded Capital Investment Companies with his friend, Bobby Edgerton.
“I remember making the decision to get into the stock market business with the Dow Jones Industrial Average at about 770. Everybody thought I was crazy. That was about as high as the Dow Industrials had ever been and it didn’t seem to be a particularly vibrant market environment. Looking back, with the Dow now at about 35,000, it was probably the perfect time to be a financial services entrepreneur and launching a business.”
Today, almost 40 years later, Bryant still serves as CEO and Chairman of Capital Investment Companies, based in Raleigh, with more than $7 billion under management and affiliate operations in asset management as a registered investment advisory firm; a broker dealer widely regarded as one of the largest independent firms between Atlanta and Washington, D.C.; an insurance arm; mortgages; and community bank and trust advisory services, among other services.
And yet, all these years building his business in Raleigh, he had rarely ventured north of Gastonia in the western part of North Carolina.
Until this year.
“My wife and I have had a place along the coast, in Atlantic Beach, for several years now and that is where we spend most of our down time,” said Bryant. “Well, I have an assistant with connections to the Blowing Rock Charity Horse Show and she suggested we spend some time in Blowing Rock this year.”
“So, we did.” Bryant added. “We rented the Penthouse on Main Street back in August and just fell in love with Blowing Rock, how easy it is to walk everywhere and the variety of restaurants in the area.”
But that was not the end of Bryant’s introductory love affair.
“Every year, we bring all of our brokers and associates together in one place for an annual conference,” Bryant recalled. “We’ve done North Myrtle Beach a few times and this year we were supposed to go to Pinehurst. For a variety of reasons, that didn’t work out so instead we booked the Grove Park Inn in Asheville for over 200 of us.
“At the same time,” Bryant added, “my wife and I decided to rent a house in Blowing Rock for a month around our conference. It has just been such a magical time. I never gave much thought to the changing seasons and the leaves, but it has been a beautiful time to be up here.”
But being a self-professed “foodie” and walkaholic, it turns out, are not the only draws for Bryant to Blowing Rock. Being in business all around the state for 40 years, he has gotten to meet a lot of people and make a lot of friends in all parts of North Carolina. Walking around town this past month, he ran into a bunch of them. It turns out, Blowing Rock is a “mecca” of sorts for Richard Bryant’s universe.
“Everywhere I turn, there is someone I know, a friend of a friend, or some other kind of connection. We were walking around Broyhill Lake and who did we run into but my nephew and his kids! Neither of us had any idea the other was here,” said Bryant.
Undoubtedly, Bryant and his family will be coming back more frequently now that they have experienced Blowing Rock up close and personal.
“I think I prefer the cold of the mountains to the heat of the beach,” Bryant smiled. “I may be at the younger end of the age spectrum in Blowing Rock — but I like it here.”
