Eyes Only
Action for Children North Carolina presented the 5th annual NC Children’s Lifetime Legacy Award to the 11 Junior Leagues across the state during a luncheon at the Carolina Club in the George Watts Hill Alumni Center on the campus of UNC-Chapel Hill. The keynote speaker was US Sen. Kay Hagan, a member of the Junior League of Greensboro.
Since 1930, the Junior League of Raleigh has contributed more than 1 million volunteer hours and over $4.2 million to community projects and programs focusing on education, health, women’s and children’s services. The Junior League of Orange/Durham counties has a current focus of Helping Children Develop to their full potential.
• • • Duke Realty Corporation has received The TOBY Award in the Corporate Headquarters category on the local and regional levels sponsored by the Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) for its Lenovo building located in Morrisville’s Perimeter Park. The project will compete internationally at the BOMA international conference in Long Beach, CA, June 27-29.
• • • Frank Harmon Architect PA, based in Raleigh, has placed 13th on Architect magazine’s 2010 list of the top firms in the nation, moving up from 26th held last year. The firm is the only one in North Carolina to make the “Architect 50” this year. The Freelon Group in Durham placed 60th, and Little in Charlotte placed 71st. To view the entire 2010 Architect 50 list, go online to www.architectmagazine.com. For more information on Frank Harmon Architect PA, visit www.frankharmon.com.
• • • The Midtown Emerging Artists Series in North Hills runs until Aug. 27 with area bands, singers and performers at the fountain adjacent to CAPTRUST Tower at North Hills. This after-work spot will have free, live music and beverages. For more, contact Angela Slater at 919-833-7755, e-mail aslater@kanerealtycorp.com or visit www.northhillsraleigh.com.
• • • Shawn Gracey has been appointed general manager of The Carolina Inn on the campus of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to joining The Carolina Inn, he was general manager at Hotel Icon, a boutique property located in downtown Houston, operated by Destination Hotels & Resorts.
• • •
The producers of the documentary Landscapes of the Heart: The Elizabeth Spencer Story are the recipient of a $5000 grant from the North Carolina Humanities Council for completion of the final filming this summer. In addition, the Mississippi Arts Council has awarded the project $5000 for completion of an audio recording of Elizabeth Spencer narrating her award-winning memoir also titled Landscapes of the Heart.
Spencer, 88, resides in Chapel Hill. Project Director is Sharon Swanson, a Chapel Hill-based freelance writer. Filmmaker is Kevin McCarthy, a Dartmouth professor, who resides in Danville, VT.
For further information, contact Sharon Swanson at sharon_swanson@earthlink.net or 919 942-3205
...
read more 
|
Secrets of State
Raleigh Author Applauded For Groundbreaking New Book On Presidential Politics
Garland Tucker, in his new book The High Tide of American Conservatism, clears the political smoke to locate the moment when both Republican and Democratic presidential candidates were both conservatives. The year was 1924 and the contestants were Calvin Coolidge for the GOP and John W. Davis for the Democrats. As Fred Barnes, executive editor of The Weekly Standard and a regular contributor to Fox News puts it in the book’s Foreword: “The nomination of Davis proved to be the last hurrah of Democratic conservative. …The 1924 election realigned the parties, though few other than Tucker have noted this.”
Tucker, a Raleigh investment banker with an MBA from Harvard, came to admire Davis in his undergraduate years at Washington and Lee University, where Davis graduated and went to law school. Davis practiced law in his home state of West Virginia before election to Congress followed by a stint as Solicitor General of the United States. Later, he was tapped to serve as ambassador to the United Kingdom during the dizzying years following World War I as the US emerged as a player in European and world events.
Coolidge grew up in rural Vermont and climbed through local and state offices to the governorship of Vermont, followed by the office of vice president under Warren Harding, who died in office elevating Coolidge to the presidency in 1923. Coolidge and Davis were nominated at their respective Party conventions to set up the contest that ended an era and ushered in the future shape of American politics. 
Tucker takes readers into fascinating detail of the political background leading up to and including the decade of the Roaring ’20s and the 1924 election. The characters that shaped the nation then resonate today, including Teddy Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, Robert La Follette and lesser-known players who made significant contributions to the American political pastiche. And Davis and Coolidge on their own personify values so longed for today. Readers will discover why Ronald Reagan admired Coolidge and learn why Davis is a hero worthy of recognition.
Most refreshing is Tucker’s insights the so-called presidential scholars ensconced in their ivied splendor missed completely. The book is not only informative and entertaining, but it also breaks new ground to divulge America’s authentic political heritage.
The hardback final version is due out this September from Emerald Book Company — 800-932-5420. The book can be pre-ordered from Amazon.com.
Raleigh-Born John Jeffries Honored
Raleigh-born John C. Jeffries Jr., David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law — where he also served as dean — has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences along with 229 leaders in the sciences, social sciences, the humanities, the arts, business and public affairs. The new Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members join one of the nation’s oldest honorary societies. A center for independent policy research, the Academy is celebrating the 230th anniversary of its founding this year.
Jeffries, who graduated from Raleigh’s Needham B. Broughton High School before going on to Yale and UVA School of Law, is the author of Lewis F. Powell, Jr.: A Biography about former US Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell. Jeffries also served as co-chairman of the War Powers Commission.
Raleigh Surgeon Publishes Biography
 There is pleasing comfort for the reader in the narrative of a useful and accomplished life. Dr. George Edwards, now retired from a distinguished career as an orthopaedic surgeon, felt the muse and has put to paper Man’s Chief End, a worthy chronicle of early life in Eastern North Carolina and his ensuing professional practice in Raleigh.
Delightfully illustrated by the Right Rev. Robert W. Estill, a former bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina, Man’s Chief End is a saga of Tar Heel life, with an early interval in Chattanooga, TN — where Edwards graduated from the McCallie School and where he met his future wife Kathy. It was at McCallie that Edwards read in study hall the inscription: “Man’s Chief End Is To Glorify God And To Enjoy Him Forever,” the epigram that influenced his life.
Edwards, referred to as Eddy in the third person narrative style of the book — his nickname as a child — joined the long line of family members to enroll at Davidson College where he sought a degree that would set him up for work in the family wholesale grocery business. Realizing he really wanted to be a doctor, he enrolled at UNC-Chapel Hill and gained the prerequisites for acceptance to medical school.
Edwards sets scenes in the context of national and world events and intersperses internal dialogue that captures the era of his life. Readers are immersed in atmospheric details now gone, concerning school life, train and automobile travel, courting rituals, pre-technological business environments and the evolution of medical practice. Lessons are often learned the hard way as the cycle of a life unfolds in its often chaotic manner.
Later anecdotes carry the reader into Raleigh’s Central Prison — where Edwards treated inmates — and onto the playing fields of NC State University where his roles as team physician took the author up close and personal with legendary football coaches Lou Holtz and Joe Paterno, as well as athletes, including basketball star David Thompson. And along the way, readers meet unforgettable characters, such as the eclectic and truly unique orthopod Gus Harer, a memory well-worth reviving.
The book’s guileless specificity, unvarnished narrative — and ability to evoke the Everyman in us all — is a worthy, readable and enjoyable contribution to the canon of autobiography.
Nicely produced by Chapel Hill Press, Man’s Chief End is available at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh and via Amazon.com.
...
read more
|
Correspondence
Ports And Jobs
In his Editor At Large column in the April issue of Metro — “Poor Planning Leaves NC Ports Far Behind” — Jim Leutze states Wilmington and Morehead City ports generate 85,000 state jobs.
Where are these jobs, and how many would cease to exist without NC ports?
SA Chalk
Morehead City, NC
Media-Driven Mediocrity
Just thinking that in his May 2010 My Usual Charming Self (“Net Loss of Knowledge Now the Norm”), Bernie Reeves sums up what people are waking up to these days — what sensibilities, history, morality and standards we grew up with and pledged allegiance to are fragmenting and disappearing, just as fast as we can delete it.
The people who are running academia are dropouts. Faux educators are promoting teaching just 50 years of history. No more the likes of George Washington cutting down the cherry tree and, heaven forbid, kids celebrating Halloween. An afterthought anyway, as kids view sub-human TV shows and are served up a steady diet of violent video games featuring tattooed and shaven-headed actors and avatars in gang-like, street-walking garb.
There is a stunning lack of deference to peace and quiet as folks in high-pitched cell phone and Bluetooth conversations appear to have conversations with themselves and/or non-human customer service. Amplified boom systems and non-muffled cars rule the streets. And restaurant music makes one want to run out in the piney woods.
TV is forcing one to seriously want to take up hobbies of yore. As Reeves muses, the rampant and repugnant use of media-driven mediocrity, making falsehood and innuendo everybody’s baby, is twisting up folklore into agenda-shaped pretzeled opinion until people have no idea what to think. Fact is, a lot people could care less. Some of us did start thinking about things seriously in 2008, though, as even the smartest of us got hornswoggled in operation GROPE, the Greatest Robbery of the People Ever on Wall Street.
As we realized, the US has lost control of its higher ups, as well as its borders. We no longer know what the shape of the United States of America is; how we can collectively reclaim the sanity of principled thinking in order to grow together and prosper again? Anti-Obamites seem short on citing the specifics as to what the so-called “left”-handed devil of modern Socialism is really up to, and thus, the flavor of this thought-provoking article was lost with Reeves’ final caveat, welcoming readers “to the Age of Obama” as his sum total of whom to blame for what is to come.
A simple, TRY DOING THE RIGHT THING PEOPLE, no matter what persuasion you think you are, would do.
Kris Christensen
Raleigh
...
read more
|