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 Julie Harris. 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. 

by Charly Mann

Getting an undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina is very expensive. Today that cost ranges from $120 to $168 thousand dollars for a student who graduates in four years. This includes the yearly tuition which is $5,613 for in state residents and $20,543 for out of state students, as well as fees, food, lodging, books, health insurance, and personal expenses. Since the average student takes 4 1/2 years to graduate from Carolina these costs are probably going to be about 12% higher than this.

Wilson Library opened in 1929, and was the main UNC Library until 1984. Now it is used to hold the University of North Carolina's massive collection of rare books, documents, and photographs.

In 1795 when the University of North Carolina first opened it doors the estimated total cost to get a four year degree was $424. This included a yearly tuition of $20, boarding, food, candles, fire wood, and servant costs.

The price of going to UNC has far outpaced inflation over the last two hundred years, and the question one might ask is:  Is it worth it?

It used to be very few people finished high school, much less attended college, now it is almost a rite of passage. In fact a bachelor's degree today is equivalent in economic value to a high school diploma 50 years ago.

This is New East the home of UNC's most acclaimed school, the Department of City and Regional Planning.  It was originaly a men's dorm and was built in 1861.

Over the last six months I have asked many current UNC undergrads and recent graduates if they thought the money spent to send them to Carolina was worth it. By and large most said it was the intangibles more than the education that made going to UNC valuable to them. Many said it helped them become more mature and well-rounded. They also stated that it was not a priority for them to absorb the information they were being taught, but to simply get good grades. Most of them said they thought the majority of things they were asked to learn would be useless to them in the real world.

It is a fact that many jobs ask prospective employees to provide their level of education, and some even require you to have a college degree. Having a degree from UNC is certainly a positive when applying for certain jobs. At the same time many UNC students I have communicated with told me that little to none of actual education they received in college actually helped them with their job. This was especially true of UNC students with degrees in liberal arts.

Gerrard Hall was built in 1837 as the student chapel. It seats 380 and is now used for speeches and presentations. It was featured in the 1998 Robin Williams movie Patch Adams. 

Recent UNC grads say they believe the current recession has made it difficult for them to find jobs that pay more than $30,000 a year, and many are having difficulty paying their student loans which average about $50,000 among the people I talked to. Two former UNC students even said they wish they had used the money they spent on college to learn a trade like plumbing or becoming a electrician, where they say the pay is more lucrative, and jobs are more secure. Several parents of perspective students have told me they do not believe a liberal arts degree at Carolina is worth the investment. They say in today's job market they will insist their kids get a degree in a field where there are jobs. A career counselor told me that the majority of recruiters that are now coming to campus are looking for students with specialized and technical degrees. Starting salaries for specialized graduates are increasing each year at UNC, while general majors are finding it more difficult to find a job and often have difficulty paying back their student loans. Among the jobs I found among graduates with liberal arts majors were dishwasher, sales clerk, and waitress.

Two UNC coeds trying to get the most from their education, studying in the yard in front of Craig Dorm.

There are now some who say that the next bubble to burst in our fragile economy is the education bubble. They say colleges are no different than many other businesses that have expanded too rapidly, and care more about keeping enrollments high to cover their expenses than providing the best educational preparation for their students. One indication of this are popular majors like psychology. One business recruiter told me an undergraduate degree in that field is not recognized by most employers as something that conveys occupational skills. For someone to be considered occupationally qualified in psychology, he said one must have a minimum of a masters degree. Becoming job qualified in many liberal arts fields means three or four more years of college, often doubling the cost of an education to over $350,000 for a job that will often start at about $40,000 a year. On the other hand, graduates with a four year degree in specialized business and computer science majors often command starting salaries above $50,000, and are making twice that within eight years.

Entrance to the Playmakers Theater at UNC Chapel Hill

I personally believe a UNC education is usually a good thing even if it does no more than advance a student's socialization skills and independence. If it teaches young adults to think smarter and live on their own, then it seems to me the cost is worth it.

by Charly Mann

On March 31, 1962 the residents of Chapel Hill had one thing on their mind, and almost everything else in town was canceled or postponed. The next day at 7 PM in Kenan Stadium the UNC Scholastic Team was going to meet Harvard in the 23rd annual National Championship Academic Bowl. Every seat in the stadium had been sold-out within two hours of the National Academic Council's announcement that the contest would be held in Chapel Hill. Tickets to the event with a face value of $15 (which is the equivalent of $107 today) were being scalped for as much as $100 that very day.

UNC students celebrating on Saturday March 31th, 1962 in honor of the UNC team's appearance in the Academic Championship Bowl the next day

Since the inception of the Academic Bowl in 1939 no southern university had ever made it to the championship. Chapel Hillians were simply ecstatic that their team had gotten this far, and were well aware that the Tarheels had little chance of beating Harvard. The last non-Ivy League school to win the National Academic Championship was the University of California at Berkeley in 1957. Harvard had an incredible team that had won three out the last four championships, and this year's team returned two starters from the previous year's team that had trounced Stanford 330 - 55 in the 1961 final.

1962 UNC National Champion Academic Team
First row: Mark Armstrong, Donald Springen, and Bill Imes
Second Row: Hayward Clayton, William Patterson, George Carson, Charles Heatherly, and Kellis Parker

On Sunday, the day of the championship, even church services were canceled throughout Chapel Hill and most restaurants were closed. Both of the local TV channels, WTVD in Durham and WRAL in Raleigh preempted all their scheduled shows for live newscasts that focused almost exclusively on the match. The national media also swarmed over Chapel Hill, and the Bell Tower parking lot was littered with television trucks. The headlines of that day's New York Times proclaimed "Greatest Brains in College History Compete Today".

Werner Friedrich was the 1962 UNC Academic team coach and also the chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature. He received his PhD at Harvard, the school he coached against in the 1962 National Academic Bowl.

Fans began arriving early for the contest, and by 5 PM Kenan Stadium was packed. The Tar Heels and the Harvard Band performed for more than an hour. At 6:50 PM the national anthem was sung by Frank Sinatra, who had flown in from Las Vegas on his private jet and was staying with Kay Kyser. Next the two teams were introduced. First the defending champion Harvard Crimson team and coach were introduced to polite applause from the partisan crowd. As soon as Art Fleming, the host and inquisitor of the match, began announcing the Tarheel team, the crowd on both sides of the stadium came to their feet and erupted into the loudest cheers and applause I have ever heard in my life. None of the names could be heard above the roar, but the four starters for the UNC team were Donald Springen, Hayward Clayton, George Carson, and Kellis Parker.

At 7:00 a national TV audience joined the event that was carried by NBC. The two teams were seated on a podium on the West side of Kenan Stadium. In the center of the stage was Art Fleming and on the left side was a long table with four chairs where the Tar Heel team was seated. On the right sat the four members of the Harvard team. In front of each team member was a buzzer. The game began with a 20 point question which could be answered by the first team to hit the buzzer indicating they knew the answer. The first question was, "He studied scientific farming under George Geddes several years after his vision recovered from the sumac poisoning he suffered as a youth. After heading the U.S. Sanitary Commission during the war, he became chair of Yosemite property for California where he implemented ideas like the 'parkway.' An outspoken essayist, works like The Cotton Kingdom expressed his abolitionist politics, while his urban designs, often collaborations with Calvert Vaux, were meant to bring nature to the masses. He planned the terrace of the U.S. Capitol, the Stanford Campus, and Jackson Park in Chicago, now for twenty points, name this engineer and landscape architect who remains best known for designing Central Park?" The instant he completed the question Harvard buzzed in and correctly answered "Frederick Law Olmsted." The score was Harvard 20 and UNC O.

UNC students cheering as UNC Academic Team is introduced before championship at Kenan Stadium in 1962

The Next question was, "For 30 points this Englishman discovered Hawaii on his third voyage, and on his first voyage aboard the Endeavor he sailed the entire length of Australia’s eastern coast, which he claimed for Britain and named New South Wales." Again Harvard buzzed first and answered correctly, "James Cook." Harvard was ahead 50 to 0.

The third question was, "Act II of this play features one of the characters remembering his time in Morocco where he had to fend off a child prostitute, while Act IV begins with Dr. Baugh arriving to deliver some morphine and a woman coming to realize that her husband has terminal cancer. One of the central characters repeatedly asks for solid quiet and drinks until he hears a click in his head so that he can forget the death of his best friend, and possible lover, Skipper. Ultimately, the greedy and oddly fertile Mae and Gooper lose out as Big Daddy names the other Pollitt son as his heir. For 30 points, name this 1955 play that revolves around the doomed marriage of Brick and his wife Maggie, a work by Tennessee Williams." As before Harvard buzzed first, but this time they answered incorrectly, saying, "The Long Hot Summer". For an incorrect answer to a 30 point question Harvard lost 15 points. UNC then correctly answered the question with, "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", and the score was Harvard 35 and UNC 30. There were sixteen more questions in the first round which lasted thirty minutes. At the end Harvard seemed to have an insurmountable lead with 170 to 55.

The final round did not get off to a good start for UNC. The first question was, "For 30 points, take the number of German Reichs and add the number of French Republics. What is the answer?" This time UNC buzzed first and answered "seven." "Incorrect," Fleming said and UNC was down by 170 to 40. Then Harvard gave the correct answer of "eight," and it became 200 to 40. An embarrassing blowout for the Tarheels seemed inevitable.

The next question was, "For 20 points this was the port city where on September 15th 1950 MacArthur landed troops behind the North Korean lines sending the North Koreans into retreat." UNC again got to the buzzer first and this time answered correctly, "Inchon." Harvard 200 and UNC 60.

Throngs of UNC students heading to Kenan Stadium for the Harvard - UNC National Academic Championship in 1962

The third question was, "The Treaty of Paris ceded this area to the US, and the Continental Congress passed an ordinance in 1787 to set up the area's administration. For 30 points, name this early American territory, which has since been divided into five states and part of a sixth."  This time Harvard answered first and said, "the Northwest Territories." Fleming said this was incorrect, and the Harvard captain shook his head in disbelief. UNC then said "Northwest Territory," which the correct answer. Harvard now led 185 to 90.

For the next 10 minutes UNC tried to make up its deficit, but with less than four minutes remaining the score was Harvard 285 and UNC 190. The next question was, "The ostensible villain of this work is the heir to the estate Coombe Magnon, and he must marry Sophia Grey to ensure that inheritance. The heroine briefly becomes the confidante of Lucy Steele, who had entered into a secret engagement with a man the heroine loves. However, that engagement is broken and the path becomes clear for the two weddings that end the novel in which Colonel Brandon and Edward Ferrars are the grooms. For 25 points, name this novel in which Elinor and Marianne Dashwood represent the title sentiments, a work by Jane Austen." UNC's Kellis Parker seemed to buzz as soon as the last syllable to the question was uttered, and answered correctly, "Sense and Sensibility." Harvard 285 and UNC 215.

The next question was, "For 30 points, what was the name of the first transatlantic passenger steamship?" Several Harvard team members seemed sure of the answer even before the question was complete, but were confused about which member would hit the buzzer. As a result UNC buzzed a couple of seconds later, and correctly answered, "Great Western." Now it was Harvard 285 and UNC 245 with less than two minutes remaining.

UNC students on Franklin Street Chapel Hill in a massive all night celebration of the University of North Carolina's Academic Championship

The next question did not take much time to ask, "Solar cells work on this principle where electrons are ejected from a metal surface upon exposure to electromagnetic radiation. Einstein used Planck’s quantum theory to describe it mathematically. For 30 points name this principle." Instantly a UNC player buzzed and said, "The photoelectric effect." "Correct," said Fleming and UNC now trailed by 10 points with exactly 35 seconds to go.

Every UNC fan was praying that there was time for one more question and answer before time expired. Fleming then said, "For 20 points name the Peruvian city located just to the west of Lima. This city is Peru's largest port." With just three seconds left UNC's Parker buzzed and answered, "Callaco." The final buzzer sounded and Fleming proclaimed, "The University of North Carolina has just become the 1962 National Academic Champion defeating Harvard 295 to 285." At that the crowd erupted and fireworks began shooting off from behind the field house. More than ten thousand fans poured onto the field and rushed the podium. Each of the four Tar Heel Academic Team members were hoisted on the backs of the massive crowd and carried across the field.

Students celebrating inside Kenan Stadium seconds after UNC won the National Academic Championship on April 1, 1962

The victory celebration that night has never been equaled in Chapel Hill. More than 100,000 students, town folks, UNC alumni, and citizens from neighboring communities celebrated on Franklin until 7 AM Monday morning. On Monday all classes were canceled at UNC and Chapel Hill Schools. That afternoon the UNC baseball team even forfeited a game against Wake Forest to signify that academic excellence should be celebrated more than athletic. Over the next year book sales increased more than 200% in Chapel Hill.

by Charly Mann

Bob Cox was a UNC tight end and kicker for the great "Charlie Justice" era UNC football team. He was called "True Toe" because of the accuracy of his extra points. In 1947 he led the team in pass receptions.

In February 1952 Bob Cox quit his position as coach of the UNC Junior-Varsity football team. The team had gone undefeated in 1951, and many people thought Bob was going to become a leading college football head coach in the near future. But Cox had a hard time supporting his growing family on a salary of $300 a month, and convinced his friend Monk Jennings, who was the manager of The Sport Shop on North Columbia Street in the Carl Smith Building, that they should rent  the recently vacated space on Franklin Street where the Varsity Clothing Store had been located and open a clothing store to be called Town and Campus. This may have seemed like a fool hearty idea at the time as they were greatly undercapitalized,  but it proved to be one of the most auspicious decisions in Chapel Hill's retail history.

This is ad for the Sport Shop from January 1952, the last month Monk Jennings worked there before co-founding the Town and Campus store. 

This is the Grand Opening Annoucement for Town & Campus in Chapel Hill  from April 1952

In 1952 Chapel Hill was a small town of about 10,000 and the number of students at UNC was 1/8 of what it is today. There were also already a number of great clothing stores downtown catering to the same preppie look market Bob and Monk wanted to sell. These included Milton's Clothing Cupboard,  Stephen Shepherd's, Julian's College Shop, and Varley's, which sold primarily to professors and men over 30. Bob and Monk were undeterred and quickly secured a talented young sales staff and some great lines of clothing. They also scored a major coup in getting the exclusive rights to several of the top coed lines in the nation including Villager.

The only shoes to wear in Chapel Hill and look cool in were Bass Weejuns. In 1952 Lacock's had the exclusive on Weejuns, so Town & Campus sold these clones that look almost as good as the real thing. Weejuns are still made today, but not by the original company. Their quality is poor, and the women's Weejuns of  today are far inferior to any clone from the 1950s or 60s. Note that students had accounts at Town & Campus where bills would be sent to their parents.

Bob Cox had the charisma ,charm , and good looks of John F Kennedy, and was an innate politician. By 1954 he was the leading force of the Chapel Hill Junior Chamber of Commerce. In 1956 he became President of the North Carolina Jaycees, and in 1957 was elected to the highly prestigious and influential position of President of the National Jaycees. During that year his family moved to Tulsa, and he lived out of suitcase visiting every state on behalf of the Jaycees. When Bob returned to Chapel Hill in 1959 he took over Town and Campus, and  Monk Jennings and amazing wife, Ann, helped establish the great downtown women's clothing store The Fireside.

Bob Cox and Monk Jennings often appeared in their ads. This is from October 1957 when Bob was actually away from Chapel Hill acting as President of the National Jaycees out of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

In 1960 Bob sold Town and Campus to Bob Simpson, who had worked at the store almost from the start, and a couple of other investors. Bob and his wife, the former Anne Ruffin, transformed Town and Campus into one of the most visually dynamic and sophisticated clothing stores in the nation. They had the local exclusive on the European styled Pierre Cardin line which they bought from the company's sales representative Mickey Ewell. Ewell was so taken by the town when he made his regular sales trips to see the Simpsons at Town and Campus that he left Piere Cardin to start a restaurant business in Chapel Hill. In 1984 he opened McCarthy's, and went on to become Chapel Hill's most successful restaurateur with Spanky's, Squids, and 411 West Italian Cafe.

This is an ad for the Bob and Anne Simpson era Town & Campus from 1964

Town and Campus through Bob Cox, Monk Jennings, and Bob and Anne Simpson added a warmth and class to Chapel Hill that we can all be thankful for.
 

by Charly Mann

UNC has one of the top college basketball programs in the country despite this season's record. Because of its excellent facilities, traditions, and coaching staff many of the most talented high school basketball players in the country want to play for Carolina for at least one season before joining the NBA. Until 2006 if you were a super talented player like Kobe Bryant or Lebron James you could go straight from high school to a multi-million dollar professional career. Now the NBA has mandated that everyone has to play at least one year for free on the college level before they can turn pro. This has been a blessing and a curse for the Tar Heels.

In 2009 UNC was #1 in the nation and celebrated a great NCAA national championship victory over Michigan State. Carolina had a 34 - 4 record that year. After the season two of Carolina's best players Wayne Ellington Jr. and Ty Lawson decided to leave Carolina after their junior year, and begin to get paid for playing the sport they excelled at. Each of them received multi-million dollar contracts. Without these two superstars Carolina managed only 16 wins this season, and was not considered even among the 65 best teams in the country at the end of the year. If Ellington and Lawson had returned for their senior year Carolina would have been a strong contender for another NCAA title. In the last decade many more of UNC's top players have left early to join the NBA, including Brandan Wright and Joseph Forte.

2009 UNC NCAA Championship team players Wayne Ellington and Ty Lawson who both left after their junior year

Despite a poor season this year, UNC is still the most successful basketball program in the nation financially, generating over $27 million dollars in profit. While the University makes a lot of money on these kids the players do not get paid. The minimum salary in the NBA is about $450,000 a year. UNC could afford to pay its top players this amount or more and still have a very profitable program. Some actually believe the NCAA should sanction the payment of top athletes. They say it would give them an incentive to stay in school and graduate, and help maintain cohesiveness in the top programs. Another solution being offered is to make classes optional for top athletes. Currently student athletes must maintain a certain grade point average to be eligible to play, and there is a lot of pressure on faculty members to help keep top players eligible. Even with tutors and a less than demanding curriculum for some athletes, this can be a challenge. I have talked to several former Tar Heel players who tell me how hard it was for them to find time to study, attend class, get enough sleep, and have any kind of normal student life with a "sport" that takes up a large part of both semesters, requires two or more travel days a week, practice, and lots of media attention. Even when they are being students their size and celebrity status make them objects of attention for many of the students and faculty they come in contact with.

An illustration of  what the first UNC basketball game was like

If we want real student basketball at UNC we should go back to the way the program was originally designed. In 1911 a UNC sophomore from Charlotte named Marvin Ritch convinced the UNC track coach Nat Cartmell to coach a UNC basketball team. Ritch took it upon himself to find the players for the team and find opponents to play. Since 1906 basketball had been enjoyed as part the physical education program at the university The UNC coach, Cartmell, knew practically nothing about basketball. UNC's first basketball game was held at Bynum Gym on January 27, 1911 before a crowd of less than 35. The opponent was Virginia Christian College, and UNC prevailed 42 to 21. UNC managed a winning season that first year going 7-4 and knocking off powerhouses as the Durham YMCA, Woodberry Forest, Davidson, and the Charlotte YMCA, but losing to teams that included the University of Virginia and Wake Forest. Attendance never exceeded more than 40 at any of the games. UNC's arch rival of today, Duke, was known as Trinity College in those days, and was not one of the teams the Tar Heels played that year. Trinity (Duke) actually started their varsity basketball program five years before Carolina's, in 1906. Marvin Ritch, the person responsible for starting UNC's basketball program, left UNC after that year and enrolled at Georgetown where he was a standout on their basketball team.

Nat Cartmell was the first UNC basketball coach even though he knew little about the game. He was hired by UNC as the Track & Field coach. 

Many of today's best college basketball players are called counterfeit amateurs because of the special treatment they are afforded by the University and other students, and because they are anxious to make the jump to the lucrative NBA as soon as they can. The truth is that UNC basketball is more a commercial entertainment than a college sport if you consider the attention, ticket costs, and facilities it requires. That is why UNC and other major universities have athletic departments that operate as a business separate from the educational side of the University. "Students" in sports such as basketball and football are recruited and given scholarships not because of their academic ability or potential, but for their entertainment value for producing a winning team. This would be equivalent to UNC giving scholarships to up and coming singing stars in the music department so they would perform at UNC and other schools for money that the University would keep.

This is the only decent photograph I have found of Marvin Ritch the UNC student who was responsible for founding the Tar Heel basketball program.

The most successful basketball coach of all time was John Wooden at UCLA. His UCLA teams won 10 NCAA national championships in a period of twelve years. His last championship team was in 1975. During his time at UCLA he never received a salary of more than $35,000 a year, nor asked for a raise. Today head coach Roy Williams receives a salary from UNC that totals more than $1.2 million a year. I think most of us, including myself, think he is worth it, but this is because college basketball has become so much more than what it was 30 years ago. March Madness for example has become a national pastime. Even in 1968 when almost every family had a color television, I recall that the NCAA final between UCLA and North Carolina was not shown nationally (UCLA won that game 78 to 55).

This is Bynum Gym at the UNC Chapel Hill campus in 1910. It was the site that year of the first UNC varsity basketball game.

UNC's basketball team has a reputation for excellence and dominance that needs to be maintained. In order to do this it has to keep the great talent it recruits or the team will face decimation every year through defections to the NBA. The NBA is especially attracted to great tall college players. As a result, there are virtually no dominant post players on any NCAA team this year over 6 foot nine, and all the top players in the ACC, Pac-10, and Big Ten are 6 foot 8 or less. Almost all the best tall players are going to the NBA after one or two college seasons. The same is true of the magic players who have traditionally made the college game so spectacular. This year's most exciting player, Kentucky freshman John Wall, is almost certain to turn professional at the end of the season.

Coach Roy Williams and the graduating seniors of the 2009 UNC basketball team. Until this year Williams had taken the teams he coached to 20 consecutive NCAA tournaments and won at least one game in each.

Face it, we love Carolina basketball because they win so often, and that is what ignites the student section to show so much excitement and enthusiasm during every home game. Sooner or later the futility of cheering for a mediocre team will dampen this spirit. We owe it to our students and hardcore fans to find some accommodation with the NCAA and NBA to discourage top players from leaving the university early.

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