It wasn't deep in the shitter then, but it was on an inevitable trajectory. The family moved us out when i was still in the 2nd grade, so I didn't get any of this until later.
Dad was then a professor at Wesleyan College, which was (And still is?) a big employer at the time. All of our neighborhood was primarily Professors with a mixture of the Hardee's execs of the day. I think Hardee's moving out around that time (I think it was at that time), and with the admins at Wesleyan driving out most of their departments with a "culture change" and budgetary downsizing--much of which had to do with city leadership--the neighborhoods that I knew quickly evaporated. Those people were beginning to flee ~1984 or 85, and we went back to Raleigh in 1987.
There was still an operable downtown RM in those years, and Bob Melton's had survived it's...28th? flooding and was still going strong. Well, all of that has long changed.
My uncle, who has been "long-retiring" as a pharmacist for KMart (KMart being KMart fucked over his pension several times), sent him down to "close out" the KMart in Rocky Mount about 8 years ago, and he's been stuck there ever since. The Pharmacy field is changing anyway--tough to find senior pharmacists that operate in the same kind of position that he does--but it's been completely impossible to find interns and junior pharmacists straight out of training willing to tolerate Rocky Mount for more than 3 months at a time. Turnover for him has been something like 2 or 3 pharmacists per year, leaving him trapped. He's finally done in 2 months, though, which will put him back in the mountains for good.
I'm not really privy to all the details of what doomed the town, but dad has filled me in some of the mayoral and superintendent machinations that were going on when we were still there. About 12 years ago, I met Alan Gurganus when he was doing a public reading of his then current novel. Afterward, I mentioned that I also "grew up" there (I consider myself mostly a product of Raleigh, but with a bit of RM because I retain strong memories), and he signed my book: "A fellow Rocky Mount escapee! NEVER RETURN!"