by Charly Mann

From 1955 to 1958 I was part of a Chapel Hill gang of young cowboys called "The Good Guys"

Chapel Hill was once inhabited by a large number of cowboys. They were all very young men and women who had been mentored by Roy Rogers, The Lone Ranger, Wild Bill Hickok, and Annie Oakley on Saturday mornings. They learned from their heroes to always be polite, and that it was their duty to protect the weak, as well as rid Chapel Hill of any outlaws and villains. As old fashioned as it may sound today, Chapel Hill's cowboys and cowgirls believed that families always stayed together, and that courteous and well-groomed people were almost always good.

On the top is me, Charly Mann, as a cowboy at the age of three in 1952. Below it is a picture of me at the age six during my days in the Chapel Hill "Good Guys" cowboy gang. I never got the cowboy out of me, and have lived for the last twenty years in cowboy country near a herd of free-range buffalo, hundreds of wild horses, as well as many coyotes.

Morality, and what we now call family values, were held in high regard by Saturday morning television cowboys in the 1950s. This was also consistent with the way most Chapel Hill families lived. Almost everyone attended church, and honor and hard work were virtues instilled into most children by their parents.

I was named after my grandfather and he was a huge influence on me. This is a mural of Roy Rogers from Portsmouth, Ohio, the hometwown of both my grandfather and Rogers. 

I was part of a small gang of 6 to 8 year old cowboys whose homes were in Greenwood, Glen Lennox, and Morgan Creek. We called ourselves the "The Good Guys". I still keep up with all but one member of the group today. Four are now physicians, and one is a well-known singer-songwriter. There were kids I would call bullies who used intimidation and sometimes violence to get what they wanted, but all of us got what we wanted by being assertive. While most of the bullies, as well as passive kids, I knew have not fared well in life (most are in fact deceased), my gang of cowboys are all alive and well. Like our cowboy role models we saw that you got what you wanted by speaking up and being confident.

Happy trails to you.

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by Charly Mann

When I was a young boy in the 1950s I often spent delightful afternoons at the farm of the Reverend Clarence Parker located off Mt. Carmel Church Road not far from where it intersects with 15-501. Father Parker, as most people called him, was a retired Episcopal priest who was in his early 80s. He was the kindest and most gentle human being I have ever known. Surrounding his rustic house was a field that contained a number of large hickory and maple trees. Running free through this expanse was a large number of farm animals including chickens, goats, ducks, cows, and turkeys.

I was particularly fond of the turkeys on the Parker farm, which I always thought of as pets and could never envision someone might think of killing one for a Thanksgiving dinner. One male turkey (who I called Tom) was an especially good friend. He loved when I pet him and enjoyed following me around as I walked around the farm. At night he would roost on an oak tree branch near the Parker’s house. Tom and I remained friends for years and he always seemed to recognize me. He eventually died in 1959 at the age of 10. Years later I learned that most turkeys live on factory farms in cramped pens until they are slaughtered when they're just 5 months old.

Charly Mann, left, and baby goat at the Parker's farm March 1955. Terry Golden, who lived on Stagecoach Road, is my friend on the right. Mrs. Parker is standing above us. I would often ride my bike from my home on Old Mill Road to the Parker Farm.

I remember the female turkeys were called hens and would usually build their nests just beyond where the yard ended and the woods began. For a week or more they would lay their eggs, and when there were around ten they would begin sitting on them until they hatched. Several times Father Parker placed unhatched Turkey eggs that a hen had an abandoned in a chicken’s nest. Once the turkey was hatched the mother chicken would raise it as if it was one of her brood.

The great Tom the turkey at the Parker farm in Chapel Hill, North Carolina 1958

I learned from the Parkers that turkeys have full-color vision just like us, and that baby turkeys are called poults, and stay with their mothers for the first five months of their lives (in a free range setting like their farm). Mother Turkey hens were very sweet and tightly bonded to their offspring, and would courageously defend her family from predators such as hawks and owls.

Father Parker was a tall, thin man who was charitable, jovial, and brave. When I knew him he was an old man and his hair was white. He was also the only white Chapel Hill minister that was actively involved in supporting the civil rights and anti-war protests of 1960s. I remember him in 1962 going to The Pines Restaurant in his clerical collar and black vests with several blacks and asking for a table. At that time The Pines was the most upscale restaurant in Chapel Hill and forbade service to Negros. The manager of the restaurant told the group they were not welcome and should leave the premises immediately. Instead Father Parker and his black friends sat down in the lobby and refused to leave. The manager called the Chapel Hill Police who arrested Father Parker and physically carried him and his friends out to awaiting police cars and he was placed in jail overnight.

Father Parker's home was often used as safe house for non-violent civil rights and anti-war leaders who were under subpoena to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Throughout the 1960s and early 70s there were dozens of marches through downtown in support of integration and ending the war in Vietnam. Father Parker was at the head of most of them until he was almost 90. Father Parker died in 1973 and is buried in Chapel Hill Memorial Cemetery between Fordham Blvd. (US-15-501 Business) and Legion Road. His love for animals lives on in me today.

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by Charly Mann

In my mind, almost everyone I knew in Chapel Hill was a star. I have recently compiled brief bios on 223 people I knew in town who I not only admired but who also inspired me. I was fortunate to keep a fairly detailed diary from an early age, and used it as my primary source for these profiles. Over the decades most of these characters also made numerous appearances in the journals I wrote, which have helped me describe the personality and remarkable attributes of these individuals. I also had dozens of personal letters from many of these people that were often a better source than my diaries for capturing their spirit.

In 1960, when I was 10, I started writing letters to political and civic leaders I admired. Herbert Hoover was President of the United States from 1929-1933. Few know that before he was President he was considered one of America's greatest humanitarians, and this is what I admired him for. We corresponded for almost three years, and I got to visit him briefly in the summer of 1962 at his suite in the Waldorf Astoria in New York City.

When I was ten I developed a keen interest in politics. I began corresponding on a regular basis with a number of current and former political leaders. This eventually led me to meet a handful of these people including Martin Luther King, Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, and Robert Kennedy. I also got to know four North Carolina governors including Luther Hodges, Terry Sanford, and Dan K. Moore. Also because of a mutual friend I got to meet Jimmy Carter, and by pure serendipity for six years lived next door to George Walker Bush prior to his becoming president of the United States. Over the last few decades my interest in politics has significantly waned. When I was young I was one of the most liberal people living in Chapel Hill, but the rhetoric and anger of both my side and the right never appealed to me, and I found too much information was skewed by each side of the political dialogue. I began to see that people's political ideology could become their religion, with both liberals and conservatives so convinced they were right and virtuous that the other side was often labeled "evil".

Eleanor Roosevelt was the First Lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945. She was an early supporter of civil rights and inspired my interest in the cause. She also helped arrange a short meeting for me with Martin Luther King in 1960.

I also always had a great love for music. Chapel Hill was an ideal place to grow up with this passion. I was mentored by people like Kemp Battle Nye of Kemp's Record Store and Orville Campbell, who besides publishing the Chapel Hill Weekly (Newspaper) owned the highly influential Colonial Records that launched the careers of several major artists including Andy Griffith, George Hamilton IV, Billy "Crash" Craddock and John D. Loudermilk IV.

While producing the Robert, Rory, Ricky album in 1978 I met Dale Krantz Rossington. These were great guys who I still keep up with. The album sold well for about a year. In 1980 I sold the album to Allen Collins and Gary Rossington of Lynryd Skynyrd (Dale's boyfriend and soon-to-be husband). The Rolls Royce convertible on the album cover was supplied by my friend Geoff Eade. He now owns the Bentley dealership in High Point. 

Hanging out with Kemp I got to meet a slew of well-known songwriters and poets who frequented his store including Burl Ives and Carl Sandburg. By the time I was 19 I was managing a record chain headquartered in Chapel Hill which allowed me to get to know many of my favorite artists at the time including Gordon Lightfoot, Linda Ronstadt, and several members of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and the New Riders of the Purple Sage. Over the years I went from being a roadie for The Doors to producing albums, managing a handful of national acts, promoting concerts, and producing and directing a live music television show. Because music, television, and movies have become so intertwined in the last several decades this also led me to get to know a number of top movie directors as well as a handful of leading actors and actresses. A funny thing though, most people seem to think celebrities are somehow more interesting than regular people. Most of the time, they are not. I care far less about the politics, likes and dislikes of my famous acquaintances than of most other people I know. To me a celebrity is just someone we pay attention to because of the media attention they garner. I feel embarrassed when I am having a meal at restaurant or walking down the street with someone that is recognized just because they had a hit song or were in a movie or television show. I think - what is the big deal? In most of the cases I know these people well enough to know they have the same kinds of faults (often more of them) as everyone else I know. I just find it hard to grasp that we treat some people differently simply because they are famous.

This is a picture Dale Krantz gave me when she was staying with me in Chapel Hill in 1979. We had even toyed with the idea of doing a solo album, and having her use the stage name of Dale Clover.

This morning I heard an acapella version of a song made famous by a well-known group which has a member that I got to know well in Chapel Hill. That story begins in 1978 soon after I signed a group from Georgia to my record label, Cream of the Crop Records. I brought them up to Chapel Hill to record the album and they suggested a female singer from Jacksonville, Florida named Dale Krantz to sing harmony vocals on some of the record. She was beautiful, and had an incredible voice. She had also just finished touring with Leon Russell. Over the next few months she and I became good friends and I visited her and her wonderful sister in Jacksonville. Soon after that she decided to come stay with me in Chapel Hill. We had a delightful time together, even enjoying a thrilling UNC-Duke basketball game at Cameron Indoor Stadium that my good friends and Record Bar co-owners Bill and Lane Golden gave me. One thing we had in common at the time was that we were both involved with other people. After a few weeks we each unsuccessfully went back to our other relationships. Dale came back up to Chapel Hill with her sister a few months later, and even though she was staying with me again, I had little time to spend with her as I was busy ending a relationship with my girlfriend.

This is a note Dale and her sister left me during their last visit to my home in Chapel Hill in 1979.

Dale went on to have an incredible life and career. A few months later she joined .38 Special as their female vocalist. The following year she joined the core of the former Lynyrd Skynyrd to form the Rossington-Collins Band. Less than two years later she married Gary Rossington and they have had a long storybook marriage that produced two wonderful daughters. Rossington, by the way, is also the co-writer of the two rock classics, Freebird and Sweet Home Alabama. Since 1987 she and Gary have been a part of the re-formed Lynyrd Skynyrd band.

The last time Dale came to stay with me she left a number of her momentos, including her autographed program from Leon and Mary Russell and all the other members of the group she had performed with in 1976 and 1977. One member of that band was her friend Teddy Jack Eddy who is better known as Gary Busey. The year Dale and I were friends, Busey played Buddy Holly in The Buddy Holly Story.

In 1981 I took a sabbatical from the music business to help start a chain of video stores and teach computer programming. During this time I sold the master of the album Dale sang on to Lynyrd Skynyrd members Gary Rossington and Allen Collins.

This is a copy of the check Gary Rossington and Allen Collins paid me in 1981 for the rights to the album Dale Krantz (Rossington) had sung on.

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by Charly Mann

An amazing collection of political minds have lived in Chapel Hill including U.S. Presidents James K. Polk and Gerald Ford, as well as Robert Welch the founder of America’s most conservative organization, The John Birch Society, who was a gradate of the University of North Carolina and former U.S. senator John Edwards a leading advocate for liberals until his recent troubles. Now our country is in the midst of an acrimonious political debate on how to reduce our onerous national deficit and lift our debt ceiling. Since I resided in Chapel Hill longer than any of these men I figured my political genes must be as acute as theirs, and I figured I could come up with a solution to this crisis.

James K. Polk was the 11th President of the United States. He graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1818. The lower quad of the main campus - Polk Place - is named after him. Interestingly he is the only President I know of who kept all his campaign promises after he was elected.

I think the real problem that must be solved is getting control of the ticking time bomb of the vastly underfunded entitlement programs of Social Security and Medicare. Because of the demographic shift of the American population over the next 30 years, economic conditions in the United States are going to go from bad to absolutely catastrophic. By the year 2020, 26% of Americans will be collecting Social Security and Medicare benefits, and that number will increase to 38% by the year 2045. Both of these programs are known as "pay as you go" entitlements, meaning they are funded with current taxes or by increasing the already bloated federal deficit.

By 2020, our federal budget will probably be triple what it is today, with more than 70% of it allocated to these two programs. It will also mean the average American will be faced with a tax rate (federal, local and state combined) of 65% by 2025. By 2045, the tax rate could easily surpass 80%. Obviously, such tax rates are unsustainable for our economic health, and probably politically untenable as well.

Gerald Ford lived in Chapel Hill twice, first in 1938 when he took several classes at the UNC law school and lived in Carr dormitory, and then in 1941 when he was enrolled in the Navy's Pre-Flight school.  

It is very likely that well before the midpoint of the 21st century the U.S. economy will be close to what is now considered third world status, because our inflation rate will have to soar above 200% in order for the government to keep paying for all of its obligations. After this, things will get worse because other countries, which have been keeping us afloat by buying our debt, will stop doing so because it will be considered worthless.

So, is there a solution to this seemingly inevitable calamity? Yes. There is a great one. The cost to the federal government for these entitlement programs will probably average $225 per day for each retired American by 2025. It is likely that at this time the average wage in India will be $2.25 per day and in China $5.50. The solution, as I see it, is to begin exporting our older Americans to these two countries because the cost of housing, food and medical care for our senior citizens there would be less than $12 a day. This would even include a full-time personal assistant for each American we export.

Former Presidental candidate and U.S. senator John Edwards owns the largest home in Orange County. It is almost 29,000 square feet and was recently valued at $8,500,000. 

This would reduce the cost of our entitlement programs by more than 90%, our federal deficit would almost immediately disappear, and our tax rate could be reduced to about 12%. In fact, we would be the strongest economy on earth, and Americans, by the middle of the 21st century could enjoy a standard of living 3-4 times greater than today.

So would this plan really work? Well, of course some senior Americans, for various reasons, may not be exactly keen on spending their golden years in India or China. Please do not get me wrong, I am not an uncaring person, and I want this program to be accommodating to everyone. After all, America was founded on the principle of equality and justice for all. So I have two options for those senior Americans who don't want to be part of our resettlement program.

One option would be to simply give our "stay-at-home" seniors the daily cash equivalent of what the government would pay for their living expenses in India and China, or about $12 per day. Individuals who had saved well or learned to live very frugally would be ideal candidates for this program.

Robert Welch was considered the smartest person to have ever attended UNC when he enrolled in 1912 at the age of 12. He graduated in 1916. He and his brother made a fortune in the candy business. Among the sweet treats they develped were Junior Mints and Sugar Babies. He was the founder and primary benefactor of the country's ultra right political organization The John Birch Society

The other option would be to allow these Americans to receive the $12 supplement and take part in what I call the "Family First" program, in which loving and supportive children agree to take their parents in and care for them for their remaining years. As a supplement to this, there would also be an "adopt a senior" program, through which younger individuals could adopt and care for a senior who is not a blood relation. This might be particularly popular among people who have issues with their own parents, and want to make the ultimate statement of dissatisfaction with them by taking in someone else in their senior years.

Our resettlement destinations, China and India, have some of the greatest offerings of culture and cuisine of any place in the world, with an array of historical sites and places to visit. I actually think that the problem we may have if this plan is enacted is many younger Americans lying about their age so they can be part of the program early.

Charly Mann lived primarily in Chapel Hill from his birth in 1949 until 1990. Since then he has lived in Boca Raton, Florida, Austin, Texas, and has lived in Bartlesville, Oklahoma for most of the last decade. He has never run for any political office, and if he did he never would be elected.

One final thought. The U.S. has the largest per capita prison population of any country in the world. There are now more than 3 million people in federal, state and local prisons. The cost of incarceration is more than $50,000 per year for each prisoner. As you may know, Iceland has recently gone bankrupt, with little hope of economic survival. The population of Iceland is approximately 350,000. My suggestion is that we move all of our prisoners to Iceland (one of the harshest and least hospitable climates on earth) and hire the majority of the adult Icelandic population to feed, guard, and house these inmates, at $25,000 a year per inmate. This would reduce our prison costs (currently $200 billion a year) by half, restore Iceland’s economy, and because of Iceland's remoteness and climate, provide a major disincentive for people thinking of committing crime.

Through these programs, we can restore America’s financial soundness and virtually eliminate crime. However, this vision cannot be realized without dedication and commitment by the citizens of this great nation. We must therefore work together across party lines, age, race, and gender. I do not expect personal recognition or remuneration for these ideas. Having played my small part in solving the current ailments of the United States would be enough reward for me.

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by Charly Mann

Charly (Charles) Mann and his father, UNC math professor William Robert Mann in 1952

Chapel Hill was blessed with an abundance of great fathers in the 1950s. Somehow these men who had grown up in the Great Depression and most of whom were veterans of World War II were all kind, honest, decent, and selfless individuals. They all enjoyed their work, but loved their families even more. These guys were authority figures who did not often have to give instructions. Through their own actions you knew what was expected. They really did inspire by example. Besides my own wonderful Dad, I saw these characteristics in the fathers of many of my closest friends including, Henry Brandis, who was Dean of the Law School, Bob Cox, who was a downtown merchant, David McGowan, who was a pharmaceutical salesman and reminded me of Fred McMurray on My Three Sons, George Prillaman, who ran UNC Food Services such as Lenoir Hall and was the personification of cool, and Sandy McClamroch who was the Mayor of Chapel Hill for most of the 1960s and owned WCHL yet was as laid back as Ozzie Nelson in the Adventures of Ozzie and Harriett. These men were great to be around and each left an indelible impression on me about how to be a responsible adult and father.

George Prillaman managed the UNC food services in the 1950s and 60s. In his spare time he always had a project going from turning his garage into a large entertainment area to restoring a vintage Model T. He was also perhaps the only owner of a Ford Edsel in Chapel Hill.  

As Chapel Hill entered the 1960s families spent a lot less time sitting and talking around the dinner table at night. Television became the center of family gatherings and friends and myself began seeing the people on television more as role models than our own parents. My own dad was never really interested in television and rarely watched it. By the mid 1960s we no longer even had a television in our house, which coincidentally was the same time that I went from being a "C" student to an "A" student. For the rest of his life he only had a television once more, and that was a gift I gave him in the mid 1970s. Within a few years he gave it away.

Sandy McClamroch was not only Chapel Hill mayor for most of the turbulent 1960s, but also owned WCHL and a number of apartments in town, yet he was so easygoing it was hard to believe he even had a job. 

As my own adolescent turmoil began to surface I often rebelled against my father and his generation by letting my hair grow long, deriding the sentimental music he listened to, and blaming his generation for all the injustice and hypocrisy I saw in the world. Somehow I knew better, and was confident my generation would make the United States a better and safer place to live. I now know I was wrong and I would love to have more men like I knew then as our leaders and fathers today.

This is a photo of UNC Law School Dean Henry Brandis from 1959. I was friends with his son Hank and often had breakfast at their house on Arrowhead Road.   

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By Bill Anthony UNC Class of 1965 (all photos provided by Charly Mann)

“Plain as an old shoe; honest as an old field pine; tough as a top sergeant; blunt as the crack of doom; impulsive to a hurt; generous to a fault; quick to fly off the handle and dangerous as an axeheive when he does; quick to confess he was not himself when he did it – though it is hard to imagine who he was because, God knows, he could not be anybody else; wrathful as an Old Testament prophet, truthful as a sinner brought to repentance by an inward grace, overflowing with notes that are always set to music, full of lightning as a cloud in a storm and full of the calm that follows; an artist with the thunderbolt and a master of the still, small voice full of earthiness without a trace of vulgarity, and full of flare as a lightwood knot.”

UNC Chancellor Robert House in his office in 1966

These words were used by Professor Albert Coates ’18 to describe his friend – and a friend to all who were privileged to know him – Chancellor Robert Burton House. I was not one of those so graced – though God knows I tried. Entering Carolina in the fall of 1961 as a wide-eyed freshman from High Point, I was eager to absorb all that UNC and Chapel Hill had to offer. It didn’t take long to develop a feel for those experiences which were on the “must do” list. Shop at Kemp’s, go to a home football game, have a beer and pizza – or perhaps a Gambler - at the Rathskeller and sign up for a Classics course taught by Chancellor House. Life didn’t get much better than that in the early 60s!

Chancellor House loved to play the harmonia and often was a guest performer with well-known groups that played in Chapel Hill

My first year was a bit of a struggle, due in part to the challenge of General College courses I was taking. However, most of my difficulties were self-inflicted because of poor study habits combined with considerable excellence in the partying department. As a dorm rat, no reason to have a good time with college buddies was too insignificant, whatever the resulting amount of GPA damage might be. However, there was the promise of a Chancellor House class come Sophomore year – if I could just make the cut and stay in school!

As the end of second semester approached, word got out that Chancellor House would be retiring a second time as a University employee in June of 1962. The first time was as Chancellor, the second from his teaching responsibilities. So close to my grasp, the opportunity to take one of his courses slipped away. Oh, he remained a fixture in Chapel Hill during the years following retirement – but incidental contact was just not the same as having the opportunity 3 times each week to hang on his words of wisdom and wit. In an attempt to make up for that hole in my education, here for all to consider and appreciate are a few of his personal accomplishments and significant contributions to UNC.

This is a photo of Robert House in 1934 when he was the Dean of Administration at the University of North Carolina

• Born in Thelma, Halifax County, in 1892.
• Graduated with honors from UNC in 1916 and inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, serving as chapter president his senior year.
• Received Master of Arts degree from Harvard in 1917.
• Served with the American Expeditionary Forces as a Lieutenant in the Army (Infantry) during World War I in 1917-18.
• Served as executive secretary of UNC during 1924-34.
• Appointed dean of administration in 1934.
• Selected as the first chancellor of the University in 1945, serving in that capacity until his retirement in 1957.
• Returned to the classroom and taught both English and Classics as one of the most popular professors on campus until his second retirement in 1962.

Robert House loved Chapel Hill and UNC and graduated at the top of his Carolina class in 1916

Former Consolidated University President William C. Friday ’48 said of House “I don’t know of a man who more symbolized Chapel Hill in my experience than Bob House – intellectual, urbane but still simple, an incredibly friendly man. There was never a time when you didn’t enjoy being with Robert House. He was always fun. But he was always work, too. A lot of people didn’t give him credit for what he did here. But I can tell you from first hand, close-range observation that Robert House and Bill Carmichael made Frank Graham possible. They ran the place. They tended to the place while he (Graham) was in Indonesia or wherever he was.”

Well, that was Chancellor House, the professor I never really got to know – yet feel that I do. He had that way about him, touching the lives of those by his side, in his classes and, yes, even some who just missed the opportunity to be a closer part of his world. He died in 1987 and left a void that remains unfilled to this day. One of a kind, indeed. Rest easy, my almost mentor and vicarious friend.

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Charly (Charles) Mann, Jenny McClamroch, & Karen Orr having fun in July 1954

Jenny McClamroch Crittenden, 62, died peacefully Monday, April 4, 2011 with her family by her side at home on Bald Eagle Lane, Wilmington, NC after an extended battle with Inflammatory Breast Cancer.

She was born, raised, and lived most of her adult life in Chapel Hill, NC, where she and her husband Louis raised their three sons.

For the past five years, they have lived in Wilmington, NC, where their children have also relocated.

She is survived by Louie; parents, Sandy and Bet McClamroch (Chapel Hill), sons, Joel and wife Jayna, Sam and wife Michelle, and Jeff; sister, Lee Oliver and husband Kevin of New Zealand; brother Jim and wife Connie; sister-in-law, Betsy Crittenden of New York; six adorable grandchildren; two nieces and a nephew; and Master Mo.

A private celebration of her life is planned for a later date.

Special thanks go to The Lower Cape Fear Hospice, sister Lee, and good friend and neighbor Sue Jones for special end-of-life care.

Donations in her memory may be made to the N C Coastal Land Trust, 131 Racine Drive, Suite, 101, Wilmington, NC 28403 (www.coastallandtrust.org) or the Lea Island Conversation Initiative, 7714 Market Street, Unit D, Wilmington, NC 28411.

Condolences may be sent to the family at www.andrewsmortuary.com

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by Bob Jurgensen

In 1964, Chief Bill Blake, a rather robust man of probably no less than probably 450+ lbs, implemented a "cadet" program for teenagers interested in law enforcement careers. This program served as well to help youths struggling to find their identity in a very vibrant and eclectic Chapel Hill in those days. I don't recall the names of all the participants, but it included myself, Kemp Nye, Jr., Steve Sparrow and a few other high school kids.

Former Chapel Hill Police Chief William D. Blake, who most credit with keeping Chapel Hill calm during the turbulent 1960s.

During the demonstrations for civil rights in the mid-60's there was a sit-in at Columbia and Franklin and the police arrived and started making arrests. Chief Blake was there in the thick of it all, He actually sat on some demonstrators to hold them down until officers could cuff them. I was watching from the marquee roof of the Carolina Theatre, at age 14, before I was a cadet.

As most Chapel Hillians from that era may recall, Chapel Hill was often referred to as "Berkley East" - a liberal town of many compositions and personalities - there was the Town and Gown crowd (University officials and students, local businesses and of course political figures) and then there was the rest of us. And let's not forget the hippie population (Berkley East!)... who were building their base and eventually grew to their peak influence by 1966-67 in their dominance of Franklin St.

In high school I was something of a latch key kid who hitchhiked all over town, often catching rides with local police officer's who I had befriended. My grandmother lived diagonally across the street from the Police Department on Rosemary street when it was both a police station and fire house. My mom, who worked for the Chapel Hill Newspaper, often interviewed Lt. Herman Stone, Chief Blake and other officials during her news reporting days, so almost everyone at the police department knew me. When I needed a ride home late at night on the weekends, after working as a projectionist at the Varsity or Carolina, I'd just go by the police station and eventually someone would take me back to Glen Lennox, where we lived for several years. We had no phone at the time. Sometimes we were diverted to calls enroute and I wouldn't get home until 1 or 2AM.

Chief Blake eventually invited me to become a cadet - one of my first jobs was helping Lt. King, who was well past retirement and relegated to working the police radio and little or no field work. At first Lt King would not even allow me near the transmitter and had me doing paperwork chores, which I found boring, to say the least. Eventually, after a few tours of duty, Lt King permitted me to conduct routine radio traffic on the radio and after a short period of confidence building on his part, I was regularly assigned to work the radio while he drank coffee and sat in the office. Over time I became a regular dispatcher, often working entire shifts. Chief Blake's office was about 20 feet away, which meant regular contact with him and he routinely said "when you turn 21, I expect you to come to work for me."

Downtown Chapel Hill civil-rights sit-in demonstration in1963. At that time both downtown Chapel Hill movies theaters would not admit blacks, nor would the popular breakfast and lunch establishment, The College Cafe, serve blacks.  

Enter Vietnam War and a low draft number, so I volunteered and joined the US Coast Guard (versus Army!) in 1967 and left for a four year run. When I returned to Chapel Hill in 1971, I needed to wait a few weeks to turn 21 so I could be sworn in and so I worked as a dispatcher with Kemp Nye, Jr who had remained while I was away. Once I was sworn in I attended police training, an abbreviated version of what state troopers attend at UNC's Institute of Government and became a sworn office in June of that year.

Those were interesting times, long gone were "most" of the hippies that once lined Franklin Street with their sidewalk wares; Chapel Hill had changed during my time away and the new prevalent drug generation seemed to be the mainstream students of North Carolina's elite.
Being 6'5" and 250 lbs, I was regularly assigned a walking street beat on Franklin St with another officer, who I recall was usually fellow officer Manley Dawson. Manley and I did not always agree on how to deal with people and there were more than a few disagreements. I am an “ask questions first” kind of person, Manley, well, not so much. Eventually I was reassigned to the Eastgate and Glen Lennox patrol district or as we called it, the sleepy district (no action, whatsoever).

Lt Herman Stone was quite the dandy dresser. There was never a speck of dust on him, and he was also a lady's man - whenever I was under his supervision, Herman was always most interested in doing a bar check on the topless bar located underneath Hector's, and he would often take me with him. Needless to say I was always eager to go!

Some of the most interesting things I was involved in were the "great pursuit" which started on Rosemary St, behind the Varsity Theatre and ended just outside of Hillsborough on OLD Hwy 86 (through Carrboro.) We observed a youth riding a motorcycle at a high rate of speed and fell in behind him. Once he realized we wanted him to stop, he sped up and the pursuit was on. Vernon Sikes was the dispatcher that evening. As we entered Carrboro on Rosemary St, at speeds approaching 70 mph, the motorcyclist threw his helmet at us and cracked the cruiser windshield. We continued on and went almost to the town of Hillsborough on Old Hwy 86, a very narrow and windy road. I wasn't driving that night and the officer I was with was the black officer who always patrolled what we called "the west end" of town. As we approached speeds of nearly 80 mph on this road, I swear I saw my young life flash before my eyes more than once, thinking we were surely going to die wrapped around a tree or telephone pole. Eventually we got the Hillsborough officer (only one on duty) to join us in what is called a "running road block" where we trapped the culprit between two cruisers and slowed him down to the point he was forced into a shallow ditch and gave up the chase. When I got out of the cruiser, ready to punch his lights out, adrenalin coursing through my veins, I looked down to see the face of a 14 year old child - but to this day I do understand how officers involved in such life threatening pursuits can get so pumped up and stressed they would want to immediately beat the suspect to within an inch of their life (ala, Rodney King!) - Fortunately, for him, we remained composed and took him home to his parents and went back on patrol, after charging him with the theft of the motorcycle.

While still in training, my officer went home to lunch and turned the cruiser over to me to go on patrol for a half hour while he ate. As I were patrolling the entire town and not one particular zone, I ventured up to the west end, near the Carrboro line, a not so good area in those days, and came upon a fight between two men who were knife fighting in a dirt parking lot that was a hangout at night. As I pulled up, one dropped his knife and ran, I arrested the other and the crowd dispersed quickly. I never did find the other party and charges were eventually dropped because of that.

Another evening, while on patrol on Strowd's Hill, I observed a car full of young men who were driving erratically - there were at least 6 people in the car. My mistake was stopping them at the very top of the hill where there is a big curve and no shoulder. I hurriedly arrested the driver for driving drunk and handcuffed him in front (another not so smart move on my part) placing him in the back of my cruiser, while waiting for a wrecker to tow the car and my Sergeant to tell me what to do with the 5 others who did not appear to be drinking but were pretty mouthy. When I turned my back the arrestee was suddenly gone and we spent the next several hours hunting for him to no avail. I still have no idea how he got out of those handcuffs.

One night, while off duty and home sound asleep, my phone rang at about 1AM and I was summoned to the police department ("don't ask any questions, get in your uniform and be here within 30 minutes!") - turns out there was a huge drug bust/sting that had been undercover for more than a year, with lots of buys, we were assigned in groups of three (there were Sheriff's deputies and state troopers as well) to serve several warrants - I recall we went a few miles out of town toward Hillsborough and up some dirt trail, ultimately to a shiny silver Airstream like trailer sitting oddly in the woods - no lights, no evidence of human existence other than the trailer itself - we knocked and eventually forced entry, arresting the half naked man inside who was talking to us but refused to open the door, confiscating what we thought was a huge quantity of drugs and paraphernalia - only to find out when we returned with our stash, that others had all had even greater success and there were what I would deem to say hundreds of pounds of drugs and illegal substances all sitting on tables in the squad room - it was a huge bust and we arrested about 23 people that night.

One very bitter cold winter night, it was sleeting and icy out, I followed a VW bug down Strowd's Hill and the driver was driving pretty fast for the conditions and when he went over that little bridge before Estes Drive, he flew right over it, no problem (I guess having the engine in the rear helps) - however my cruiser did not fare so well and I spun totally out of control, spinning around what seemed like a half dozen times and just barely missing a big metal pole. I remember being so embarrassed because the clerk where I usually stopped for coffee at the convenience store just over the bridge was standing outside and witnessed it all. I regained control of my vehicle and attempted to catch up to the VW, but had lost sight of it. As I passed Eastgate and went up on the flyover, I observed car lights shining over the embankment and I saw the driver of the VW had finally run out of luck and spun out on the second bridge, plunging down the embankment and striking a tree. Rescue was called and I had never seen anything like that in my life - it was truly horrific - the driver's leg had penetrated the floor board of the VW and they had to saw off his foot to get him out. It turned out to be two Duke Football players who had been to Chapel Hill for the evening. Bad as I hate Duke, I never felt as sorry for a Duke team as I did that night. Both players were seriously injured.

Another interesting night was after a UNC-Duke basketball game, myself and another officer were summoned to "big frat court" to quiet down the music and a water balloon fight going on between two feuding fraternities. It was an interesting moment, arriving at what was nearly a riot and watching no less than 50 drunken students acting like 12 year olds. I recall getting on my loudspeaker and demanding that they all immediately cease and desist and return to their own house or risk arrest. Within minutes the big frat court was empty like a Sunday night in mid-summer. I had never felt so much control before!

Bob Jurgensen - Chapel Hill Police Officer 1970 - 1973

So, why did I leave the Police Department? After nearly three years of service I began to realize that my personality was not one that mixed well with others operating primarily on a political agenda, I guess would be the best explanation. One night in late 1973 I was on routine patrol on 15-501 at about 2am - leaving Glen Lennox and heading to Eastgate when I fell in behind a Lincoln Town car driving erratically. Feeling certain the driver was probably drunk, I pulled him over and administered a field sobriety check and in my opinion, he was inebriated, so I placed him under arrest and called for a wrecker to tow his car. What happened next was perhaps a reflection of the times and political clout. My Lieutenant, Charlie Edmundson, showed up, asked me what was going on, and I explained that the driver was under arrest for DWI. I was told to return to patrol and that he would handle it from there. I initially protested and was rebuked by the lieutenant. So I did as told and well and later found out the driver  was a member of the Board of Aldermen. The dispatcher had run his tag and the Lieutenant was alerted and the rest is history. The alderman was UNarrested (technically, under NC law, only a judge or magistrate can UNarrest a suspect - but not that night.) The case never went to court, no publicity whatsoever and so a drunk who would likely strike again got off.

Once I arrested a stoned pedestrian student, walking down the middle of Franklin Street after midnight, pockets chock full of peyote. He was incarcerated. The evidence was collected and sealed and stored in the evidence refrigerator, but the evidence eventually disappeared and the case was dismissed. Found out later his dad was a big wig at Bank of America in Charlotte (formerly NC National Bank).

There was a blind judge in those days who tried most traffic cases, and there was also Judge Stanley Peele, who I believe is still alive today, and was one of the Judge's I best recall. He was fair but stern, and I regularly tried cases in his courtroom, but I did lose one case before him. The case revolved around another influential student, charged with driving recklessly at Columbia and Franklin Streets, and I never got over that one. Again I felt because of the undue "influence" inflicted on the prosecution that the case was dismissed and that was the one that broke my spirit. The next day I turned in my resignation and eventually moved to Virginia for a new job in law enforcement. I found political influence is alive and well in Virginia also, and so for the past 27 years I have been a real estate broker.

In those days, Chapel Hill was ripe with influence peddling. Having never been subjected to political tricks and games, I was and to this day, remainone of those who believe "you did the crime, you should do the time (or pay the fine)".  But those well heeled among us obviously have a different set of rules and while I am not naive, and there are two sets of rules for the haves and the have-nots.

Photos and photo captions provided by Charly Mann

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by Charly Mann

From 1962 to 1971 hitchhiking was my prime mode of getting to school and work. Ordinary people would stop and pick me up without a second thought for their personal safety. I usually began my journey about 7:00 AM near the intersection of 15-501 (Fordham Boulevard) and Morgan Creek Road, and my destination was usually somewhere in downtown Durham where I attended part of junior high and high school and subsequently managed a record store. My daily roundtrip was 60 miles and it usually required three rides in each direction to complete.

Have thumb will travel. When I was thirteen a friend and I hitchhiked all the way to Nashville during a bitterly cold and snowy January weekend.

I found hitchhiking to be usually an exhilarating experience, as I never knew the kind of person who would pick me up next, but almost all were fascinating to talk to. I always figured that the main reason people gave me a ride was because they wanted someone fun and interesting to talk to, so I worked hard at being an engaging passenger. I knew it was almost always going to be my job to start the conversation and making small talk like discussing the weather had its limits. Instead I always began by thanking the driver for picking me up and then selected a topic that I thought they would enjoy. I found the more stimulating the conversation the more likely it was that the driver would take me all the way to my destination, or at least to a better drop off point to get the next ride.

My favorite topic of conversation was to ascertain my companion's philosophy of life, usually beginning with me asking either what they thought the purpose or meaning of life was. This may surprise many people today, but the generation of people who picked me up usually seemed excited to expound on their beliefs. I usually took notes in my journal on what they said on these topics, and what follows is a sampling of their responses.

We are here to live, become mature and make this world a better place for all people to enjoy.

Every person has a potential to do something really good and meaningful. It is our purpose to live up to that.

We are here to do good. We should aspire to do something that is worthwhile and that will make the world a better place than we found it.

Life is a gift from God and we should not waste it.

Your life is meant to be lived to its fullest and it is just one chapter in your existence.

Life does not have meaning – only words do. 

We are here to make our lives exciting by being forever curious.

Staying alive is the meaning of life.

Life is worth living if our works and deeds are remembered and continued by others.

We are here to ask questions and not to accept easy answers. Answers often change, but questions do not.

We are here to be good companions to one or more other souls.

From the early 1920's through the 1960's many students hitchhiked to Chapel Hill from across the state.

Life just exists.

We are here to change the word with small acts of kindness.

We are here to kill time, drink beer, and laugh until we die.

The purpose of our life is to give meaning to our lives. Life without meaning means we are indifferent, which means we are dead without knowing it.

We are here to be gentle, cheerful, and persistent.

Our purpose in life is to make our hearts sensitive, and our minds alert, refined and brilliant.

Our minds are not equipped to know if life has purpose or meaning, yet we can sense there is much more than we can comprehend.

To know and to serve God.

The purpose of life is to develop intelligence and spirituality which is the only way to attain depth.

We are here to live and die. That's it.

This is a line of hitchhiking UNC students on a Friday afternoon in the late 1950s at the intersection of South and Raleigh Road. There were also usually groups of students on Franklin Street near the President's house and on Country Club Road across from the Forest Theater with their thumbs out at the same time.  

Only a life lived for others is worth living.

It is to realize our lives and each day we live is a miracle.

If there is a purpose I don't care.

The question my friend is, "Are we here?"

Life is a shit sandwich, and everyday we have to take another bite.

Our existence is not an accident. All creatures possess a spark of the creator. We are meant to treat every person and animal with love and respect. Our purpose is to worship, nourish, and love life not destroy it.

I live my life based on Blaise Pascal's wager that God may or may not exist, but by betting that he does we can win eternal life, and if we lose nothing is lost.

Me, me, me..... i, i, i.

You may share your own view on the meaning of life as a comment to this article below.

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by Charly Mann

Almost everyone I know has gone to at least one of their high school reunions. If you are my age and have recently attended one of these events the first thing you noticed is how old everyone has become. You will also see that most of the men are balding and fat, and surprisingly most of the women are in good shape and still fairly attractive. Many of the men I have run into seem uncomfortable and have insipid conversations about sports, investments, and their careers, while the women for the most part are outgoing and talk about their families and current interests and usually ask me about mine.

While I always love to see or hear from old friends from my childhood and high school days, I wish there were a way we could have reunions with friends from each year of our adult lives. As we change careers, work our way up the corporate ladder, or move, we lose touch with so many wonderful people. I think that while the friends we had in high school and college were nice, the friends we make in the real world are usually more similar to us and therefore more interesting to reconnect with.

Me with "lost"  Chapel Hill friends. From left to right: Harry Clements, Charly Mann, and Lizanne Fisher from 1979. At the time Harry was the owner of the Paradise Records chain. Before that he had been CFO of the Record Bar. Today he is a partner in the Childress Kline commercial real estate development and management company. 

I often wonder why I have lost track of so many of the friends I made in the last 40 years. Was it that they all stopped liking me, or did I lose interest in them? It turns out that most of our "lost" friendships have nothing to do with this. Instead, they are the fallout of a natural limit uncovered by recent anthropologist research which found that human beings can only handle a maximum of 150 relationships at a time. Beyond that number, the critical neocortex part of our brain begins to malfunction. As a , we naturally drop some old friends as new ones come into our lives.

I would like to pay tribute to a handful of my former Chapel Hill friends who were purged from my friendship database.

A smiling Lizanne Fisher making her dinner at my house in the summer of 1979

Lizanne Fisher was a real estate agent for J.P. Goforth in Chapel Hill in 1979. I had a large house off Whitfield Road at that time and a mutual friend, Harry Clements, told me what a fascinating person Lizanne was and that she needed a place to stay. I let her have a room which I believe was rent free. In return I had the pleasure of befriending one of the most ebullient and delightful people I have ever known. She later left Chapel Hill and became a highly successful real estate agent in Washington, D.C.

Betsy Moore and her always present smile in my den in Chapel Hill in 1985

Betsy Moore and I were good buddies for more than five years in the 1980s. She would often come over to my house where we would play tennis, and I would regularly watch her favorite show, Cheers, with her at her apartment on Thursday evening. We also had lunch together on a regular basis and sometimes went on day-long driving trips to places like Southern Pines and Pinehurst. Betsy was the sweetest person I ever knew and also the cutest. The last I heard she had become a pastry chef and moved to Virginia.

Christi Owens of Chapel Hill in 1983 at 18 years old

After working more than a decade in the music and video business I decided to try teaching and got a programming degree and was hired as a Professor of Computer Programming at Durham Technical College in 1982. I loved being a teacher, and many of my favorite students were also from Chapel Hill including Christi Owens. Christi came from an illustrious Chapel Hill family. Her father developed Estes Hills and other neighborhoods in town, and her mother, Patsy, and her friend Anna Darden ran an avant-garde upscale women's clothing store between Chapel Hill and Durham. They lived in a large house on Rosemary Street near where it intersects with Boundary.

Christi loved The Wizard of Oz, and I had a friend of mine make a chocolate red slipper birthday cake for her in 1984

Christi was the first student to give me an apple, and we soon became good friends. She often came over to my house after school where at 3 p.m. she would religiously watch her favorite show, General Hospital, then featuring the wedding of Luke and Laura as well as staring a young and beautiful Demi Moore. Christi was passionate about The Police and Every Breath You Take seemed to often be playing when we were together.

Lori Stephens and Charly Mann at Temptatons Bakery in Durham in 1982. They were located across from Brightleaf Square and had the best chocolate truffles in America. 

Lori Stephens was an enormous ball of energy with a fondness for the outrageous. Her father was a gynecologist in Durham, and she grew up in Hope Valley. In 1978 and 79 I was dating her best friend, Laura Kreps (who grew up on Oakwood Drive in Chapel Hill and whose mother was then Secretary of Commerce in the Carter administration). Lori and I became good friends and she stayed in one of the rooms in my house for awhile. She and I had several wonderful trips together; one to Southern California, and another to New York City. On our return flight from our New York trip Lori may have had a little too much to drink. In those days rolling stairs were brought up to an airplane when it landed at Raleigh-Durham Airport. My tipsy friend fell from the top of the stairs all the way to the ground, but was so relaxed at the time that she got up laughing and without a bruise.

Angela Cason in Chapel Hill shortly after graduating from Yale

Angela Cason moved to Chapel Hill in 1984 after graduating from Yale with a degree in English to work for her sister Lee White's advertising and design company. Angela was an extremely brilliant and curious person, and after just a few hours of conversation could penetrate into the soul of another person. She gave me a copy of her favorite book, The Phantom Tollbooth, that I still occasionally read sections from. A few of my favorite passages from it are: "So many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible," and "What you can do is often simply a matter of what you will do."

Angela is today the CEO and President of Cason Nightingale, an advertising and marketing company located in New York City.

I am fortunate to have a marvelously eclectic collection of former Chapel Hill friends – some were artists, some business people, several were lawyers and doctors, many were musicians, two were philosophers, and quite a few were bohemians, yet each was an individual with a warm heart and a gentle spirit.

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by Charly Mann 

Jim Heavner more than any other person created the character and spirit of modern Chapel Hill through his relentless drive of promoting the town and elevating UNC football and basketball to national prominence through his conglomeration of media companies including WCHL, The Tar Heel Sports Network, and The Village Advocate.

James Allen Heavner first came to Chapel Hill as a freshman in the fall of 1957 to major in Radio, Television, and Motion Pictures. Since he was a young boy growing up in Kings Mountain he had been determined to have a career in radio or television and probably thought he would become a reporter. In high school while his classmates pursued sports as an extra-curricular activity Jim became a reporter for newspapers in Kings Mountain, Shelby, and Charlotte. He also was a dee-jay for the Kings Mountain radio station.

Jim Heavner during his two years at UNC, as a freshman and sophomore in 1958 and 1959. During those years he was also working in television in Durham and as a deejay at WCHL. 

From the moment Jim entered Carolina it was clear that was not going to wait until he graduated to start his career. I first remember seeing Heavner on WTVD when I was about 9, in about 1959, hosting a short-lived television bowling show. The next year I saw him working at the then relatively new radio station WCHL which was owned by Sandy McClamroch, and "managed" by now legendary Charlotte radio personality, Ty Boyd. I had been going to WCHL on a regular basis since I was 8 in the afternoons to get promotional copies of rock 'n roll 45s that the station was given but did not play. (WCHL's format was strictly easy listening throughout the 1950s and 60s.) I vividly remember the easy going Boyd introducing me to Heavner who I recognized from his television show, and being impressed that a "TV star" was working at WCHL. I was also struck by how intense and focused this young man was compared to anyone I had ever met before. By 1960 Heavner had dropped out of UNC and was working full-time for very little money at WCHL. (In those days most WCHL employees were UNC students and received minimum wage, but it proved to be the launching pad of many illustrious broadcast careers including NPR's Carl Kasell, CBS's Charles Kuralt, and Jim Lampley.)

Disc Jockey lineup at WCHL in 1956 when the great Ty Boyd was the station manager and morning host, and future NPR newscaster Carl Kasell also had a show. 

1961 was the most important year in Jim's life. Ty Boyd left Chapel Hill to take a job in Charlotte and Sandy McClamroch made the then 21-year-old Heavner WCHL's manager. That same year McClamroch began serving the first of 8 years as mayor of Chapel Hill. This meant the station owner would be far too busy governing Chapel Hill during its most tumultuous decade to watch over his young station manager. With Jim at the helm the station rapidly became the voice of Chapel Hill. Almost immediately WCHL supplanted the Chapel Hill Weekly as the best source of up-to-date local news and sports. Jim also became active in almost every important community organization, especially the Junior Chamber of Commerce which was made up of almost every merchant in town. Heavner was a master promoter and helped create events and contests that significantly helped every business in town. My favorites were "treasure hunts" the station sponsored in which cleverly ambiguous clues were given each week about where a treasure could be found. Hundreds of Chapel Hillians became amateur sleuths trying to discover the location.

Even though Heavner still did a radio show every day and managed the entire staff of the station, it was not unusual for me to see him in the afternoon in some store on Franklin Street, Eastgate, or Glen Lennox talking to the owner about their next ad campaign for the station. His energy and enthusiasm seemed boundless when he was selling ads or promoting the community.

I began paying closer attention to Heavner in the 60s when I was a teenager. I noticed he was always incredibly charming and loquacious to people he was interested in, but seemed to have little interest in people my age or even college students unless they were basketball or football players. This was the greatest decade of rock and roll music, yet Jim seemed to disdain it as much as most people in my parent's generation even though he was in his early 20s. His station adamantly refused to play the music that everyone in my baby-boom generation was listening to, instead featuring music that my friends and I called "music for the elderly". Looking back at this today I realize that he was catering to the musical tastes of his sponsors; men and women who had grown up in the 1930s and 1940s and loved big band and easy listening music.

Jim's hard work paid off and by 1970 he had become co-owner of WCHL with McClamroch. Sandy McClamroch was an incredible man, but in most ways the opposite of Heavner. I often spent time at the McClamroch home at the corner of Stagecoach and Greenwood Road in Greenwood in the 1950s, and was always impressed at how relaxed and quiet Mr. McClamroch was. On the other hand every time I saw Jim he was dominating the conversation and was so zealous. In the early 1970s several people I knew who worked for Jim told me how driven and goal-oriented he was, and how he expected the same of his employees.

In the 1970s Heavner began to amass a highly profitable and influential media empire in Chapel Hill. Under the direction of former WCHL sales manager Roger Jennings, the Village Advocate advertiser was launched, which was delivered free to every residence in Chapel Hill. It was enormously successful from the beginning. Before this, merchants only had the Chapel Hill Weekly or Daily Tar Heel for their display advertising. Ads in both these publications were expensive in relation to the traffic they generated, and at best only reached 30% of the town's population. The s of placing an ad in the Village Advocate were tremendous and much more cost effective. I managed two downtown records stores in the early 70s, and found that a front page ad in the advocate would usually at least double my weekly revenues.

This is one of many front page ads I placed in the Village Advocate. This is from October 1972. The photo was taken in front of the downtown Chapel Hill Post Office. I am standing with the cowboy hat on the far right.

In 1975 Heavner launched The Tar Heels Sports Network which broadcast UNC football and basketball games throughout North Carolina and parts of Virginia and South Carolina. Heavner, who truly loves Carolina sports, did the color commentary while Woody Durham did the play by play of the games. The next year Heavner bought the Chapel Hill home of former North Carolina Governor and Secretary of Commerce Luther Hodges that included a beautiful indoor swimming pool.

Jim Heavner on the far left with two of the greatest basketball coaches in North Carolina history; Jim Valvano and Frank McGuire. The "Voice of the Tar Heels", Woody Durham, is on the far right.

In 1978 Heavner bought out Sandy McClamroch and took control of what was now called Village Companies. The same year he also started Chapel Hill's cable company; Village Cable. Since then Jim's drive and ambition have not abated and his empire has expanded into various media enterprises throughout the country. In 1988 a heart attack set him back only enough for him to give over more control to subordinates who were then charged with running their parts of the company with the dedication and expectations of their leader.

Over the last few decades Heavner's company has sold off some of its assets like the Tar Heel Sports Network in 2000 and the cable company in 1986. In 1997 he sold WCHL to a company in Raleigh which moved the station's studio to Durham and abandoned WCHL's long tradition of focusing on the community and local news. Fortunately, Jim bought back WCHL in 2002 and it has returned to Chapel Hill and its community-centric format.

Jim Heavner has long been active in supporting Chapel Hill and the University of North Carolina. He has donated funds to build the James A. Heavner mini-theater at Kenan Stadium which shows films of UNC's footballs past glories. He also spearheaded the $18 million fundraising efforts to transform UNC's Memorial Hall into the world class performing arts center it is today. Along the way Jim has made a lot of friends, but has also alienated many others.  I only know Heavner from afar and have always greatly admired his hard work, dedication to detail, and all he has done to make Chapel Hill a better place to live. A very successful friend of mine once told me that he never would have achieved very much without "pissing a lot of people off," and I suspect both Jim's high expectations and strong personality are what turn some people off to him.

This is Jim Heavner's house at the far end of Gimghoul Road. For more than 40 years the Roman Catholic Church; St. Thomas Moore, stood at this location. Several people have told me they think the house looks like a hotel. 

I believe Jim's genius was figuring out that the people of Chapel Hill were more interested in what was happening in their community than the world at large, and that he used WCHL, The Tar Heel Sports Network, and The Village Advocate to make Chapel Hill a cohesive community by making us aware of what was happening in our town. WCHL's Ron Stutts morning show, which focuses on the daily life of Chapel Hillians, is the personification of Jim's vision.

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by Charly Mann

When I was eleven I read the fairytale Hansel and Gretel to my 5 year old sister Monika, and became enchanted by how the story ended with the two youngsters living happily ever. For some reason this impacted me enough to write down in a notebook that I wanted to have a life like Hansel and Gretel's. Over the course of the next several weeks I began asking several friends of my parents how one could live happily ever after, and added their words of wisdom to my notebook. My father noted what I was doing, and said if I kept this up I might become another Thomas Wolfe. I had never heard of this person, but was sure my Dad meant it as a compliment.

This is a picture of me (Charly Mann) and my amazing sister, Monika, about the time I read Hansel and Gretel to her.

A few months after this my family and I were visiting the home of Dr. Lonnie London, curator of the Rare Book collection of the UNC Louis Round Wilson Library. He mentioned that he had recently been given some manuscripts by Thomas Wolfe to file, and I asked him who Thomas Wolfe was. He told me he was a genius and the best writer to ever graduate from the University of North Carolina. I was inspired enough by this to have my father check out a couple of Wolfe's books from the library so that I could learn not only about the man my father compared me to, but also to hopefully get some insights from a genius about how to live a happy life.

Above is a photograph of some of my journals. I have been keeping a journal since 1961 when I was eleven years old. This article is about the very first entry to my journal. These journals now include more than 40 spiral notebooks. I have just begun to read through them for the first time. I often recorded long conversations I had with friends and other people I met each day as well as my thoughts, insights, and activities. I have been surprised at how many people I write about, including many early friends, I no longer remember at all. I now plan to begin using my journals as the source for many future Chapel Hill Memories articles.

Unfortunately Wolfe had a rather negative outlook on life and the only quote from him that I recorded in my journal was: "The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence." Such an insight from a man who the adults around me called very smart made me realize that perhaps living a fairytale life was not really very likely.

Dr. Urban Tigner Holmes, Jr. (July 13, 1900 – May 12, 1972) lived off of Laurel Hill Drive on Pine Lane in Chapel Hill. He was a Kenan Professor of Romance Philology at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Less than a week later I was at the house of the legendary, haughty and crusty UNC literature professor Tigner Holmes for dinner with my family. After dinner I read him Wolfe's quote from my journal and asked him if he agreed. Holmes looked bemused and said Wolfe was indeed a genius but he had a terrible flaw which was drinking alcohol. He said that the regular consumption of liquor only complicates one's life and usually makes people sadder. When I asked him why, he eloquently explained in scientific terms how alcohol was a depressant because it decreases the activity of the nervous system.

Beer drinking has been a common activity on the lawns and in the dorms and fraternities around UNC since I was a young boy in the 1950s. At one time Chapel Hill was known as the beer drinking capital of the United States.

At this time in my life I had never tasted liquor, and the only alcoholic beverage I noticed much in Chapel Hill was beer, which I often saw students consuming at social gatherings, or by my father and some of his friends and graduate students when they would watch the New Year's football bowl games at our house. As a result of the conversation with Dr. Holmes I began equating beer drinking with unhappiness, and still have never tasted a sip of the brew in my life even though as a manager and promoter in the music business I have spent countless hours in bars.

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by Charly Mann 

A mid 1950's ad for Sid Rancer's iron furniture

Sid Rancer was Chapel Hill's steel man. He was also once a member of the Chapel Hill's city council. Sid's first love outside of his family was acting and he was in countless theatrical productions in town, and even played supporting roles in several cult films. I only recall meeting Sid once, and that was when I was eight years old in 1958. I rode my bike across town to visit his home on Bradley Street off Barkley Road to look at a used bicycle basket he had for sale. I am not sure if I bought the basket, but I do remember being impressed with his sales enthusiasm.

Sid Rancer's used steel ad from 1958

Bob Jurgensen's Recollections of Sid Rancer:

I recall coming home to Chapel Hill after serving in the Coast Guard and discovering Sid and my stepdad Kai Jurgensen were like brothers, attached at the hip. My best recollection was of Sid in the lead role of the Playmaker's (Kai Jurgensen, a Dramatic Arts Professor at UNC was the director I think) "Fiddler on the Roof" - he was perfect in that role - incredible as I recall. Sid was quite a character and a bundle of fun to be around - he would take all comers and tackle any subject matter.

My first day on the job at the Chapel Hill Police Department, Sid and Kai celebrated with me by enjoying shooters (It was also my 21st birthday). We got pretty sloshed, drinking Mexican Beer w/Tequila shooters and the sucking limes - that's all I remember, but it went on for hours. It took me two days to sober up.

Sid owned a junk yard (or a recycling of metals facility, I'm not really sure) in Durham where he would crush cars and recycle metals - he also made a great of commercial art for hotels and resorts. I still have several pieces of his work he gave my mother and she passed on to us before she died. Vi, his wife, recently sold the property after renting the facility for many years. She lives now with her daughter, Robin, in Chapel Hill.

Sid did a brisk business in the 1950s selling clothes line posts in Chapel Hill

Marketing and ornamental metal work are still a tradition in the Rancer family. His daughter, Gayle Rancer, is a jewelry maker and radio marketer in Hinton, West Virginia.

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by Charly Mann

From 1944 to 1972 a true celebrity lived in Chapel Hill at 315 Rosemary Street in perhaps the most elegant house in town . Her name was Betty Smith and she was one of the most acclaimed novelists of the twentieth century. She came to Chapel Hill in 1936 as a poor struggling playwright and author with two daughters to support. She first lived with her two children in a one room apartment on Hillsborough Street. They were so destitute that she once tried to get a $3 loan from the Bank of Chapel Hill so they would not starve. (The bank did not lend her the money.)

The Betty Smith House of Chapel Hill in its prime

When Smith first arrived in Chapel Hill in 1936 she was 39 had endured a hard and harsh life growing up in poverty in a cold tenement building in Brooklyn and an unhappy marriage. The one thing that had sustained her was her love for words and writing. She recalled that that one of the first words she learned was cat and had immediately associated the word with a real moving creature. From a very early age she spent almost all her free time writing, and would even copy entire books she loved word for word. At 12 she sent a poem to a newspaper that was published. When she was 14 she began writing letters to herself and enjoyed reading them as much as writing them. Smith loved Chapel Hill from the moment set foot in town. As she and her daughter were walking from the bus station to their rooming house her daughter asker her "Mama, how long are we going to stay here?" and she replied "Forever."

Betty Smith in Chapel Hill 1955 at her typewriter. She wrote an average of ten pages for her novels every day.

Betty Smith's first novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was published in August of 1943 to almost instant critical and popular acclaim. Like all three of her subsequent books it is highly autobiographical.  The main character Francie Nolan is based on Smith as a young girl. Francie loves to read and write, but lives a lonely life and feels like a nearby tree that is ready to bloom and enjoy the world. Francie sustains herself through her strength and dreams, and has been an inspiration to young girls and women for seven decades.

Entry to Betty Smith house at 315 Rosemary Street Chapel Hill. The double doors are original to the house.

Soon after moving to Chapel Hill Betty Smith and a friend walked by a magnificent house on Rosemary Street and Betty said, "I wonder what you have to do to own a house like that?" And her friend replied, "Be born there." Betty Smith said to her companion, "One day I'll own that house." Less than a year after the publication of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn Smith became wealthy. The movie rights alone to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn from Twentieth-Century Fox gave her $55,000. On September 1st, 1944 she bought the house she admired for $15,000. In those days it was called the Mangum Mansion, and when Smith moved in it was in poor condition. It was originally owned by one of the first professors of the University and was built in 1829, making it one of the oldest houses in Chapel Hill.

The parlor of the Betty Smith in Chapel Hill.

She totally renovated the house for a cost of $37,000 from a Southern Victorian to the Williamsburg that it is today. She had the front porch removed from the house, the outside of the first floor bricked, and added the stone walls around the property. She moved into the house in April of 1945 and lived there until she died in 1972. Smith always loved trees and it was the array of shade trees that especially enticed her to want the house. In August 1943 she was given a 14 inch tree in a small flowerpot which she called her pet tree. The first thing she did after moving in was plant that tree in her backyard. By 1955 that tree had reached the height of the roof of her two story house. I spent my earliest years less than a block from her house and recall the chinaberry, elms, oaks, azaleas, and crepe myrtles around her house, as well as a beautiful flagstone walk around a garden that was meticulously maintained. I remember that in the 1950s she had at least one cat, and that the yard always seemed to have lots of squirrels and birds. In later years she had an English sheepdog called Noname.

Betty Smith in 1966 tending to her garden under the trees she so loved.

Smith was a very private person who walked with her head down, but the success of her novel and the movie based on it made her house a tourist attraction and Smith celebrity. For the rest of her life every move she made was watched, and she received hundreds of fan letters and requests for appearances every week. In 1966 Chapel Hill honored its reluctant celebrity with the premiere of Joy in the Morning starring Richard Chamberlain and Yvette Mimieux. Chapel Hill mayor Sandy McClamroch declared the day Betty Smith Day and Franklin Street was renamed Betty Smith Boulevard. The profits for the premiere were given to the Chapel Hill Public Library.

Dining Room of the Betty Smith house in Chapel Hill.

Betty Smith for the first forty-seven years of her life lived hand to mouth, and the last twenty eight was very wealthy. I was in her house only once, and remember it being beautifully furnished. It was filled with mementoes including editions of her books in many languages, her original manuscripts, boxes with clippings of reviews of her books, and lots of trays of unopened letters which she said she always tried to answer. On the mantle was a gold trophy that she said was given to her by one the Presidents, but she could not remember which one. My most indelible memory of Betty Smith is seeing her driving around town in her black Cadillac convertible. It was the only time I ever saw her smile.

Front entry to Betty Smith House 1969.

The Chapel Hill Preservation Society was founded to prevent Betty Smith's house from being used for commercial development. The house and garden had deteriorated during the last five years of Betty Smith's life.They renovated the house and cleaned up the garden, and  sold it as a private residence in 1973.

Front entry to Betty Smith house in Chapel Hill 2010.

I heard Betty Smith speak once to aspiring writers when I was very young at the Methodist Church. I recall one of her insights into writing characters was to remember that no person is born bad, but that evil grows inside some people for various reasons. She said the same is true with intolerance, saying no one is born intolerant, but grows into this over time because of the prejudices of the community one lives in. Her greatest fear for civilization was that it would not be destroyed by the atom bomb, as most people felt then, but by intolerance. 

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Ric Carter was Chapel Hill's best counterculture photographer in the 1970s. He came to Chapel Hill from Gates County in 1967 as a 17 year old freshman, and got his first serious camera in 1969, a Yaschica Mat twin-lens reflex. As a student at UNC he learned to develop his own film, and was soon combining his love for music with his passion for photography to document the bands and concerts in the area.

The Byrds at Carmichael Auditorium, UNC Chapel Hill 1971.
Left to right: Clarence White, Roger McGuinn, Gene Parsons, and Skip Battin

Ric Carter, The Chapel Hill photographer whose images have kept our musical memories alive

Frank Zappa fronting his Petit Wazoo Band in Charlotte, November 1972

Carter was also a writer and photographer for the legendary Protean Radish, a newspaper associated with the Southern Student Organizing Committee. Ric has continued his career in photography and journalism throughout his life. He was the photography editor for the Washington Daily News where he was part of the 1990 Community Service Pulitzer Prize winning staff. He is currently the editor of The North Carolina Mason, journal of the Freemasons fraternity in North Carolina.

The J. Giles Band at UNC's Jubilee 1971. Peter Wolf vocals and Danny Klein bass.

In 1971 Duke University had Joe College weekend about the same time UNC had Jubilee. This is Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead. Other performers that year were The Beach Boys, Nils Lofgrin with Grin, and The New Riders of the Purple Sage 

 
Tom Rush at UNC's 1971 Jubilee

What is special about Carter's photography is his vision. If you look at his photographs in this article and look at a more extensive collection at http://cartersxrd.net/Site/Performances/Performances.html you will see his a amazing eye for composition. He knows how to emphasize his subject and eliminate anything that is not important to the picture. There are no distractions in his pictures only an image that captures the artist in performance at that moment.

These are photos of members of South Wing performing at Carmichael Auditorium in Chapel Hill on August 8, 1972. South Wing featured Ed Ibarguen and Scott Madry, and many consider them Chapel Hill's best band of the 1970s. South Wing may have gotten their name from the psychiatric ward at UNC Memorial Hospital where many young Chapel Hillians were involuntarily commited because of drugs, depression, and anti-social behavior.

The Blazers of Chapel Hill 1971
Left to right: Sherman Tate, Joey Earth, Ronny Taylor, and Rodney Underwood

Duane Allman shortly before he died, with the Allman Brothers at UNC's Chapel Hill Jubilee in May 1971

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by Charly Mann

Today, May 26 2010, Art Linkletter, one of the kindest and most gracious individuals I ever met died at 97. In 1957, at the age of seven, I was fortunate enough to be one of the children he talked to on his very popular CBS television show, Art Linkletter's House Party.

I remember the interview process to be selected to appear on the show was quite a challenge. It seemed to me they were looking for kids who were either quite charming or very funny. I did not think I was charming, but thought I could ad-lib funny responses to questions that would make people laugh. A woman interviewed me for an hour asking me several dozen off the wall questions that I knew were similar to what Art Linkletter would ask the kids on his program. I tried my best to come up with answers that an adult audience would find amusing, and was selected to be one of the children on his show on July 19, 1957.

My invitation to appear on Art Linkletter's CBS televsion show HOUSE PARTY on July 19, 1957

On the day of the show I went to make-up, and then was led out into a bright studio in the CBS building in downtown Los Angles next to the Farmer's Market. I had no hint of what Mr. Linkletter might ask me, but knew I better be able to think quickly of an amusing response. You can listen to my conversation with Art Linkletter here to see if you think I did a good job. Years later Linkletter repackaged many of what he considered the funniest responses to his questions in a television program called Kid's Say The Darndest Things in which my appearance was featured. I was most happy getting to say I was from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and then latter finding out that most of my friends had actually seen me on national television.

Charly Mann and a "Police Officer" in Disneyland several hours after he finished appearing on the Art Linkletter House Party television program

Art Linkletter was one of the last surviving adults I looked up to when I was young, and now he is gone. There was so much to admire in him. He never swore or said anything negative about anyone in public. Even in the segregated 1950s, he had black children on his show, and he knew how to make entertaining television that was not only wholesome, but could be enjoyed by everyone. The world has lost a true gentleman.

One funny part of this story was that after the show I was loaded up with gifts for being a guest on the program. My mother parked in the reserved loading area for CBS personnel as I made several trips back and forth to carry items out to her car. Behind her in a Mercedes convertible was a very upset Liberace who was waiting to unload some items for the taping of his television show later that day. By my third trip Liberace had began honking his horn at my mother and his face had turned red. Years later I would learn that was the start of very bad day for him. He was about to give a deposition in his $25 million libel suit against Confidential magazine saying he was a homosexual, and that evening, two men broke into his home in Sherman Oaks and beat his mother. 

In 1957 no one in the entertainment business would admit to being gay, and the fact that Liberace was "outed" could have ended his career if it proved to be true. Liberace actually won his lawsuit in 1958 proving he was not a homosexual, even though today it is widely known that he was.

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by Charly Mann 

I would like some help with Chapel Hill Memories. From what I understand the population of the United States is 307 million. Of that number 118 million are over 60 and I doubt if they have the energy to write articles about Chapel Hill. That leaves 193 million Americans who can help, however 120 million of those are under the age of 20 and thus do not have the time or experience for this endeavor. That still gives me a pool of 69 million to choose from. Unfortunately 59 million Americans are employed by the government – local, state, or federal, and we all know people who work for the government feel they are already doing their community service with their jobs. So my pool of potential contributors is down to 10 million, but there are also 7 million U.S. citizens serving in the armed forces and these men and women are just too busy protecting our country to help. That leaves only 3 million of you to help. Unfortunately there are one million Americans who are patients in hospitals or committed to mental institutions and they are of no use to me. Finally, there are 1,999,998 Americans serving time in prison, so that leaves just you and me, and I really could use your help writing about the people, places, and events of Chapel Hill's past.

Submit your articles to CHMemories@gmail.com.

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by Charly Mann 

Chapel Hill Memories is establishing the Chapel Hill Hall of Fame to memorialize citizens who have made a significant impact to our community. The first inductee is Billy Arthur who did more than any other person in our town's history to make us laugh, help us play, and appreciate our heritage.

Billy Arthur, first inductee into the Chapel Hill Hall of Fame

Billy Arthur was one of many polymaths who have lived in Chapel Hill, but none excelled in as much as Billy, and no one in town came close to his curiosity, storytelling ability, entrepreneurship, enthusiasm, and pure talent. Over his lifetime he had a huge impact on Chapel Hill and the state. He was a born ham with a great singing voice who was a touring Vaudeville performer before giving up the stage to enter UNC. The highlight of his act was his performance of the song Carolina Moon. As a UNC freshman in 1929 his enthusiasm sparked the freshman class to yell louder than the seniors at football games. By 1932 he was Carolina's head cheerleader and many say the most fervent the Tarheels have ever had. (His daughter Annis shared many of her dad's best characteristics and went on to become UNC head cheerleader in 1973). After graduating from UNC with a degree in journalism he started writing a newspaper column that was made up of primarily humorous stories about the people of North Carolina. He continued writing that column for the next 66 years. In 1940 he became owner, publisher, photographer, and primary writer for a newspaper in Jacksonville North Carolina.Throughout his life he always had two or more careers simultaneously, and while he ran the newspaper he was twice elected to the North Carolina House of Representatives.

Billy Arthur, UNC head cheerleader 1932-33. In the 1950s and 60s another former UNC head cheerleader, Vic Huggins, owned Huggin's Hardware on East Franklin, and downtown insurance agent George Coxhead was also a cheerleader at Carolina.

Annis Arthur, Billy's daughter, on left was co-head cheerleader at UNC in 1971 

In 1953 Billy moved with his wife Edith and family to Chapel Hill where he became the marketing director for the recently opened Morehead Planetarium. He loved Chapel Hill and its people, and was a common sight around town. In the 1950s and 60s I remember him using a white golf cart as his means for transportation. He also had one bad habit which was chain smoking Pall Mall cigarettes, which I think he must have been immune to. He was also quick witted and wise. During the height of the UNC Speaker Ban in which the North Carolina  Legislature enacted a law that prevented students from hearing ideas they thought dangerous or immoral he said "I wonder what the Legislature will do when they find out Tarzan didn’t marry Jane, and Snow White lived with Seven Dwarfs?"

This is Billy Arthur's home at 753 Old Mill Road in Chapel Hill. I remember in the mid 1950s when I used to visit Annis that in her room was a large jar filled with what must have been $50 in coins - more money than I had ever had. Unlike me, she learned frugality while I spent my money in those days as fast I got it.  

Billy was first and foremost a storyteller. As a young boy I was a friend of his daughter Annis and often visited the Arthurs' home. I remember Billy several times recounting something that to most of us would pass as an ordinary occurrence in a dramatic narrative that always had a punch line. Billy had a regular column in the Chapel Hill Weekly simply titled Billy Arthur which usually included six to ten short humorous pieces about things he had seen or overheard the previous week.

Billy Arthur on right working as a stagehand at the Playmaker's Theater

I think Billy Arthur’s greatest contribution to Chapel Hill was the Billy Arthur Hobby Store which opened in the new Eastgate shopping center in 1962. (It moved to University Mall in 1972). It was the first real toy, arts, or craft store in Chapel Hill, and by far the best in all those categories in the state for decades. I spent many hours there buying model planes, railroad cars for my train sets, and most of all miniature toy soldiers. Both Mr. and Mrs. Arthur worked at the store, and their sales staff was the most friendly and knowledgeable in Chapel Hill. Mr. Powell, who was my family's mailman, moonlighted there. I always felt their employees were simply part of Arthur's extended family.

Billy Arthur Hobby Shop ad soon after the store first opened in 1962. Billy sold the store in 1980, but it continued under his name long after that.

Billy Arthur was the most lighthearted person I have ever known and was loved by everyone in Chapel Hill. He almost always had an amusing joke or story to tell. A good example of Billy's nature is an obituary he once wrote for himself; "Billy Arthur, Sr. died suddenly. Mrs. Arthur is being held for questioning." A statement he made in 1964 was humorously prophetic: "Some people want to die rich. Not me. I want to die old." Billy Arthur died in Chapel Hill in 2006 at the age of 95.

A young Billy Arthur with the ever present dog running free on Franklin Street in 1933

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by Charly Mann

It is impossible to find a single adjective to describe the extraordinary contribution Kay Kyser bestowed on Chapel Hill, the University of North Carolina, and the state of North Carolina. He was an exceptional human being who excelled as an entertainer and a humanitarian. He was one of the biggest stars of all time, yet walked away from fame and fortune at his peak in 1951 to live in a dilapidated house in Chapel Hill. The rest of his life he dedicated to making the town and the world a better place. Among his work was the establishment of two of Chapel Hill's most important institutions, UNC Memorial Hospital and UNC Public Television.

Kay Kyser as a student at the University of North Carolina went by the name of Kike for his first three years . He graduated in 1927 as Kay Kyser.

Kay was born in 1905 and came to UNC as student in 1923 with more energy and enthusiasm than any person who has ever lived in Chapel Hill. He became involved in almost every extra-curricular activity the university had to offer including becoming the school's head cheerleader. This was also a time when Hal Kemp, an extremely talented and sophisticated musician, was a UNC student and was heading a small pop orchestra of university students that had a strong regional following. When Kemp and his band left UNC in 1926 to build a national audience he encouraged his friend Kike Kyser (as he was then known) to start and lead his own UNC jazz orchestra. Kyser was originally hesitant since not only could he not read music, but he could not even play an instrument, but Kemp said his enthusiastic nature and organizational ability would make up for this.

The Kay Kyser Orchestra the first year as a full-time band in 1928.In this photo Kay Kyser is leaning over on the far left. He was classified as the "Director" of the orchestra. The musicians are Benny Cash - piano, Muddy Berry - drums, George Strum - banjo and guitar, Bill Rhodes - saxophone, Art Walters - first saxophone, clarinet, and violin, Sol Mason - trumpet, mellophone, and saxophone, Charles Kraft - second trumpet and mellophone, and George Wetherwax - trombone and mellophone.

Kyser formed his band in the fall of 1926 with six other students and they were called Kike Kyser and his Orchestra. Musically none of the members were very good, but Kyser made them into as much a comedic novelty act as a band, and they put on a great show filled with stunts and Kyser's own brand of corny stage antics. At the end of the school year Kyser took his band on a successful tour of Ohio and Pennsylvania. At the start of his senior year (1926– 1927) he changed his name to Kay Kyser (the “K” is from the initial of his middle name Kern), because he had learned “kike” was an ethnic slur for Jews.

Kay Kyser and his Orchestra perform two shows at the Pickwick Theater on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill in May of 1928. The band sometimes made as much as $2000 per performance in those days. That is equivalent to $25,000 today.

Kyser graduated with honors from UNC with a degree in commerce (now called business), but was determined to try to make his band a national success. Their road was long and challenging and took a decade of perservenance before they achieved this goal. During those early years the most endearing aspect of the orchestra was that during each performance the band members would assemble as a Glee Club and sing a series of popular songs.

Kay and the band found the perfect formula for success in 1933 when they became Kay Kyser's Kollege of Musical Knowledge on a radio show in Chicago. Kyser wore a professor's graduation robe and called himself the Old Professor (he was then 27 but looked at least 40). On the program the audience was called "the students" and were asked questions about music. If they answered the question to the satisfaction of the Old Professor (usually incorrectly) they got a small monetary prize and a "diploma".

Kay Kyser as the "Old Professor" on the Kollege of Musical Knowledge NBC radio show asked a "student" a musical question

The program became a national hit in 1938 when it was brought to a national radio audience by NBC, catapulting Kyser to fame and riches almost overnight. In those days when there was no TV, radio programs often drew a larger audience than top television shows do today. The Kollege of Musical Knowledge was a top ten radio show for 10 of the 13 years it was on the radio, often attracting an audience of 20 million listeners. By comparison today America's #1 television show Dancing with the Stars attracts just under 20 million viewers and the population of the United States is now more than 2 and a half times as large as it was in the 1940s.

Kay Kyser's movie Playmates playing at the Carolina Theater in Chapel Hill in 1943

Kyser and many of the members of his band became celebrities and even though they did not sell as many records as Glenn Miller and his Orchestra they were better paid and attracted bigger audiences in the 1940s. Hollywood also came calling and Kyser and his Kollege of Musical Knowledge starred in seven motion pictures.

Three of the biggest stars of the 1940s, left to right: Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, and Kay Kyser

During the 1940's Kyser and his Orchestra achieved another great milestone, they had 11 songs reach number 1 in the country including On a Slow Boat to China, Old Buttermilk Sky, and the Woody Woodpecker Song which also won an Oscar for best song. This compares to artists with much longer careers like Michael Jackson who had 13 #1 songs and Madonna with 12. The Bee Gees and Elton John had only 9 #1 songs, and Stevie Wonder and Janet Jackson had 10.

The Woody Woodpecker song was a huge #1 hit for Kay Kyser and his Orchestra in 1948

During World War II no entertainer, including Bob Hope, performed for more troops and at more military bases than Kay Kyser and his traveling USO show always included a bevy of beautiful Hollywood starlets. One of those in 1944 was Georgia Carroll, a Dallas native, who had found instant success as a top fashion and cover model in New York at the age of 17 which led her to a career in the movies. The two were married in 1944 and remained so for the rest of Kay's life.

Georgia Carroll was a celebrity model by the time she was 20 with covers on magazines like Vogue and Redbook. She began appearing in movies in the early 1940s and surely would have had a great success as an actress had she not married Kay and started a family. While she was single she was often seen with the likes of men like Howard Hughes and Jimmy Stewart. After the Kysers moved to Chapel Hill they would usually spend their summers in Beverly Hills so that Georgia could see her many friends there. Georgia Kyser entered UNC in 1951 as a part-time student and graduated about 15 years later with a degree in art.

Kyser was never comfortable with the trappings of fame and show business, andeven though his public persona was one of a corny individual, he was highly intelligent, a deep thinker, and a very religious person. Soon after he married he made a commitment to himself and his family to get out of show business and dedicate the rest of his life to humanitarian purposes. His first major cause began shortly thereafter when he learned North Carolina had the worst health care system in the nation. For the next six years he used his celebrity status and much of his time to lobby the North Carolina legislature to provide funding to build a first rate teaching hospital to train doctors and nurses. One of his most effective lobbying tactics was to get Frank Sinatra and Dinah Shore to team up with him to record a song called It's All Up To You, but usually referred to in the state as "The Good Health Song", which encouraged the people of North Carolina to rise up and call on their legislatures to support this plan. His efforts were successful and North Carolina Memorial Hospital opened at UNC Chapel Hill in September of 1952.

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In 1945 North Carolina ranked 42 out of 48 among states in health care. Kay Kyser wanted to make North Carolina #1 by establishing a first rate medical school as well as more medical facilities around the state. He got two of the top songwriters of the period, Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne to write a song to mobilize North Carolina in this effort. He also got the biggest star of the day, Frank Sinatra, to sing the song along with top female singer Dinah Shore.  

In 1951, while Kay was in New York doing his second year of the Kollege of Musical Knowledge for NBC television, he learned that several states had started public educational television stations. He began to focus his efforts on securing funding to establish UNC public television to be headquartered in Chapel Hill. Not only was he successful in this endeavor, he even got his network, NBC, to donate most of the equipment needed for the station.

Kay Kyser's stage persona was one of a wild silly professor, yet in reality he was a soft-spoken, highly intelligent, and reflective man.

At the end of the second season of his highly rated television show Kay said goodbye to the limelight for good and moved to his favorite place on earth, Chapel Hill. It was 1951 and he moved with his wife and daughters to the oldest house in town located at 504 E. Franklin St. He had inherited the house from one of his relatives, but it was in such poor condition that most people thought it should be torn down. The house was originally owned by a UNC ancient language processor named William Hooper.

This is the Kay Kyser house at 504 East Franklin Street. The next article that will appear in Chapel Hill Memories by me will be a feature on this house.

By the mid 1930s Kay was living life in the fast lane but not enjoying it. A member of the Church of Christian Science helped straighten him out, and Kay became interested in this faith. A decade later Kay began to feel run down and started suffering from arthritis, and a Christian Science practitioner helped cure these ailments. (Christian Science disdains traditional medicine in favor of healing through prayer.) After this he became more active in the religion, and took an intensive course to become a Christian Science practitioner so he could help heal others through the teachings his religion.

For the remaining thirty five years of his life Kay was involved in making life better for the people of Chapel Hill and North Carolina, donating his time, organizational skills, and money to establish the North Carolina Symphony, the North Carolina Safe Driving Program, scholarships at UNC in music and drama, as well as well as being an ardent fundraiser for the Playmaker's Theater. He also was very active in the ministry of the Christian Science church and for a while moved to Boston to head their television and radio division. In 1983 he was named president of the Christian Science Church.

Kay Kyser died in 1985 and is buried in the Chapel Hill cemetery.

Kay Kyser headstone in Old Chapel Hill Cemetery

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by Charly Mann

While Chapel Hill is proud of the athletic glory of past UNC sporting teams, famed musicians who once called the town home, and its magnificent setting and beauty, it is the large number of great minds that have inhabited the town that make it so extraordinary. While these individuals have not received the wide spread adulation and celebrity status of other residents, Chapel Hill Memories will try to rectify this oversight by occasionally profiling some of these people.

Growing up in Chapel Hill I was privileged to meet and get to know a wide array of distinguished professors, university administrators, writers and playwrights. One of these individuals was the greatly admired UNC professor of philosophy Maynard Adams. He and his family lived near me when I was young, and he first attracted my attention by hand digging with a pick ax, shovel, and wheel barrel a large bomb shelter under his house on Old Mill Road in 1962. As I grew older and got to read some of his books, as well as letters he would often write to my father, I gained an appreciation this man's intellect.

Maynard Adams in 1962, the year he built a  bomb shelter under his house

The following was written by Maynard Adams in 1996 (Adams lived from 1919 to 2003) 

Death simply terminates one's life, but death on the horizon takes on meaning; it forces one to try to wrap up one's life and bring it to a fuller and richer completion. My pending death, although frightening, especially when first confronted, has become an important part of my life. It keeps my life in clearer focus. Every day becomes more precious and I hope more fully lived. My consciousness has been raised and my love deepened; the world has taken on a new splendor. While all of this makes life more attractive and whets my appetite for more time, it makes death a source of meaning that redeems it somewhat.

Of course the devil is in the dying, and the wrenching and tearing of the lives closely woven with one's own.  There are blessings to be found even in the dying and the loss of a loved one, if we are open to them.

The following is a condensed version of a 13 page typed memoir Maynard Adams wrote in 1994 that I found stuck in one of my files.

I grew up on a family farm in Halifax County in south/central Virginia. My early life revolved around the farm, the local Baptist church, and the school. Both the church and the school drew me like magnets, for to me they were gateways to a higher reality and a wider world. My family and most of my neighbors had only a limited education, but they were religious people and had a profound respect for education. We had daily family Bible reading and prayer in my home. My father always said a good education was something you would never lose and nobody could take it away from you. By the time I was twelve years old I was committed to being a Baptist minister and planned to attend the University of Richmond as a ministerial student upon graduation from high school.

Even in high school I began to feel a tension between the simple orthodox religion of my home and church and my studies in school. By the end of my first year at the University of Richmond, my intellectual cramps were severe. I turned to philosophy in trying find a way to deal with them. In the fall of my sophomore year I wrote my mother that I was engrossed with certain philosophy books that I had to force myself to do the assignments in my courses and to go to bed at night. At that point I had not taken a philosophy course, but I went on to major in philosophy with the hope of resolving the tension between my religion and the culture dominant in my education. During this time, although deeply troubled, I worked in several churches in the Richmond area. In fact, I was pastor of two churches during my last two years of college. I expected to find a solution to my intellectual problems that would allow me to continue as a minister.

Maynard Adams in 1951 shortly after starting his career as a philosophy professor at the University of North Carolina 

Upon graduating from Richmond I chose Colgate Rochester Divinity School because I understood that it offered an approach that would reconcile Christianity and modern ways of thought; and I began that summer a M.A. program in philosophy and literature at the University of Richmond, which I hoped to complete in summer sessions while enrolled at Rochester. At Rochester I took to my studies eagerly, doing far more work in each course than was expected. The longest paper I wrote was over 500 pages in a course, and most of my papers ranged from 50 to 100 pages. I did this amount of work because of the hunger I had for understanding the subject matter. After receiving an M.A. from Rochester, I enrolled in Harvard University in 1944 to do more graduate work in philosophy. At Harvard I received another M. A. and a Ph D.

I became a modern naturalist, but I remained troubled about how and why the classical framework of thought that defined a value-and meaning-saturated world had been transformed into our modern scientific perspective that presents us with a purely factual world devoid of inherent structures of value and meaning. I have carried on a running philosophical critique of modern naturalism while I developed and argued for a full-fledged humanistic view of the culture and the world. The great revolution in Western civilization was occasioned; I contend, by a shift in our culture-generating stance toward the world. The classical stance was the humanistic perspective, which was defined by such questions as: Who are we? What does reality require of us? What is it that we ought to become and ought to do? and How can we understand the world and ourselves in a way that will further the human enterprise conceived in these terms?

2009 book Maynard Adams : Southern Philosopher of Civilization by Glenn Blackburn on the philosophy of Maynard Adams  (1919 - 2003)

On the other hand, modern Western civilization is defined by such questions as: How can we get what we want? How can we impose our will on the world and exploit it for our purposes? and How can we understand the world in a way that will give us manipulatory power over our environment? This shift led to the progressive elimination of humanistic concepts (especially the concepts of meaning and value). This, I contend, is what gave rise to subjectivistic theories of the humanistic dimension of the culture, including the language of lived experience, morality, politics, and religion. Furthermore it is what pushes contemporary thinkers towards the total cultural subjectivism that is proclaimed by the self- labeled postmodernists.

Although I tried for ten years to find a way of integrating the culture and of developing a unified worldview on naturalistic terms, I was forced to conclude that the culture and the world can be made whole again only within the humanistic perspective and in humanistic categories. My four major books taken together make this case against modern scientific naturalism and for a realistic humanism. They are Ethical Naturalism and the Modern Worldview (1960, 1973, 1985), Philosophy and the Modern Mind: A Philosophical Critique of Modern Western Civilization (1975, 1985) , The Metaphysics of Self and World: Toward a Humanistic Philosophy (1991), and Religion and Cultural Freedom (1993).

The other books I have published along the way are The Fundamentals of General Logic (1954), Logic Problems (1954), (with others) The Language of Value (1957), Commonsense Realism (1966), and The Idea of America (1977). In addition, I have published about 100 articles and reviews in professional journals, encyclopedias, and books; and I have written newspaper columns for many years on topics of public interest from an ethical or philosophical point of view. In addition, I produced and participated in twelve educational films; and I produced and participated in six one-hour television programs on The Idea of America.

Book by Chapel Hill philosopher and professor Maynard Adams

My primary work has been teaching and participating in the life of the universities where I have taught. I was a graduate assistant in philosophy at Harvard from 1944 to 1946 and a teaching fellow and freshman adviser in 1946 to 47. I was an assistant professor of philosophy at Ohio University in 1947-48, but I moved on to The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1948, where I remained on the faculty for forty- two years, retiring in 1990. I have been a visiting professor at the University of Southern California, the State University of New York at Albany, and the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. I have lectured widely in universities and in public forums.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has been a good place for me to do my work. I always wanted my career to be in my native South. And The University has been good to me. I moved smoothly through the academic ranks, becoming a full professor in 1958, and was elected to a coveted Kenan professorship in 1971. I was chairman of my department from 1960 to 1965: director of the Curriculum on Peace, War, and Defense 1970-72, and chairman of The University faculty 1976-79. I served on numerous hoards and committees through the years.

I have been active in professional organizations. I help found and was president of the North Carolina Philosophical Society; I was president of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology; and I served on the executive committee and was chairman of the program committee of the American Philosophical Association. In addition to having helped establish and having served as director of the Curriculum on Peace, War, and Defense: I helped establish and was director of the Free World Institute in The University in the early 1950s to conduct a state-wide program to counter the McCarthy-like mentality in the Cold War. I was one of the co-founders (with a group of business and institutional leaders) , and served as a member of the Board of Directors, of the Tanglewood Center for the Study of Human Values in the 1970s. I proposed and was instrumental in establishing the Program in the Humanities and Human Values in The University in 1979; and I had a guiding role in the development and running of it for more than ten years. It is a program of weekend and week-long seminars for people from all across the region. I worked for eight years with, and was chairman of, the North Carolina Humanities Council. In the 1980s, I was chairman of the Governor's Taskforce on Science, Technology, and Human Values. And I have worked with local churches and schools in various capacities. In connection with the civil rights movement in the 1960s, I proposed and was chairman of Chapel Hill Community Action, Inc., which was one of the first such organizations in the nation. It was expanded into The Orange Economic Opportunity Commission, Inc. , and then into the Joint Orange/Chatham Community Action, Inc., which I chaired in its early years. It is still a functioning institution

1963 lecture by UNC philosophy professor Maynard Adams entitled Where is Religion in Philosophy?

My work with students, The University, the profession, the community, and the state has been most gratifying. The problems I have taken on in my philosophical writing and teaching are so large and so deeply situated in our culture that it is difficult to know whether I have had any effect, except with my own students and some others who may study my written work. But I have had some good students, both undergraduate and graduate. I have former Ph.D. students who are professors and administrators in universities all across the United States and a few in Canada and other countries. I am encouraged by the thought that one can never know what fruit one's ideas may hear.

While I hesitate to mention honors I have received, this memoir would be incomplete if I left them out. Perhaps the one that I have cherished most was election to the Kenan Distinguished Professorship in 1971. That same year I received The Thomas Jefferson Award from the McConnell Foundation, an Outstanding Educator of America Award for "'contributions to higher education and service to the community" from a national foundation, and the undergraduates at UNC-CH made me an honorary member of the Golden Fleece, their highest honorary society. In 1976, my book Philosophy and the Modern Mind was selected for inclusion in a series of "Contemporary Classics" for translation into several languages and distribution in many parts of the world by the U.S. State Department. In 1985, my book Ethical Naturalism and the Modern Worldview was selected for republication in a series of "classic works in their field" by the Greenwood Press: A division of Congressional Information Service, Inc. In 1988 I was given The North Carolina Adult Education Association's Special Award in recognition of "outstanding contributions to continuing education in North Carolina." In 1989, Wake Forest University gave me the honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree. Also in 1989, I was presented with a volume of essays on my work by sixteen philosophers from around the country, edited by one of me former students on the faculty at Williams College; it is entitled Mind, Value and Culture: Essays in Honor of E. M. Adams. In 1992, the University of Richmond gave me the honorary Doctor of Humanities degree. Also in 1992, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill established an endowed distinguished professorship that bears my name. All of this was totally unexpected in each case and all the more gratifying for that reason.

The Philosopher of Chapel Hill, Maynard Adams

My Dad, William Robert Mann who was a UNC professor of mathematics, and Maynard Adams were great friends and loved talking about philosophy and religion. Later in life they would go on long hikes in the Blue Ridge Mountains and engage in stimulating conversation along the trail. Fortunately many of their conversations have been preserved in writing, and the Wilson Library even has several audio recordings of their conversations in their archives.

The following is a letter my father wrote to Maynard when my father was 78.

Fall of 1998

Dear Maynard,

Since our lunch this past Monday I have been reading alternatively your Society Fit for Human Beings and Sokal's Fashionable Nonsense. I find much to admire in the former, and much to ponder in the latter.

The Age of Science, which dominated our youth, was a peak of intellectual achievement. The cloud of post modernism which is now sitting over us creates a pit of anti-intellectual darkness. We are in a state of free fall from the sublime to the ridiculous. Today underneath the glitter of scientific brilliance is a gestating growth of the most muddleheaded irrationality to be found in history. The nonsense spreading under the name of post modernism is not a blight rising from the swamps of illiteracy, but it is descending upon us from the highest levels of educational snobbery.

How can an age of such brilliance decline so quickly into irrational darkness? I think Chesterton answered that question when he said; "When men stop believing in God, they will believe in anything."

Bob Mann

Maynard Adams inscription to my Dad, Bob Mann, in his book A Society Fit for Human Beings

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by Charly Mann

Most mothers I knew growing up in Chapel Hill had three or more children. In addition to being great mothers and wives, almost every mother was involved in several volunteer activities as PTA mothers, club scout den mothers, brownies leaders, organizers of fund raising activities, and more.

For every mother in Chapel Hill, her children were the priority of her life, and she did everything possible to make sure they had a happy and stimulating childhood. Expectations of what a mother should be and do were probably never higher than during my childhood in the 1950s and 60s. I do not believe that any mother of that era had what we now call personal time; they were just too busy.

This page is dedicated to all the mothers of Chapel Hill, and is open to all current and former Chapel Hill residents to post a photograph and a brief recollection about their mother. Send information to chmemories@gmail.com

from Bob Jurgensen:

Paquita Mignon Morton, my mother met and married my father, Robert Fine in 1941. They had three children: Robin (deceased), Robert (now living in Virginia) and Debbie, who lives in Sanford. She was known by most family and friends as simply "Kiki."

My mom worked as a journalist and columnist for several newspapers, including the News & Observer as state desk editor, a columnist and society editor ("Town and Gown") for the Chapel Hill Newspaper from the 1960's to the early 1990's, winning countless state and national writing awards. Her work spanned nearly 40 years.

After enduring a difficult divorce, she became a single mom raising three children. She often worked two or more jobs, to make ends meet. During that period of time, she was independent, never asking for help from anyone.

In the mid 1960's mom met and married Kai Jurgensen, a professor of drama at UNC. She moved from Glen Lennox apartments to Whitehead Circle. Kai passed away in the early 1970's, and mom lived alone near Eastgate for many years. With no car, she often walked up Strowd's Hill to the west end of Chapel Hill, where the newspaper office was located. Only if it was bad weather would she "waste" money on a taxi to get back and forth!

Mom met and married a retired Ernst & Young partner, Robert (Bob) Shafer in the 1980's and lived comfortably with Bob for many “fun and fascinating” years, traveling and exploring places she never thought she would see. Then Bob passed away from a stroke.

Alone, mom lived a number of years after Bob’s death. Then she was diagnosed with cancer, requiring 11 months of treatment before she passed away in her home in 2003.

Now, as I recall my visits to mom, I remember that everywhere we went -- be it McDonald's, the Carolina Inn or the Ram's Head Club -- she was greeted by a steady stream of people from every direction. In 2004, an office at the School of Journalism at UNC, was named in her honor, the result of a fund raising effort.

Having been an integral part of Chapel Hill life, my Mother was, and is, missed by many.

from Robert Humphreys:

My Mother was Nancy Leigh Humphreys and she lived to the age of 97 with reasonably good health and mental capacity. She smoked until about the age of 93 and never had cancer or any other related problems and drove until she was 91. In 1956, I was the age of 8 and we lived in a rental house on Patterson Place, just a block and a half South of Franklin Street. Mother worked alongside my Dad in building Chapel Hill Cleaners, a business they started in 1947 on West Franklin Street. In retrospect, They built that business from the ground up, although in those times, it was my Father that got the credit. But Mother was an integral part of its foundation and operation. She went to work every day and in later years ran the Laundromat that they opened on East Franklin Street in '57. But she did get off early everyday about 3:00 PM so she could come home to take care of her 3 children and cook a full dinner Every evening. Her work didn't end then as she also did alterations and sewing for the cleaners, many times at night! She did many of the alterations for the ROTC on campus and for the 5 men's shops that were on East Franklin Street and used the remnants of shortened pants legs to make pants and shorts for my brother and me. She worked hard and took us all to University Baptist Church on Sundays; well, all but my Dad. She was known for her generosity and kindness to everyone around her. The only bad thing I can say about her is that on the night of the UNC Basketball Championship game in 1957, she and my Dad took my brother and sister to Franklin Street to celebrate the win and left me at home asleep in my bed!

 From Ruth Vickers:

My mom, Bessie Bland Hundley, born 1894 and 42 years old when I was born, had the most beautiful white hair at a young age. She bore 5 children, lived to bury 4 of them, as well as her husband, Chris. Working in Venable's (Carrboro) cotton mill at age 12, she still managed enough schooling to become a well-read, musical, educated lady. President of Carrboro Schools PTA, Sunday School leader, contributor to folk song collector, Richard Chase's accumulation of old time songs and poems. She lived to be 91 years of age.

From Dianne Rolwing:

Dorothea S. Thompson was known throughout the garden world for introducing the silica-gel process for drying flowers. This process, described in the magazine, American Home (1960), was a sensational success, and the magazine commented that they were "literally swamped with inquiries" following publication of the story. She was also the author of the book, Creative Decorations with Dried Flowers. She was Registrar of UNC School of Nursing for 20 years.

I have very fond memories of my mom. She was always a very hard worker and did without many things so she could provide for her family. She grew up in Wilmington, NC so we spent most of our many vacations at the coast.

She was always helping the poor. We had a maid who was very poor. One Thanksgiving, she made a huge dinner for her and her family. When we took the meal to her, we saw that she was living in a deplorable state with no running water, no electricity, newspaper stuck in the walls to keep the cold air out and dirt floors. When we took her home, she would never let us drive her to her house. She always said that her driveway was in bad shape and we might get stuck so we let her out at the top of her long driveway. Our whole family was so overwhelmed with sadness that my mom immediately made some phone calls and got her quickly into a brand new public housing apartment. She went around our house and collected lamps, etc., made some phone calls to round up things she would need to make her apt. a home. Daisy, as she was called, cried and told my mom that her apartment was the most beautiful home she had ever seen.

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 by Charly Mann

Since I was six years old I have hiked up and down the unmarked trail from Greenwood Road to Gimghoul Castle thousands of times on my way to and from various locations in Chapel Hill. Long before I was born another man often walked through these woods. His name was Horace Williams, and he was a professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina from 1890 until the time of his death in 1940. Even though I never knew him I often felt his spirit on my path.

Horace Williams (1858 to 1940). He was the gadfly of Chapel Hill and a UNC philosophy professor from 1890 to 1940. His house is now home to the Preservation Society of Chapel Hill.

Williams was an unusual man who believed a teacher's job was to help a student find himself. His favorite subject was Socrates, and he taught students about him by making his classroom a pure Platonic experience. Williams believed everything had meaning. He once said "There is no abstract knowledge." He would never allow his students to make assumptions or speak in abstractions. He was by all accounts as much a gadfly in Chapel Hill as Socrates had been in Athens. It was even said by some who knew him well that he not only practiced Socrates, he was Socrates.

This followings recounts one of my walks on this trail when I was accompanied by the spirit of this man.

Entrance of the trail from Greenwood Road up to Gimghoul Castle. Much of this land was owned by Chapel Hill novelist Betty Smith.

Horace Williams: Excuse me young man; I understand you are interested in me.
Charly Mann: What – where did you come from – do I know you?
Horace Williams: Were you not recently visiting my house?
Charly Mann: Yeah – oh I get it... you must be an actor the Preservation Society of Chapel Hill hired for their open house.
Horace Williams: No my friend, I am Socrates.
Charly Mann: Look buddy... cool... whatever you say. Now I want to get back to my walk.
Horace Williams: So you do not think I am Socrates?
Charly Mann: Look, you can be whoever you want to be, but just so you know Socrates died over 2500 years ago after drinking hemlock.
Horace Williams: Yes, my soul did leave my body, but my presence is alive as long as people like you think about my ideas.

Charly Mann on side of trail leading up to Gimghoul Castle.

Charly Mann: Okay – I'll play along for a while. You can be Socrates, and I'll ask you some questions. Why don't you walk along with me? I'll slow my pace down on account of your age.
Horace Williams: I will enjoy walking with you, but let us walk faster. Fast walking does for the body what thinking does for the mind.
Charly Mann: Hey that's a good line. So here is a question I would ask the real Socrates. Can one find happiness in life?
Horace Williams: Life is not for making you happy, but for perfecting your character. To strengthen oneself requires great challenges. Does your life give you those?
Charly Mann: Yes, I know from experience that life is a series of great challenges.
Horace Williams: That is very good. Life should be a psychological gymnasium that gives you opportunities to work on yourself.
Charly Mann: Out of curiosity Sir, I always thought Socrates spoke in Greek. You seem to have mastered English quite well since the time of your death.
Horace Williams: Ah yes, there is only one language to know if one is fortunate to spend time in the company of the Divine, and that has been English for almost 200 years.

The enchanted trail up to Gimghoul Castle has been the site of many strange occurrences.

Charly Mann: Okay so why is that?
Horace Williams: God has a small group of souls that she spends much of her time with. When we gather it always includes someone you may have heard of named Jane Austen, who sits on the Supreme's left side. Being in God's presence is the most blissful experience one can imagine, but even the Divine seems overwhelmed when Jane reads to us.
Charly Mann: I see, and would I know anyone else in this select group?
Horace Williams: Yes there are only two others, Marcus Aurelius and George Washington.
Charly Mann: A rather small group considering all the souls who must reside in heaven.
Horace Williams: Yes we are all fortunate to have escaped the cycle of birth and death and gain eternal life, but much of heaven is reflected in your own world. Each soul is an individual that has its own interests.  Everyone is in a constant state of joy and peace of mind, but few even in heaven have much desire to learn more. For the most part they are all intoxicated by the serenity of their eternal existence and seek nothing more.
Charly Mann: I must say that sounds wonderful.
Horace Williams: It is not enough for me, and those who are closest to God. The real health of the soul comes from continuous growth. My gift has been to provoke and even annoy others to come to know themselves, for only in this way can we ever really be close to God. Jane Austen, for example, has written hundreds of books since she came to us, each much better than the previous. On the other hand, most of the great writers, philosophers, composers, and artists you know from your world simply ceased creating and growing when they settled in heaven, being satisfied with perpetual bliss.
Charly Mann: So let's get back to earth for a moment, I have long had an interest in how to best find contentment in this world.
Horace Williams: Almost all of one's discontentment on earth stems from an inability to sit quietly with oneself.
Charly Mann: You mean like meditation?

Gimghoul Castle has been the home of the UNC secret society, the Order of the Gimghoul, since 1926.

Horace Williams: No, meditation usually means emptying your mind. Your mind is meant for thinking and learning.
Charly Mann: And what types of things should I be doing then?
Horace Williams: The best way to use time is by improving yourself through other men's writings so that you can come easily to what others have labored hard to know.
Charly Mann: Alright, but there are many responsibilities and distractions one encounters each day which make it difficult to find much time for this kind of self-improvement.
Horace Williams: Nonsense. You should focus on excellence and learning whether you are at work or at play. There should be no distinction between the two.
Charly Mann: There are so many bad things in this world. Can I do anything to improve it, or should I leave that for God?
Horace Williams: God has sent help to this world, and it is you and every other person who inhabits this earth.
Charly Mann: But the problems seem immense. I really don't think someone like me can make much of an impact.
Horace Williams: The problem with you and almost everyone else on this planet is that they think like you. They refuse to aim too high in their ambition because they are afraid they will miss their goal, so instead, they aim too low and they reach it.

Battle Seat is at the top of the trail to Gimghoul Castle. For most of the 19th century this was a favorite spot  for UNC students to relax and enjoy an incredible view of Durham an Raleigh. Today trees block most of that view. The seat was built at the same time as the castle in 1926. Many of the rocks used in it were placed near this spot many decades earlier by former UNC President Kemp Plummer Battle (1831 - 1919) who was a friend of Horace Williams.

At this point we reached Battle Seat at the top of the trail. Horace Williams sat down and I continued on my walk.

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 by Charly Mann

Much of what makes Chapel Hill and the University of North Carolina such a memorable place comes from a family who emigrated to Chapel Hill in 1939 from Vienna, Austria. That family is the Danzigers. Many of us recall Papa Danziger and his Old World Restaurant & Gift Shop, and his son Ted's Rathskeller, Zoom-Zoom, Ranch House, and Villa Theo. Yet the most extraordinary Danziger, in my opinion, is Ted's younger brother Erwin.

Erwin Danziger, UNC Class of 1951 at age 22

Erwin was born in Vienna on December 9th, 1928 into a family of candy makers and merchants. His grandfather had owned coffee houses in Italy and what is now Croatia. He also had a pastry and candy shop in Vienna. Erwin's father, Edward "Papa D" Danziger owned a candy factory in Vienna as well as candy stores in Berlin, Baden, and Vienna before he came to the United States. He was also the Austrian distributor for the top three premium chocolates in the world; Lindt and Tobler (both Swiss) and Droste (Dutch).

When the Danzigers moved to Chapel Hill in May of 1939 Erwin saw his father working 18 hour days for the next four months to get his store, Danziger's Candy and Coffee Shop, ready to open on Franklin Street by September. Once the store was open his Dad cut back to working 12 hours a day. Even though Erwin was eleven in 1939 he also worked in the new Danziger's Candy Store along with his mother, Emily and brother Ted.

One of the first ads for Danziger's Candy and Coffee Shop from 1939

Erwin left Chapel Hill in 1948 to serve in the US Army and was stationed in Germany. He returned to Chapel Hill in 1950 to attend UNC, and received a BA in business administration in 1951. He then returned to Germany and worked for the Army in a civilian capacity learning skills that would today be similar to those of a systems analyst. In 1952 he came back to UNC to get an MBA which he received in 1954. The entire time Erwin lived in Chapel Hill, from junior high school until he finished graduate school, he always worked at his father's store. The family has a tradition of working hard and being smart. His brother Ted, who was Chapel Hill's greatest restaurateur, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from UNC in only 2.5 years with a degree in chemistry.

After receiving his MBA Erwin decided to break from the family tradition of owning a restaurant or being a candy maker and try something else that would give him more time to enjoy life. He had seen how hard and long his father had worked to be successful as a candy maker and merchant, and by this time his brother Ted had established the Rathskeller and the Ranch House, he saw the physical toll this was taking on him. Erwin decided he could to enjoy life more if he worked for someone else. For the next ten years, from 1955 to 1965, Erwin worked as a Programmer and Systems Analyst for a succession of the top corporations in the United States including Chrysler, Dow Chemical, General Electric, and RCA. At this time large companies were just beginning to use computers to automate some of their processes. Computers before this had been used primarily for military and scientific purposes. Programming computers was a slow and tedious task that required writing code in the binary language of "0s" and "1s" which is all computers really understand. It was not until five years later, in 1960, that the "higher level" language COBOL was introduced to make programming vastly easier for business applications.

Erwin Danziger, Director of UNC's Administrative Data Processing 1965 to 1989 

After ten years in industry Danziger again returned to Chapel Hill to take on the challenge of bringing UNC into the computer age. For the next twenty-four years, from 1965 to 1989, he was the Director of Administrative Data Processing for the University of North Carolina. In addition to this, from 1965 to 1987 he taught a class in Business Systems Analysis for the department of Computer Science, as well as a computer course for UNC School of Public Health from 1975 to 1980. He was also one of three UNC representatives for TUCC, the Triangle Universities Computer Center, which was established in 1965 as a cooperative venture between Duke, NC State, and UNC-Chapel Hill to provide mainframe computing services to the three universities, the Research Triangle Institute, and other schools in the area.

Joe Ragland, TUCC Information Services manager, Erwin Danziger, TUCC Board member from UNC, Leland Williams, TUCC Director

Over Danziger's years of managing the UNC's ADP Computer Center there were several large mainframe computer systems that the University used including a UNIVAC 70/7 and a IBM 370. These were huge computers that took up several thousand feet of space and had to kept in specially designed rooms. In the beginning most of the programming and data was entered into the computer by punch cards. The ADP department eventually included around 120 programmers and systems analysts. Today almost all this work is done by personal computers that are networked to UNC's central computer.

1960s UNIVAC computer system. Today's laptop computers are many times more powerful than these machines.

In the summer of 1968 Richard Nixon, who was running for President, visited the UNC computer center to talk to Erwin about a program developed for Manpower Development Corp (MDC) that would match unemployed people to jobs with their skills. The meeting was covered by all the major network news programs and most national newspapers.

Erwin Danziger talks to Richard Nixon in 1968 shortly before he was elected president

Today Erwin Danziger is 81 and in good health, still enjoying life and the hobby he has had since he was a young boy, stamp collecting. Working for someone seems to have added longevity to his life. His Brother lived to 46, his Grandfather 72, and his father to 78. Erwin Danziger has also had a long and happy marriage. He married Betty Heath, daughter of UNC Economics Professor Milton Heath Sr. and they have two daughters, one who is now married to a Law Professor at George Mason University, and the other who is married to a Chemistry Professor at N.C. State.

Richard Nixon's visit to Chapel Hill in 1968 to meet Erwin Danziger

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This is William Strowd of Chapel Hill who graduated from Medical School at UNC in 1909

On the right is Annie Strowd's UNC graduation picture and information from her 1923 yearbook . In those days there were less than 200 students in the senior class, and everybody knew everyone else. For years graduating seniors merited not only a description about themselves, but height and weight were always given in the class yearbook. Age was given for men, but not for women. Only about 6% of the class was female.

  
Mae Braxton Strowd was Frank Strowd's daughter. This is her graduation photo from UNC in 1933. When she was a little girl she had a pet turkey named "Billy Sunday" that she would often walk with up and down Franklin Street.

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by Charly Mann

Dr. Isaac "Ike" Taylor was one of the most driven men ever to live in Chapel Hill. He came here at 18 in 1938 as a freshman at UNC and left in 1971 after serving as Dean of the UNC School of Medicine. Ike was born and brought up in the small town of Morganton at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. His grandfather, Dr. Isaac Montrose Taylor, moved to Morganton in the 1870s to take a job at the Western Insane Asylum (now called Broughton Hospital). He quickly became one of the most respected men in the town. In 1901 he set up a small private hospital called Broadoaks to treat the mentally ill.

Dean Isaac M Taylor of the University of North Carolina Medical School in his office from 1966.

Ike's father, Alexander Taylor, married Theodosia Haynes in 1920. She was from a well-to-do Massachusetts family, a state that has been connected to Ike and his family ever since. Theodosia gave birth to Ike in June of 1921. She had her then 64 year old father-in-law deliver the baby. Somehow she got a uterine infection during childbirth and died two weeks later. Dr. Taylor blamed himself for Theodosia's death and died in grief two months later. The double tragedy of his wife and father's deaths turned Ike's father into an alcoholic. He was incapable of caring for and raising Ike. Sarah Taylor Vernon, Alexander's sister, who had been Theodosia's roommate in College, raised him.

This is a picture of Ike Taylor at UNC in 1941.

Ike was a smart and driven youth who was determined to become a physician like his namesake, yet the tragic nature of his birth and upbringing, an only child without a father or mother, gave him a morose personality. As a student at UNC from 1938 to 1942, Ike displayed an intensity rarely seen in Chapel Hill. He not only focused at excelling in his academic pursuits, but also found the time to be an officer in an array of student organizations and as well as compete on the track team.

After Taylor received his undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina he went to Harvard Medical School and received his M.D. in 1945. In 1946 he came back to Morganton for a short stint as a resident physician. During that time Gertrude "Trudy" Woodward, a Massachusetts native who Ike had met while at Harvard, came down from Boston by train to visit him. They were engaged to be married and planned to have a formal wedding in Boston, but after meeting her at the train station in Salisbury Ike convinced her they could not wait and should instead get married then and there. They were married by a judge at the Salisbury City Hall, and then drove to Morganton to enjoy their first night as newlyweds.

Isaac M. Taylor's UNC senior picture

As you can see Ike Taylor had his time very full with memberships in three fraternities and many other UNC organizations. He was also taking a challenging course load and received "A" s in all of his classes.

Ike returned to Boston in the fall of 1946 for a one year internship at Massachusetts General Hospital. He followed that with a year as an assistant resident in medicine for the hospital, and in 1948 became the senior resident in medicine. Also in 1948 he was hired by Harvard University as an assistant medical advisor. By the end of 1948 Harvard named him a research fellow in medical science. For the next two years he held this position at Harvard while serving as a clinical fellow in medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. In 1951 Dr. Taylor became the chief medical resident at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Taylor had a bright future ahead of him at Harvard and Massachusetts General, yet he gave it all up to return to his native state. He began his career at the University of North Carolina on January 1, 1952 as an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine. He was a standout from the start as a professor of medicine at UNC, and In 1954 he was named a Markle Scholar, the highest honor awarded to promising new teachers in academic medicine.

Isaac "Ike" Taylor in his UNC track team outfit 1942

Starting in 1955 Dr. Taylor took a two year leave of absence from UNC to fulfill his Military Service from which he had been exempted during college and medical school. He served as a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy, setting up a medical dispensary in McMurdo Sound in the Antarctic. He had been offered an assignment at Bethesda Naval Hospital outside of Washington, D.C., but instead volunteered for service at the South Pole even though it would keep him isolated from the world and his young family. (He then had five children ranging in age from three to eight.) Those who knew him well say that after his return from military service he remained distant from his family for the rest of his life. The only real time he spent with his family was on summer vacations at Martha's Vineyard.

Isaac and Trudy Taylor's young family circa 1954. Left to right, Alex, James, Kate, Livingston, and Hugh Taylor

Upon his return to the UNC medical school his rise through its ranks was meteoric. In 1958 he was promoted to associate professor and then became a full professor in 1964. Also in that year at the age of only 43 he succeeded Dr. W. Reece Berryhill on Septenber 1st as Dean of the UNC School of Medicine. Ike Taylor simply excelled as a medical administrator, doctor, and researcher. During his years as dean he spent countless hours in his third floor office at UNC Memorial Hospital. People I have spoken to who knew him in those years describe him as tall and lean with rugged features and always having an intimidatingly serious countenance. He was also usually well tanned and in great physical condition, which was probably attributable to his primary means of relaxing: sailing and fishing.

Taylor enjoyed the challenge of being the Dean primarily because he wanted to implement ideas he had formulated since graduating from Harvard. He initiated a series of programs designed to make the UNC Medical School one of the best in the nation. He first wanted established doctors in the state to be made aware of all the new medical procedures and technologies being taught at the medical school. To that end, he made sure that a major function of the school became offering continuing education for practicing physicians. He also introduced the Second Chance program that allowed medical students who had flunked a course to repeat it. He believed this would ensure that almost every student who entered UNC's medical school would get an MD degree.

This is a picture of Dr, Isaac Taylor from 1964, the year he became Dean of the UNC Medical School.

Dean Taylor ensured only the best students got into his medical school. He believed that an applicant's personality was the key ingredient for success as a medical student. The trait he thought most important was being "motivated to do hard work." During Taylor's tenure the medical program averaged 350 applicants a year. Of those only 70 were admitted. Only 5% of the medical students enrolled at UNC flunked or dropped out while he was dean.

Politically Dr. Taylor was very liberal, to the left of almost every major politician of his era. He was an early advocate of socialized medicine and said in 1964 that "medical care must be made available to all". He served on many boards and became an outspoken advocate for improving the nation's health care system. He was a fellow of the NC Coastal Plains Heart Association, and a member of N.C. State Board of Mental Health. In 1965 U.S. Surgeon General Luther L. Terry appointed him to serve as a member of the National Advisory Research Resources Committee of the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Isaac Taylor stepped down as Dean of the Medical School in September of 1971 and was replaced by Dr. Christopher C. Fordham III. He died in November of 1996 at the age of 75 at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston where he had worked for several years before coming to Chapel Hill.

On February 9th, 2009 Trudy Taylor, ex-wife of former UNC Medical School Dean Isaac Taylor will be interviewed by the current Dean of the UNC School of Medicine William L. Roper. Later that day at 5:00 PM Dr. Taylor's only daughter, Kate, will appear at the UNC Student Union for a screening of Kate Taylor: Tunes from the Tipi and Other Songs from Home. After the screening, Kate, who is also the sister of musicians James and Livingston Taylor, will perform some songs and answer questions about the film. The film includes a history of the Taylor family in Chapel Hill. The event is free.

On February 12th Kate Taylor will be performing at Marsh Woodwinds in Raleigh at 8:00 PM.
 

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by Charly Mann

Bruce Strowd and friend Ernest Hutchins on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill in 1903. The Methodist Church now stands where the house behind them is.

Bruce Strowd was born on August 18, 1891 in a large house on what is today Davie Circle. The house was called Plum Nelly because it was "Plum out of Chapel Hill and Nelly to Durham". Today this area is considered part of central Chapel Hill and is located less than a mile from the center of town. As you drive up Franklin Street from Estes Drive almost all the land you pass was at the time part of the Strowd estate which consisted of about 1200 acres. The hill you go up towards downtown has been known as Strowd Hill for more than a century. It was not until 1950 that this area became part of Chapel Hill.

This is a photo of Plum Nelly, The Strowd House on Davie Circle, from 1985. It use to be one of the grandest houses in Chapel Hill.

This is a photo of Plum Nelly from 1978.

William F. Strowd was Bruce Strowd's grandfather, a U.S. Congressman, and one of the largest landowners in the area in the late 19th century.

Bruce's family was one of the most prominent in Chapel Hill at the beginning of the 20th century. His grandfather W.F. Strowd (Dec. 7, 1832 - Dec. 12, 1911) had been a two term member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1895 to 1899, and was largely responsible for the building of a railroad to Chapel Hill. His father R. L. "Bob" Strowd was Vice President of the Bank of Chapel Hill, and had been the Chapel Hill postmaster, and a local merchant. A building that he built on Franklin Street is still standing and is called the Strowd Building. Sutton's Drug Store is now one of the tenants there.

Both Pickard and Strowd were involved in many Chapel Hill businesses. At the time of this ad in 1907, Mr Pickard also had a livery stable and a hotel. In the 1950s through the 1970s Leadbetter Pickard Stationery Store was a leading business downtown, first on Henderson Street and then in the center of Franklin Street.

 
R.L. Strowd was a leading Chapel Hill merchant all of his life. This is a 1909 ad. His son Bruce established the first car dealership in town.

R.L. Strowd was a banker during most of his career in Chapel Hill. His house, "Plum Nelly", was one of the largest in town. This ad is from 1931.

From an early age Bruce had a fascination with internal combustion engines and automobiles. In 1903 the Dean of the School of Pharmacy, Vernon Howell, brought the first automobile to Chapel Hill. This new contraption fascinated Bruce and by the time he was sixteen in 1907 he built his own rudimentary automobile using parts from a sewing machine, wheelbarrow and a boat motor. It only went about five miles an hour and made a terrible racket that scared the horses in town when he drove it down Franklin Street. It had a smokestack that billowed out a cloud of smoke as it roared by it went "chooka, chooka, chooka, pow, pow, pow, pow." Chapel Hill soon banned him from driving the thing in town saying it was too noisy and unsightly.

Drawing of early automobile built by Bruce Strowd in1907 called the Strowdmobile

Bruce worked hard from an early age and was employed at Carr Mill in Carrboro for most of his teenage years. In 1911 he left Chapel Hill to learn more about cars by working in a car manufacturing plant in Wisconsin. In 1914 he returned to Chapel Hill and opened the first auto repair shop, in what is now Porthole Alley behind the Carolina Coffee Shop. The location had been a livery stable, and horses were still the primary mode of transportation in town. He was the only person in town who could work on cars. There were then thirteen cars in Chapel Hill. Bruce also got the rights to sell Ford Motors cars which people could special order from his shop.

This is Bruce Strowd's Garage and first Ford Dealership in 1914. It was behind where the Carolina Coffee Shop is today. Before this the building had been a popular livery  stable for many decades.

The Strowd Ford Dealership in about 1946. This was the largest retail space in Chapel Hill with over 20,000 square feet. In later years the Zoom-Zoom, Logos Books, Copytron, and even a short-lived 5 and 10 cent store would occupy some of this space. In 1970, when I was twenty, I ran a music management company from an upstairs office here. 

His car business grew slowly, specializing in used cars for much of the depression era 1930s. Eventually he opened the first modern car dealership in Chapel Hill at the corner of Columbia and Franklin Street.

Bruce Strowd in October 1937 with 1914 Ford 

This is the auction for the sale of the huge farm that the Strowd family  owned in Chatham County. It was almost 3,000 acres. It was never a very profitable farm. The R.L. Strowd  family  owned 1200 acres that are now part of central Chapel Hill. The auction occurred on May 22, 1928. Land and real estate prices plummeted in Chapel Hill a few years later during the Great Depression.

Bruce was an outgoing and gregarious man and in 1937 the Chapel Hill Kiwanis Club named him Chapel Hill's "Most Valuable Citizen" for that year. He was an avid Tarheel basketball fan long before the team attracted much local attention.

This is Johnson Strowd Ward furniture store on West Franklin Street in 1965. It was the only furniture store in town in those days and also sold televisions. One of the owners was Gene Strowd

Bruce Strowd retired in 1953 and sold his Ford Dealership to Crowell Little. He died in 1955.

Well into the late 1940s Strowd Motors sold more used cars than new ones. These are prices for some of their used cars in 1937.

This is the corner of Franklin and Columbia Street in Chapel Hill in 1925 soon after the building was built and Strowd Motor Company moved in to sell Ford cars and ESSO gas. If you look closely you can see a pump at the corner of the two streets. 

Thanks to Susan Prothro Worley for the Strowd House photos

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by Charly Mann

Almost every day Chapel Hill Memories receives one or more e-mails or comments from someone trying to track down a friend from the past. Over the course of our lives we have made many friends, and for most us the majority of these people are only a fading memory. Every time we make significant changes in our lives such as moving or changing careers we lose our connections to the people we knew before. One of the saddest realizations in life is that the majority of people we have known are no longer around.

 
Kat McKay Chapel Hill High School Class of 1967 Senior picture

There are more than a dozen names that people keep asking about and this has inspired me to begin a series called Where Are They Now. The first one is on Kat McKay who is someone I barely knew or thought of when growing up, but six people have asked about her in the last nine months. She was one or two grades ahead of me in school, and as far as I know we never had any friends in common. My only memories I have are a vague recollection of her mother being an impressive figure, and that her parents owned a company that made premade sandwiches. I also think she lived in one of the large houses at the beginning of Laurel Hill Road. These are just my memories from about the time I was 13 to 14, the only time we even attended the same school, so they may well be faulty. I look forward to other readers providing more information.

Kat McKay, Chapel Hill High School Sweetheart Queen

The purpose of this series is for other Chapel Hill Memories readers and hopefully the person themselves to fill in the details about where they are and what they have done with their lives. I hope this feature will reunite some old friends and help overcome the consequences of losing touch in the passage of time. 

Kat McKay was the star and leading scorer of the 1967 Chapel Hill High School Kitten's basketball team

Anyone looking to reunite or find out about old friends from Chapel Hill or UNC days are welcome to use this column. Simply write up a small piece about the person, and e-mail it to chmemories@gmail.com. Please send one of more photographs of the person. Chapel Hill Memories now has more than 15,000 readers a month, so there is a good chance you will soon have more information on your old friend.

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by Stanley Peele

Roland Giduz was a writer, scholar, reporter, Chapel Hill historian, photographer, cable TV host, and civil leader – among many other accomplishments. He was a beloved and well-known citizen of Chapel Hill who passed away in January of 2009.

Roland Giduz (July 24th, 1925 - January 23rd, 2009)

Roland Giduz called himself a "notorious hometown ne'er-do-well." He was notorious, for sure, and definitely hometown. But he has never been and will never be a "ne'er-do well"!

He was born in 1925 and was a veteran of WWII. He earned an AB degree in journalism at UNC and an MS in journalism at Columbia. For more than 50 years, he was a writer, photographer and editor. He was editor of the Chapel Hill News Leader (1954-59) and then alumni editor for the University; and wrote the "Newsman's Notepad" column over a period of 35 years. He also was a columnist for the Chapel Hill Herald.

He was the original publisher and editor of a weekly visitors guide magazine, The Triangle Pointer.

He published "Who's Gonna Cover Em Up?" in 1985, and "Conversations On The Wall," in 2000. In the latter book he documents his conversations with his friend and idol, Cameron Henderson. He also collaborated with Jim Shumaker to publish "Shu" in 1995.

He was a member of the Board of Aldermen of Chapel Hill for 12 years. He was quite active in local civic life, and was a gifted public speaker. He was the host/producer for "The People's Channel" on cable TV.

This is only a short list of some of his accomplishments: it is not possible to list them all in this article. Yet, he was self-deprecating. He explained himself this way: "I haven't got any more sense than any other d___ fool!"

Here are some quotes from Roland:

"I have suddenly realized, "By God, I'm 80 years old." . . . .But, I don't feel old – I feel FREE. . . . . I am free to plan each day, I have no obligation to an employer or to society. I have willingly passed on the torch of service to society to the younger generation. Best of all, I don't look back. I look ahead. I find true satisfaction in public service – a thing I used to accept as an obligation. Through all of this I find peace – contented peace. I know there are a limited number of years ahead for me. If it all ended tomorrow I'd have no regrets."

Roland was a member of what has been called, "The Greatest Generation." His service in World War II left an indelible impression on him. Here are his words:

"Let me take you back to the fierce days of WWII and how we felt about it. We were preparing to enter the military. We certainly did not feel "great." But – we did not feel any doubt. We were a bit fearful, and not anxious to lead a charge. But we had absolutely no doubt about the cause and outcome of the war that was thrust upon us.

"There was nothing heroic nor great, to us, about serving. It was simply our time. That generated a quality of patriotism that has never left us through these 60 years since.

"It was a fearsome time for most of us. Appreciation of freedom is born of patriotism – of a belief in the dignity and integrity of every human being.

"Earlier [last] year I revisited a combat scene of our 100th Infantry Division in France. On that 60th anniversary of the liberation of the town of Bitche, we were welcomed by those citizens. Their heartfelt gratitude to us, three score years later, gave us the ultimate appreciation of patriotism.

"I hope you also feel patriotic about our country."

Roland Giduz stood for the enduring spirit of Chapel Hill. His words beautifully express a feeling about our country that is hard for young people to understand. The quality of our movies and TV sinks lower every year. The condition of corporate America is gloomy at best. Our neighbors regard our government as corrupt and greedy. Yet Roland Giduz stood tall in the midst of all of it. He reminded us of the highest and best that is within us. When he wrote about his "belief in the dignity and integrity of every human being," these were not just words on a piece of paper. He believed it – and his life was guided by this principle.

Chapel Hill Memories would like a life-sized bronze statue of Mr Giduz in this pose we call "The Oracle of Chapel Hill" created and placed on the stone wall on the south side of Franklin Street

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by Charly Mann

Harold McCurdy was a truly extraordinary man, A UNC Kenan Professor of Psychology who was probably Chapel Hill's most knowledgeable resident and the epitome of what is referred to as a polymath. He was a man who excelled in many things and had an almost limitless capacity to learn and become accomplished in any subject that interested him. He came to UNC in 1949, the same year as my father, William Robert Mann, and they quickly became good friends. I learned much about McCurdy from my Dad.

Harold McCurdy - UNC Psychology Professor and Polymath of Chapel Hill

A subject that McCurdy was keenly interested in was what factors most contributed to someone becoming a genius. After considerable study of the lives of twenty geniuses McCurdy wrote The Childhood Pattern of Genius. His first conclusion was that genius was most common among children who spend the majority of their time with adults and little time with children near their ages unless they were siblings. His research actually showed that preteen children who are sent to school and must do their socializing with their peers are significantly impeded in their intellectual and character development. Boys he found are particularly impaired if they begin interacting with people their age before 14. His second discovery was that highly intelligent and socially mature children are usually immersed in the interests of adults around them, and are allowed the time and loving support to naturally master these subjects. Children who grow up in this kind of environment develop a high degree of intellectual and artistic creativity. Finally he found that most geniuses were given a high degree of family responsibility from a young age that builds self-respect and confidence. This often meant making things that could be useful or even sold, and at a minimum taking a major role in maintaing their home. What this all means is that home schooling is far better than public schools for primary education. Children, McCurdy found, are just not socially or academically mature enough for institutional education until they are teenagers. Children in fact are negatively socialized by having to spend their early youth interacting with other children, and become less creative and much more likely to have mental and emotional problems throughout the rest of their lives.

McCurdy was also an expert on William Shakespeare and wrote a book on his personality. He also did extensive writing and research on D.H. Lawrence and Emily and Charlotte Bronte.

McCurdy was an outstanding poet and several volumes of his poetry were published. Harold McCurdy died in Chapel Hill in November of 1999. The following poem by McCurdy showcases his genius and his love of God.

Meteor

When softly and slowly fell the other night
That meteor flaring through my screen of trees,
Maybe I only was privy to the sight.

Eastward it fell of great Orion's knees
And his dog Sirius; southward of Jupiter;
And it was very bright, brighter than these.

If others glimpsed it (as, say, Lucifer,
Or some dull chunk of matter being consumed),
Let their view of it be as they prefer.

To me it was a miracle, subsumed
Within the ancient mystery and profound
From which the whole starred universe once bloomed.

For look! I was alone on private ground
Awed by the starry heavens at Christmas Eve,
Yet sorrowful, and in self-pity drowned,

Pleading, as one who clamors to believe,
"Oh God, whom none can see and live, do you
Care in the least for us? Did you conceive

Us and this world and come incarnate too
To lodge here? "Me, Lord, have you loved? Me, heard?"
--And then, abruptly, silently, fell and grew

That flare of light, that bright, that lordly word

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Old or young we all enjoy the circus. One hundred years ago circus wagons drawn by teams of horses were a yearly sight on Franklin Street, signaling that the circus was coming to Chapel Hill. Fifty years later, William Meade Prince and Carl Boettcher created the Circus Parade carvings that were originally placed in the Circus Room snack bar on the UNC campus to commemorate this event. These exquisite carvings now adorn a hallway in the alumni center on the north side of Kenan Stadium.

 
Closeup of Charly Mann in Circus Parade Animals Under the Big Top. See the full version of this work of art.

One of my earliest memories was being in the Circus Room and imagining how it would be to be the first person to spot the circus wagons heading into Chapel Hill. I would see myself running up and down Franklin Street crying out, "The circus is coming to town again!" Then I would shout "Tigers, Clowns, and Elephants" as the parade drew closer.

Detail of the white tiger from painting inspired by William Meade Prince's Circus Parade.

What excited me the most after looking at the carvings was the idea of the circus being set up the next day and going by to see all the animals. "Wouldn't it be fun to ride on an elephant?" I thought.

The original wood carving of this elephant is in the UNC Alumni Center on Stadium Drive.

This year I took my daughter to see the Circus Parade carvings and she created this painting as she imagined William Meade Prince would have painted the animals with me today as the ringmaster.

To see the full version of this painting, which is 42" by 24", see the following article: Chapel Hill's Newest Work Of Art

   
Closeups of giraffe and seal from Circus Parade Animals Under the Big Top, by Kathryn Mann.

To see some of the original carvings from this painting and more information on the Circus Parade history, see The Circus Room and The Circus Parade

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by Stanley Peele

The year was 1959. I was a senior in law school, about to graduate; and looking for a job. I walked into the Office of Judge L. J. Phipps on Henderson Street in Chapel Hill, (right by the post office). The office was Spartan – very small by today's standards. It had two small offices in the back and two secretaries in front; no library, no break room, no conference room.

Alice Oldham, the senior secretary, told me I could go into his office.

I walked into his office. Most of the space of the small office was taken up by a large desk. On top of the desk was a mountain of papers. Behind the papers sat Judge Luther James Phipps.

With great fear and trepidation, I said, "My name is Stanley Peele, I am about to graduate from law school, and I am looking for work."

Judge Phipps smiled and said, "When can you start?"
"Right now," I replied.

"OK, Mrs. Oldham will tell you what to do." He said. And from that moment, I was hired. No resume. No questions. No conversation about salary. That's the way it was in the 'good old days' between people who trusted one another. Instinctively, I trusted him. Absolutely.

Judge Phipps was a kindly man with a soft voice. Yet he commanded great respect – which, for me, amounted to awe. I never called him "Jim." It was always "Judge Phipps." His abilities were legion.

In 1921, as a student in UNC, he received the Major Wm. B. Cain award for the math student who "demonstrated a high degree of mathematical ability and originality." He had a phenomenal memory and was the leading title lawyer in this area. He could examine old deeds and diagram property lines with lightening speed and uncanny accuracy. In fact, the map of the properties given to the University prior to 1920 were drawn up by Judge Phipps; and the map is in use to this day.

He was a stickler for the law, and did not drink. He was extraordinarily careful about driving, and would not go even 1 mile over the speed limit. This made it very hard on me when I drove him. If I drove 57 in a 55, he would say, "I believe the speed limit here is 55." So I would meekly slow down.

On the other hand, Charlie Hodson, the lawyer, was always late to court and would consistently speed. One time, Judge Phipps was driving to Hillsborough, and made a complete stop at an intersection. Charlie Hodson was driving behind him; and did not expect the Judge to make a complete stop; and plowed right into the Judge’s car.

How the courthouse gang made fun of Charlie about that!!

Judge Luther James Phipps (1898-1969)

Judge Phipps and I were both so busy, that our time together was rare. Yet I remember a few times that I witnessed him doing complex title work. Once I had been wrestling with trying to map out adjoining properties, and I had not been able to do so. Judge Phipps looked at the deeds, and then, with lightening speed, put them all together in a perfect fit.

"How did you do that!?" I exclaimed. He just smiled. Sometimes checking title was like trying to assemble a jig-saw puzzle.

He was a staunch supporter of UNC and seldom missed a home football game. He and Vivian would walk from his home to Kenan Stadium. He had massive knowledge about UNC football.

He was a supporter of the Boy Scouts, and would often be called upon to present the Eagle Scout award at presentation ceremonies.

He had property and title files for Orange County and Chatham County. The Orange County files were the best ever seen at that time. Other attorneys would come over to use them. His files were so good that I could sometimes check 7 titles for bank loans in one day.

People thought Judge Phipps was rich because of his high-volume business. But he was not. His charges were very low. "Temper the wind to the shorn lamb." he told me.
Bill Olsen, the realtor, remembers his mother, Sarah Olsen, telling him if you wanted advice, you went to Jim Phipps. He was the authority. When Mrs. Olsen sold property, she would take the buyer and seller to Judge Phipps. He would draw the contract, check the title, draw the deed and mortgage and close the deal in his office. He would handle the whole transaction, start to finish. And how much would he charge? $1 for the deed and $20 to check title.

He was town attorney for the Town of Carrboro, and never charged a penny for that work.

He knew so many people that on some weeks he went to 3 or 4 funerals.

He was the leading expert on Orange County Churches. He had title cards for every Orange County Church, which showed every deed into or out of the church, together with every mortgage they gave. Hugh Lefler wrote a book titled Orange County. Judge Phipps wrote a chapter in that book, called "The Churches of Orange County." Many years ago, I read that chapter, and was absolutely stunned by the amount of information cited there. I thought I knew something about local churches; but compared to him I was hopelessly ignorant.

In his quiet way, he was a political force. If you wanted a job at the post office in Chapel Hill, you would first have to see him. Those seeking political office would check with him. Not to do so would have been a major blunder. In his quiet way, he was a master politician.

He was judge of the Recorders Court in Chapel Hill for many years. He was Orange County’s representative to the NC Legislature. He was very active with the American Legion, particularly with the Chapel Hill Post; and was commander of the NC American Legion, 1963-64. He drew up the bill to establish the Hillsboro Historic  Commission, which became law in 1963. He was active with the democratic party, and was considered a leader in that area for many years, having various offices on the executive board, including president. He was a staunch conservative, and in those days he and others kept control of the Orange County Democratic Party.

One year he went on a vacation and therefore could not attend the annual meeting of Orange County democrats. When he came back, he found that local liberals (under the movement for Eugene McCarthy) had taken over. This was a dark day for him.

He, together with his wife, Vivian, and his two children, "Snookie" and Dana, lived in an imposing house on Pittsboro Street. It was then 4 houses south of McCauley St., approximately across from the present State Employees’ Credit Union. The home was razed by UNC and is now occupied by UNC buildings. The pillars in front of his home were imposing, giving it an elegant appearance. When I went to his house I always felt out of place – kinda awkward. Yet the rooms inside were modest.

In 1968, he became Orange County’s first District Judge. He was very happy to have this job, for the job of Chapel Hill Recorder’s Court judge, was only a municipal office, unconnected with other judges. The new judgship was a part of a Statewide system; a vastly improved court system. He set up a plan for the district, which was Orange, Chatham and Alamance Counties. The present system in Orange County is based on his original plan.

He died in 1969. Even after all these years, I still miss him. The sky was never quite as blue after he was gone.

Editor's Note: Phipps taught mathematics at UNC from 1943 to 1945. He got an S.B. degree at UNC before his law degree (That is the same as a B.S. degree today then known as Scientiæ Baccalaureus) 

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by Charly Mann

I have previously discussed the history of Dr Kluttz and his general merchandise store that was dominant business on Franklin Street from 1883 to 1923, but there was much more to this man than this. The most important thing in his life was his wife, Ora Jane, who he married in 1890. She was a beautiful red head from Goldsboro who was born on March 27, 1868. Dr Kluttz grew up outside of Salisbury and was born on July 7, 1857. Together they were the most respected, well liked, prosperous, and generous couple in Chapel Hill for half a century.

When they first married, Dr Kluttz was working hard to get his store established, but he always seemed to have time for other interests. One reason for this was Ernest Thompson, a black man, who was the de-facto manager of Kluttz's store. He was so competent that most townspeople and students joked that Dr Kluttz was the only person in town who did not work. A popular poem in town in those days went:

Ernest runs the business,
Doc Chews cigar butts
Everybody works in this town,
But A.A. Kluttz

Actually, Dr Kluttz did more before most people got up than the average Chapel Hill citizen did in a day. He was always up by three or four in the morning to work in his vast vegetable and flower garden. He and his wife had purchased the Sam Phillips house and law office across from the University President's house at 407 East Franklin Street in 1894 for $2,800. Dr Kluttz and his wife thoroughly enjoyed this property and got the maximum use out of it.

407 East Franklin Street soon after Dr and Mrs Kluttz bought the house in 1894 

What Dr Kluttz's called his garden was actually a small farm extending back to Rosemary Street. In it he grew a variety of vegetables including tomatoes, radishes, squash, cucumbers, cabbage, green beans, and a wide variety of flowers. He owned a dairy cow that often grazed where Spencer dorm is today which provided the sweetest cream in Chapel Hill. He also grew several types of corn including a variety called County Gentlemen which he was renowned for. It was a sweet white corn that had just been introduced in 1890 and had irregular rows of very deep and narrow kernels. Almost all his guests and boarders recalled its wonderful flavor and texture. His garden was large enough to provide fresh vegetables almost all year for the meals of the Kluttz's, their boarders and the many people they entertained. It also supplied an almost year round supply of fresh cut flowers for their house, and for the Presbyterian Church each Sunday, which he and Ora attended for more than thirty years.

Ora Kluttz was just as amazing as her husband. In 1897 the Kluttzs took over the running of the Central Hotel, which is where the Battle-Vance-Pettigrew building stands today across from the downtown post office. Since Dr Kluttz had his store and "farm" to attend to, it was Mrs Kluttz who really managed the place. The hotel was then dilapidated and catered mainly to students who could not find accommodations in a dormitory. A few years later Mrs Kluttz took her knowledge of hotel management to the next level by turning the Kluttz's home into the finest boarding house in Chapel Hill.

The Central Hotel on Franklin Steet across from what is now the Post Office. It was torn down in 1912 and replaced with the Battle-Vance-Pettigrew building.

Ora Kluttz was a highly refined and dignified woman, and she ran her boarding house like an elite country club. Only a select few were allowed to stay at the Kluttz's, and those who did enjoyed the best rooms, finest meals, and the most stimulating companionship in Chapel Hill. The rooms were rented exclusively to bachelor professors or single professional women who Mrs. Kluttz deemed worthy of her establishment. It was considered a great honor to be allowed to room at the Kluttz's.

Mrs. Kluttz was an imposing presence, and had an aristocratic style that made many who met her feel they were in the presence of royalty. Indeed she was often referred to as the Queen of Chapel Hill. She wore her hair in a pompadour and her manners and taste were impeccable. She loved to entertain and had the finest cook and staff in Chapel Hill to help her provide sumptuous feasts for her guests. She was particularly well known for her stag dinner parties, where eligible bachelor professors would be introduced to ladies she deemed worthy of their attention. Many love affairs began at these soirees.

The Adam and Ora Kluttz boarding house

The greatest love of Ora Kluttz's life was for her husband. They were perfectly matched and totally complimented one another. At their house Mrs. Kluttz did most of the talking, though Dr Kluttz often had the last word. While she always behaved and conversed in an elegant style, Dr Kluttz loved to find humor in almost everything. For example when they had a new guest to dinner he would pass them a plate of biscuits or deserts and startle them by saying "take a lot, take two, take damn near all of them." When a man he didn't care for came calling for one of the female boarders he would say, "Come in! Tell me all you know, it won't take you long." One boarder recalls that a rather large lodger was piling his plate rather high at dinner when Dr Kluttz turned to him and said, "here just take another plate." Mrs. Kluttz always seemed to enjoy her husband's wit. Throughout their life together they always called each other "Bay" which was short for "Baby".

Sam Phillips law office (far left) at northeast corner of Hillsborough and East Franklin Street 1920. Next door is the Kluttz house.

After dinner Dr Kluttz enjoyed sitting on the swinging chair on his front porch and exchanging greetings with every person who walked by his house. When it was cold he enjoyed sitting next to the fire in his living room. There was a steady stream of visitors to the Kluttz's every evening. Almost everyone in town, including all the other merchants and professors at UNC enjoyed sitting in the Kluttz's parlor and discussing a wide range of topics. Among the regular visitors was the esteemed UNC botanist William C. Coker, who landscaped most of the UNC campus and downtown Chapel Hill, and M.C.S. Noble, Dean of the UNC School of Education.

Sam Phillips law office in 2009.  (401 East Franklin Street)

The Kluttz house was built in 1856 by Samuel Field Phillips. The small stucco building next to it on the corner of Franklin and Hillsborough, which the Kluttz's also owned, was originally Phillips law office. and was constructed in 1843. After Mrs. Kluttz died their home was left to her niece Sudie Coenen. Since 1978 the house has been the Tri Delta (Delta Delta Delta) Sorority.

The Kluttz house today at 407 East Franklin Street which is now the Tri Delta sorority

By 1916, the Klutzes were the wealthiest family in Chapel Hill, primarily due to good real estate investments. They owned several downtown buildings including those that in later years housed the Varsity Theater, Jeff's Confectionery, Lacock's Shoe Store, Max Snipes Barber Shop, and the N.C. Cafeteria. They also owned four other downtown houses. After Dr Kluttz died Mrs. Kluttz became the town's leading advocate for improving the local public schools and urged for an increase of the school tax on property. Since she was the town's single largest taxpayer this affected her more than anyone else in town. She was also a generous contributor to the Playmaker's Theater.

 Dr Kluttz died in 1926, while Mrs. Kluttz lived on another 21 years until May 31, 1947. They are buried next to one another at the Chapel Hill cemetery.

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by Dan "Arthur" Gifford

Long before snicklefritz came to mean a batch of bad marijuana or the name of a cartoon cat in modern American popular culture, it was for centuries a German term of endearment for a small boy. And it was with that word and a pinch on the cheek that "Papa" Gustav Danziger used to greet me when I would visit his Viennese Candy Kitchen and Old World Restaurant -- simply called "Danziger's" -- or the Rathskeller below it with my father.

Edward "Papa" Danziger at Danziger's Old World Restaurant and Candy Store Chapel Hill

The greeting was quickly followed by a slice of peanut cake or Vienna Kranz or some other central European goodie to keep me occupied while Papa, sometimes joined by his son Ted, and my father would sip coffee and converse in German. For hours it seemed they would sip coffee and speak in German, and if they happened to be joined by Werner Friedrich (always "Doctor Friedrich" to me then), my father's Swiss born comparative literature professor, it could actually be hours.

 
"Papa" Danziger caricature logo showing him reading Goethe's Faust

By then I was wandering around the store and into the kitchen where I would learn special secrets about the candy that filled Danziger's Franklin Street display window. So when my elementary pals pressed their faces on that glass after school and salivated about the mystery of white chocolate (an object of fascination then), I could tell them with authority that it wasn't really chocolate. That would take us inside for a Papa D explanation, in English, about the difference between cacao and cacao butter und a schnitzel of each. Now, Freidrich at least noticed when my antsiness was nearing critical mass and would begin quizzing me on the German pronouns, or the names of states or countries outlined on cards he always seemed to have with him or the meaning of the "Famous Quotes" painted on Danziger's wall or he'd offer a synopsis of what was being discussed even if I didn't really understood what he was talking about. Tried explaining Hegel, Kant or Goethe to a five or six year old? Freidrich gave it a good shot, though. "Vhat can you zink ov zat you vant zo badly zat you vould zell your zoul to ze devil to have it as Faust did, Arthur?" ... "Uh, Black Forest Cake?"

Inside Danziger's Old World Restaurant and Candy store Franklin Street Chapel Hill. For the last 35 years this has been the located of the Shrunken Head.

Yes, there's a reason Papa D's caricature in this Danziger's ad is reading Faust. He had seen poor choices made on a mass scale and was looking for answers. So was my father, and that was their main common ground so far as I can tell.

Papa was Jewish according to the Nazi's definition, saw the handwriting on the wall, and left Austria. In fact, his family had been Lutheran for two generations. He was also a philosophical man with many questions about the roots and appeal of that master race evil that replaced the residual protections of the Hapsburg and Hohenzollern reigns. A mild anti-Semitism may have been part of the natural social order in both countries just as it was all over Europe, but why would millions of people sell their souls to Hitler and go along with an extermination of Jews and others who had been their friends?

 
This is the Quotation Wall inside Danziger's Old World Restaurant and Candy Store

Unlike the Japanese Imperialists he had fought who were not signatories to the Geneva Conventions and had no cultural concept of either honorable surrender or protection of civilian noncombatants, the German volk had a history of all three yet had trashed the lot of it. Why? My father wrestled with that question and many others about a people with a humanistic history descending into Nazi hell while also struggling against his warrior nature and the civilian he was trying to be.

He was already in the Army when Pearl Harbor was hit and had served in both theaters of W.W.II and then Korea. As a forward artillery observer and scout, he generally snuck around behind enemy lines and either liked it or didn't depending on the time of day and his mood. The "liked it" eventually won and he went back in the Army for for twenty five years of special combat units on the East German border and three tours in Vietnam. He was truly the proverbial man you did not want to meet in a dark alley and I noticed early on those in Chapel Hill, a town filled with war veterans, showed him that deference. But he was a hard man with a sense of honor who was troubled by the soulless Nazis and SS, as opposed to the typical Wehrmacht soldier, he had encountered. He admired the SS martial skill and ferocity, but he was also aware that many of those uniforms were filled with some of the worst degenerates humans had produced and were little better than rabid animals that needed killing for the sake of the sane.

Henry Gifford the man who "saved" the Rathskeller by installing steel beams to keep the ceiling from collapsing

In the meantime, he was attending UNC and doing construction contracting on the side. I used to hear Ted Danziger say that my father was the person who had saved the Rathskeller he had started under the candy shop by installing several steel I beams to keep the sagging ceiling nobody else had noticed from caving in. He also did some shoring of the several side rooms like "The Cave" Ted literally dug out (hauling the dirt away in the trunk of his car) sans building permits to expand the Rathskeller.

Dan "Arthur" Gifford and his father Henry Gifford in 1956 in front of their house at 738 East Franklin Street  Chapel Hill

"The Rat" was a place I especially liked visiting with my father because of its high student energy -- drinking lots of beer will do that -- and the fact that everything was said in English. That meant I could take in the "my hard times during the depression were harder than your hard times during the depression" and the "my war experience was more terrifying than your war experience" stories everybody seemed to have. Papa D would occasionally come in and shake hands but "The Rat" didn't really seem to be his scene. It wasn't mine for a few weeks either after my mother asked me what I did with my father that day. My enthusiastic reply: "I watched daddy drink tea outa the bottle at the Rat."

That's when snicklefritz learned not to rat on what he learned at "The Rat."

Inside the newly opened Rathskeller - The Rat - Amber Alley Fanklin Steet Chapel Hill 1949

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by Charly Mann

James Paul Goforth was the most financially successful person in Chapel Hill in the 1980's. He created a home real estate empire that started in Chapel Hill in the 1970's and eventually spread throughout the eastern part of North Carolina. Goforth built quality homes in every price range from condos in the low $70,000's to magnificent executive estates that often sold for more than $300,000. He was Chapel Hill's greatest developer, creating more than half a dozen meticulously designed and beautiful communities. He built real neighborhoods instead of housing tracts. Goforth dedicated almost every waking hour of his day to his business. J.P. was also an honorable man who worked hard to be fair to his customers, while maintaining the highest quality standards in construction. Today, twenty years after his death, his name is still often attached to a real estate listing to denote a house of quality.

This is a Goforth Properties of Chapel Hill advertisement from 1982. Note fixed rate mortgages are 14 7/8 percent and variable rate are 12 3/8.

J.P. Goforth came to Chapel Hill in 1968 to attend UNC in the same freshman class as me. He was from a poor farm family that lived near Statesville. As an undergraduate he began working as a real estate salesman to help pay his way through school. By the time he entered UNC law school in 1973 he had already started Security Building Company, and in 1976 formed Goforth Properties to develop subdivisions. A partial list of the local neighborhoods he created are Stoneridge, Village West condos, Ironwoods, Falconbridge, Northwood, The Oaks II, Sedgefield, and Coker Hills. By the early 1980's, J.P. also owned Triangle Mill Work, Chapel Hill Grading, Boyce Supply, and Chapel Hill Electric, all of which supported the building trade. His companies employed more than 180 people.

Entrance to J.P. Goforth communities Stoneridge and Sedgefield off Whitfield Road in Chapel Hill

Real estate development and construction are extremely cyclical businesses. The 1980's was volatile period for real estate in North Carolina. Despite this, J.P. seemed to have the Midas touch and weathered the 1980 to 1983 recession better than any of his peers. Starting in 1984 J.P. began to expand his empire throughout the entire eastern half of the state, broadening his model of well-designed upscale communities into areas that were demographically different from Chapel Hill. By 1990 the United States found itself in another economic recession, this time brought on about primarily by the sudden collapse of the real estate housing bubble that started in 1984. Housing prices crashed throughout the United States, especially in the high end market that Goforth specialized in. J.P. had large investments in land that had become unviable for development, and also had a huge inventory of houses that could not be sold.

J.P. Goforth built home by his company Security Builders in Chapel Hill

Goforth's businesses were under a mound of debt, and tax officials from Orange and Durham counties were hounding him to pay property taxes on the land and houses he could not sell. J.P. was a master businessman, but because of complications from kidney surgery he was no longer able to dedicate himself fully to his business. His cash flow was now well below what he needed to pay his suppliers and employees. Almost everyone who he owed money to, including the state, agreed that Goforth was an honorable and nice person, but they all wanted their money. Goforth worked diligently liquidating assets to slowly pay off his debts, but it wasn't fast enough for District Attorney Carl Fox .

Stoneridge tudor style house in Chapel Hill built by J.P. Goforth

Goforth saw his world closing in around him. He knew that being out of work for much of the last few years had hurt his business. He also admitted that he miscalculated the severity of the real estate downturn. Several of the largest developers and home builders in the state filed for bankruptcy because of the real estate bust, but this was  anathema to J.P.'s honor. The final blow came on Friday April 13, 1990 when DA Carl Fox made a media splash announcing a call for the State Bureau of Investigation to look into Goforth's business. Fox was concerned that Goforth had been bouncing checks and not paying his real estate sales people commissions they were owed. That evening, J.P. Goforth, 49 years old, took his own life.

Another house built by J.P. Goforth and Security Builders in the heavily wooded Stoneridge neighborhood in Chapel Hill 

For J.P. Goforth suicide was not painless or a coward's way out of a problem. Like most of us, he feared death far more than what seemed like the financial collapse of his company and the ruin of his reputation. However, because some recent investors of his businesses who were worried about his health had insisted he take out a $12.5 million life insurance policy, he saw that his death was the best way for him to honor his obligations. Because of the insurance policy, after all the suits and claims were settled, his estate was able to pay off his $7.4 million in debts and still have $5 million dollars left. James Paul Goforth is buried in Statesville at the cemetery of the Hebron Baptist Church.

J.P. Goforth's Goforth Property sold primarily houses his companies built, but the Lake Forest home at the bottom right is not one of his homes. 

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by Charly Mann

Corrine Howell, UNC Coed

One of the lessons I learned as a freshman at the University of North Carolina in 1968 was that Aristotle believed that there was a set of universal standards for physical beauty. The most important he said were balanced bodily proportions including symmetry. According to scientists symmetry is a very accurate predictor of one’s genetic ability to stay healthy. Our brain by nature responds positively to a beautiful face. I have always believed that Chapel Hill has the highest proportion of highly symmetrical women of any place on earth.

Nina Ford, UNC Homecoming Queen 1980

Over the decades I have amassed a vast collection of Chapel Hill and University of North Carolina photos going back more than 150 years. Contained in my library are several thousand photos of beautiful women. The following is a random selection of these photos from the mid 1960s to the early 1980s that represent a sampling of perfect Carolina symmetry. I have also created a musical medley that pays tribute to all the women of Chapel Hill and the University of North Carolina.

Madonna Bentz 1971 (at 16), cover of The Trangle Pointer weekly, photo by Roland Giduz, Madonna managed A Southern Season in the 1980s

Janet Fullenwilder, UNC Coed 1970

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by Dr Harold Kushner

I first met Professor Mann in the fall of 1958 when he walked into my math 15A classroom in Phillips Hall. He was dressed in a tan gabardine double breasted suit fashionable in the 1930's, a white shirt with the collar buttoned and no tie. His hair was reddish brown, abundant and unruly, and he was thin, but full cheeked with ruddy complexion. He looked like a young English vicar but he could have been a student, for in those days there were lots of older students implementing their GI bills. He was 38 and the youngest full Professor on the faculty.

Painting of former UNC Mathematics Professor Robert Mann by his grandaughter Kathryn Mann

But, he assumed his position in the front of the class and began teaching immediately with great authority. He spoke in fluent and eloquent paragraphs with exquisitely precise language, but pronounced in soft southern syllables. About five minutes into his presentation, a young male student asked no one in particular who he was. He stopped, and said, "I'm sorry, my name is Bob Mann." And wrote "Robert Mann" on the blackboard.

That began my 48-year relationship with Professor Robert Mann. I took six courses from Professor Mann and when it was time to apply for medical school, I went by his office and asked him if he would write me a letter of recommendation. He was standing in the office smoking a cigar and blowing the smoke into a cigar box which had holes cut into it, and the holes were covered with Saran wrap. He explained that he was investigating the mathematical description of exhaust gases from rockets in the then very nascent space program. When I asked him if he would write a letter for me, he responded with great alacrity: "of course." And he stopped what he was doing, picked up a lead pencil and a yellow legal pad and proceded to write the most beautiful and persuasive letter a prospective med school applicant could ever have. He tore the page from the pad, and handed it to me and said to use it as I saw fit.

His knowledge was encyclopedic; his brilliance was luminous. He formulated the Mann Iteration for fixed point analysis, wrote an advanced calculus textbook which was the standard college text for many years, and he taught with such passion and inspiration that it was a wonderful gift to be in his presence. I used to sit with him at Emerson Field and watch baseball games just for more exposure to his wisdom and judgment.

"Bob" Mann in his office on the third floor of Phillips Hall at UNC Chapel Hill where he enjoyed nothing more than helping his students

Once after a particularly trying and rigorous exam period, I showed up at his office, unkempt, bleary eyed and unshaven, dressed in raggedy Bermuda shorts and a tee shirt (and this was in the days when boys dressed in khakis and oxford blue shirts from Milton's) to see what my grade was. He gave me the news, and then asked if I would like to accompany him to Danziger's Tea Room to have lunch with Mrs. Mann and him. I demurred because of my appearance; but he was completely oblivious to my inappropriate dress. It was unimportant to him. He saw through the superficial.... straight to the heart of a person or a problem.

I recall that we had an earnest student in the class named Mendenhall. He asked Dr Mann a question one day, and Professor responded with great patience; "As usual, Mr. Mendenhall, your problem lies with the ambiguity to the antecedent of the relative pronoun." And he advised me on several occasions, even into the 90's, to attempt to avoid pronouns in my discourse if possible. He was a very strict prescriptive grammarian. Once a student asked for his help on a problem, and Dr Mann asked him where he was going with a step. The student said, I really don't know where I'm going. "In that case," Dr Mann said, "you should read Alice in Wonderland." When the student looked perplexed, Dr Mann reminded him of the Cheshire Cat's admonition to Alice: "if you don't care where you are going, it doesn't matter which direction you take", and he reminded us that Lewis Carroll taught Math at Cambridge.

Once, he asked me to baby-sit for him when he lived in the house on Old Mill Road in Greenwood, before he moved to Whitehead Circle. I agreed, and we went out in the parking lot to drive over to his home in his car. We must have spent 30 minutes looking for his car, before he remembered that he didn't bring his car that day, and had been dropped off.

I left Chapel Hill in 1961 and wrote him erratically. Then in 1980, my daughter came to Chapel Hill and took one of his classes. He was already family folklore. So when I went up to visit her, she arranged for us to have lunch together, and we resumed our friendship. He came to see me each year for 8 or ten years, and I would come to visit him in the house on Whitehead Circle, and met his friends. He loved to dance, and play tennis with much guile and wickedness, and read philosophy and study theology, and fight against what he thought were the destructive currents of academia. When he came to see me, he enjoyed walking on the beach, the conviviality of a good meal and wine with friends, and he even went to surgery and watched me operate. He never lost his sense of wonder or his love of learning. I have long since forgotten the math that he taught me. But he taught all of his students to think clearly, objectively, and logically, and to communicate with precision and exactitude. I often recall his lessons when I have a difficult problem to solve, and think how he would approach it. In a man's life, perhaps one has two or three teachers who have been profound influences on his direction and maturation. I can say one person stands head and shoulders above the rest, as the prime mentor of my life, save my own father. My relationship with Professor Mann shaped and enhanced my life as it did to countless others, and we have been made so very much richer by the association. I am deeply grateful to him for all that he gave me. 
 

Professor William Robert Mann congratulates the first three black undergraduate students to be admitted to the University of North Carolina on September 15, 1955. He is shaking hands with Leroy Frasier. His brother Ralph Frasier is on the right and on the left is John T. Brandon.

At this time there was strong resistance in Chapel Hill and the University of North Carolina to admit black students. Robert Mann was the only professor to formally greet the students. A few years later, in 1957, a leading member of the UNC medical faculty, Dr. W. C. George, wrote a four piece article entitled The Negro Race is Biologically Inferior for the Daily Tar Heel that argued against ever integrating the races. Even then, few on the campus or the community took issue with this belief.

The W. Robert Mann Award is given each year for excellence in actuarial science. Plaques bearing the names of winners are located in the undergraduate study room in Hanes Hall.

In 1967 Professor Mann received the Tanner Outstanding Teacher Award from the University of North Carolina.

W. Robert Mann Fund

This is a fund of the Curriculum in Mathematical Sciences that honors the outstanding undergraduate teacher who retired in 1986 after a 37-year career at UNC-CH. The fund enriches the educational experience for students in the curriculum by providing career information, support for technology, and possibilities for interaction for students in that program.

Contributions to this fund can be sent to:
     Ms. Rhonda Inman
     Department of Mathematics, CB #3250
     Phillips Hall
     University of North Carolina
     Chapel Hill, NC 27599

You can also contribute through the UNC Development Office by mailing a check made out to:
     UNC-Chapel Hill to Office of University Development
     Post Office Box 309
     Chapel Hill, NC 27514-0309
and designating that it go to the Department of Mathematics. You can contribute online through the web site carolinafirst.unc.edu
 

Final words from Amanda (a college professor and artificial intelligence researcher)

While it's not as exciting as my friend who managed to buy a many-hundred-dollar-valued autographed book for a couple of bucks recently, I had what I think was a very cool used book experience yesterday. I spotted a copy of Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind on the $1 rack outside the local used book store, which I've been curious to skim. Well, it was on the cheap rack because there are notes scattered through the margins of the book, but they're tidy notes, so I decided to buy it anyway. However, on closer examination, the book was labelled as having belonged to a "W. Robert Mann", which any math major will immediately identify as the name of one of the authors of Advanced Calculus the classic . Granted, it's plausible that multiple people would share this name, but the previous owner was also kind enough to note that the book was purchased at McIntyre's Book Shop, which is in Pittsboro, NC, not far from UNC, where Dr. Mann is listed as a professor emeriti. And the comments clearly come from someone fluent in mathematics. So, I am going to chose to believe that I'll be reading the criticisms of the man whose textbook introduced me to advanced mathematics. His very first note reads:

One of the seductive fascinations of mathematics is that every subject turns out, in the long run, to be merely a small part of something else.
William Robert Mann

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by Charly Mann

Chapel Hill was the launching pad for the man responsible for the most beloved television show of all time, The Andy Griffith Show. Andy Griffith learned acting, singing, and acting here, and it was his attendance at UNC football games at Kenan Stadium that inspired the vehicle that made him a star.

Cover of the extended play (EP) 45 of What it Was, Was Football 1953

Andy Griffith graduated from UNC in 1949 with bachelor’s degree in music. He was president of the UNC Glee Club, a member of the Carolina Playmakers and belonged to Phi Mu Alpha, the music fraternity. In 1952  while he was driving from Chapel Hill to Raleigh he created the hilarious spoof of college football he entitled What it Was, Was Football. In the monologue Griffith takes on the persona of a country bumpkin named Deacon Andy Griffith who is swept up by a crowd ascending the wooded hills surrounding Kenan Stadium and finds himself attending an event he will never forget. He recalls seeing opposing crowds on two sides of a cow pasture watching men hit each other and throwing others to the ground as they try to get control of something that resembles a pumpkin. He was appalled to see convicts in striped shirts following the men up and down the pasture, and police standing all around the stadium doing nothing to stop the mayhem.

Andy Griffith in Chapel Hill at Kenan Stadium performing  What it Was, Was Football, Fall of 1954

The routine was recorded at a Jefferson-Pilot insurance convention in Greensboro in 1952. Orville Campbell the incredible owner of the Chapel Hill Weekly released the record on his new label Colonial Records, which would go on to rival Sun Records as an incubator for great artists including George Hamilton IV, Billy “Crash” Craddock, and John D. Loudermilk. The record was soon so popular that the rights were sold to Capital Records where it went on to sell more than one million copies. The attention Griffith received from this record vaulted him into the national spotlight and gave him opportunities to show his acting talents in movies like A Face In the Crowd and No Time For Sergeants, and eventually The Andy Griffith Show.

MAD MAGAZINE's illustrated version of Andy Griffith's What It Was, Was Football

Griffith has stayed close to Chapel Hill and his alma mater throughout his career. He recently gave UNC’s Wilson Library his papers, letters, and memorabilia including his own penciled and marked-up scripts of every Andy Griffith Show episode, as well as those from Matlock. I think his best gift to Chapel Hill though was a time on the Andy Griffith Show in which he told his “son” Opie that if he wanted to go to the University of North Carolina he would have to study hard.

1949 Game that may well have inspired What it Was, Was Football. That is 69, Bob Cox, leading the blockers for the great Charle "Choo-Choo" Justice ,22, against William and Mary in Kenan Stadium. 

This is the forest surrounding Kenan Stadium Andy Griffith would have seen in his UNC years 

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by Charly Mann

Thomas Wolfe, one of the greatest writers of all time, entered the University of North Carolina at the age of 15 in September of 1916. When he was a senior he was editor of the Daily Tar Heel. During his college years he was also an editor of the Yackety Yack and a member of the Playmakers. Like many other UNC students, at the time, he often paid for the services of prostitutes in Durham brothels.

Thomas Wolfe 1918 Debater and Orator for UNC Dialectic Society

Thomas Wolfe (center) on the porch of Pi Kappa Phi fraternity 1919

Wolfe loved Chapel Hill more than any place on earth, and shortly before graduating in June of 1920 wrote his girlfriend in Asheville the following: I hate to leave this place. It’s mighty hard. It’s the oldest of the state universities and there’s an atmosphere here that’s fine and good. Other universities have larger student bodies and bigger and finer buildings, but in Spring there are none, I know, so wonderful by half. I saw Carolina graduates when I was home for Christmas who were doing graduate work at Yale, Harvard, and Columbia. It would seem that they would forget the old brown buildings in more splendid surroundings, but it was always the same reply: “There’s no place on earth that can equal Carolina.” That’s why I hate to leave this big fine place. (May 17, 1920)

UNC campus 1919 when Thomas Wolfe was a senior

UNC campus 1916 when Thomas Wolfe was a freshman

Thomas Wolfe’s honors and activities at UNC, listed here from the 1920 Yackety Yack, far exceeded those of everyone else in his graduating class. Note it is said, “He can do more between 8:25 and 8:30 than the rest of us can do all day, and it is no wonder that he is classified as a genius.”

Thomas Wolfe's  UNC senior yearbook photo and accomplishment list. (Note the reference to Gooch's where Wolfe would often eat his meals late in the evening - see previous article.)

Thomas Wolfe's dipolma from UNC, June 1920 

Wolfe is most famous for four lyrically eloquent autobiographical novels. The first, Look Homeward, Angel was published in 1929. The second, Of Time and River was published in 1935. His last two great novels, The Web and the Rock and, You Can't Go Home Again, were published after his death. Wolfe came down with a highly unusual case of pneumonia in September of 1938. He was admitted to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore where it was finally determined he had tuberculosis in his brain. The best brain surgeon in the country operated on him, but found the entire right side of Wolfe's brain was covered with tubercles. Nothing could be done, and he died at age 37 on September 15, 1938. He is buried in Riverside Cemetery, Asheville.
 

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by Charly Mann

What makes Chapel Hill great is the people, and great people usually come from incredible families. The Harry and Sybil Macklin family was one of these. Besides owning and running one of most quintessential Chapel Hill eateries, they produced three remarkable children: Ralph, Arlene, and Rosalie.

Harry (and later Ralph) Macklin House on Noble Street in downtown Chapel Hill

Ralph has made his mark on Chapel Hill in a variety of ways from restaurateur and top-notch poker player, to one of the most lighthearted souls to inhabit the Southern Part of Heaven. I also know several very bright people who knew him well who say he is incredibly smart. Ralph graduated from UNC with a degree in Industrial Relations.

Ralph Macklin, Chapel Hill High School 1957 Senior picture

His sister Arlene is also very bright, but my impression is that she is much more practical and focused than her brother. I started noticing Arlene when I was in the 7th grade at Chapel Hill Junior High School and she was an 11th grader at the High School next door. She made an indelible impression because she had a maturity and seriousness that was years beyond her actual age. She also was one of the best-dressed and most attractive young women in Chapel Hill. These attributes swept a Durham boy named Barrie Bergman off his feet, and they were married just a few months after she graduated from Chapel Hill High School in 1963.

Arlene Sharon Macklin, at 17 in 1962 - Junior Year Photo

Arlene and Barrie opened the Record Bar on Henderson Street in 1963, which was the first of more than one hundred record stores that Barrie would go on to open all over the United States. Arlene and Barrie now live in Santa Barbara.

FRONT ROW: Arlene Macklin - Senior Class Treasurer, Gale Green - Secretary, Eva Blaine - Associate Justice
BACK ROW: George Thompson - Vice-President, David McConnell - President

Arlene Sharon Macklin and other members of 1963 Chapel Hill High School Senior Class. The quote under her name says, "A little word in kindness spoken, a motion or a tear, has often healed the heart that's broken, and made a friend sincere,"  which is from A Little Word by Daniel Clement Colesworthy

Arlene and Barrie Bergman House - 612 Greenwood Road (This house was on my paper route before the Bergman's owned it)

Barrie Bergman – Mr. Arlene Macklin

Barrie Bergman, Arlene’s husband, lived in Chapel Hill most of his adult life. Barrie also long ago switched allegiance to UNC over his alma mater Duke.

Barrie is deservedly a legendary figure in the music business. His vision and hard work created a chain of more than 200 stores, The Record Bar and Tracks, that has never been rivaled in quality, selection, or customer service. Many of my contemporaries incorrectly believe Barrie lucked into the music business because his Dad owned the Record Bar in Durham in the early 1960s. The truth is that it was Barrie's uncle who owned that store, and that Barrie learned the music business from working with him, starting as I recall, at about the age of twelve. Barrie's Dad, Mr. B, as he was known, was a wonderful man who really cared about his customers, but it was Barrie who knew music. When Barrie's Dad took over the record store in Durham, it was already Barrie's intention to make his mark in the music business. I have heard from several people who knew Barrie that he planned to go to New York City in the early 60's and get a job in the music business.  I am confident he would have been very successful at starting a record label that would have rivaled the likes of Atlantic, Electra, and A&M Records. After all he had a passion and an early background in the music business, and certainly had better connections to southern soul, rock, and folk than anyone else in the industry.

As luck would have it Barrie agreed to work for his Dad for a few years to expand the Record Bar, first in Chapel Hill, then to Raleigh, followed by a second store in Durham. Under Barrie’s leadership the company doubled its size almost every year until 1989 when the chain was sold to the Dutch company Superclub for, as I recall, about 200 million dollars. It is true that Barrie got his start in the record business at the best possible time, just as he sold out as the decline of the music business began, but no one else could do what Barrie did so well, and that was running well stocked record stores, primarily in malls, run by people who loved music and loved selling it to others. A unique trait of Barrie’s is his ability to learn and not repeat mistakes. He candidly admits several terrible senior personnel choices he made, but throughout his career he has gained from those experiences and become one of the best judges of business character on the planet. 

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by Charly Mann

In the 1950s and 1960s Chapel Hill High School was located on West Franklin Street, but played its home football games in Carrboro in Lion’s Park located on Fidelity Street. I cannot recall that the team was ever known for its offensive dominance or overpowering defense, but it had something no other team in the country had that made all the difference, George Cannada, better known as Cat Baby, who always enthusiasticly led the Wildcats onto the field.

"Whatta Ya Say Cat" - Cat Baby 1980 photo submitted by Robert Humphreys

Cat Baby was omnipresent in Chapel Hill throughout the 1960s and 70s. He was also probably the most well-known and well-liked person in the community. He enjoyed talking to anyone. He was a large man in both heart and body. He usually had a cigar or chewing tobacco in his mouth when he made the rounds of his town. He was also the “unofficial” greeter every Sunday at the Carrboro Baptist Church.

Some say he was the unofficial mascot of Chapel Hill High School, but I think he was actually the mascot and quintessential spirit of all of Chapel Hill. Cat Baby managed to eke out a living throughout his life as a paperboy. Cat Baby died at 58, in 1993.

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by Charly Mann

There are many reasons I love Chapel Hill, but the primary reason is its beauty. Much of what we consider beautiful about Chapel Hill is because of one man, William Chambers Coker. He came to UNC in 1902 to teach biology, but his love for natural beauty, and his wise decision to marry the then President of the University's daughter, Louise Venable, gave him the eye and the power to transform a rather bland campus into the southern part of heaven. At the beginning of the 20th century there were few trees, shrubs, or paths on the campus, and more than five acres of it were nothing but swamp.

During the 1920s he had sidewalks built and beautiful trees and shrubs planted to unify the look of McCorkle and Polk Places. He also used his own money to make an arboretum out of the swamp. Over the course of nearly forty years he continued to add trees and plants to this place, including many that are native to Asia. The wisteria arbor on Cameron Avenue was built of native black locust in 1911.

William Coker (1892 - 1953)

right portion of this view is Coker Arboretum

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by Charly Mann

Dean Smith Center

Like Baron von Haussmann, who almost single handedly designed and built Paris, Joe Hakan is the person most responsible for the Chapel Hill we all love. He designed and built the Dean Smith Center or Dean Dome, the tower and facilities for UNC-TV, the sundial outside the Morehead Planetarium, Manning Drive, and the Siena Hotel. He was also the Chief Engineer at the University of North Carolina in the fifties. In his lifetime he was literally responsible for hundreds of projects in the Triangle area. He loved UNC sports, knew all the coaches as friends, and if you did business in Chapel Hill you almost always had a connection to Joe.  Joe died in May 2006, at the age of 80.

Joe Hakan

I had several connections to Joe, including the fact that my father-in-law married Joe's ex-wife Virginia. The above set of interviews of Joe, broadcast on WCHL some years ago, will teach you more about Chapel Hill history than any other source. My assocation to WCHL goes back to its beginnings with Ty Boyd in the late 50s. I would go by the station and he often gave me "rock" 45s that the station received. WCHL did not stray into playing "rock" music until the 1970s. In those days they were pure easy-listening. The station's owner, Sandy McClamroch, was also the mayor of Chapel Hill from 1961-1969. He and his family lived in my neighborhood of Greenwood ,at the intersection of Stagecoach and Greenwood Road. Below are a  couple of pictures of me with his daughter, Ginny, in my driveway from July of 1954.

Charles Mann, Jenny McClamroch, & Karr Orr at Mann residence on Old Mill Road

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