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Chapel Hill Friends
by Charly Mann
Growing up in Chapel Hill and living there most of my life afforded me a wide array friends and wonderful memories. I often hear from many of my former Chapel Hill friends and several encouraged me to join Facebook so that I could be in contact with even more of my former cronies. I did reluctantly join Facebook, but have spent less than two hours using it. What most overwhelmed me about Facebook was that many people I knew had more than a thousand "Facebook friends." I have five close friends, most of whom I have known for more than 30 years, yet not one of them even has a Facebook account. So I remain a Facebook wallflower and contemplate the meaning of friendship.
From Mr. Duncan's 1965 9th Grade Class at Chapel Hill's Guy B. Phillips Junior High School
Top left: Lennie Jernigan, Fred Johnston
Bottom Left: Watts Poe, Donnie Ray
As humans we are social creatures who naturally want to form friendships. When I was in the tenth grade I was assigned to read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. In it, Aristotle discusses what he believes are the three kinds of friendships we can have. The first and most common form is utility friendship. This is a friendship that we form because it is advantageous to us at that time and place, but is in reality quite shallow and can easily be discarded as we grow, change, or relocate. As a 15 year old then, who had already had at least six best friends and several dozen good friends who were no longer part of my life, I immediately related to what Aristotle was saying. Aristotle believed that people like this we should not even call friends, but more accurately describe as acquaintances. The second kind of friendship Aristotle said is one of pleasure, and it is primarily characterized by passionate feelings between two people. Unlike the more common utility friendship that seeks a long term benefit or advantage in the relationship, this kind of friendship seeks to establish immediate pleasure between the friends. Unfortunately, a relationship based on pleasure is built mostly on passion, and that is usually fleeting. In both of the previous types of friendships we can become friends with someone very quickly, and just as quickly end it. In reality most of our friendships are one of these two kinds, and are therefore unstable and subject to abrupt termination.
Jenny McClamroch Chapel Hill High School 1967
To Aristotle the highest and rarest form of friendship is true friendship which is between people with shared values and principles, and who have selfless love for each other. In this case each friend wants what is best for the other and works to cultivate and stimulate the friend's potential.
Chapel Hill High School Sophomores: Top left: Robert Varley, Bottom left: Skip Via and Jimmy Vine
Real friendship is beautiful and is the glue that has made my life wonderful. Even though the majority of my childhood and college friendships are over, they do endure in my memory, and I am thankful for them all.
Mrs. Peiper's 1965 8th Grade Class from Chapel Hill Junior High School: Top: Susan Colewell , Anne Creech, Bottom: Mason Dorr, Dick Geary
Comments:
Fred Payne
2:12 PM Sun 8/29/2010
I agree with the previous comment that friendships can be fleeting and swallow, but you can avoid this by developing relationships with people you already have some things in common with and then accentuate those bonds. Of course the more you truly know yourself and the more developed your interests the easier this will be.
T-Square
9:16 PM Sat 8/28/2010
I have found friendships all to often to be fleeting and shallow, the result is avoiding letting folks get too close. The effect is to often make me seem aloof and disinterested when in fact I desire to be the opposite.
Charly Mann
3:46 PM Sun 7/25/2010
Thanks for the comments on Chapel Hill Memories. I am about your age and have a lot of the same memories about learning to swim at Woollen. I have some photos from those days of the locker rooms and where we would get our trunks.
I had thought about writing a detailed piece on learning to swim at Woollen - the different levels - and the advance swimmers who swam outdoors - as well as the mini-ice-cream cart always in front of the Woollen Gym parking lot when classes were over. I've decided this might be a story a better swimmer should tell - I never made it to the outdoor pool.
Griff Steel
1:44 PM Sat 7/24/2010
Congratulations and hearty thanks to Charly Mann, Sally Geer and all the others who put together this super time-travel back to beloved Chapel Hill of our youth. Those of us who grew up in Chapel Hill were truely privileged. I have many fond memories but will share only one: free swim lessons for the townschildren at Wollen Gymnasium. Build with federal dollars during WWII, the huge swimming pools, both indoor and out, where originally designed to teach fliers how to exit their downed aircraft and survive the oceans. We townschildren in the '50's benefitted by learning to swim, for free, taught by summer college students. I remember standing in long lines of naked little boys waiting for our swim trunks to be handed out to us (no personal suits allowed), then getting lost in the underground locker room, and finally finding my way (by following the crowds) to either the indoor or the outdoor pool depending on your age or swimming level. I can still smell the clorinated foot baths and the Dial soap bars in the showers. We were no more than 6 or 7 years old. We learned to swim, we also learned not to be unduly modest, and we learned to stand still and be quiet in long lines. The summer days did not seem so hot back then in Chapel Hill. God bless everybody and I still have a crush on Alice Dawson. Griff Steel; class of '69 CCHS and veteran of Glenwood Elementary and GB Philips JHS. neurology14@yahoo.com
Mary Neal
12:42 PM Fri 5/7/2010
I love your articles that include school photos. Please do one on the Chapel Hill High Class of 1997.
Tammy GaIns
10:22 AM Wed 5/5/2010
There is a photo in this article I would like to get a copy of. Can I purchase digital copies of pictures from you?
Bill Price
6:46 AM Tue 5/4/2010
Thanks for the great piece and photos of a lot of people I went to school with in Chapel Hill from 1959 to 1964.
My only true friends today are my wife and three grown children, and that is more than enough for me.
Robert Dalton
9:58 PM Mon 5/3/2010
I enjoyed your perspective on friendship, and it has comforted me a bit that none of my closest friends are from my childhood. I grew up in Carrboro in the 1980s.
Check out our other website:
Investment strategies and advice about Apple Inc. and related technology companies by Charly Mann. www.appleinvesting.com
Investment strategies and advice about Apple Inc. and related technology companies by Charly Mann. www.appleinvesting.com
Chapel Hill is located on a hill whose only distinguishing feature in the 18th century was a small chapel on top called New Hope Chapel. This church was built in 1752 and is currently the location of The Carolina Inn. The town was founded in 1819, and chartered in 1851.
What is it that binds us to this place as to no other? It is not the well or the bell or the stone walls. or the crisp October nights. No, our love for this place is based upon the fact that it is as it was meant to be, The University of the People.
-- Charles Kuralt
Dark Side of the Hill -- Pink Floyd, the creators of the most popular album in history, Dark Side of the Moon, took the second half of their name from Floyd Council, a Chapel Hill native, and great blues singer and guitarist. He once belonged to a group called "The Chapel Hillbillies".
Check out Charly Mann's other website:
Oklahoma Birds and Butterflies
http://oklahomabirdsandbutterflies.com
Oklahoma Birds and Butterflies
http://oklahomabirdsandbutterflies.com
There would probably be no Chapel Hill if the University of North Carolina Board of Trustees in 1793 had not chosen land across from New Hope Chapel for the location of the university. By 1800 there were about 100 people living in thirty houses surrounding the campus.
The University North Carolina's first student was Hinton James, who enrolled in February, 1795. There is now a dormitory on the campus named in his honor.
The University of North Carolina was closed from 1870 to 1875 because of lack of state funding.
William Ackland left his art collection and $1.25 million to Duke University in 1940 on the condition that he would be buried in the art museum that the University was to build with his bequest. Duke rejected this condition even though members of the Duke Family are buried in Duke Chapel. What followed was a long and acrimonious legal battle between Ackland relatives who now wanted the inheritance, Rollins College, and the University of North Carolina, each attempting to receive the funds. The case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, and in 1949 UNC was awarded the money for the museum. Ackland is buried near the museum's entrance. When the museum first opened, in the early sixties, there were rumors that his remains were leaking out of the mausoleum.
The official name of the Arboretum on the University of North Carolina campus is the Coker Arboretum. It is named after Dr. William Cocker, the University's first botany professor. It occupies a little more than five acres. It was founded in 1903.
Chapel Hill's main street has always been called Franklin Street. It was named after Benjamin Franklin in the early 1790s.
Chapel Hill High School and Chapel Hill Junior High were on Franklin Street in the same location as University Square until the mid 1960s.
The Colonial Drug Store at 450 West Franklin Street was owned and operated by John Carswell. It was famous for a fresh-squeezed carbonated orange beverage called a "Big O". In the early 1970s, I managed the Record and Tape Center next door, and must have had over 100 of those drinks. The Colonial Drug Store closed in 1996.
Sutton's Drugstore, which opened in 1923, has one of the last soda fountains in the South. It is one of the few businesses remaining on Franklin Street that was in operation when I was growing up in the 1950s.
Future President Gerald Ford lived in Chapel Hill twice. First when he was 24, in 1938, he took a law couse in summer school at UNC. He lived in the Carr Building, which was a law school dormitory. At the same time, Richard Nixon, the man he served under as Vice President, was attending law school at Duke. In 1942, Ford returned to Chapel Hill to attend the U.S. Navy's Pre-Flight School training program. He lived in a rental house on Hidden Hills Drive.
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your comment is truly beautiful & sincere. It is what we are missing in our
schools today, PERSONAL..,we have so much technical,so little
PERSONA...communication. we have learned to text instead of smile.
You had more then even though I am sure you didn't know it.
I hope you reach many others NOW...