donbosco
Inconceivable Member
- Messages
- 3,096
‘Capital of the Southern Mind’
By Peter Range, Dec. 17, 1972, New York Times
Chapel Hill NC — This is the kind of town where an alderperson
(that is, a lady alderman) lofts a helium filled balloon above
the main street on a 90‐foot string to dramatize the visual
damage that would be done if the zoning board approved a
bank's plan to construct a 9‐story building in the center of
an otherwise two‐story town. She helped get the building cut
down to 3 stories.
It's also a town where a 72‐year‐old retired investment
banker, Robert Hudgens, thunders forth at irregular intervals
with editorials on the Vietnam war, the Men's Garden Club or
the promise of youth. He writes, hand‐sets, prints & mails
the editorials out to friends from a basement printshop he
calls The Rooster Press of Chapel Hill. “Everybody here tends
to take you at face value,” Hudgens says. “You can be in
violent disagreement with your neighbor & it doesn't matter.
You can mow your lawn on Sunday & the people who go to church
don't pay any attention.”
Chapel Hill's tradition of individuality & intellectual
ferment is consistent with what has always been its principal
industry: higher education. The University of North Carolina,
which is in the town & is often called, simply, “Chapel Hill,”
was the first state university in the US & has been a leading
educational institution since it was opened in 1795.
Chapel Hill is in the rolling Piedmont region at the center
of the state. One of its blessings is isolation: it's 10 miles
from the nearest city, Durham, a swampy 30 miles from the
state capital, Raleigh, & 12 miles of pastureland from the
tiny county seat of Hillsboro. The old campus of the
university, much like a well‐done but casual English garden,
is the heart of Chapel Hill. Thomas Wolfe, a student there
from 1916-1920, described it in “Look Homeward, Angel”: “The
university was a charming, an unforgettable place...buried
in a pastoral wilderness.... The central campus sloped back
& up over a broad area of rich turf, groved with magnificent
ancient trees.”
Boost the Spirit
-----------------
Overrun with cherry trees, dogwood & hardwoods hung with
wisteria, Chapel Hill has brilliant springs & misty autumns
that do something for the spirit. Meticulously laid brick
walks crisscross the university's undulating grounds with
their hodgepodge of old brick buildings, but the grass
clearly invites you to walk, sit, read or play on it. And
everybody does. It's never surprising to see a graduate
seminar or even an overcrowded freshman class meeting out
of doors under one of the hundreds of oaks & maples. In the
evening sitters or strollers enjoy their own private recitals
outside the practice rooms of the music department. A reverie
may be interrupted by meandering children, dogs & young
lovers, but it's all part of the background, & mildly,
pleasantly distracting.
The campus is a very open one, flowing naturally over a
low rock wall onto the one‐block hub of downtown. Academe &
commerce do not collide here.
Like any university community, Chapel Hill has its town &
gown rifts, but because the rather cosmopolitan academic
community is at least as large as the homegrown business
& farm population, a modus vivendi was reached long ago.
Except for a brief upheaval at the height of the civil
rights movement, the good God-fearing folk of Chapel Hill
& the surrounding farmland maintain a friendly respect for
all of the hairy, book‐toting atheists in their midst &
the intellectual community has less arrogant scorn for its
non‐academic, more fundamentalist neighbors than any
assemblage of eggheads east of the Iowa Writers Workshop.
The modus vivendi extends even to political power, which is
a shared thing. Aldermanic seats are more or less evenly
divided between town & gown; 2 of the 6 aldermen are women,
& while Chapel Hill has a very small black population for
a Southern town (only 10% of the 25,537 inhabitants are
black), its mayor is Howard Lee, a black medical career
adviser at arch‐rival Duke 10 miles away. In his 2nd race
Lee carried every precinct by an overwhelming margin.
Writers, editors, social & political scientists have come
to The Hill to study, work, teach & live.
For many decades the only liberal enclave in a vehemently
conservative South, Chapel Hill was the natural gathering
spot for young Southerners looking for a Harvard within a
day's railroad ride. At the turn of the century, philosopher
& gadfly Horace Williams was the town's intellectual dynamo
& the man who started it on its more or less permanent
ideological collision course with a state legislature
dominated to this day by tobacco & textile interests. As a
student, Thomas Wolfe helped make the outspoken, six‐day‐a‐
week campus newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, the pushy force
for change that it has become. Dramaturgist Frederick Koch
created in the Carolina Playmakers the best Southern
university theater company outside Tulane University. The
Playmakers gave Wolfe his first playwriting experience &
actors like Jack Palance & Andy Griffith their early
exposure to greasepaint.
Chapel Hill sociologist Howard Odum, Dixie's answer to
Gunnar Myrdal, undertook the first major regional study
of the South with his 1936 work, “Southern Regions of the
United States,” which graphically portrayed an impoverished,
prejudice‐bound South on the threshold of its own industrial
revolution. This approach is now being carried on by a
group of intellectuals called the L.Q.C. Lamar Society,
whose current guiding light is Chapel Hill alumnus Terry
Sanford, former Governor & now president of Duke University.
Words are the currency in academe; writers & editors have
always been drawn to Chapel Hill, whether to begin their
careers, pursue them or retire from them. Betty Smith (“A
Tree Grows in Brooklyn”) came to Chapel Hill for a visit
in 1935 & never left until her death last year. Novelists
Leon Rooke, John Ehle, Robert Ruark, Noel Houston & James
Street all thrived in or around Chapel Hill. John Knowles,
after the success of “A Separate Peace,” spent a fructuous
year in Chapel Hill as a writer‐in‐residence.
Playwright Paul Green & short‐story writer Max Steele still
work here. Journalists like C.B.S's Charles Kuralt & The
New York Times' Clifton Daniel, Tom Wicker & Wayne King
all graduated from the university. Gene Roberts, a former
Times man & now managing editor of The Philadelphia
Inquirer, is a Chapel Hill alumnus.
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
Continued...
By Peter Range, Dec. 17, 1972, New York Times
Chapel Hill NC — This is the kind of town where an alderperson
(that is, a lady alderman) lofts a helium filled balloon above
the main street on a 90‐foot string to dramatize the visual
damage that would be done if the zoning board approved a
bank's plan to construct a 9‐story building in the center of
an otherwise two‐story town. She helped get the building cut
down to 3 stories.
It's also a town where a 72‐year‐old retired investment
banker, Robert Hudgens, thunders forth at irregular intervals
with editorials on the Vietnam war, the Men's Garden Club or
the promise of youth. He writes, hand‐sets, prints & mails
the editorials out to friends from a basement printshop he
calls The Rooster Press of Chapel Hill. “Everybody here tends
to take you at face value,” Hudgens says. “You can be in
violent disagreement with your neighbor & it doesn't matter.
You can mow your lawn on Sunday & the people who go to church
don't pay any attention.”
Chapel Hill's tradition of individuality & intellectual
ferment is consistent with what has always been its principal
industry: higher education. The University of North Carolina,
which is in the town & is often called, simply, “Chapel Hill,”
was the first state university in the US & has been a leading
educational institution since it was opened in 1795.
Chapel Hill is in the rolling Piedmont region at the center
of the state. One of its blessings is isolation: it's 10 miles
from the nearest city, Durham, a swampy 30 miles from the
state capital, Raleigh, & 12 miles of pastureland from the
tiny county seat of Hillsboro. The old campus of the
university, much like a well‐done but casual English garden,
is the heart of Chapel Hill. Thomas Wolfe, a student there
from 1916-1920, described it in “Look Homeward, Angel”: “The
university was a charming, an unforgettable place...buried
in a pastoral wilderness.... The central campus sloped back
& up over a broad area of rich turf, groved with magnificent
ancient trees.”
Boost the Spirit
-----------------
Overrun with cherry trees, dogwood & hardwoods hung with
wisteria, Chapel Hill has brilliant springs & misty autumns
that do something for the spirit. Meticulously laid brick
walks crisscross the university's undulating grounds with
their hodgepodge of old brick buildings, but the grass
clearly invites you to walk, sit, read or play on it. And
everybody does. It's never surprising to see a graduate
seminar or even an overcrowded freshman class meeting out
of doors under one of the hundreds of oaks & maples. In the
evening sitters or strollers enjoy their own private recitals
outside the practice rooms of the music department. A reverie
may be interrupted by meandering children, dogs & young
lovers, but it's all part of the background, & mildly,
pleasantly distracting.
The campus is a very open one, flowing naturally over a
low rock wall onto the one‐block hub of downtown. Academe &
commerce do not collide here.
Like any university community, Chapel Hill has its town &
gown rifts, but because the rather cosmopolitan academic
community is at least as large as the homegrown business
& farm population, a modus vivendi was reached long ago.
Except for a brief upheaval at the height of the civil
rights movement, the good God-fearing folk of Chapel Hill
& the surrounding farmland maintain a friendly respect for
all of the hairy, book‐toting atheists in their midst &
the intellectual community has less arrogant scorn for its
non‐academic, more fundamentalist neighbors than any
assemblage of eggheads east of the Iowa Writers Workshop.
The modus vivendi extends even to political power, which is
a shared thing. Aldermanic seats are more or less evenly
divided between town & gown; 2 of the 6 aldermen are women,
& while Chapel Hill has a very small black population for
a Southern town (only 10% of the 25,537 inhabitants are
black), its mayor is Howard Lee, a black medical career
adviser at arch‐rival Duke 10 miles away. In his 2nd race
Lee carried every precinct by an overwhelming margin.
Writers, editors, social & political scientists have come
to The Hill to study, work, teach & live.
For many decades the only liberal enclave in a vehemently
conservative South, Chapel Hill was the natural gathering
spot for young Southerners looking for a Harvard within a
day's railroad ride. At the turn of the century, philosopher
& gadfly Horace Williams was the town's intellectual dynamo
& the man who started it on its more or less permanent
ideological collision course with a state legislature
dominated to this day by tobacco & textile interests. As a
student, Thomas Wolfe helped make the outspoken, six‐day‐a‐
week campus newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, the pushy force
for change that it has become. Dramaturgist Frederick Koch
created in the Carolina Playmakers the best Southern
university theater company outside Tulane University. The
Playmakers gave Wolfe his first playwriting experience &
actors like Jack Palance & Andy Griffith their early
exposure to greasepaint.
Chapel Hill sociologist Howard Odum, Dixie's answer to
Gunnar Myrdal, undertook the first major regional study
of the South with his 1936 work, “Southern Regions of the
United States,” which graphically portrayed an impoverished,
prejudice‐bound South on the threshold of its own industrial
revolution. This approach is now being carried on by a
group of intellectuals called the L.Q.C. Lamar Society,
whose current guiding light is Chapel Hill alumnus Terry
Sanford, former Governor & now president of Duke University.
Words are the currency in academe; writers & editors have
always been drawn to Chapel Hill, whether to begin their
careers, pursue them or retire from them. Betty Smith (“A
Tree Grows in Brooklyn”) came to Chapel Hill for a visit
in 1935 & never left until her death last year. Novelists
Leon Rooke, John Ehle, Robert Ruark, Noel Houston & James
Street all thrived in or around Chapel Hill. John Knowles,
after the success of “A Separate Peace,” spent a fructuous
year in Chapel Hill as a writer‐in‐residence.
Playwright Paul Green & short‐story writer Max Steele still
work here. Journalists like C.B.S's Charles Kuralt & The
New York Times' Clifton Daniel, Tom Wicker & Wayne King
all graduated from the university. Gene Roberts, a former
Times man & now managing editor of The Philadelphia
Inquirer, is a Chapel Hill alumnus.
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
Continued...
