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East The Magazine of East Carolina University spring 2009 Portrait of the Artist Scott Avett of the Avett Brothers East The Magazine of East Carolina University spring 2009 32 16 22 F E A T U R E S 16 POR T RAI T OF THE AR T IS T By Jimmy Rostar Whether he’s holding a banjo or a paintbrush, Scott Avett ’99 ’00 puts family ahead of fame. 22 INVISI BLE NO MORE By Marion Blackburn On a spring night in 1969, about 150 mostly black students came knocking on President Leo Jenkins’ front door asking tough questions about campus desegregation. Their questions and his answers changed minds and the history of campus race relations. 28 GO D CHE MIS TRY By Leanne E. Smith It isn’t easy explaining organic chemistry in terms students can understand. But that’s a piece of cake for Brian Love, a fun-loving professor with an oddball sense of humor and a cool Camaro. 32 EQUI TY, F I NALY By Bethany Bradsher Women’s sports at ECU become “fully funded,” meaning their teams offer the maximum scholarships allowed. D E P A R T M E N T S FRO M OUR REA DERS 3 THE ECU RE POR T . 4 SPRING AR TS CALEN DAR 12 PIRA TE NA TION . 36 CLASS NO TES 37 UPON THE PAST 48 28 viewfinder Pe De shapes up A slimmer and healthier-looking Pee Dee debuted at the Homecoming game. A series of funny videos explaining the mascot’s new look can be seen at ECU’s YouTube channel. Just search for “Pee Dee.” Jay Clark 2 Miss North Carolina No. 7 In the most recent edition of East, in the section entitled “East Carolina Timeline,” there was mention of six ECU students who have been crowned Miss North Carolina. I know of at least one other. Lynn Williford was crowned Miss North Carolina 1981, representing Wilmington. She also competed in 1979, representing another community. —Margaret Daniel Gafford ’79, Vista, Calif. Editor’s note: We overlooked Williford because she had already graduated when she was crowned Miss North Carolina and thus was not on the ECU records we researched. A theatre arts major, Lynn headed to Broadway after graduation and had a small role in a 1980 production of Snow White. Today she’s director of national field sales for Murad Inc., a global provider of professional skin care products, and living in Nashville, Tenn. “I still have wonderful memories of ECU,” she told us. That was my siste r! I could not help but smile to see the article on page 56 of the Winter 2009 issue titled “Meeting Eleanor Roosevelt” by student reporter Clarissa Humphrey—my sister! She worked part time free of charge for the newspaper in Greenville so as to learn something about newspapers and journalism. She taught English and journalism at Jenkins High School in Savannah, Ga., for many years and died in 1994. —Richard Crotwell ’87, Metter, Ga. Another Ira Baker prote ge Loved the story on ECU students who have gone on to become journalists. I had both Ira Baker and Larry O’Keefe as my teachers. During a 33-year career in journalism, I’ve won two Associated Press awards and several state awards for editorials and sports stories. I am currently editor of the Caroline County Times-Record and the Caroline County editor for the Easton Star-Democrat (both on the eastern shore of Maryland), as well as a stringer for the AP. Tom Tozer and I worked together on the student newspaper, where I was first reviews editor and then sports editor. I worked in Rocky Mount, Durham, for the Washington Post Co., then the Salisbury Times, the Annapolis Capital and now my current job. In between, there was a 12- year career as senior communications officer for the Riggs National Bank. —John Evans ’76, Denton, Md. Time to replace the natatorium ? After reading the article related to the stadium expansion in the fall issue of East I believe that the vision of our Athletic Director Terry Holland, his staff and the Pirate Club should be commended. The range of projects would benefit not only football but also basketball, softball, volleyball, tennis and other sports and activities utilizing these new facilities. However, I did notice that there was no mention of a new competitive swimming facility. Swimming has been one of the most successful sports in the history of East Carolina University. The swimming facility, though kept in great condition, is over 40 years old and is scheduled throughout the day and night. —Professor Emeritus Ray Scharf, swim coach 1967-82, Harker’s Island Editor’s note: Holland said he stretched the budget as far as he could to devise a plan that will significantly improve the facilities used by 13 of the school’s 19 teams. Building a new swimming facility for the men’s and women’s teams would cost about as much as all the other Olympic Sports facility improvements combined, Holland added. That does not include expansion of the football stadium, which will be funded by the sale of the additional seats and the additional Pirate Club donations of the new seat holders. Bring bac k the old Pe De I’m a very proud alum who loves coming back to visit Greenville and ECU. I attended Homecoming weekend and had a wonderful time. As always, the campus, the weather, the activities, the cleanliness, the Greenville southern charm were all perfect. I even proposed to my girlfriend of four years (also an ECU alum) on the beautiful, grassy campus mall late Friday afternoon. I couldn’t have asked for a better weekend. My only concern is the “new face” of Pee Dee, which I noticed during the football game. My girlfriend and I were very upset with the mascot’s “new look” and I heard comments from other fans sitting around us. Please help bring the traditional Pee Dee back! —Heath Courtright ’03 ’05, Charlotte Editor’s note: Turn back a page to see the new Pee Dee. Pirates around the world I was reading my wife’s most recent Clemson alumni magazine. In it, they dedicate a section (similar to what East does with the Class Notes) showing alumni wearing Clemson attire in various locations of the world, anywhere from the Great Wall of China to Afghanistan to South Africa. I thought it was really neat and would be a great way to show how our ECU alumni are spreading the word about ECU throughout the world. I say that because I immediately start conversations with others, regardless of where we may be, if I see them wearing something relating to ECU. Just as the case with the Class Notes, I am confident our alumni would take great interest in not only learning about how others are prospering, but also “where” they are spreading the pirate message. —Drew Walker ’89, Greer, S.C. Editor’s note: You can already see many photos like that at the Alumni Association’s web site, PirateAlumni.com. Fall graduation We had reached my favorite part of commencement ceremonies, where the graduates walk across the stage as their names are read aloud. I enjoy hearing the shout-outs from parents and friends in the audience, and tonight Wright Auditorium is ringing with laughter as the 140 School of Communication’s graduates cross the stage. The loudest come when Pierre Bell, a popular student who’s a star linebacker on the football team, walks across. He flashes a dazzling smile, then hugs the lady department head as she hands him his diploma. She practically disappears in his beefy embrace. Seven departmental graduation exercises are going on across campus tonight but I’m at this one for two reasons. First, my wife is the commencement speaker, and, second, I’m just one course shy of completing a B.S. degree in communication and would be walking myself tonight if I’d managed my time better. I’ve been taking a couple courses each semester for the past two and a half years. Once you get used to being older than everyone in the room, including the professor, attending classes is fun. I didn’t originally go to ECU, so being a student here now helps me understand the East Carolina experience that we reflect in this magazine. As the commencement speaker, Gayle McCracken Tuttle ’75 seems to really connect with the Comm School graduates. She’s a corporate PR executive now but previously she was a White House correspondent, and before that a great beat reporter; she tracked down racist serial sniper Joseph Paul Franklin. She sympathizes with the graduates, who are walking into the highest unemployment rate since 1975—the year she sat where they sit now. She struggled to land her first job and they probably will, too. But you’ll do fine, she assures them, because you’ve acquired that special ECU spirit. She leans into the microphone, her voice rising: “You know what I’m talking about. Skip Holtz knows what I’m talking about. They don’t have it at Syracuse and they don’t have it at Auburn. It’s what lets us get things done when the chips are down.” The kids break into the “ECU, ECU, ECU” chant. At the university’s main fall graduation ceremony the next night, Phil Dixon ’71 tosses off a statistic that put things into perspective for East Carolina’s 100th commencement class. Recent statistics show, he says, that out of 100 ninth-graders only 58 finish high school. Of those 58, only 38 will begin college, 28 will return for a second year and only 18 will earn a degree in six years. “This puts you in very unique company,” he says. Plus, “You know you attended the best university in the state and you’re not snotty about it.” from the editor Volume 7, Number 2 East is published four times a year by East Carolina University Division of University Advancement 2200 South Charles Blvd. Greenville, NC 27858 h EDITOR Steve Tuttle 252-328-2068 / tuttles@ecu.edu ART DIRECTOR/DESIGNER Brent Burch PHOTOGRAPHER Forrest Croce COPY EDITOR Jimmy Rostar ’94 CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Marion Blackburn, Bethany Bradsher, Kellen Holtzman, Erica Plouffe Lazure, Christine Neff, Jimmy Rostar, Steve Row, Leanne Smith CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS David Butler, Brian Christiansen, Jay Clark, Crackerfarm, Rob Goldberg, Cliff Hollis, Kelsey Sutton CLASS NOTES EDITOR Leanne Elizabeth Smith ’04 ’06 ecuclassnotes@ecu.edu ADMINISTRATION Michelle Sloan h Assistant Vice Chancelor for University Marketing Clint Bailey East Carolina University is a constituent institution of The University of North Carolina. It is a public doctoral/ research intensive university offering baccalaureate, master’s, specialist and doctoral degrees in the liberal arts, sciences and professional fields, including medicine. Dedicated to the achievement of excellence, responsible stewardship of the public trust and academic freedom, ECU values the contributions of a diverse community, supports shared governance and guarantees equality of opportunity. ©2009 by East Carolina University Printed by Progress Printing U.P. 09-328 74,000 copies of this public document were printed at a cost of $42,539 or $.57 per copy. East The Magazine of East Carolina University spring 2009 from our readers 3 4 the ecU Report 20,000 jobs arrive via Highway 17 The huge investment the state has made in four-laning U.S. Highway 17 is paying big dividends for eastern North Carolina, according to an ECU study showing that every dollar the state spent on the roadway has generated nearly three dollars in direct output and earnings and created more than 20,000 jobs. Since 1989 the state Department of Transportation has spent $2.43 billion upgrading Highway 17, eastern North Carolina’s major north-south transportation artery that stretches 300 miles from the Virginia border to Wilmington. In that time, more than $5.5 billion in output was produced by the region’s construction sector, resulting in more than $1 billion in earnings, said Mulatu Wubneh, chair of ECU’s Urban and Regional Planning Department, who led the study. Construction workers earned $600 million during the period studied. “We were asked to find out what did the state get back in return for its investment,” Wubneh said. “This study shows that the investment in infrastructure has a multiplier effect that continues to grow over time and generates additional benefits to the region.” ECU conducted the study at request of the Highway 17 Association, an alliance of businesses in the region. While the costs for materials, labor and expenditures can be quantified, Wubneh said, other benefits from the highway improvements can’t be quantified, including improved safety, reduced travel time and lower transportation costs. “These benefits are present but we cannot assign them dollar values,” he said. Fifty miles of Highway 17 still are only two lanes and other sections of the road remain in need of upgrading. —Erica Plouffe Lazure Shaping leaders Brad Congleton is vice president of the student body, an office he feels sure he never would have sought successfully if he hadn’t spent a week at ECU’s Leadership Institute. “Attending LeaderShape was the difference maker in my life,” says Congleton, a senior from Wendell. “Before going, I thought I knew who I was, and what I wanted to do. I learned quickly that becoming a successful leader you must stay committed. I was searching for an easy road, but the program taught me that being a leader is a daily job and sometimes it’s very challenging.” Each year, up to 60 students like Congleton have the opportunity to attend LeaderShape, a weeklong intensive leadership camp that teaches a “healthy disregard for the impossible.” The ECU office that supervises LeaderShape is making plans for a third annual retreat in August, either on campus or at an outside site. The previous two sessions were held over spring break at Camp Carraway in Asheville. Any ECU student with at least a 2.5 GPA can apply for the program, which uses an interactive approach with an emphasis on small groups, problem solving and community building exercises. Halfway through the week, each participant develops a “Leadership Breakthrough Blueprint” in which they define a specific leadership goal they hope to achieve within the ECU campus community. Camp participants explore topics around a theme like “The Value of One, The Power of All” and “Living and Leading with Integrity.” It’s not a week of leisure by any stretch, said Krista Wilhelm, assistant director of the Center for Student Leadership and Civic Engagement and the coordinator for ECU LeaderShape. “It’s intensive,” Wilhelm says. “It’s almost like leadership boot camp.” “I enjoyed how you moved around a good amount,” says Tiffany Mills, a senior from Hertford who attended in 2007 along with Congleton; both returned to the camp as program assistants last spring. After they complete the program, LeaderShape graduates receive continuing encouragement from the ECU LeaderShape Society, which meets throughout the school year and reinforces the principles taught at the retreat. Students who are accepted to the August session of LeaderShape will be asked to make a nonrefundable deposit of $100, but campus organizations and local businesses are encouraged to sponsor a student who might not otherwise be able to attend. Anyone interested in sponsoring a student or donating to LeaderShape can contact Wilhelm at wilhelmk@ecu.edu. —Bethany Bradsher 5 Closer to curing monkeypox Brody School of Medicine microbiologist Dr. Rachel Roper is attracting national attention, and a major grant, for research that brings doctors a step closer to stopping the spread of monkeypox, a coronavirus that’s a cousin of smallpox. Once found only in Africa, monkeypox recently turned up in prairie dogs in the U.S. and spread to humans. Her technique involves removing a specific gene from the pox virus that affects immunity. Her research also may lead to better treatments for other viruses, particularly the human severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus. “The emergence of SARS [and other viruses, including monkeypox] may well be the biggest infectious disease event since HIV,�� Roper says. Roper, former program director for the British Columbia SARS Accelerated Vaccine Initiative, was one of the scientists who sequenced and analyzed the SARS genome, proving that the virus belongs to a previously unrecognized group of coronaviruses. Now she’s working on a vaccine created by removing a gene from the virus that seems to inhibit immune responses in mammals. She’s using a grant from the N.C. Biotechnology Center to produce a vaccine that’s safer and more effective against such threats as monkeypox. Add two cups of science The National Center for Research Resources, a part of the National Institutes of Health, awarded a $504,000 grant to East Carolina researchers to study how K–12 students can use food to learn concepts in science, math and nutrition. The 2008 Science Education Partnership Award will fund the second phase of an earlier ECU study that showed that such common items as measuring cups and spoons can become valuable learning tools. “Children love anything to do with food and food preparation,” said Melani Duffrin, professor of nutrition and dietetics. “We’ve been watching enthusiastic, young students engage in scientific processes such as measurement, data collection, critical thinking and comparative analysis in very natural self-directed ways, and it’s exciting.” Cliff Hollis Campaign at $121 million Halfway through its eight-year Second Century Campaign, East Carolina University has raised more than $121 million, or 60 percent of its $200 million goal. Launched in 2008, the Second Century Campaign is providing resources for student scholarships, faculty, program, and athletic support, and campus facility construction and improvement. “East Carolina is being called upon to enhance its service to students, the region and the state,” said Vice Chancellor for University Advancement Mickey Dowdy. “The Second Century Campaign is vital to the university’s ability to continue that service, now and in the years to come.” The Second Century Campaign is one of the major steps necessary to accomplish the ambitious goals of ECU Tomorrow: A Vision for Leadership and Service, the university’s strategic plan adopted in 2007. To fully implement this strategic plan will require in excess of $1 billion in new resources from state, federal and private sources over the next 10–15 years. “Even during these challenging economic times, when they have chosen where to spend their philanthropic dollar, alumni, friends and supporters have chosen East Carolina in record numbers,” said Dowdy. “That remarkable support is truly making a difference at our university and we are heartened by the dedication of the Pirate Nation.” Please use the envelope inserted in the magazine to make a donation. For more information about the Second Century Campaign, please visit www.ecu.edu/devt or call 252-328-9550. the ecu report 6 Tuition rises 2.8 percent Tuition at ECU will rise 2.82 percent next year for both in-state and out-of-state undergraduate students, an increase that’s on the low end of what most other UNC campuses are adopting. Currently, tuition and fees are $4,219 per semester. The Board of Trustees approved the increase at a special meeting in November after failing to reach a decision at its regular October session. North Carolina residents will face a $69 increase in tuition, while students from other states will see their rates increase by $366 annually. All students will pay an increase in fees of $25. Graduate students, both resident and nonresident, will pay an extra $69 beginning next year. Chancellor Steve Ballard proposed a 2.41 percent tuition increase at the trustees’ October meeting but several members of the executive committee thought that was too low. “We are trying to hold to a minimum to North Carolina students,” Ballard said. “I think this is a reasonable compromise while paying attention to the needs of our students.” Around $650,000 of the tuition increase will be used to boost faculty salaries; about $1.5 million will go to financial aid; the rest, nearly $500,000, will be used for other support services at the university. Trustee Margaret Ward, who wanted to see a higher increase, voted against the compromise. The hikes at ECU are lower than fee and tuition increases at UNC Chapel Hill, N.C. State, UNC Wilmington, Appalachian State and UNC Greensboro, where increases were 5.5 percent or higher. The Board of Governors limits tuition increases at the state’s universities to a maximum of 6.5 percent a year. ECU, the third-largest school in the UNC system, ranks sixth in fees and seventh in tuition. —Greenville Daily Reflector Supply of dentists declines After four years of moderate increases, the state’s supply of dentists per capita has taken a downturn, according to the Sheps Center for Health Services Research at UNC Chapel Hill. According to the center’s annual report, the dentist workforce grew 4.8 percent in 2003–2004 but the growth rate slipped to 1.6 percent in 2006–2007. Adjusted for population growth, this translates into a 3.9 percent increase in ’05– ’06 and a 0.7 percent decrease in ’06–‘07. Nationally, there are an average six dentists per 100,000 population but in North Carolina the ratio is 4.3 dentists per 100,000. Four counties in eastern North Carolina—Camden, Gates, Hyde and Tyrrell—did not have an active dentist in 2007, and Camden and Tyrrell haven’t had a dentist since data collection began 1979. “The fact that our dentist supply is not keeping pace with population growth is of concern and a trend worth further monitoring,” said Erin Fraher, director of the Health Professions Data System. “North Carolina already lags behind the nation in dentist supply and we have an aging dentist workforce with nearly one in three dentists aged 55 and over. As this cohort begins to retire, it is likely that supply will contract at an even faster rate and some counties, particularly rural ones where dentists are an average three years older, may be left without a dentist,” Fraher added. East Carolina’s new dental school will accept its first students this fall, and the dental school at Chapel Hill is expanding, but these additional graduates will not enter the workforce until 2015 and 2016 respectively, Fraher said. After adjusting for population growth, the state’s supply of physicians, nurses and pharmacists increased while the supply of physicians in primary care specialties declined slightly. ECU plans an online high school After studying the feasibility of opening an Early College High School on campus for pupils from the region, East Carolina has determined that the better option is creating the special school in cyberspace. Chancellor Steve Ballard said UNC System President Erskine Bowles and the governor have given the go-ahead for ECU to expand its existing Second Life web portal, which already is used by thousands of online students, to house the Early College High School. Ballard said Shirley Carraway ’75 ’80 ’00, the recently retired superintendent of Orange County schools, has been hired part time to work on this project with Pitt County Schools and Pitt Community College. DE enrollment grows The number of distance education students enrolled in East Carolina grew to 6,190 during fall semester. They are studying for more than 60 types of undergraduate, advanced and certificate degrees. They range from 18 to 81 years old and log on to virtual classrooms in 99 of the state’s 100 counties, 43 of the 50 states and five countries other than the United States, according to a new report. The 16 UNC system campuses combined now have more than 22,000 DE students, up 20 percent in just the past year. —Christine Neff North Recreational Complex opens Interior design students display their ideas for “barracks of the future” that are better able to accommodate sick and wounded Marines during their rehabilitation at Camp Lejeune’s Wounded Warrior Battalion. The students visited military bases and talked with wounded Marines about what they would like to have in their barracks and incorporated their input into the designs. The designs include public areas for Marines who do not like to be alone, furniture specially crafted for wheelchair-users and storage space designed to hold military gear. 7 Cliff Hollis Cliff Hollis East Carolina officially opened its newest student recreation facilities last semester with plenty of lacrosse sticks, rugby balls, soccer cleats and free food. Chancellor Steve Ballard led the ribbon-cutting for the North Recreational Complex, an $8.5 million project on U.S. Highway 264 six miles from the Main Campus in a booming area of big-box student apartment complexes. Women and men’s club sports teams put the fields to good use before downing lots of hot dogs and hamburgers. Construction began on the project in March 2006. It sits on 129 acres and features eight lighted regulation fields for rugby and soccer. It is financed by student fees. Ballard noted that with the new fields and the existing Student Recreation Center on the core campus, ECU offers students some of the best and most comprehensive recreation and fitness opportunities in the nation. Nance Mize, assistant vice chancellor for campus recreation and wellness, said the new fields put the university in a position to host state, regional and national championships in several club sports. 9 Heart Center opens its doors After two years of construction, the university and Pitt County Memorial Hospital jointly dedicated the East Carolina Heart Institute on Dec. 11. The $220 million heart institute includes a six-story patient bed tower to be used by the hospital and a 206,000-square-foot research, education and outpatient care facility for the Brody School of Medicine. The dedication capped more than four years of collaboration between ECU and PCMH supported by $60 million from the N.C. General Assembly and $160 million from PCMH for the bed tower. Just how blue is ECU? The widespread perception that college professors and top administrators are politically liberal would seem to have even greater credence now that North Carolina has turned blue for the first time since 1976. But according to records at the State Board of Elections, the East Carolina community, at least, is about as divided in its politics as everyone else. According to a search of records of the 500 highest-paid employees of East Carolina University available online from the State Board of Elections (SBOE), 36 percent are registered as Democrats and 23 percent are registered as Republicans. A little less than 20 percent are unaffiliated and about 21 percent of them couldn’t be found in SBOE records. As state employees, the university’s employee and salary records are public documents, as are state voter registration lists. Those statistics indicate that ECU employees—at least the highest paid ones, most of whom work on the medical campus—are less Republican than the state as a whole. Statewide, 45 percent of all registered voters are Democrats, 34 percent are Republicans and 21 percent are unaffiliated, according to SBOE data. “Those with higher levels of education are likely to be further to the left on the ideological scale,” says political science professor Bonnie Mani. “Remember that ideology and party affiliation are two different concepts—although Republicans are more likely to be conservative and Democrats are likely to be further to the left.” Despite ECU’s Democratic leanings, the Republican Party does target students with groups such as College Republicans and Students for McCain. Kim Hendrix, the chair of the Pitt County Republican Party Executive Board, echoed Mani’s sentiments. “Most educators are Democrats, but there does seem to be a Republican presence on campus.” “I’ve noticed that just driving through the faculty parking areas during the day that most cars are sporting Obama bumper stickers, ” says grad student and teaching assistant Nicole Keech. “There are very few in support of McCain—maybe that just means that McCain supporters are more conservative in publicly expressing their political stances.” A Democrat hasn’t carried North Carolina since Carter in ’76. In 2004, George Bush defeated John Kerry here 56 percent to 44 percent. In Pitt County, Bush edged out Kerry 53 percent to 46 percent. Barack Obama carried Pitt County by 54 percent to 46 percent. Of the 14 other counties that host a UNC system campus, only New Hanover County, home of UNC Wilmington, went for John McCain, and that by only the slightest of margins. —Kellen Holtzman Editor’s note: East occasionally publishes original writing by ECU students. This story was prepared by Holtzman as a research project for the Communications 3320 Investigative Reporting class. the ecu report Spiders for scholarships There’s a new reason to give money to ECU: You could get a spider named for you. Biologist Jason Bond, who received international attention last summer for naming two of his newly discovered trapdoor spiders after musician Neil Young and talk show host Stephen Colbert, is offering similar naming rights to donors to a scholarship fund for students studying biodiversity. “We want this event to be a lot of fun, as well as informative,” says Jeff McKinnon, chair of the biology department. The largest donor to the fund will win the opportunity to name one of Bond’s trapdoor spiders. The winner was to be announced on Feb. 12. Bond discovered the new species of trapdoor spiders in late 2007 and is in the process of naming them. Other species in Bond’s collection have been named after Nelson Mandela, Neil Young, Angelina Jolie, and Bond’s wife, Kristen. To learn who won and how much money was raised for scholarships, visit www.ecu.edu/ biology. 8 Greenville’s expensive real estate Let’s say you’ve just taken a job teaching at East Carolina and will be moving to Greenville from, say, Raleigh. You should be able to buy a much nicer house in Greenville than the one you had in Raleigh, right? Wrong. Based on sales over the past year, the average price of a 2,220-foot, four-bedroom home with 2½ baths, a family room and a two-car garage here will cost you about $50,000 more than in Raleigh, according to a national survey by Coldwell Banker Real Estate. Greenville real estate also is pricier than Winston-Salem and Durham. Rank School City Housing cost 1 Stanford University Palo Alto, Calif. $ 1,740,731 17 University of Virginia Charlottesville, Va. 408,475 21 University of North Carolina Chapel Hill 369,966 30 West Virginia University Morgantown, W.V a. 331,333 42 Virginia Tech University Blacksburg, Va. 302,075 47 East Carolina University Greenville 283,022 74 North Carolina State University Raleigh 236,124 78 Wake Forest University Winston-Salem 230,667 83 Duke University Durham, N. C. 221,491 90 University of Tennessee Knoxville, Tenn. 208,637 100 University of South Carolina Columbia, S. C. 189,262 The Access Scholarship program, begun just two years ago, has grown to serve 62 students as of fall semester. The scholarships are worth $5,000 a year for four years, enough to cover college costs beyond what’s available in most student loans. More than 9,000 undergraduate students at East Carolina have demonstrated financial need, the highest in the UNC system. With existing resources ECU is only able to meet 60 percent of financial aid requests from students with the most need. A $250,000 gift from BB&T allowed the program to expand by two scholarships. For more about this gift, see page 38. The fact that Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Sarah Palin all campaigned in Greenville stoked a noticeable increase in political activity on campus. Obama filled Minges Auditorium on April 18 and Sarah Palin did the same on Oct. 7. Three weeks later, Joe Biden walked out of the student center wearing an ECU baseball cap and talked to students gathered on the mall. Nancy Ballard welcomes Barack Obama to Minges. Contributed photo E a s t C a r o l i n a t i me l i n e The first faculty arrives In the spring and summer of 1909, President Robert Wright (far right) hires 10 teachers to instruct the inaugural class of 174 East Carolina students, who will arrive in the fall. Today, several buildings on campus are named for those first faculty members. From left to right, top row, are Kate W. Lewis, William Henry Ragsdale (residence hall), Birdie McKinney, Sallie Joyner Davis (library), Maria D. Graham (classroom building), Mamie E. Jenkins (originally the infirmary, now an office building), Claude W. Wilson (residence hall), Jennie M. Ogden, Fannie Bishop and Herbert E. Austin (classroom building). Computerized registration begins As student complaints soar over long lines at registration and drop-add, East Carolina buys 50 IBM computers in the spring of 1984 and becomes the first college in the state to move toward a computerized, decentralized system of registering students for classes. The system requires students to go to their advisors’ offices and make out class schedules. The schedules are then given to computer operators who feed the data into the campus mainframe. Observers are awed that the mainframe is able to crunch the data and confirm the requested classes “within minutes.” After a year of testing, the system is first used in March 1985. Images courtesy University Archives President Messick’s last year The rigors of leading a college undergoing constant growth and change begins wearing on President John Messick. In his 12 years at the helm, the student body triples in size to 4,000, 11 new buildings are constructed and 13 others on campus are enlarged or remodeled. In early 1959 he tells friends, “I’m just getting tired of the pressures involved, mostly the pressure of obtaining sufficient funds to operate a college like ours.” He announces his resignation in October. Leo Jenkins, Messick’s longtime right-hand man, is named to lead the college. Robert Wright dies Amid enthusiastic preparations for the 25th anniversary of the school’s founding, and Robert Wright’s 25th year as president, the 64-year-old leader suffers a heart attack while working at his desk in the Spilman Building and dies two days later, April 25, 1934. He lay in state in the auditorium later named for him. 100 YEARS AGO 25 YEARS AGO 40 YEARS AGO 75 YEARS AGO the ecu report Marilyn Sheerer was appointed provost and senior vice chancellor for academic and student affairs, a post she had held on an interim basis. Sheerer came to ECU in 1996 as a professor and chair of the Department of Elementary and Middle Grades Education. She served as dean of the College of Education from 1998 to 2006 and also led the university’s fund-raising operation and the Division of Student Life. In making the appointment, Chancellor Steve Ballard said that Sheerer “is exactly the right person to fill this critical role at the university.” John Given, an assistant professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, is the new director of the program in Classical Studies within the College of Arts and Sciences. He replaces John Stevens, who directed the Classical Studies program for the past five years. Stevens will return to the classroom. Given has worked to create a full curriculum in Greek. Mary A. Farwell was appointed director of undergraduate research in the Division of Research and Graduate Studies. She had worked for 14 years as associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Biology. Farwell will be responsible for helping to organize and fund undergraduate research projects. David Weismiller was named associate provost for the Office of Institutional Planning, Assessment and Research. He was vice chair for academic affairs in the Department of Family Medicine. A faculty member since 1996, he was recognized in 2004 with the School of Medicine’s coveted Master Educator Award. Beth Velde, a professor of occupational therapy and assistant dean in the College of Allied Health Sciences, was named director of East Carolina’s new Outreach Scholars Academy. The academy will develop engaged scholars who are leaders in their professions, working with communities to improve the quality of life and foster economic prosperity for North Carolinians. The academy will provide professional development for faculty and enable them to pursue sponsored scholarship related to curricular engagement, outreach and partnerships. Patrick Pellicane, dean of the Graduate School, has resigned to become vice provost for research and dean of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Graduate School. Paul Gemperline, associate vice chancellor for research, will serve acting dean for the Graduate School while a search continues for a permanent replacement. Dr. Lessie Louise Bass, 62, died Jan. 18, weeks after receiving the 2008 Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Public Service (above). Dr. Bass joined the ECU College of Human Ecology School of Social Work faculty in 1993. She also taught at the University of Maryland, Fayetteville State University and Barton College. She also was Executive Director of the Lucille W. Gorham Intergenerational Community Center of West Greenville. She was a founding member of the Wilson, Omicron lota Zeta Chapter of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority and a life member of Norwayne Alumni. Kelsey Sutton The Green Grass Cloggers, founded at ECU in 1971, received the 2008 Mountain Heritage Award at the 34th annual Mountain Heritage Day at Western Carolina University. In the years since the group was started by Dudley Culp ’71 and Toni Jordan Williams ’77, helped by recreation professor Ralph Steele and geology professor Stan Riggs, a third of its nearly 160 members have been ECU graduates or faculty. Green Grass Cloggers now has a team based in Asheville, and a Home Team based in Greenville that performs regionally. The two teams perform together at least once a year. A 40th anniversary reunion of all former and current members is being planned for 2011 in Greenville. U n i v e r s i t y L i f e Photo courtesy Western Carolina University 12 13 The ECU Opera Theatre’s spring production will be Puccini’s Madama Butterfly March 4, 5 and 6 in Fletcher Recital Hall. John Kramar will direct three evening performances and one afternoon performance, which will be sung in Italian and accompanied by the ECU Symphony Orchestra. The Four Seasons Chamber Music Festival closes its season with trios, quartets and quintets. The March 19–20 program will feature Haydn’s Piano Trio in C, Schumann’s Piano Quartet in E-flat major and Faure’s Piano Quartet No. 1 in C-minor. Performers will be ECU’s Ara Gregorian, violin; Shai Wosner, piano; Hsin-Yun Huang, viola; and Zvi Plesser, cello. The finale April 30 and May 1 will consist of Bloch’s Piano Quintet No. 1 and Dvorak’s Piano Quintet in A. Joining Gregorian will be guests Thomas Sauer, piano; Soovin Kim, violin; Elina Vahala, violin; and Amit Peled, cello. The programs will be played in Fletcher Recital Hall. ECU Theatre and Dance. The ECU-Loessin Playouse series presents Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well April 2–7, and the season concludes April 23–28 with Dance 2009, the annual program featuring ECU dancers in ballet, modern, jazz and tap. The Family Fare series winds up April 17 with an ECU Storybook Theatre production of Willy Wonka, based on the book by Roald Dahl. The ECU production will be the musical version, with music and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley. The ninth annual NewMusic@ ECU Festival takes place Feb. 25–March 1, with the Daedalus Quartet and Pulsoptional among the featured guest performers. Festival director Edward Jacobs planned seven concerts, along with master classes with visiting composers, performers and conductors, and reading sessions of student composers’ works. New this year is an orchestra composition competition. Among the ECU performers will be the Chamber Singers, Feb. 26 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church; NewMusic Camerata, Feb. 27 and Feb. 28 at Fletcher Recital Hall; and Symphony Orchestra, March 1 at Wright Auditorium. Clarinetist Christopher Grymes of the music faculty will lead off the festival Feb. 25 with a program at the Starlight Café. ECU Symphony programs in late winter and early spring will include an unusual range of musical selections and also will highlight winners of orchestral composition and concerto competitions. A March 1 concert in Wright Auditorium at 3 p.m. that is part of the NewMusic Festival will include Folksongs of the Vikings, a work by David Dahlgren for tuba and string orchestra, which will feature tuba soloist Tom McCaslin, and a world premiere piece by Marc Faris of the Music School’s composition program. Faris also is a co-founder of Pulsoptional, the ensemble scheduled to play in the NewMusic Festival. The April 26 concert (Wright Auditorium, 3 p.m.) will include Borodin’s overture to Prince Igor and Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements. The ECU Jazz Studies Program’s Jazz at Night series at the Hilton Greenville Hotel ends Feb. 20 and March 27. Jazz students, as well as faculty members and guest musicians, perform, and the hotel donates a portion of ticket holders’ restaurant purchases to the university’s Jazz Studies program. Performances begin at 8 p.m. The School of Art and Design’s annual exhibition of art and craft work by undergraduate students will be on display March 4–April 8, with an awards ceremony scheduled March 4. The annual exhibition of thesis works by graduate students is scheduled April 17–May 22. Who’s in town? Uzee Brown Jr., president of the National Association of Negro Musicians, former chair of the music department of Clark Atlanta University, and choir director at Martin Luther King’s home congregation, Ebenezer Baptist Church, will be the special guest of the School of Music for a program, “The Art of the Spiritual,” in A. J. Fletcher Music Center Recital Hall March 17 at 8 p.m. Brown recorded a CD of his own solo spiritual arrangements, Great Day, in 2006. Rebecca Penneys will present a piano recital March 21 at 7 p.m. at Fletcher Recital Hall. She has been a resident artist at the Chautauqua Festival since 1978 and was appointed visiting artist at St. Petersburg College in Florida in 2001. Sole Nero, a piano and percussion duo, will perform in Fletcher Recital Hall April 5 at 7 p.m. Percussionist Anthony Di Sanzais and pianist Jessica Johnson explore new and existing works for piano and percussion. Gary Smart, Yessin Professor of Music at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, will present a piano recital in Fletcher Recital Hall April 9 at 7 p.m. Smart is a composer and improviser whose music has been performed at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall and Kennedy Center. —Steve Row For ticketing and other information, go to www.ecu.edu/arts Jennifer Licko Shelton ’98 will present a special St. Patrick’s Day concert March 17 at 8 p.m. in Wright Auditorium as a fund-raiser for the S. Rudolph Alexander Performing Arts Series. Licko sings Celtic music and plays piano, guitar and bodhrán—the Irish drum. The Swansboro native started performing as a Highland dancer before she was a teenager. She has recorded several CDs since graduating from ECU with a music degree. She’s also studied in Scotland and Ireland. Hear songs from her new album at www.jenniferlicko.com. The S. Rudolph Alexander Performing Arts Series concludes its season with internationally known piano accompanist John Wustman and Metropolitan Opera baritone Nathan Gunn, who will perform Franz Schubert’s Die schone Mullerin Feb. 20, and the Russian National Ballet’s production of Giselle April 2. Wustman, the Robert L. Jones Distinguished Visiting Professor in the ECU School of Music, will accompany members of the ECU Vocal Studies Department in the first and second parts of Wolf’s Spanisches Liederbuch March 22 and 23. Jazz singer Nnenna Freelon will be the principal guest artist for the Billy Taylor Jazz Festival April 16 –1 8, with most events held at the Greenville Convention Center a nd adjacent Hilton Hotel. Freelon lives in Durham a nd is married to Phil Freelon, the architect who is designing ECU’s new student center. Nnenna was discovered in 1990 by jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis and signed by Columbia Records, which has releas ed 11 of her albums. F ive of them garnered Grammy nominations. She has received the Billie Holiday Award from the Academie du Jazz i n France and the Eubie Bla ke Award from the National Ja zz Institute. She toured with the Monterey Jazz Festival’s 50th Anniversary Band in 2008. Freelon’s April 18 performance at 8 p.m. closes the festival, which will run under the direction of Carroll V. Dashiell Jr., director of jazz studies in the School of Music. Over three days the festival will include a free “Jazz Bones” program April 16 at the Hilton, a ticketed performance by the ECU Jazz Ensemble April 17 at the convention center, and critiques of visiting high school and middle school jazz ensembles April 18 at the convention center. 20 09 Spring Arts Calendar 14 15 Portrait of the Artist Whether he’s holding a banjo or a paintbrush, Scott Avett ’99 ’00 puts family ahead of fame. 16 17 By Jimmy Rostar It’s the last week of December, and the Avett Brothers are playing the third of five back-to-back, sold-out concerts. Sweat flies, strings break and fists pump inside Asheville’s Orange Peel club as the band performs a string of their own songs and covers of tunes made famous by Townes Van Zandt and Bob Wills. The audience cheers for an encore and the band complies, first with the ballad “If It’s the Beaches,” a song from their 2006 album The Gleam that’s been featured on the NBC drama Friday Night Lights. Then the concert ends with the anthemic “Salvation Song,” from the band’s 2004 album, Mignonette. As the song reaches the final chorus, band and audience become one as they sing together: “W e came for salvation We came for family We came for all that’s good That’s how we’ll walk away We came to break the bad We came to cheer the sad We came to leave behind the world a better way.” The lights dim with the band right where they spent many nights in 2008—on stage, performing for enthusiastic fans who love the music and seemingly know all the lyrics by heart. And with a new album coming out produced by the legendary Rick Rubin—the man who revived Johnny Cash’s career—many believe 2009 will be the year the band emerges as the next big thing in American music. If that does happen, it’s unlikely the Avett Brothers—Scott Avett and younger brother Seth, a graduate of UNC Charlotte, with bandmates Bob Crawford and Joe Kwon—will follow the path of so many bands before them, from discovery to sudden success, followed quickly by burnout and oblivion. They aren’t performing for the fame, the money, the attention. “Salvation Song” tells you exactly why the Avetts came. ‘Day by day—that’s the key’ It’s difficult to define the type of music the Avett Brothers play. The San Francisco Chronicle describes it as “the heavy sadness of Townes Van Zandt, the light pop concision of Buddy Holly, the tuneful jangle of the Beatles, the raw energy of the Ramones [which] allows them to express a full range of emotions and opt for honesty and optimism over irony and cynicism.” Scott primarily plays the banjo, and he also plays the guitar, piano, harmonica, and drums. Seth’s mainly a guitarist, while he too plays piano and drums. The brothers share most of the singing and songwriting duties. Crawford is the bassist, and Kwon plays cello. However you categorize the tunes, 2008 was a momentous year for the Avetts. The band released its 10th album, The Second Gleam, and continued building an ever-growing fan base through a grueling tour schedule. A visual artist as well as a musician, Scott showed paintings and other artwork at a gallery in New York City. On personal notes, he also became a father, and Seth got married. This year is shaping up as an even greater seminal period, with the much-anticipated new album and another heavy touring schedule on the way. The Avett Brothers will play several shows with the Dave Matthews Band, including an April 22 concert at Raleigh’s Time Warner Cable Music Pavilion at Walnut Creek and an April 24 show at Charlotte’s Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre. With all of that ahead, Scott says it’s more important than ever for him to keep focused on the family values he learned growing up in Concord, N.C., and the work ethic that earned him two degrees from East Carolina. “I can’t think about the big picture too much and what’s ahead because it’s way too overwhelming,” he says during an interview in his art studio in Concord, a suburb of Charlotte. “Day by day. That’s the key.” He credits his parents, Jim and Susie, for nurturing a love for family and the arts. A welder by trade, Jim Avett played guitar and had a collection of records and 8-tracks that he shared with his family. As children, Scott, Seth and sister Bonnie all learned to play the piano. Family sing-alongs were common, and the three siblings regularly sang with their father at church services. Some of those songs would make their way onto the 2008 album Jim Avett and Family, a collection of gospel tunes featuring the Avett patriarch along with his children, as well as Crawford and Kwon. “As far back as our memory goes, it’s there,” Scott recalls of his first exposure to music. “The earliest memories are of whatever my parents were listening to and my dad was playing. I always remember this sort of mid-’70s John Denver vibe, and Tom T. Hall. Those old country and country rock things were really inspiring, and they really impacted us as kids.” Interest in the visual arts also developed early, Scott says, recalling a game in which his father encouraged his children to create images out of simple shapes he would draw. “They had art around,” Seth Avett says of his parents. “We weren’t a family of means—there wasn’t a lot of money—but if we wanted to hear music, there was a record player in the living room. We could hear Dad playing guitar and singing to us. There were some art books in the bookshelves, and there was a lot of good literature around.” The brothers agree that the family bond has been essential in shaping who they are as people and as artists. “I’ve been very fortunate to grow up and realize how much that’s carried me,” Scott says. “Seth and I wouldn’t be able to do what we do if our parents hadn’t been so generous and forthcoming with supporting the music.” Now a father himself, Scott says he even more deeply appreciates the importance of family as he and his wife, Sarah, tend to their infant daughter. “Our family has stepped up,” he says. “We just do things for each other. There’s no talk about how anybody needs favors returned or how anybody is on borrowed time or anything like that. As I get older, I realize how important that is.” Coming to Greenville At East Carolina, Scott found a home in the College of Fine Arts and Communication. In 1999, he earned a BS degree in communication. A year later, he earned a BFA degree in Each week Time magazine asks a notable person what they’re reading, watching or listening to. In the Jan. 8 issue, John Grogan, author of the best-seller Marley & Me, said he’s listening to Emotionalism by the Avett Brothers: “I discovered the Avett Brothers while browsing in one of those iconic hippie shops in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. The album was playing on the store’s sound system, and I was instantly smitten. It is impossible not to grin while listening to this infectiously upbeat blend of folk, rock and bluegrass, all played on acoustic instruments and with whimsical, witty lyrics to boot.” The Avett Brothers—Joe Kwon, Bob Crawford, Scott Avett and Seth Avett, from left—perform at the sold-out Belk Theater in Charlotte on Dec. 30. They are joined by Bonnie Avett Rini, Scott and Seth’s sister. David Butler Crackerfarm 19 art, focusing mainly on painting. “ECU was absolutely awesome,” he says. He says his college experience was especially fruitful once he opened himself to the support his professors gave in shaping his craft. “ECU was there to offer whatever direction it was that I needed,” he adds. “It was there to guide me. There was nothing stopping me after I homed in on what I wanted to do. For that, I have ECU to thank.” Leland Wallin, a professor emeritus of painting, recalls Scott Avett the art student as “an individual with enormous potential,” and he encouraged the budding artist to continue in his studies. “The works he did with me were quite beautiful—painterly portraits, lush brushwork and color, with considerable amount of control,” he says. “Scott was one of my outstanding students. He’s a very talented guy in many ways, quite diversified in his abilities.” Scott also took an interest in printmaking and continues to keep in touch with professor Michael Ehlbeck. He regularly returns to campus to create elaborately crafted prints that commemorate the band’s annual New Year’s Eve and other big shows. “I have the highest opinion of Scott—the work he does, the work ethic that he has set up for himself, things that he does on the road, things that he does at home,” Ehlbeck says. “He wants to keep his hands in the printmaking and in the painting. He continues to make prints and paintings because he feels it’s important.” Scott says his music and visual artwork are pursuits that parallel and complement one another, adding that his time at East Carolina definitely shaped his dedication to both as career and artistic options. “The same year that Leland Wallin said, ‘You’ve got to stay in this [painting]; this is what you’re obligated to do,’ I picked up the banjo and started playing,” he says. “So I committed myself to both of them at the same time.” He sang in bands throughout his years at East Carolina. One, a rock outfit called Nemo, eventually brought Scott and Seth Avett together along with a few friends. In the late 1990s, a side project featuring acoustic instruments was born, and the Avetts began collaborating on songs over the phone. In 2000, Scott and Seth—along with Nemo guitarist John Twomey—released a CD under the Avett Brothers name. Since that first album, the Avett Brothers have continued a period of intensive songwriting, performing and recording. Their songs focus on many aspects of the examined life—love, loss, regret, resolve, truth and honesty among them. David Butler, who hosts an Americana music radio program on Guilford College’s WQFS in Greensboro, first heard the Avett Brothers’ music on a box set of Charlotte-area musicians. Later he saw the band perform at MerleFest, the perennial music festival in Wilkesboro. He says he knew he had seen and heard something special. “They impressed me more than anybody I saw at MerleFest that year,” Butler says of that 2004 performance. Since then he has been to nearly 70 of their shows and plays the band’s music regularly on his program. He says the artistry of their songs keeps his interest engaged. “I love them live, and I like the fact that you can see them several nights in a row and it’s radically different each night,” he says. “But to me, it’s their basic songwriting skills. They’ve got the ability to write great, amazing songs. Whether I’m listening to the studio things or listening to them live, it’s the songs that stick with me.” ‘They want to make great art’ In 2003, the Avett Brothers connected with Dolph Ramseur, a former tennis pro from Concord who owned an independent label called Ramseur Records. The Avetts have been with him ever since. “They want to make great art,” Ramseur says. “Their artwork is pretty much an extension of how they really live. They’re doing it the right way.” Even as they achieved early success with 18 In a recent post to the Ramseur Records blog (ramseurrecords.blogspot.com), Scott Avett talks about his passion for printmaking: My introduction to printmaking was by professor of printmaking at East Carolina University, Michael Ehlbeck. While focusing on painting as a concentration at the School of Art, I also found time and the good fortune to learn multiple printmaking processes under Ehlbeck’s instruction. Among these processes was relief block printing, which I initially learned on wood and then later on linoleum. The process has proven very useful in the moving world that I live in, where mobility is a must due to the changing workspace. Over the past five years I have used The Avett Brothers’ annual New Year’s shows as a commercial outlet to produce prints using this process. In between show posters I have also completed prints using other subject matter as well. The process of relief block printing starts with a drawing, usually in one of my many sketch books and then it is transferred, in parts, to a large piece of tracing paper to make up a unified composition. The image is then traced again on the opposite side of the tracing paper and then burnished onto a piece of linoleum. I then redraw the image over the lines I have transferred and add touches and possibly more elements to the image on the linoleum, sometimes changing it completely. Some images are drawn straight to linoleum when traveling with scrap pieces. After the image is completely drawn in black ink on the linoleum, I began carving the unmarked areas away. This creates the “negative” space that ink will not touch, and will leave the paper exposed creating the lighter value of the image. The black areas that make up the drawing become the surface in which the ink is carried and make up the dark value of the image. Once the linoleum block is entirely carved I began the printing process. Printing has been done in the printmaking department at East Carolina University with the help and support of Michael Ehlbeck and others. Without the faculty within the printmaking department at the School of Art at ECU, printmaking, for me, would not be possible. The prints are made in limited runs and are signed and numbered accordingly. Some will not be reproduced. Some of Avett’s artwork can be viewed and purchased at Envoy Gallery located in New York City’s Lower East Side or at www.envoygallery.com. Prints are also available through Applewood Gallery of Charlotte, N.C. D i s c o g r a p h y 2000 The Avett Bros. 2002 Country Was 2002 Live at the Double Door Inn 2003 A Carolina Jubilee 2004 Mignonette 2005 Live, Vol. 2 2006 Four Thieves Gone: The Robbinsville Sessions 2006 The Gleam 2007 Emotionalism 2008 The Second Gleam Scott Avett returned to campus in 2008 to create this print commemorating the band’s year-end concerts. 20 Town and Gown = Hand in Glove Jacqueta Thomas volunteers as a tutor at the Building Hope Community Life Center 21 Ramseur, the Avetts remained a small, do-it-yourself operation consisting of the band, the label, a road manager, a sound engineer, a booking agent and a distributor. Marketing has largely been by word of mouth and the support of fans who volunteer to hang up concert posters. To date, they’ve sold more than 150,000 albums. They’ve performed in all but a handful of the continental United States, and they’ve done a string of shows in the United Kingdom. They’ve built a successful business model based on good will and a handshake—the band and Ramseur never signed any contracts with one another. “I want the whole world to hear them,” Ramseur says. “I think they’ve got something that touches everybody. We started out just winning over a fan at a time and selling one record at a time. I feel we’ve grown at a great pace, and it’s just a good situation.” Megan Westbrook ’08 was won over as a freshman at East Carolina when she saw the band perform in Greenville. She’s seen them perform about 25 times since then. “It’s real music and honest lyrics, and they’re such great songwriters,” Westbrook says. “There’s a wide range of emotion you can feel in their songs. They write what they feel.” Their last two albums, Emotionalism and The Second Gleam, made it to the Billboard Top 200 chart. When Emotionalism debuted, it was No. 1 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart as well. The band has appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and won awards from the Americana Music Association. Scott Avett continues to immerse himself in visual work as well as his music. A self-portrait still in process is among a variety of paintings in various stages of life at his art studio. He recently began selling sketches through Envoy Gallery in New York, where he has shown his works on several occasions. And he still regularly visits Ehlbeck’s shop on campus to make prints, often accompanied by his brother. “You watch Scott and Seth printing together, and it’s like they’re good friends who haven’t seen each other in a couple of years—and they’ve been on the road for 200 days together,” Ehlbeck says. “It’s a pretty unique combination for all of them, and I think it feeds Scott’s work.” Working with a luminary The music world sat up and took notice last July when the band announced that its next album would be produced by Rick Rubin and released on his American Recordings label. Ramseur will stay on as manager. The Grammy-winning Rubin, co-founder of Def Jam Records, has produced albums by Johnny Cash, Metallica, the Dixie Chicks, Neil Diamond, the Beastie Boys and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. “It’s really amazing,” Scott says of working with Rubin. “Surreal at first, absolutely. The more we’ve grown, the more serious we’ve become as musicians and the more serious we’ve gotten as songwriters. The songs aren’t as light as they once were, and [Rubin] gravitated toward that. He gravitated toward the bigger, serious-topic songs.” The band was prepared to surrender a certain level of creative control to Rubin as they made the record, but Scott says 95 percent of the decisions made were the band’s own. Ramseur says the core organization that is the Avett Brothers remains intact. “It’s still a day-to-day operation,” he says. “There’s going to be a lot more hard work ahead, and we’re prepared for it. We could continue to put records out on Ramseur Records, and we could have done really well. But sometimes you���ve got to see the big picture and realize that if we partner with someone, maybe we can take this to a wider audience.” Scott recalls that it wasn’t too long ago that he and his brother were performing songs in front of 10 people on a Charlotte sidewalk. Last summer, the band played to 7,000 people at the Koka Booth Amphitheatre in Cary, near Raleigh. Whether the audience includes 10 or 7,000 people, the connection with them continues to be vital to him, Scott says. As he meets fans and hears their stories, he says he is nourished by their energy and feels a strong sense of obligation to continue producing art. “There’s a real goodness to this that has kind of blindsided me,” he says. “Where I’m at in my life, I want to grab at that obligation, and if we can make it into positives, then we ought to.” He pauses to consider his future in music and art. “I’m going to see to it that my skill and my craft are as well-refined in whatever way refined means,” he says. ��I am going to educate myself and learn. But everything learned and established and achieved amounts to nothing if there’s not some type of good coming from it. That takes a while to get to. “You can’t own enough to make yourself feel good. You can’t make enough to make yourself feel good. You can’t know enough to make yourself feel good. You’ve just got to do the best at what you do and try to return the favor by being positive.” East 23 One spring night 40 years ago, about 150 students came knocking on President Leo Jenkins’ front door asking tough questions about campus desegregation. They wanted to know why Dixie persisted at football games, why there were no black faculty members, and why the only other blacks on campus were janitors and housekeepers. The moment was tense but lines of communications were opened, and although the students continued pressing for answers that spring, the path to campus equality continued peacefully. Invisible no more The iconic photograph captures a moment when minds and history were changed: On the evening of March 26, 1969, a group of angry students surround President Leo Jenkins on the front porch of Dail House, their arms crossed, their faces intent. It was not a social call. Frustrated by lingering prejudice on campus, the students rose from a meeting and strode across Fifth Street to ask why, nearly seven years after the first black student enrolled at East Carolina, they still endured the playing of Dixie at football games. Why the Confederate battle flag appeared at sponsored events. Why there still were no black professors. The visitors felt campus desegregation had stalled, and they wanted Jenkins to take action. Because of Jenkins’ natural empathy for their cause, and the students’ own maturity, the face-off ended peacefully that night. The students went home with a promise the university would continue addressing their concerns, and Jenkins kept his word. That night marked an especially rocky stretch on East Carolina’s road to desegregation, which began in 1962 and perhaps culminated when the first group of African American faculty arrived in 1974. They were critical years for the university, marking its departure from provincialism into the ways and values of a modern, multicultural university. Behind the transformation were leaders like Jenkins and the late Dr. Andrew A. Best, Greenville’s first African American physician. Together, they crafted a thoughtful path to desegregation— avoiding the courts, the National Guard and federal intervention. In the weeks after the front porch summit, Jenkins held several high-profile meetings with students. By the next year, no one heard Dixie at games and the battle flag was unwelcome. Though it would be years before African American faculty were hired in significant numbers, the university was on its way toward full desegregation. b y m a r i o n b l a c k b u r n University Archives 24 First steps In 1962, a single African American student arrived on campus, Laura Marie Leary Elliot ’66. Two years later, a hopeful class of 16 other black students arrived with a sense that they weren’t just going to learn history, they were going to write it. “We stepped out on faith,” says Ray Rogers ’72 of Greenville. “If you live in a dorm with only four blacks and you walk across campus and you’re always in class by yourself, it takes a lot of inward peace and feeling good about yourself. Everywhere you went, there was a culture of 16 versus 10,000.” He later met and married another dynamic African American student, Eve (Everlena) Clark ’69, who arrived on campus in 1967. Rogers, a financial administrator, today works as a consultant, and his wife, a retired juvenile justice administrator, has been recognized with the Order of the Long Leaf Pine award. “We had a sense that there was a movement afoot concerning civil rights,” Eve Rogers says. Though without a lot of money, she says, her parents were keenly aware of the value of a good education for their daughter. She felt inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King to take part of the change happening around her. “We felt that however small, we were part of it,” she says. Meanwhile, out of the public eye, Jenkins and Dr. Best worked to accelerate desegregation. They knew strong forces beyond the university opposed them. They also knew what happened further south, where armed intervention ushered desegregation onto campuses in Mississippi and Georgia in the early 1960s. The two men held deep personal commitments to racial equality. Dr. Best befriended the trailblazing African American students, and tirelessly advocated for them. Jenkins instructed staff and faculty to welcome and support black students, seeing to it they received financial aid. That assistance was critical, because though they were high achievers, they likely could not have afforded college. For campus pioneers like Ray Rogers, an ordinary walk across campus took enormous inner strength. It was common to hear racial slurs whispered and sometimes shouted at him. He recalls a rally by the Ku Klux Klan at the site of today’s Minges Coliseum, and says his classmates were aware of their unspoken boundaries. “Downtown was not a place you were welcomed,” he says. When Rogers returned to ECU from overseas military service in 1970, he noticed quite a few changes. He no longer heard Dixie at sporting events; he didn’t feel so alone. By that time, about 200 black students were enrolled. Second wave In 1969, however, the mood was grim. Dr. Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated the year before and racial tensions were high throughout the nation. Black students numbered about 90 on a campus they felt was still largely segregated. Student William Lowe was quoted as saying in 1969, “When you see your race being cast in the role of invisible people, it gives you a feeling of inferiority.” There was work to be done. To unify their calls for progress, the students created SOULS, or Society of United Liberal Students. They developed a list of requests and in a dramatic move, presented them to Jenkins on his front porch on March 26, 1969. While by the late 1960s most universities had successfully desegregated, memories of the beatings, high-pressure water hoses and imprisonments could not have been far from the students’ minds that night. For them, Jenkins was a lightning rod. “If we were to be a true part of the campus, we needed to have our ideas heard,” says Luther Moore ’72, who was among the 150 or so students facing Jenkins that night. “One of the first concerns was with playing Dixie at football games…and displaying Confederate flags at school sponsored events. “Our job was to try to make the student body understand how we felt, why we didn’t like the playing of that song and what it stood for. It brings thoughts of slavery and Jim Crowism, those kinds of things that occurred after slavery was abolished.” Today, Moore works as a guidance counselor at Clinton High School and, as the county’s only African American male counselor, is still something of a pathfinder. He vividly remembers those heady days. “We were a small group of African Americans and bonded,” he says. “We became a group I could socialize with, and feel part of something. I am humble, but I knew we were pioneers, because there were very few of us. I felt like I had to be my best. Academically, I didn’t set the world on fire, but I was successful.” The students weren’t alone that night on the front porch of Dail House. Watching from the shadows were campus police, state troopers and an agent of the State Bureau of Investigation, who took the historic image. In the original photograph stored in the University Archives, you can see numbers written on several faces, an apparent attempt by the SBI agent to identify those involved. “We were aware of the fact that we were involved in events where there were people taking photographs,” says Roosevelt Morton ’84 of Raleigh, who works with the state Department of Public Instruction. “We didn’t know who the people were, but it wouldn’t have been a stretch to imagine that it was an official arm of the government.” As a result of that meeting, Jenkins initiated a series of roundtable discussions and eventually held a special convocation. Morton remembers those meetings. “He gave us the opportunity to sit down and talk about what was on our minds,” he says. “I think that was an initial step. But we also weren’t sure of the changes that would result, after our meeting. We didn’t see immediate change.” In his convocation, Jenkins asked students for patience during those turbulent times. “We will settle what we can here, but on matters requiring a broader consensus, we must be patient and we must take into consideration that we do not get everything Ray and Eve Rogers, at home with daughter Adeea 26 we want. I am aware that this may be taken as a statement for the maintenance of the status quo in a time of change. But you are well aware that I do not have the reputation of a defender of the status quo.” First black Greeks In 1969, Ken Hammond ’73 ’83 ’85 was among the change leaders who helped establish ECU’s first black fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha. These days Hammond pastors Union Baptist Church in Durham, a congregation of more than 5,100 members. He remembers how Dr. Best successfully negotiated a change in the rule barring students who received financial aid from joining a social organization, which effectively banned black fraternities and sororities. “That rule was suggested as a means of keeping blacks from joining white sororities and fraternities,” Hammond recalls. “Dr. Best had to negotiate with Dr. Jenkins to have it changed.” It’s no surprise that Dr. Best, himself a member of APA, paid the charter’s start-up fees. The university’s first black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, was founded in 1973. Hammond became senior class president and later worked at the university for many years before leaving his post in 1991 as associate director of student activities to assume leadership of the Durham church. During 2008 Homecoming festivities, he was named an Outstanding Alumni, one of the university’s highest honors. “From day one I was involved in campus life, and those are memories that I cherish,” he says. “ECU will always be a very special place. It provided an atmosphere to excel.” A legacy for tomorrow In 1974, the university hired several African American faculty, including Ledonia Wright, a community health professor originally from Rockingham County with a distinguished career in New York and Boston. She briefly served as adviser to SOULS before her death in 1976. In 2006, the university awarded the Jarvis Medal, its highest service award, posthumously to Dr. Best, who died in 2004. Ray and Eve Rogers today are proud of their daughter, Adeea Rogers ’05, for many reasons, but high on the list is a passion for leadership. You could say it runs in the family. Adeea Rogers works at the university union as an event planner, but she’s carrying on her parents’ legacy as staff adviser to the Black Student Union—the grandchild organization of SOULS. “I tell my students stories about my parents, and remind them they can learn from others,” Adeea Rogers says. “We have immense pride in ECU and the strides it has made. It’s important for students to know that history.” East Giselle E A S T C A R O L I N A U N I V E R S I T Y ® Thursday, April 2 www.ecu.edu/srapas TEH RUSSIAN AN TAILNO BAEL T In Volatile Economic Times, Invest In What You Believe In As you evaluate your top priorities, know that your investment in East Carolina University through one of our foundations (East Carolina University Foundation Inc., the East Carolina University Medical & Health Sciences Foundation Inc., and the East Carolina Educational Foundation Inc. [Pirate Club]) will ensure meaningful future opportunities for students. A revocable gift such as a bequest provision in your will, a beneficiary designation from your qualified retirement plan such as an IRA or 401(k), or an owner/beneficiary designation from an insurance policy serves as a meaningful gift that does not distribute assets from your estate during your lifetime. These options are an excellent way to leave a future gift (either dollar total or percentage) to ECU. Your planned gift enables you to designate your future contribution to any area for the purpose of your choice. Your support will help us attain our Second Century Campaign goal while you earn membership benefits in the Leo W. Jenkins Society. Please call Greg Abeyounis, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Development, at 252-328-9573 or e-mail at abeyounisg@ ecu.edu for more information or to schedule an appointment to discuss these or other planned giving options. www.ecu.edu/devt planed giving a t east ca r o l i na university® I n te g r at i o n T i me l i n e 1962 Laura Marie Leary Elliot ’66 of Vanceboro becomes East Carolina’s first black student. 1964 Sixteen African American students are enrolled, including Ray Rogers ’72. 1966 About 50 black students are enrolled. Paul D. Scott is the first black student to receive a football scholarship. Vincent Colbert and Marvin Simpson become the first black players on the basketball team. Elliott becomes the first black graduate. 1967 Dennis Chestnut is selected for the SGA Judiciary Board, the first black in a student leadership role. 1967 Bennie Teel, managing editor of The East Carolinian, is the first black from East Carolina in Who’s Who. Lillian T. Jones and Nellie Ross graduate. 1968-69 About 90 black students form the Society of United Liberal Students, or SO ULS. They come up with a list of demands at a March 3 meeting and present them to President Leo Jenkins. At SO ULS ’ next meeting on March 26, 1969, the students decide to march to Dail House to press Jenkins for faster action. In coming weeks Jenkins meets with SO ULS several times, then calls the entire student body and faculty together for a convocation in Ficklen Stadium. He urges patience and predicts progress will be slow, but he makes it clear that overt prejudice will no longer be tolerated. Referring to two professors accused of discrimination by SO ULS , Jenkins says “one of these is no longer with us, and the other is leaving at the end of this year.” 1970 Black enrollment grows to about 200. 1971 The Admissions Office turns to the SGA Office of Minority Affairs for help writing a recruitment brochure aimed at black high school students. Although brutally frank about the state of race relations on campus—it admits there have been “open displays of prejudice by some whites to some blacks” and that some white professors discriminate against black students—the brochure is highly effective and widely praised. Ken Hammond ’73 ’83 ’85 and other black students establish the Eta Nu chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha, ECU’s first black fraternity. Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first black sorority, is formed. 1973 Hammond is the first African American elected senior class president. 1974 The first black faculty members arrive on campus, including Ledonia Wright, a community health professor originally from Rockingham County who has had a distinguished career in New York and Boston. She becomes adviser to SO ULS. 1975 The old “Y” Hut is converted into the Afro- American Cultural Center. A year later, it is renamed the Ledonia Wright Cultural Center upon Wright’s sudden death. 1976 The separate black and white homecoming queen contests are merged, and Jeri Barnes becomes the school’s first black Homecoming Queen at ECU. 1981 Natalear Collins and Brenda Klutz became the first African American graduates of the Brody School of Medicine. from the classroom 28 29 Brian Love says most of the problems his students confront involve mixing materials, identifying variables and predicting what will happen in the ensuing chemical reaction. “We don’t have to study that sugar makes tea sweet,” he explains. Students just need to know that A+B=C. “We learn by doing and remembering.” However he explains it, Love says he knows he’s reached students when their facial expressions change from “What?” to “Now I get it!” Then he knows “they can solve a problem they couldn’t before.” Even some colleagues don’t fully understand Love’s specialty: organic synthesis and synthetic methodology. To those who say “all you’re doing is cooking” in his field of study, Love responds with the ever-present twinkle in his eye: “So? How do you eat? Someone has to make the molecules, so it’s not an insult to be accused of cooking.” As for culinary preferences, he loves desserts. That’s why there’s a Periodic Table of Desserts poster in his office peeking through hanging storage for his molecular models. It’s stylish efficiency: suspend the models from the ceiling and they don’t get tangled in a box. He says, “It’s quirky. It’s chemical. I just pluck them down when I need them for class.” Love has taught at East Carolina since 1994. He received his undergraduate degree from Texas Christian University in 1980. He received his doctorate from Princeton in 1986, completed his postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA the following year, and taught at Auburn University before settling in Greenville. He chose teaching as a career almost as an afterthought. “There was no big aha moment,” he says. In college he had many good teachers and some bad ones. He observed his professors’ lifestyles and thought, “I could do this.” Besides, teaching sounded better than company lab work, plus he likes “explaining stuff to people, not having to wear a suit to work, and picking my own projects.” Andrew Morehead, director of graduate studies, says Love is “a wonderful colleague and mentor to the young faculty. He tirelessly serves the department and students, but what I enjoy most about him is his sneaky sense of humor. As his many lucky students can attest, Brian’s dry wit and puns can enliven the driest of subjects—and fortunately for his colleagues, meetings.” Students don’t forget his influence. Love’s first thesis advisee, James Wynne ’94 ’96, now is senior research chemist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., and a professor at George Mason University. As a professor Wynne says he tries to pass on Love’s “immense passion for organic chemistry and immeasurable patience with new researchers.” He recalls a time when Love captured the imagination of the class by letting students create esters, or fragrances, and try to identify the starting ingredients. He says, “I still practice Dr. Love’s perfected technique of glassware cleaning—no bubbles allowed in the base bath!” Good Chemistry It isn’t easy explaining organic chemistry in terms students understand. But that’s a piece of cake for Brian Love, a fun-loving professor with an unique sense of humor. “If we were making cars instead of molecules,” he says, “we’d be building the drill presses and lathes to make the parts.” It’s not surprising that Love uses cars in his analogy because his hobby is maintaining his classic ’74 Camaro that’s often parked near the Sci-Tech building. By Leanne E. Smith from the classroom 30 Love teaches both undergraduate and graduate classes. He says the latter are fun for him because they are more like his lab work, and he can integrate current research. He has greater expectations for independence and gives take-home problem sets to be completed on the honor system, for which his analogy is: if two paratroopers jump out of a plane, one who studied and one who cheated, the one who studied is more likely to land safely. At the graduate stage, he assumes, “There’s a drive to learn instead of just get by.” One of his most vivid teaching memories challenged his preconceptions but showed he was doing something right. A student, unhappy with an exam grade, complained that the test wasn’t fair because some questions weren’t straight out of the book. He asked the student, “Do you think it’s unfair to expect students to think on exams?” Love says he was blown away when the student responded, “Yes.” He laughs about it now, calls it a “slap-my-forehead moment,” but his tests still have at least one question requiring students to explain something. “I try, anytime we’re talking about something we’ve done, to show connections,” he says. Sometimes students ask, “Do we need to remember that?” To which he responds: “Yes, we’re now using what seemed useless.” One of his biggest surprises about teaching is the fact that professors must keep updating their lectures and teaching strategies. But he’s philosophical about that and likens it to the near constant work he must do to keep his Camaro running. It’s the first car he ever drove; he says he keeps it around because “it seems silly to sell it now.” Keeping things running also is what he enjoys about being director of Organic Labs, a position he’s held for eight years. In that capacity he’s responsible for revising the lab course pack, scheduling classrooms, restocking supplies and many routine tasks such as repairing drawer locks. “His ability to organize labs has helped our students have the best learning experience possible in the lab classes,” says Morehead, the graduate studies director. “The job needs someone who can keep it together, so I’ll do it till it’s set so the next person won’t have trouble,” says Love, who admits he’s an “organization freak.” In research, too, he looks forward to a sense of accomplishment. He’s won numerous grants and published a dozen articles but says it’s a “way bigger thrill [when] something we did is getting used. When Love read in a journal article that someone was finally able to solve a problem using one of his methods, he thought, “Woohoo! Circle that!” Most of those revelations happen accidentally from working on projects where he found published research methods impractical. bent,” he says. “Like my students, I want something to be easy.” But his sense of humor shines through in the serious subject of research. “How can there be this many chemists, and we haven’t done everything already?” B o o k s b y E C U F a c u l ty If you think politics was hot and voters were demanding change in last fall’s presidential election, you should have been around in 1888, when an issues-dominated campaign produced an 80 percent voter turnout. That heated race between Democratic incumbent Grover Cleveland and the GO P’s Benjamin Harrison foreshadowed both the modern political campaign and the modern presidency, or so ECU history professor Charles W. Calhoun argues in his new book, Minority Victory. Americans had money in the Gilded Age and spent a lot of it on imported goods. Tariffs on those goods piled up as surpluses in the federal budget. Most Democrats, Cleveland among them, took the small-world view of government and supported slashing duties on imports, thereby cutting prices for consumers. Harrison stood on his front porch daily to rail against “Cleveland’s pinched sense of what the government could and should do.” Cleveland won the popular vote but Harrison took the Electoral College, becoming one of only four presidents (Bush is another) to lose the popular vote but win the White House. Harrison told Americans “Yes we can,” an outlook that kept his party in power for a generation. —Steve Tuttle Minority Victory By Charles W. Calhoun University Press of Kansas, 243 pages, $29.95 The Voice of the Pirate Nation arrrrgh listen free online www.pirateradio1250.com 32 33 Equity, Finally Women’s sports become ‘fully funded,’ meaning their teams offer the maximum number of scholarships allowed. By Bethany Bradsher Tracey Kee and Charina Sumner wore the same uniform and played the same sport. But 20 years have passed since Kee represented the Pirates on the softball diamond where Sumner stars today. And there’s a world of difference in how the two women athletes were treated. Kee, who is Sumner’s coach, came to East Carolina from Virginia on a partial scholarship and many of her teammates received only textbook money. Sumner was recruited all the way from Hawaii and was offered a full scholarship. When Kee was a player, the women’s softball team stayed in budget hotels, sometimes five to a room, and ate on $12 a day. For their away games this season, the Lady Pirates will stay in Marriotts and Hiltons, two to a room, and receive $30 a day for meals. Kee remembers walking along the railroad tracks in downtown Greenville to get to their weightlifting facility in a warehouse on 14th Street. Today’s teams lift in the Murphy Center, considered one of the finest collegiate fitness centers in the country. “I share lots and lots of stories from back in the day when I played,” says Kee, who is starting her 12th season as the women’s softball coach. “I want them to appreciate what they have, and appreciate those that helped build our program by playing with less.” Jay Clark 35 It’s a new day for the female athlete at East Carolina in terms of scholarships, amenities, facilities and victories. “It’s hard to compare where we were,” says Tom Morris, the women’s tennis coach and a 10-year veteran of the athletics staff. “Women’s sports are really on the rise here. And I think that’s going to continue to improve.” It’s been an uphill climb and no one can see the summit yet. That may come when new playing facilities for sports like softball, tennis and volleyball, now on the drawing board, actually become reality. Still, in the gauge that means the most to the coaches— scholarship numbers—East Carolina is finally right where it should be. In coach talk, the magic word is “fully funded,” which means that a sport is able to offer the maximum number of scholarships allotted to it by the NCAA. In 2001, at the urging of the NCAA, East Carolina drafted a gender equity plan and appointed a task force to make sure it was followed. That year basketball and golf were the only fully funded women’s teams. At the time, the women had a total of 63.5 scholarships overall out of a maximum allowed 99. “We just made sure we stayed on track and improved on the schedule as more funding became available,” athletic director Terry Holland says of the gender equity plan. “Having the maximum number of scholarships allowed by the NCAA is normally viewed as essential to having an equal opportunity to be competitive.” Today all sports teams are fully funded, which allows coaches to recruit superior players, compete with tougher opponents and amass more wins. “I don’t think it’s any mistake that we’re very close to being fully funded now, and you start to see some success in women’s programs with that,” says women’s soccer coach Rob Donnenwirth, who will use all 14 scholarships—the maximum—for the first time this fall. “That’s a big piece of the puzzle that is now there for us.” In the past, most women’s teams were led by the coach who also headed up the men’s team. Now, the swim team and track and field are the only teams that still have just one coach and one training program for both teams. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that as the number of scholarships available to women athletes rose, and coaching improved, there has been a corresponding increase in victories and other successes. Over the past three years: n Both the basketball and softball teams earned bids to the NCAA tournament. The basketball team stunned Conference USA by winning the tournament and making the field of 64 in 2007, and the softball team earned its first-ever NCAA at-large bid last spring after reaching the semifinals of the C-USA tournament. n The soccer team made a national name for itself last fall, becoming the first women’s team to clinch a C-USA regular season title after going 12 games without a loss in the heart of conference competition. They made it to the championship game of the C-USA tournament, where they fell to Memphis and narrowly missed an at-large bid for the NCAA field. n The golf team has finished second in the conference for the past two seasons. Junior Abby Bools—the reigning C-USA Golfer of the Year—finished in the top four in all but one of the fall tournaments the team played this season. And the competition for the golf team keeps getting steeper— their first tournament of the spring season is hosted by Ohio State and features 15 of the nation’s top Division I teams, including Florida, Notre Dame, Stanford and the University of Southern California. n The women’s swimmers finished the 2007– 08 season 7-1 in dual meets. The tennis team has compiled four consecutive winning seasons, including a 17-6 mark in 2008. More success, more pressure When the administration throws its support behind women’s sports with full funding, the coaches feel the need to set higher goals, Kee says. “When someone is putting that much money and care into your student athletes, then with that comes a lot of responsibility and a lot of pressure. You want to win.” And more victories by the women’s teams is translating into greater fan support of the rabid kind usually reserved for the “big three” of football, baseball and men’s basketball. “When we’re getting closer to these postseason invites and that kind of thing,” Kee says, “I think that’s when the regular fan notices us.” When the women’s soccer team started to climb the C-USA ladder last fall, the message boards on several Pirate fan sites were heavy with positive comments from fans who normally only follow football. Bodies in the bleachers are also a tangible gauge. “Every year that I’ve been here attendance has been up,” said basketball coach Sharon Baldwin-Tener. “The year before I got here we averaged 191 [fans per game in Minges], and this season it was 2,500. I think people are realizing that it’s a pretty good game.” The softball team benefits from close proximity to the baseball stadium. At times during the season, men’s baseball fans will stick around after that game ends to watch the women play. Kee remembers one of the first times that happened, in 2006, when the Lady Pirates were in extra innings against UNC Chapel Hill. “I bet they were 25 people deep along our sideline, just heckling [the Tar Heels]. You see a little bit more rowdy crowds, and I think that’s a good thing. People are getting a little bit more passionate about it.” Junior tennis player Brooke Walter says she��s seen public awareness and fan support—as well as the team’s expectations of itself—rise every year. “Last year we were nationally ranked for the first time in years, so that got some people’s attention.” Smart players, smart students Female athletes at ECU historically have excelled in the classroom, and that tradition is continuing even as the teams win more games. The volleyball, golf, soccer and softball teams all were honored by their coaching associations in the past year for their high cumulative team GPAs. In April the tennis team was the only sports program at ECU to receive a special NCAA honor for compiling a team GPA in the top 10 percent nationally. The softball team was recognized by C-USA in July for having the highest GPA of its sport among conference members The men’s basketball, men’s golf and men’s tennis programs also were at the top of their sports academically. While most women’s teams have achieved parity with the men in scholarships, coaching and equipment, they still largely lag behind in one major area—facilities. But that is changing with a plan adopted by the university that will see major enhancements to women’s sports facilities over the next two or three years: East Carolina has committed to a new women’s softball stadium; a new track and field facility; and a new auxiliary gym at Minges Coliseum that will house practice courts for the men’s and women’s basketball teams and the volleyball team. Also on the list are 12 new tennis courts, a women’s soccer field and practice facility, a women’s sports field house and a sports medicine facility. Funding for the new facilities is coming out of the student activity fee. When Rick Kobe started coaching the swim team in 1982, he had exactly one-half of a scholarship for a female swimmer. Today he is fully funded at 14, but his swimmers— both male and female—are still using the natatorium that was built in 1968. Kobe can promote an array of benefits to recruits who are considering ECU—decades of winning records, the team’s camaraderie, dedicated coaches—but he still occasionally loses swimmers to schools with superior facilities. Baldwin-Tener is competing in recruiting against schools that have three different dedicated gyms—one each for men’s basketball, women’s basketball and volleyball. ECU has one gym for all three sports, a facility that’s used by physical education classes in the mornings. The volleyball coaching staff can schedule up to 20 hours of practice a week according to the NCAA, but the team never comes close to that number because they have to share the gym with so many others. “We need a practice facility, and I think everyone knows that,” Baldwin-Tener said. “It’s a huge factor right now in recruiting.” No one denies that women’s sports have come a long way since 1932, when President Robert H. Wright refused a request for an organized girls’ basketball on the grounds that such “boisterous activity” would be unladylike for the young women who attended ECTC. Funding is up, success in many seasons is surpassing that in the men’s arenas, and talented recruits are choosing to be Pirates by the dozen. Once the physical accommodations catch up to the talent and motivation among the Lady Pirates, ECU’s evolution to a friendly place for female athletes will be complete. East Rob Goldberg 37 2008 Maggie O’Neil is the new executive director at Wake Forest Downtown Revitalization Corp. From Raleigh, she previously was deputy town clerk in Garner; town clerk and finance director in Bethel; and a management intern in Ayden, which was named a Small Town Main Street Town during her time there. 2007 Amanda Faye Hal of Fayetteville and John Delanion Fisher II of Stedman were married May 24 in Fayetteville and live in Buies Creek. She teaches business at West Johnston High School in Benson. Leslie An Hart and Jason Scott Mozingo were married July 12 at Yankee Hall Plantation in Pactolus and live in Winterville. She works at Golden Living Center of Greenville. Emery Derek Smith and Sonya Nichole Edens of Grifton were married June 28 in Winterville. He works at West Greene Elementary School in Snow Hill. Laci Le Stanley of Fuquay-Varina and Justin Keith McDonald of Winston-Salem were married Oct. 11 at the Cape Fear River Deck in Wilmington and live in Morrisville. She teaches at the Ballet School of Chapel Hill and Cary Ballet Conservatory. 2006 APRIL PAUL BAER, originally of Benson, is the project coordinator for university wellness at Frostburg State University in Maryland. His latest project is Creating Healthy Informed Lasting Lifestyles, where he will manage modeling a biomedical and health initiative that may be used at universities across the county. Nick D. Kistler is the new corporate sponsorship sales executive with ISP Sports’ University of Southern Mississippi property in Hattiesburg. Kistler was assistant general manager with a collegiate summer league baseball club in Edenton. Clayton McCullough is the youngest inductee for the J.H. Rose Walk of Fame at J.H. Rose High School in Greenville. After playing baseball and football at Rose and baseball at ECU, he was drafted by the Cleveland Indians, made AAA Buffalo, worked as a hitting coach and manager for minor league baseball operations in the Gulf Coast League for the Toronto Blue Jays, and now manages the rookie league Lansing Lugnuts in Michigan. Joanne Morace is a nurse practitioner at Eastern Psychiatric & Behavioral Specialists. An RN for 15 years, she worked with critical care patients at PCMH. 2005 Celeste Amstutz and David Leich ’06 were married July 26 at Airlie Gardens in Wilmington. At ECU, she was in Alpha Xi Delta, he was in Kappa Alpha, and both are in the MBA program. A l u m n i S p otlig h t CLASS NO TES In a ceremony in the Old House Chamber in the State Capital building, James R. Gorham ’81 of Kernersville (at podium) was promoted to brigadier general in the N. C. Army National Guard. State and Army officials congratulated Gorham on becoming the first African American to attain that rank in the state Guard. A vice president of First Citizens Bank, Gorham enlisted in the Army after high school and used the GI bill to earn a history degree from ECU. He’s been in the Guard for 34 years. In 2004, his unit was deployed to Iraq for 15 months, where he was promoted to colonel. He told the Winston-Salem Journal that his latest promotion is as much about opportunity as race. He said it “gives soldiers the knowledge that they can go from private to general.” Roger W. Newsom ’86 made a lot of birdies as a member of the ECU golf team from 1982-85, and he’s still sinking long putts, as evidenced by his win at the 2008 SunTrust State Open golf tournament. His July victory was followed by golfer of the year honors from the Virginia State Golf Association. Newsome, 44, is an ophthalmologist who practices in the Hampton Roads area. After ECU, Newsom studied at the Eastern Virginia Medical School, then did his residency at the Wake Forest University Eye Center, where he won a fellowship to study plastic and reconstructive surgery of the eye at the University of Toronto. He is especially skilled in cataract and implant treatment techniques and the treatment of other ocular problems. Dr. Newsom also serves as a diplomat on the National Board of Medical Examiners. pirate nation April is service month The university’s motto, Servire, meaning To Serve, is dear to the hearts of many East Carolina alumni and friends. To capture that spirit, the Alumni Association celebrates service month every April. Hundreds of alumni and friends will be volunteering their time helping their communities through service projects, helping others in need. The leaders of many regional Alumni Association groups are planning service projects in their corners of the Pirate Nation. We hope you will volunteer wherever help is needed. Have fun and be creative—there are plenty of ways to serve the environment, children, senior citizens, four-legged friends, nonprofit organizations, local hospitals and schools, and even those in your family. The Alumni Association is glad to assist you in promoting your planned service projects by spreading the word to fellow alumni in your area. Be sure to take plenty of photos, and remember to wear purple and gold to show your Pirate spirit! We’ll put all service project photos on our web site at PirateAlumni.com. Contact Kendra Alexander at 800-ECU-GRAD or Kendra.Alexander@PirateAlumni.com. Pirate Career Calls The Alumni Association has teamed up with the Career Center and ECU’s Human Resources office to offer monthly training sessions via teleconference. Pirate Career Calls offer career advice, tips and tools to help you get ahead in your profession. Offered the first Thursday of each month from noon to 1:00 p.m., Career Calls are free to alumni and friends. Topics that will be covered this spring include: Salary Negotiations (March 5), Career Changers (April 2) and Taking Advantage of Development Opportunities in Your Workplace (May 7). Visit PirateAlumni.com/careercalls to register. Call for nominations Vacancies will soon occur on the Alumni Association board, and Chair Sabrina Bengel is asking for nominations to fill the seats. Nominees must be dues-paying members of the association but do not have to be graduates. Members of the board serve three-year terms and can be reappointed for an additional term, including a term as an officer. A slate of candidates will be presented to the board in April. New directors will assume office July 1. Nominate someone today at PirateAlumni.com/boardnomination. Come out to run for fun Lace up your running shoes for a good cause—student scholarships. The Alumni Association will host its second annual Pirate Alumni 5K Road Race and 1 Mile Fun Run on Saturday, April 18, as part of PirateFest. All proceeds will benefit Alumni Association scholarships that are awarded to undergraduates who excel in the classroom, on campus and in the community. Our 5K race travels down historic 5th Street and is a USATF certified course. Awards are presented to the first three male finishers overall, the first three female finishers overall, and the top three male and female finishers in each of six age categories. Registration is $15 and includes a race packet and complimentary T-shirt. Visit PirateAlumni. com/roadrace or call the Alumni Center at 800-ECU-GRAD to register. Buy a Painted Pirate Last spring 16 “Painted Pirate” statues were unveiled during Greenville’s 2nd annual PirateFest. After spending a year on display at each sponsor’s business, 15 statues will be auctioned off during PirateFest 2009. Proceeds will benefit the Historic Fleming House Renovation Fund and the Alumni Association Scholarship Fund. The ECU Office of Centennial Events, the Greenville- Pitt Chamber of Commerce, and the Alumni Association sponsor this public arts project. Sa ve the Date ! April 4—Alumni Association Scholarship Luncheon April 16–19—26th Annual Pirate Purple/Gold Pigskin Pig-Out Party April 18—Pirate Alumni Road Race and Fun Run April 18—PirateFest 2009 The Alumni Association recognized its 2008 Alumni Award recipients during halftime of the Homecoming football game. Standing left to right are Chancellor Steve Ballard, Distinguished Service Award recipient Steve Showfety ’70, Alumni Association Board Chair Sabrina Bengel, Honorary Alumni Award recipients Charles Rogers, Mrs. JoAnn Eakin and Dr. Richard Eakin, Outstanding Alumni Award recipients Capt. (Ret.) David Fitzgerald ’66, Rev. Ken Hammond ’73, ’83, ’85, Dr. Jerry McGee ’66, and Lt. Gen. Gary North ’76. Brian E. Christiansen Amy Brit Askew and Stephen Douglas Craft III were married Sept. 20 in Kinston and live in Greenville. She is office manager of Hometown Pharmacy of Greenville. Nichole Dun ’05 ’08 is a student counselor at Edgecombe Community College. She was a rehabilitation counselor at Vocational Rehabilitation in Rocky Mount. Jef Gadis is a maintenance sales consultant at the Greenville office of Piedmont Air Conditioning. He previously worked with a property management company. Erin Marie Sowell and David Charles Davis of Greenville were married Nov. 1 in Wilmington. She is an advertising executive with Inner Banks Media. 2004 Jason Matthew Eldridge and Kendra Nicole Clement ’06 were married Oct. 18 at the Village Inn Golf and Conference Center in Clemmons, and they live in Mount Airy. He is a graphic artist with Encore Group in Winston-Salem, and she is a court counselor with the N.C. Department of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention in Stokes County. Michael Holt is a vice president and commercial banker in the Greenville office of The Little Bank. He worked for First Citizens Bank and Albemarle Bank & Trust. Marian Ione Lowe ’04 ’06 of Raleigh and Darryl Ros Kenedy ’05 of Goldsboro were married Oct. 25 in Winston-Salem. A 2001 debutante and member of Phi Kappa Phi and Kappa Omicron Nu honor societies, she is an early intervention service coordinator for the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services in Smithfield. He is a project manager for Hine Sitework in Goldsboro, where they live. Kristie Michele Peterson of Pfafftown and Jonathan Bruce Comer of Yadkinville were married Dec. 6 in Winston-Salem and live in King. In Winston-Salem, she is an R.N. at Forsyth Medical Center, and he is a quality engineer for BE Aerospace. Wiliam Le Percise II of Snow Hill is an attorney with White & Allen, a regional firm based in Kinston. He received his law license on Sept. 8. Erica Lyn Stocks and Christopher Brian Evans were married Aug. 2 at Yankee Hall Plantation and live in Greenville. She is self-employed. 2003 Christina Lyn Crawford ’03 ’08 and Frederick Casey Edwards of Ayden were married Oct. 4. She works for Pitt County Schools. Dena Marshal and Jeremy Konkel of Apex had a son, Nolan Adam, on May 2. She is assistant director of public affairs at the N.C. Medical Board. Leigh Ann Potter and Kely Christopher Hodges ’04 of Wilmington were married Oct. 11 in Greenville. She works at Cape Fear Academy, and he is a project superintendent with Harold K. Jordan Construction. Benjamin Taylor Wiliams and Jeanne Nicole Horne Wiliams ’04 of Pinehurst had a daughter, Kenley Nicole, on Sept. 6. class notes 2002 Dr. John Howard Brooks, a cardiologist at Scotland Memorial Hospital and a Pembroke native, opened Lumber River Cardiology in Laurinburg. At BSOM, where he completed a three-year cardiovascular-disease fellowship, he received the PCMH Presidential Service Award. Steve Setser of Belhaven was promoted to vice president and auditor for The East Carolina Bank. He was a staff auditor for four years, completed his third year at the N.C. Bankers Association School of Banking, and is in ECU’s MBA program. 2001 Patrick F. Abrams of Mount Olive was promoted to banking officer in the Warsaw office of Southern Bank. He previously was a repairman at Buddy’s Jewelry in Mount Olive. Jenifer Diane Angevine and James William Gentry of Winterville were married July 19 in Wilmington. She works at the N.C. Biotechnology Center in Greenville and is in Pitt Community College’s nursing program. Melisa Dawn Barrington and Matthew Douglas McClelland of Raleigh were married Aug. 23 in the Preston Woodall House gardens in Benson. She is a realtor for Keller-Williams in Raleigh. Melisa Dawn Casper ’01 ’04 and Christopher Aaron Reaves were married Sept. 17. She is a financial analyst for Time Warner Cable in Wilmington. Laurin Leonard Deaton and Zachary Noris Deaton ’04 ’07 had a son, Luke Zachary, on Nov. 6. Tod Alston Hales ’01 ’05 and Emily Kelly Fleming of Greenville were married Aug. 9 and live in Durham. He is a project analyst with PRA International. April Nicole Hering ’01 ’02 and John Patrick Garver ’03 of Goldsboro were married Nov. 8. She is marketing director at Southco Distributing Co. in Goldsboro. He is a sales representative with Eastern Turf Equipment in Fayetteville. Bryan Holey ’01 ’07 of Wilson, a fourth-grade teacher at Corinth-Holders Elementary School in Zebulon, received the Milken Family Foundation National Educator award, which includes $25,000 and a free trip to the Milken National Education Conference in Los Angeles. The award goes to no more than 80 teachers each year, and since the program’s start in 1985, 43 N.C. teachers have received the award. Joseph Hoover was promoted to assistant vice president with BB&T in Raleigh. From Greensboro, he joined the bank in 2005 and is an investment counselor. Donna Weler Stalls was promoted to vice president at BB&T. Since 2001, she was process and quality manager in BB&T’s branch operations department in Wilson. Chad Tracy , the Arizona Diamondbacks’ third baseman, visited Clark-LeClair Stadium for the first time during Homecoming 2008 and talked with the ECU baseball players. He is married to Katie Martin Tracy ’03. Ashley Wright of Newport News, Va., and Morgan Ryan Terry of Dallas, Tex., were married in Williamsburg, Va., on Nov. 1 and live in Charlotte. She is a transportation planner with PBS&J, a national planning and engineering consulting firm. 2000 Donna Des Aldredge, a Chi Omega sister, had a son, William Beecher Aldredge, on Jan. 23, 2008. Richardson Cowles Tally of Oakland, Calif., and Elise Marie Kopesky of Camden, Maine, were married July 27 outdoors at Garre Vineyard in Livermore, Calif., and live in Oakland. He is patron services manager for the Berkeley Symphony. 1999 Tamika “Mek” Jackson and Onjeinika “Polly” Brooks, sisters originally from Wilmington, founded Polly & Meek Partnership, a book writing company. Their first book, Sisters Are from Heaven, includes Meek’s photos and Polly’s lessons for children. A l u m n i S p otlig h t After a 33-year career, W. Kendall Chalk ’68 MBA ’71 retired from BB&T in September and the bank honored his 33 years of service, most recently as CFO, by donating $250,000 to East Carolina to endow two scholarships in the Access Scholarship program. The contribution creates the first two endowed Access Scholarships, which are given to students with the best academic potential and the least financial resources. The grant is the latest in a long list of gifts to East Carolina from BB&T. Three of the five executives who helped transform a regional farm lender in Wilson into the nation’s 14th largest bank are graduates of ECU’s business school and the MBA program. Of the three, only President and CEO Kelly King ’70 ‘71 still goes to the office every day. Henry Williamson ’69 ‘72, Chalk’s predecessor as CFO, retired earlier. All three are active supporters of the university. Ken Chalk is a former chair of the ECU Foundation board and currently is co-chair, with King, of the board of the BB&T Center for Leadership Development within the College of Business. “I am very grateful to my associates at BB&T, the executive management team, and the board of directors for this recognition,” Chalk said about the grant. “The Access Scholarship program is essential to help students who could not otherwise afford higher education to attend ECU and become successful leaders in their communities.” BB&T has contributed more than $1.6 million to date in support of ECU’s efforts to become the best leadership university in the state. 38 Chalk (center) with Williamson (left) and King 40 Jackson works in biotechnology in Washington, D.C., and owns Portraits by Tamika, a company specializing in affordable location and small wedding shoots. 1998 Debra An Bard and Gregory Thomas Fowler Jr. of Raleigh were married Oct. 4 at Haywood Hall in Raleigh. She is a pharmaceutical representative with Merck & Co. Ian Andrew Cary and Jenifer Joy Prevatt Cary ’99 of Statesville had their first child, Callum Andrew, on June 12. Joy Euban ks started the Marley Fund in 2001 to memorialize her cat who died of feline leukemia, and the Greenville-based program has expanded to the Triangle with a foster program called Marley’s Cat Tales for cats with feline AIDS. Ted Lockamon is recreation services supervisor for Henderson, Nev. There since 1998, he is married to Elizabeth Brussock ’95. Edward Wiliam Turcotte III and Meghann Rae Stubbs were married July 12 on the promenade deck of the Henrietta III in Wilmington. He is a sales associate with Carolina Jewelry in Wilmington, where they live. Rusel Vernon of Wentworth was named Rockingham County Schools 2008–2009 Assistant Principal of the Year. He taught science, and since receiving his master’s from Appalachian State in 2006, has been assistant principal at Wentworth Elementary School. CHRIS WALKER of Greensboro launched Produce-A-Pic, a company that sells film promo packs to help finance independent films in pre-production stages. Walker also owns 5Rings Design, a branded content development company, and Ve-Shan, a documentary and feature film company. 1997 Matthew Cave was promoted to senior project manager for the Target store construction team with John S. Clark Co., where he has worked at the corporate office in Mount Airy since 2003. He and his wife, Emily Cave ’05, live in Dobson, manage a family farm, and have three daughters. Jeny Gay and Jason Everett of Huntersville were married Sept. 13 in Clinton. She works with Stone Properties of Huntersville. Amanda Ros Mazey and her husband, Randy, had a daughter, Sierra Maranda Mazey, on Aug. 24. A WITN news/sports anchor/ reporter for eight years, Mazey is now a freelance broadcaster in Fort Worth, Texas, and also works for The Mountain Network. Janie Sowers Taylor is a licensed marriage and family therapist and an approved clinical supervisor at CareNet Counseling East in Greenville, and she is working on her doctorate in medical family therapy. 1996 Debra DAVis Bailey ’96 ’00 became director of student loans at ECU in July after eight years as the financial administrator at Philippi Church of Christ. Kathy Flick ’96 ’97 of Atlanta founded It’s Her Team, a women’s line of sportswear. Jenifer Hemink is the new owner of A Proper Setting in Greenville’s Arlington Village after teaching middle school for nine years. Dr. Scott Alan Kendrick ’96 ’02 is a nephrologist at the Greenville office of Eastern Nephrology Associates after completing his residency in Maine and fellowships in Alabama. 1995 Lisa Wright Cartwright and Clay Cartwright ’96 expanded their 10-year-old Halloween Express franchise to two locations in Greenville for the fall 2008 season. Lisa also owns Debu Cafe and Catering. Claire Culbreath of Winston-Salem started a new career as a singer-songwriter. A music therapy major, she went blind from juvenile diabetes in 1998 at age 28, and underwent years of rehabilitation that included learning to play piano by ear with the help of Michael “Zoo” Zeoli of the band Joe Next Door. She plays jazz, sacred and popular songs in a band called Shadowbox Two. Wiliam Hunter Lloyd Jr. and Kathryn Elizabeth Lenox ’01 of Greenville were married Nov. 22. 1994 Matt Holder returned to Greenville, reopened his hair salon and expanded his Matt Holder Hairstyling products to 14 shampoos, conditioners, sprays, mists, foams and smoothers. A stylist for 20 years, he was a product formulation educator for Joico in California, but left for lack of sweet tea and barbecue. He plans to start an apprenticeship-style education alternative to community college beauty school programs. Brian Johnson and Jamie Rothman of Raleigh and Jacksonville, Fla., were married Oct. 25 at Old St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Jacksonville. They work for a local television station. Charlie Le Meks Jr. of Newport and Erin Ruth Bradley of Garner were married Oct. 18 at Jones Chapel at Meredith College in Raleigh and live in Morehead City. He is a probation officer in Jacksonville. Jean M. Sug ’94 ’06 of Grifton is a legal administrator with White & Allen, a regional law firm based in Kinston. 1993 Kim Hampton ’93 ’05 is the new student support specialist at Edgecombe Community College. She was a counselor and taught French and Spanish at Southwest Edgecombe High School. Lisa Spiridopoulos Herman and her husband, Josh, of La Quinta, Calif., had their first child, Mackenzie Barbara, on June 17. Michael Polard ’93 ’06, assistant principal at Greenville’s Hope Middle School, was named Pitt County’s assistant principal of the year. In education for 16 years, he was president of the N.C. Bandmasters Association Eastern District and helps coordinate the “Stang Power” mentoring program. 1992 CHRISTIAN KEIBER of Los Angeles guest starred as Boston wise-guy Paul Reilly on TNT’s Raising the Bar, as ex-mobster Paulie on ABC’s General Hospital, and federal marshal Panicali on NBC’s ER in September. Keny Strickland of Fayetteville was appointed to the ECU Board of Visitors. Kendrick Whitehurst was promoted to senior vice president with BB&T in Greenville. From Wilson, he joined the bank in 2001 and is a group director in the private financial services department. He is president of Literacy Volunteers of Pitt County and treasurer of the United Way of Pitt County. 1991 David Crumpler of Greenville was promoted to assistant vice president for East Carolina Bank marketing, which works with all 24 ECB locations and ECB Bancorp. He previously was a marketing and public relations consultant in Wake County. MARK A. MOORE of Raleigh co-produced a surf-rock album, Encomium In Memoriam Vol. 1: Jan Berry of Jan & Dean, with Cameron Michael Parkes of Box o’ Clox. The album includes more than 20 guest artists, five of whom played or sang for original Jan & Dean material in the 1960s. It was also featured in The News & Observer. 1990 Susan Lanehart Rhodes of Fuquay-Varina received her National Board Certification in school counseling. She has 16 years of experience as a teacher and counselor in Wake County Public Schools. She and her husband, Michael Rhodes ’04, have three sons. Doug Walker, a Miami, Fla.-based steel drum artist, released a 17-track CD titled Caribbean Christmas: Holiday Songs in a Steel Band Style. 1989 Mark Klaich is the new manager of the ReStore at Habitat for Humanity of Pitt County. He previously worked with design and installation of commercial security systems. He is married to Karen Klaich ’83. Nancy McNeil Peterson ’89 ’93 and Jeff Peterson of Wilmington had a son, Chase McNeill Peterson, on Aug. 5. 1987 Charles Pilkey of Mint Hill exhibited his sculpture The Sound of Waves at the Mint Hill Arts November show “Three in One.” After growing up in Hillsborough, working for an oil company, sailing the East Coast, bartending in Wrightsville Beach, living in Japan for 15 years and teaching at Kyushu Sangyo University in Fujuoka, he paints and sculpts at his home studio. He teaches part time at Central Piedmont Community College and Spartanburg Community College; he has exhibited pieces in Japan, China, Korea, Turkey and Italy. 1986 Karen J. Renz was a finalist for Cincy Magazine’s ATHENA Award for women professionals and community leaders in the Greater Cincinnati Area. A partner in Graydon Head & Ritchey law firm, she co-chairs the firm’s communications and information industry and women’s professional development groups. She is involved in the Cincinnati Area Senior Services Board, Leadership Cincinnati Class XXVIII, Executive Women’s Golf Association, and volunteers in pet therapy at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and with VITAS. The West Chester Chamber Alliance named her a Woman of Excellence. Olivia Scott founded a promotional products company, Promotional Partners, in 2007. Based in Cary, it supports two high school intern programs, PTA school improvement teams, and business alliance committees. As an Apex Chamber ambassador, she is on an education committee that develops opportunities for youth and business leaders to interact. 1985 Kathee Brown Staton ’85 ’88 and Boyd Ingram of Nashville, Tenn., are married and live in Lebanon, Tenn. They were regulars on the Renfro Valley Barndance show in Kentucky, where he was a lead singer for The Casinos and she recently hosted the annual Alumni Day performance. 1984 Tom Hales of Greenville received the Regional Service Award from the N.C. Association of Realtors. He was president of his local association in 1994, director and chair of the Legislative Committee and Professional Standards, and for 20 years has been a member of the Greenville-Pitt Association of Realtors. BETH A. WOOD of Raleigh, a Durham CPA, was elected North Carolina state auditor. It was her first run for office. When not crunching numbers, she enjoys shag dancing, snow and water skiing, and reading bestsellers. class notes A l u m n i S p otlig h t Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst ’66, director of the Institute of Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education, won the prestigious Peter H. Rossi Award for contributions to the theory or practice of program evaluation. The Association for Public Policy and Management presents the award annually. Whitehurst has led IES since it was established in 2002. He previously was assistant secretary for the Office of Educational Research and Improvement. Before that he was chairman of the Department of Psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the author or editor of five books and has published more than 100 scholarly papers. Whitehurst was born and reared in Washington, N. C. After majoring in psychology at ECU, he obtained a Ph.D. in experimental child psychology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is married and has two children. Professor Emeritus and former swim coach Ray Scharf won f
Object Description
Description
Title | East : the magazine of East Carolina University |
Other Title | Magazine of East Carolina University |
Date | 2009 |
Description | Vol. 7, no. 2 (spring 2009) |
Digital Characteristics-A | 4 MB; 27 p. |
Digital Format | application/pdf |
Full Text | East The Magazine of East Carolina University spring 2009 Portrait of the Artist Scott Avett of the Avett Brothers East The Magazine of East Carolina University spring 2009 32 16 22 F E A T U R E S 16 POR T RAI T OF THE AR T IS T By Jimmy Rostar Whether he’s holding a banjo or a paintbrush, Scott Avett ’99 ’00 puts family ahead of fame. 22 INVISI BLE NO MORE By Marion Blackburn On a spring night in 1969, about 150 mostly black students came knocking on President Leo Jenkins’ front door asking tough questions about campus desegregation. Their questions and his answers changed minds and the history of campus race relations. 28 GO D CHE MIS TRY By Leanne E. Smith It isn’t easy explaining organic chemistry in terms students can understand. But that’s a piece of cake for Brian Love, a fun-loving professor with an oddball sense of humor and a cool Camaro. 32 EQUI TY, F I NALY By Bethany Bradsher Women’s sports at ECU become “fully funded,” meaning their teams offer the maximum scholarships allowed. D E P A R T M E N T S FRO M OUR REA DERS 3 THE ECU RE POR T . 4 SPRING AR TS CALEN DAR 12 PIRA TE NA TION . 36 CLASS NO TES 37 UPON THE PAST 48 28 viewfinder Pe De shapes up A slimmer and healthier-looking Pee Dee debuted at the Homecoming game. A series of funny videos explaining the mascot’s new look can be seen at ECU’s YouTube channel. Just search for “Pee Dee.” Jay Clark 2 Miss North Carolina No. 7 In the most recent edition of East, in the section entitled “East Carolina Timeline,” there was mention of six ECU students who have been crowned Miss North Carolina. I know of at least one other. Lynn Williford was crowned Miss North Carolina 1981, representing Wilmington. She also competed in 1979, representing another community. —Margaret Daniel Gafford ’79, Vista, Calif. Editor’s note: We overlooked Williford because she had already graduated when she was crowned Miss North Carolina and thus was not on the ECU records we researched. A theatre arts major, Lynn headed to Broadway after graduation and had a small role in a 1980 production of Snow White. Today she’s director of national field sales for Murad Inc., a global provider of professional skin care products, and living in Nashville, Tenn. “I still have wonderful memories of ECU,” she told us. That was my siste r! I could not help but smile to see the article on page 56 of the Winter 2009 issue titled “Meeting Eleanor Roosevelt” by student reporter Clarissa Humphrey—my sister! She worked part time free of charge for the newspaper in Greenville so as to learn something about newspapers and journalism. She taught English and journalism at Jenkins High School in Savannah, Ga., for many years and died in 1994. —Richard Crotwell ’87, Metter, Ga. Another Ira Baker prote ge Loved the story on ECU students who have gone on to become journalists. I had both Ira Baker and Larry O’Keefe as my teachers. During a 33-year career in journalism, I’ve won two Associated Press awards and several state awards for editorials and sports stories. I am currently editor of the Caroline County Times-Record and the Caroline County editor for the Easton Star-Democrat (both on the eastern shore of Maryland), as well as a stringer for the AP. Tom Tozer and I worked together on the student newspaper, where I was first reviews editor and then sports editor. I worked in Rocky Mount, Durham, for the Washington Post Co., then the Salisbury Times, the Annapolis Capital and now my current job. In between, there was a 12- year career as senior communications officer for the Riggs National Bank. —John Evans ’76, Denton, Md. Time to replace the natatorium ? After reading the article related to the stadium expansion in the fall issue of East I believe that the vision of our Athletic Director Terry Holland, his staff and the Pirate Club should be commended. The range of projects would benefit not only football but also basketball, softball, volleyball, tennis and other sports and activities utilizing these new facilities. However, I did notice that there was no mention of a new competitive swimming facility. Swimming has been one of the most successful sports in the history of East Carolina University. The swimming facility, though kept in great condition, is over 40 years old and is scheduled throughout the day and night. —Professor Emeritus Ray Scharf, swim coach 1967-82, Harker’s Island Editor’s note: Holland said he stretched the budget as far as he could to devise a plan that will significantly improve the facilities used by 13 of the school’s 19 teams. Building a new swimming facility for the men’s and women’s teams would cost about as much as all the other Olympic Sports facility improvements combined, Holland added. That does not include expansion of the football stadium, which will be funded by the sale of the additional seats and the additional Pirate Club donations of the new seat holders. Bring bac k the old Pe De I’m a very proud alum who loves coming back to visit Greenville and ECU. I attended Homecoming weekend and had a wonderful time. As always, the campus, the weather, the activities, the cleanliness, the Greenville southern charm were all perfect. I even proposed to my girlfriend of four years (also an ECU alum) on the beautiful, grassy campus mall late Friday afternoon. I couldn’t have asked for a better weekend. My only concern is the “new face” of Pee Dee, which I noticed during the football game. My girlfriend and I were very upset with the mascot’s “new look” and I heard comments from other fans sitting around us. Please help bring the traditional Pee Dee back! —Heath Courtright ’03 ’05, Charlotte Editor’s note: Turn back a page to see the new Pee Dee. Pirates around the world I was reading my wife’s most recent Clemson alumni magazine. In it, they dedicate a section (similar to what East does with the Class Notes) showing alumni wearing Clemson attire in various locations of the world, anywhere from the Great Wall of China to Afghanistan to South Africa. I thought it was really neat and would be a great way to show how our ECU alumni are spreading the word about ECU throughout the world. I say that because I immediately start conversations with others, regardless of where we may be, if I see them wearing something relating to ECU. Just as the case with the Class Notes, I am confident our alumni would take great interest in not only learning about how others are prospering, but also “where” they are spreading the pirate message. —Drew Walker ’89, Greer, S.C. Editor’s note: You can already see many photos like that at the Alumni Association’s web site, PirateAlumni.com. Fall graduation We had reached my favorite part of commencement ceremonies, where the graduates walk across the stage as their names are read aloud. I enjoy hearing the shout-outs from parents and friends in the audience, and tonight Wright Auditorium is ringing with laughter as the 140 School of Communication’s graduates cross the stage. The loudest come when Pierre Bell, a popular student who’s a star linebacker on the football team, walks across. He flashes a dazzling smile, then hugs the lady department head as she hands him his diploma. She practically disappears in his beefy embrace. Seven departmental graduation exercises are going on across campus tonight but I’m at this one for two reasons. First, my wife is the commencement speaker, and, second, I’m just one course shy of completing a B.S. degree in communication and would be walking myself tonight if I’d managed my time better. I’ve been taking a couple courses each semester for the past two and a half years. Once you get used to being older than everyone in the room, including the professor, attending classes is fun. I didn’t originally go to ECU, so being a student here now helps me understand the East Carolina experience that we reflect in this magazine. As the commencement speaker, Gayle McCracken Tuttle ’75 seems to really connect with the Comm School graduates. She’s a corporate PR executive now but previously she was a White House correspondent, and before that a great beat reporter; she tracked down racist serial sniper Joseph Paul Franklin. She sympathizes with the graduates, who are walking into the highest unemployment rate since 1975—the year she sat where they sit now. She struggled to land her first job and they probably will, too. But you’ll do fine, she assures them, because you’ve acquired that special ECU spirit. She leans into the microphone, her voice rising: “You know what I’m talking about. Skip Holtz knows what I’m talking about. They don’t have it at Syracuse and they don’t have it at Auburn. It’s what lets us get things done when the chips are down.” The kids break into the “ECU, ECU, ECU” chant. At the university’s main fall graduation ceremony the next night, Phil Dixon ’71 tosses off a statistic that put things into perspective for East Carolina’s 100th commencement class. Recent statistics show, he says, that out of 100 ninth-graders only 58 finish high school. Of those 58, only 38 will begin college, 28 will return for a second year and only 18 will earn a degree in six years. “This puts you in very unique company,” he says. Plus, “You know you attended the best university in the state and you’re not snotty about it.” from the editor Volume 7, Number 2 East is published four times a year by East Carolina University Division of University Advancement 2200 South Charles Blvd. Greenville, NC 27858 h EDITOR Steve Tuttle 252-328-2068 / tuttles@ecu.edu ART DIRECTOR/DESIGNER Brent Burch PHOTOGRAPHER Forrest Croce COPY EDITOR Jimmy Rostar ’94 CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Marion Blackburn, Bethany Bradsher, Kellen Holtzman, Erica Plouffe Lazure, Christine Neff, Jimmy Rostar, Steve Row, Leanne Smith CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS David Butler, Brian Christiansen, Jay Clark, Crackerfarm, Rob Goldberg, Cliff Hollis, Kelsey Sutton CLASS NOTES EDITOR Leanne Elizabeth Smith ’04 ’06 ecuclassnotes@ecu.edu ADMINISTRATION Michelle Sloan h Assistant Vice Chancelor for University Marketing Clint Bailey East Carolina University is a constituent institution of The University of North Carolina. It is a public doctoral/ research intensive university offering baccalaureate, master’s, specialist and doctoral degrees in the liberal arts, sciences and professional fields, including medicine. Dedicated to the achievement of excellence, responsible stewardship of the public trust and academic freedom, ECU values the contributions of a diverse community, supports shared governance and guarantees equality of opportunity. ©2009 by East Carolina University Printed by Progress Printing U.P. 09-328 74,000 copies of this public document were printed at a cost of $42,539 or $.57 per copy. East The Magazine of East Carolina University spring 2009 from our readers 3 4 the ecU Report 20,000 jobs arrive via Highway 17 The huge investment the state has made in four-laning U.S. Highway 17 is paying big dividends for eastern North Carolina, according to an ECU study showing that every dollar the state spent on the roadway has generated nearly three dollars in direct output and earnings and created more than 20,000 jobs. Since 1989 the state Department of Transportation has spent $2.43 billion upgrading Highway 17, eastern North Carolina’s major north-south transportation artery that stretches 300 miles from the Virginia border to Wilmington. In that time, more than $5.5 billion in output was produced by the region’s construction sector, resulting in more than $1 billion in earnings, said Mulatu Wubneh, chair of ECU’s Urban and Regional Planning Department, who led the study. Construction workers earned $600 million during the period studied. “We were asked to find out what did the state get back in return for its investment,” Wubneh said. “This study shows that the investment in infrastructure has a multiplier effect that continues to grow over time and generates additional benefits to the region.” ECU conducted the study at request of the Highway 17 Association, an alliance of businesses in the region. While the costs for materials, labor and expenditures can be quantified, Wubneh said, other benefits from the highway improvements can’t be quantified, including improved safety, reduced travel time and lower transportation costs. “These benefits are present but we cannot assign them dollar values,” he said. Fifty miles of Highway 17 still are only two lanes and other sections of the road remain in need of upgrading. —Erica Plouffe Lazure Shaping leaders Brad Congleton is vice president of the student body, an office he feels sure he never would have sought successfully if he hadn’t spent a week at ECU’s Leadership Institute. “Attending LeaderShape was the difference maker in my life,” says Congleton, a senior from Wendell. “Before going, I thought I knew who I was, and what I wanted to do. I learned quickly that becoming a successful leader you must stay committed. I was searching for an easy road, but the program taught me that being a leader is a daily job and sometimes it’s very challenging.” Each year, up to 60 students like Congleton have the opportunity to attend LeaderShape, a weeklong intensive leadership camp that teaches a “healthy disregard for the impossible.” The ECU office that supervises LeaderShape is making plans for a third annual retreat in August, either on campus or at an outside site. The previous two sessions were held over spring break at Camp Carraway in Asheville. Any ECU student with at least a 2.5 GPA can apply for the program, which uses an interactive approach with an emphasis on small groups, problem solving and community building exercises. Halfway through the week, each participant develops a “Leadership Breakthrough Blueprint” in which they define a specific leadership goal they hope to achieve within the ECU campus community. Camp participants explore topics around a theme like “The Value of One, The Power of All” and “Living and Leading with Integrity.” It’s not a week of leisure by any stretch, said Krista Wilhelm, assistant director of the Center for Student Leadership and Civic Engagement and the coordinator for ECU LeaderShape. “It’s intensive,” Wilhelm says. “It’s almost like leadership boot camp.” “I enjoyed how you moved around a good amount,” says Tiffany Mills, a senior from Hertford who attended in 2007 along with Congleton; both returned to the camp as program assistants last spring. After they complete the program, LeaderShape graduates receive continuing encouragement from the ECU LeaderShape Society, which meets throughout the school year and reinforces the principles taught at the retreat. Students who are accepted to the August session of LeaderShape will be asked to make a nonrefundable deposit of $100, but campus organizations and local businesses are encouraged to sponsor a student who might not otherwise be able to attend. Anyone interested in sponsoring a student or donating to LeaderShape can contact Wilhelm at wilhelmk@ecu.edu. —Bethany Bradsher 5 Closer to curing monkeypox Brody School of Medicine microbiologist Dr. Rachel Roper is attracting national attention, and a major grant, for research that brings doctors a step closer to stopping the spread of monkeypox, a coronavirus that’s a cousin of smallpox. Once found only in Africa, monkeypox recently turned up in prairie dogs in the U.S. and spread to humans. Her technique involves removing a specific gene from the pox virus that affects immunity. Her research also may lead to better treatments for other viruses, particularly the human severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus. “The emergence of SARS [and other viruses, including monkeypox] may well be the biggest infectious disease event since HIV,�� Roper says. Roper, former program director for the British Columbia SARS Accelerated Vaccine Initiative, was one of the scientists who sequenced and analyzed the SARS genome, proving that the virus belongs to a previously unrecognized group of coronaviruses. Now she’s working on a vaccine created by removing a gene from the virus that seems to inhibit immune responses in mammals. She’s using a grant from the N.C. Biotechnology Center to produce a vaccine that’s safer and more effective against such threats as monkeypox. Add two cups of science The National Center for Research Resources, a part of the National Institutes of Health, awarded a $504,000 grant to East Carolina researchers to study how K–12 students can use food to learn concepts in science, math and nutrition. The 2008 Science Education Partnership Award will fund the second phase of an earlier ECU study that showed that such common items as measuring cups and spoons can become valuable learning tools. “Children love anything to do with food and food preparation,” said Melani Duffrin, professor of nutrition and dietetics. “We’ve been watching enthusiastic, young students engage in scientific processes such as measurement, data collection, critical thinking and comparative analysis in very natural self-directed ways, and it’s exciting.” Cliff Hollis Campaign at $121 million Halfway through its eight-year Second Century Campaign, East Carolina University has raised more than $121 million, or 60 percent of its $200 million goal. Launched in 2008, the Second Century Campaign is providing resources for student scholarships, faculty, program, and athletic support, and campus facility construction and improvement. “East Carolina is being called upon to enhance its service to students, the region and the state,” said Vice Chancellor for University Advancement Mickey Dowdy. “The Second Century Campaign is vital to the university’s ability to continue that service, now and in the years to come.” The Second Century Campaign is one of the major steps necessary to accomplish the ambitious goals of ECU Tomorrow: A Vision for Leadership and Service, the university’s strategic plan adopted in 2007. To fully implement this strategic plan will require in excess of $1 billion in new resources from state, federal and private sources over the next 10–15 years. “Even during these challenging economic times, when they have chosen where to spend their philanthropic dollar, alumni, friends and supporters have chosen East Carolina in record numbers,” said Dowdy. “That remarkable support is truly making a difference at our university and we are heartened by the dedication of the Pirate Nation.” Please use the envelope inserted in the magazine to make a donation. For more information about the Second Century Campaign, please visit www.ecu.edu/devt or call 252-328-9550. the ecu report 6 Tuition rises 2.8 percent Tuition at ECU will rise 2.82 percent next year for both in-state and out-of-state undergraduate students, an increase that’s on the low end of what most other UNC campuses are adopting. Currently, tuition and fees are $4,219 per semester. The Board of Trustees approved the increase at a special meeting in November after failing to reach a decision at its regular October session. North Carolina residents will face a $69 increase in tuition, while students from other states will see their rates increase by $366 annually. All students will pay an increase in fees of $25. Graduate students, both resident and nonresident, will pay an extra $69 beginning next year. Chancellor Steve Ballard proposed a 2.41 percent tuition increase at the trustees’ October meeting but several members of the executive committee thought that was too low. “We are trying to hold to a minimum to North Carolina students,” Ballard said. “I think this is a reasonable compromise while paying attention to the needs of our students.” Around $650,000 of the tuition increase will be used to boost faculty salaries; about $1.5 million will go to financial aid; the rest, nearly $500,000, will be used for other support services at the university. Trustee Margaret Ward, who wanted to see a higher increase, voted against the compromise. The hikes at ECU are lower than fee and tuition increases at UNC Chapel Hill, N.C. State, UNC Wilmington, Appalachian State and UNC Greensboro, where increases were 5.5 percent or higher. The Board of Governors limits tuition increases at the state’s universities to a maximum of 6.5 percent a year. ECU, the third-largest school in the UNC system, ranks sixth in fees and seventh in tuition. —Greenville Daily Reflector Supply of dentists declines After four years of moderate increases, the state’s supply of dentists per capita has taken a downturn, according to the Sheps Center for Health Services Research at UNC Chapel Hill. According to the center’s annual report, the dentist workforce grew 4.8 percent in 2003–2004 but the growth rate slipped to 1.6 percent in 2006–2007. Adjusted for population growth, this translates into a 3.9 percent increase in ’05– ’06 and a 0.7 percent decrease in ’06–‘07. Nationally, there are an average six dentists per 100,000 population but in North Carolina the ratio is 4.3 dentists per 100,000. Four counties in eastern North Carolina—Camden, Gates, Hyde and Tyrrell—did not have an active dentist in 2007, and Camden and Tyrrell haven’t had a dentist since data collection began 1979. “The fact that our dentist supply is not keeping pace with population growth is of concern and a trend worth further monitoring,” said Erin Fraher, director of the Health Professions Data System. “North Carolina already lags behind the nation in dentist supply and we have an aging dentist workforce with nearly one in three dentists aged 55 and over. As this cohort begins to retire, it is likely that supply will contract at an even faster rate and some counties, particularly rural ones where dentists are an average three years older, may be left without a dentist,” Fraher added. East Carolina’s new dental school will accept its first students this fall, and the dental school at Chapel Hill is expanding, but these additional graduates will not enter the workforce until 2015 and 2016 respectively, Fraher said. After adjusting for population growth, the state’s supply of physicians, nurses and pharmacists increased while the supply of physicians in primary care specialties declined slightly. ECU plans an online high school After studying the feasibility of opening an Early College High School on campus for pupils from the region, East Carolina has determined that the better option is creating the special school in cyberspace. Chancellor Steve Ballard said UNC System President Erskine Bowles and the governor have given the go-ahead for ECU to expand its existing Second Life web portal, which already is used by thousands of online students, to house the Early College High School. Ballard said Shirley Carraway ’75 ’80 ’00, the recently retired superintendent of Orange County schools, has been hired part time to work on this project with Pitt County Schools and Pitt Community College. DE enrollment grows The number of distance education students enrolled in East Carolina grew to 6,190 during fall semester. They are studying for more than 60 types of undergraduate, advanced and certificate degrees. They range from 18 to 81 years old and log on to virtual classrooms in 99 of the state’s 100 counties, 43 of the 50 states and five countries other than the United States, according to a new report. The 16 UNC system campuses combined now have more than 22,000 DE students, up 20 percent in just the past year. —Christine Neff North Recreational Complex opens Interior design students display their ideas for “barracks of the future” that are better able to accommodate sick and wounded Marines during their rehabilitation at Camp Lejeune’s Wounded Warrior Battalion. The students visited military bases and talked with wounded Marines about what they would like to have in their barracks and incorporated their input into the designs. The designs include public areas for Marines who do not like to be alone, furniture specially crafted for wheelchair-users and storage space designed to hold military gear. 7 Cliff Hollis Cliff Hollis East Carolina officially opened its newest student recreation facilities last semester with plenty of lacrosse sticks, rugby balls, soccer cleats and free food. Chancellor Steve Ballard led the ribbon-cutting for the North Recreational Complex, an $8.5 million project on U.S. Highway 264 six miles from the Main Campus in a booming area of big-box student apartment complexes. Women and men’s club sports teams put the fields to good use before downing lots of hot dogs and hamburgers. Construction began on the project in March 2006. It sits on 129 acres and features eight lighted regulation fields for rugby and soccer. It is financed by student fees. Ballard noted that with the new fields and the existing Student Recreation Center on the core campus, ECU offers students some of the best and most comprehensive recreation and fitness opportunities in the nation. Nance Mize, assistant vice chancellor for campus recreation and wellness, said the new fields put the university in a position to host state, regional and national championships in several club sports. 9 Heart Center opens its doors After two years of construction, the university and Pitt County Memorial Hospital jointly dedicated the East Carolina Heart Institute on Dec. 11. The $220 million heart institute includes a six-story patient bed tower to be used by the hospital and a 206,000-square-foot research, education and outpatient care facility for the Brody School of Medicine. The dedication capped more than four years of collaboration between ECU and PCMH supported by $60 million from the N.C. General Assembly and $160 million from PCMH for the bed tower. Just how blue is ECU? The widespread perception that college professors and top administrators are politically liberal would seem to have even greater credence now that North Carolina has turned blue for the first time since 1976. But according to records at the State Board of Elections, the East Carolina community, at least, is about as divided in its politics as everyone else. According to a search of records of the 500 highest-paid employees of East Carolina University available online from the State Board of Elections (SBOE), 36 percent are registered as Democrats and 23 percent are registered as Republicans. A little less than 20 percent are unaffiliated and about 21 percent of them couldn’t be found in SBOE records. As state employees, the university’s employee and salary records are public documents, as are state voter registration lists. Those statistics indicate that ECU employees—at least the highest paid ones, most of whom work on the medical campus—are less Republican than the state as a whole. Statewide, 45 percent of all registered voters are Democrats, 34 percent are Republicans and 21 percent are unaffiliated, according to SBOE data. “Those with higher levels of education are likely to be further to the left on the ideological scale,” says political science professor Bonnie Mani. “Remember that ideology and party affiliation are two different concepts—although Republicans are more likely to be conservative and Democrats are likely to be further to the left.” Despite ECU’s Democratic leanings, the Republican Party does target students with groups such as College Republicans and Students for McCain. Kim Hendrix, the chair of the Pitt County Republican Party Executive Board, echoed Mani’s sentiments. “Most educators are Democrats, but there does seem to be a Republican presence on campus.” “I’ve noticed that just driving through the faculty parking areas during the day that most cars are sporting Obama bumper stickers, ” says grad student and teaching assistant Nicole Keech. “There are very few in support of McCain—maybe that just means that McCain supporters are more conservative in publicly expressing their political stances.” A Democrat hasn’t carried North Carolina since Carter in ’76. In 2004, George Bush defeated John Kerry here 56 percent to 44 percent. In Pitt County, Bush edged out Kerry 53 percent to 46 percent. Barack Obama carried Pitt County by 54 percent to 46 percent. Of the 14 other counties that host a UNC system campus, only New Hanover County, home of UNC Wilmington, went for John McCain, and that by only the slightest of margins. —Kellen Holtzman Editor’s note: East occasionally publishes original writing by ECU students. This story was prepared by Holtzman as a research project for the Communications 3320 Investigative Reporting class. the ecu report Spiders for scholarships There’s a new reason to give money to ECU: You could get a spider named for you. Biologist Jason Bond, who received international attention last summer for naming two of his newly discovered trapdoor spiders after musician Neil Young and talk show host Stephen Colbert, is offering similar naming rights to donors to a scholarship fund for students studying biodiversity. “We want this event to be a lot of fun, as well as informative,” says Jeff McKinnon, chair of the biology department. The largest donor to the fund will win the opportunity to name one of Bond’s trapdoor spiders. The winner was to be announced on Feb. 12. Bond discovered the new species of trapdoor spiders in late 2007 and is in the process of naming them. Other species in Bond’s collection have been named after Nelson Mandela, Neil Young, Angelina Jolie, and Bond’s wife, Kristen. To learn who won and how much money was raised for scholarships, visit www.ecu.edu/ biology. 8 Greenville’s expensive real estate Let’s say you’ve just taken a job teaching at East Carolina and will be moving to Greenville from, say, Raleigh. You should be able to buy a much nicer house in Greenville than the one you had in Raleigh, right? Wrong. Based on sales over the past year, the average price of a 2,220-foot, four-bedroom home with 2½ baths, a family room and a two-car garage here will cost you about $50,000 more than in Raleigh, according to a national survey by Coldwell Banker Real Estate. Greenville real estate also is pricier than Winston-Salem and Durham. Rank School City Housing cost 1 Stanford University Palo Alto, Calif. $ 1,740,731 17 University of Virginia Charlottesville, Va. 408,475 21 University of North Carolina Chapel Hill 369,966 30 West Virginia University Morgantown, W.V a. 331,333 42 Virginia Tech University Blacksburg, Va. 302,075 47 East Carolina University Greenville 283,022 74 North Carolina State University Raleigh 236,124 78 Wake Forest University Winston-Salem 230,667 83 Duke University Durham, N. C. 221,491 90 University of Tennessee Knoxville, Tenn. 208,637 100 University of South Carolina Columbia, S. C. 189,262 The Access Scholarship program, begun just two years ago, has grown to serve 62 students as of fall semester. The scholarships are worth $5,000 a year for four years, enough to cover college costs beyond what’s available in most student loans. More than 9,000 undergraduate students at East Carolina have demonstrated financial need, the highest in the UNC system. With existing resources ECU is only able to meet 60 percent of financial aid requests from students with the most need. A $250,000 gift from BB&T allowed the program to expand by two scholarships. For more about this gift, see page 38. The fact that Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Sarah Palin all campaigned in Greenville stoked a noticeable increase in political activity on campus. Obama filled Minges Auditorium on April 18 and Sarah Palin did the same on Oct. 7. Three weeks later, Joe Biden walked out of the student center wearing an ECU baseball cap and talked to students gathered on the mall. Nancy Ballard welcomes Barack Obama to Minges. Contributed photo E a s t C a r o l i n a t i me l i n e The first faculty arrives In the spring and summer of 1909, President Robert Wright (far right) hires 10 teachers to instruct the inaugural class of 174 East Carolina students, who will arrive in the fall. Today, several buildings on campus are named for those first faculty members. From left to right, top row, are Kate W. Lewis, William Henry Ragsdale (residence hall), Birdie McKinney, Sallie Joyner Davis (library), Maria D. Graham (classroom building), Mamie E. Jenkins (originally the infirmary, now an office building), Claude W. Wilson (residence hall), Jennie M. Ogden, Fannie Bishop and Herbert E. Austin (classroom building). Computerized registration begins As student complaints soar over long lines at registration and drop-add, East Carolina buys 50 IBM computers in the spring of 1984 and becomes the first college in the state to move toward a computerized, decentralized system of registering students for classes. The system requires students to go to their advisors’ offices and make out class schedules. The schedules are then given to computer operators who feed the data into the campus mainframe. Observers are awed that the mainframe is able to crunch the data and confirm the requested classes “within minutes.” After a year of testing, the system is first used in March 1985. Images courtesy University Archives President Messick’s last year The rigors of leading a college undergoing constant growth and change begins wearing on President John Messick. In his 12 years at the helm, the student body triples in size to 4,000, 11 new buildings are constructed and 13 others on campus are enlarged or remodeled. In early 1959 he tells friends, “I’m just getting tired of the pressures involved, mostly the pressure of obtaining sufficient funds to operate a college like ours.” He announces his resignation in October. Leo Jenkins, Messick’s longtime right-hand man, is named to lead the college. Robert Wright dies Amid enthusiastic preparations for the 25th anniversary of the school’s founding, and Robert Wright’s 25th year as president, the 64-year-old leader suffers a heart attack while working at his desk in the Spilman Building and dies two days later, April 25, 1934. He lay in state in the auditorium later named for him. 100 YEARS AGO 25 YEARS AGO 40 YEARS AGO 75 YEARS AGO the ecu report Marilyn Sheerer was appointed provost and senior vice chancellor for academic and student affairs, a post she had held on an interim basis. Sheerer came to ECU in 1996 as a professor and chair of the Department of Elementary and Middle Grades Education. She served as dean of the College of Education from 1998 to 2006 and also led the university’s fund-raising operation and the Division of Student Life. In making the appointment, Chancellor Steve Ballard said that Sheerer “is exactly the right person to fill this critical role at the university.” John Given, an assistant professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, is the new director of the program in Classical Studies within the College of Arts and Sciences. He replaces John Stevens, who directed the Classical Studies program for the past five years. Stevens will return to the classroom. Given has worked to create a full curriculum in Greek. Mary A. Farwell was appointed director of undergraduate research in the Division of Research and Graduate Studies. She had worked for 14 years as associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Biology. Farwell will be responsible for helping to organize and fund undergraduate research projects. David Weismiller was named associate provost for the Office of Institutional Planning, Assessment and Research. He was vice chair for academic affairs in the Department of Family Medicine. A faculty member since 1996, he was recognized in 2004 with the School of Medicine’s coveted Master Educator Award. Beth Velde, a professor of occupational therapy and assistant dean in the College of Allied Health Sciences, was named director of East Carolina’s new Outreach Scholars Academy. The academy will develop engaged scholars who are leaders in their professions, working with communities to improve the quality of life and foster economic prosperity for North Carolinians. The academy will provide professional development for faculty and enable them to pursue sponsored scholarship related to curricular engagement, outreach and partnerships. Patrick Pellicane, dean of the Graduate School, has resigned to become vice provost for research and dean of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Graduate School. Paul Gemperline, associate vice chancellor for research, will serve acting dean for the Graduate School while a search continues for a permanent replacement. Dr. Lessie Louise Bass, 62, died Jan. 18, weeks after receiving the 2008 Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Public Service (above). Dr. Bass joined the ECU College of Human Ecology School of Social Work faculty in 1993. She also taught at the University of Maryland, Fayetteville State University and Barton College. She also was Executive Director of the Lucille W. Gorham Intergenerational Community Center of West Greenville. She was a founding member of the Wilson, Omicron lota Zeta Chapter of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority and a life member of Norwayne Alumni. Kelsey Sutton The Green Grass Cloggers, founded at ECU in 1971, received the 2008 Mountain Heritage Award at the 34th annual Mountain Heritage Day at Western Carolina University. In the years since the group was started by Dudley Culp ’71 and Toni Jordan Williams ’77, helped by recreation professor Ralph Steele and geology professor Stan Riggs, a third of its nearly 160 members have been ECU graduates or faculty. Green Grass Cloggers now has a team based in Asheville, and a Home Team based in Greenville that performs regionally. The two teams perform together at least once a year. A 40th anniversary reunion of all former and current members is being planned for 2011 in Greenville. U n i v e r s i t y L i f e Photo courtesy Western Carolina University 12 13 The ECU Opera Theatre’s spring production will be Puccini’s Madama Butterfly March 4, 5 and 6 in Fletcher Recital Hall. John Kramar will direct three evening performances and one afternoon performance, which will be sung in Italian and accompanied by the ECU Symphony Orchestra. The Four Seasons Chamber Music Festival closes its season with trios, quartets and quintets. The March 19–20 program will feature Haydn’s Piano Trio in C, Schumann’s Piano Quartet in E-flat major and Faure’s Piano Quartet No. 1 in C-minor. Performers will be ECU’s Ara Gregorian, violin; Shai Wosner, piano; Hsin-Yun Huang, viola; and Zvi Plesser, cello. The finale April 30 and May 1 will consist of Bloch’s Piano Quintet No. 1 and Dvorak’s Piano Quintet in A. Joining Gregorian will be guests Thomas Sauer, piano; Soovin Kim, violin; Elina Vahala, violin; and Amit Peled, cello. The programs will be played in Fletcher Recital Hall. ECU Theatre and Dance. The ECU-Loessin Playouse series presents Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well April 2–7, and the season concludes April 23–28 with Dance 2009, the annual program featuring ECU dancers in ballet, modern, jazz and tap. The Family Fare series winds up April 17 with an ECU Storybook Theatre production of Willy Wonka, based on the book by Roald Dahl. The ECU production will be the musical version, with music and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley. The ninth annual NewMusic@ ECU Festival takes place Feb. 25–March 1, with the Daedalus Quartet and Pulsoptional among the featured guest performers. Festival director Edward Jacobs planned seven concerts, along with master classes with visiting composers, performers and conductors, and reading sessions of student composers’ works. New this year is an orchestra composition competition. Among the ECU performers will be the Chamber Singers, Feb. 26 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church; NewMusic Camerata, Feb. 27 and Feb. 28 at Fletcher Recital Hall; and Symphony Orchestra, March 1 at Wright Auditorium. Clarinetist Christopher Grymes of the music faculty will lead off the festival Feb. 25 with a program at the Starlight Café. ECU Symphony programs in late winter and early spring will include an unusual range of musical selections and also will highlight winners of orchestral composition and concerto competitions. A March 1 concert in Wright Auditorium at 3 p.m. that is part of the NewMusic Festival will include Folksongs of the Vikings, a work by David Dahlgren for tuba and string orchestra, which will feature tuba soloist Tom McCaslin, and a world premiere piece by Marc Faris of the Music School’s composition program. Faris also is a co-founder of Pulsoptional, the ensemble scheduled to play in the NewMusic Festival. The April 26 concert (Wright Auditorium, 3 p.m.) will include Borodin’s overture to Prince Igor and Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements. The ECU Jazz Studies Program’s Jazz at Night series at the Hilton Greenville Hotel ends Feb. 20 and March 27. Jazz students, as well as faculty members and guest musicians, perform, and the hotel donates a portion of ticket holders’ restaurant purchases to the university’s Jazz Studies program. Performances begin at 8 p.m. The School of Art and Design’s annual exhibition of art and craft work by undergraduate students will be on display March 4–April 8, with an awards ceremony scheduled March 4. The annual exhibition of thesis works by graduate students is scheduled April 17–May 22. Who’s in town? Uzee Brown Jr., president of the National Association of Negro Musicians, former chair of the music department of Clark Atlanta University, and choir director at Martin Luther King’s home congregation, Ebenezer Baptist Church, will be the special guest of the School of Music for a program, “The Art of the Spiritual,” in A. J. Fletcher Music Center Recital Hall March 17 at 8 p.m. Brown recorded a CD of his own solo spiritual arrangements, Great Day, in 2006. Rebecca Penneys will present a piano recital March 21 at 7 p.m. at Fletcher Recital Hall. She has been a resident artist at the Chautauqua Festival since 1978 and was appointed visiting artist at St. Petersburg College in Florida in 2001. Sole Nero, a piano and percussion duo, will perform in Fletcher Recital Hall April 5 at 7 p.m. Percussionist Anthony Di Sanzais and pianist Jessica Johnson explore new and existing works for piano and percussion. Gary Smart, Yessin Professor of Music at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, will present a piano recital in Fletcher Recital Hall April 9 at 7 p.m. Smart is a composer and improviser whose music has been performed at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall and Kennedy Center. —Steve Row For ticketing and other information, go to www.ecu.edu/arts Jennifer Licko Shelton ’98 will present a special St. Patrick’s Day concert March 17 at 8 p.m. in Wright Auditorium as a fund-raiser for the S. Rudolph Alexander Performing Arts Series. Licko sings Celtic music and plays piano, guitar and bodhrán—the Irish drum. The Swansboro native started performing as a Highland dancer before she was a teenager. She has recorded several CDs since graduating from ECU with a music degree. She’s also studied in Scotland and Ireland. Hear songs from her new album at www.jenniferlicko.com. The S. Rudolph Alexander Performing Arts Series concludes its season with internationally known piano accompanist John Wustman and Metropolitan Opera baritone Nathan Gunn, who will perform Franz Schubert’s Die schone Mullerin Feb. 20, and the Russian National Ballet’s production of Giselle April 2. Wustman, the Robert L. Jones Distinguished Visiting Professor in the ECU School of Music, will accompany members of the ECU Vocal Studies Department in the first and second parts of Wolf’s Spanisches Liederbuch March 22 and 23. Jazz singer Nnenna Freelon will be the principal guest artist for the Billy Taylor Jazz Festival April 16 –1 8, with most events held at the Greenville Convention Center a nd adjacent Hilton Hotel. Freelon lives in Durham a nd is married to Phil Freelon, the architect who is designing ECU’s new student center. Nnenna was discovered in 1990 by jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis and signed by Columbia Records, which has releas ed 11 of her albums. F ive of them garnered Grammy nominations. She has received the Billie Holiday Award from the Academie du Jazz i n France and the Eubie Bla ke Award from the National Ja zz Institute. She toured with the Monterey Jazz Festival’s 50th Anniversary Band in 2008. Freelon’s April 18 performance at 8 p.m. closes the festival, which will run under the direction of Carroll V. Dashiell Jr., director of jazz studies in the School of Music. Over three days the festival will include a free “Jazz Bones” program April 16 at the Hilton, a ticketed performance by the ECU Jazz Ensemble April 17 at the convention center, and critiques of visiting high school and middle school jazz ensembles April 18 at the convention center. 20 09 Spring Arts Calendar 14 15 Portrait of the Artist Whether he’s holding a banjo or a paintbrush, Scott Avett ’99 ’00 puts family ahead of fame. 16 17 By Jimmy Rostar It’s the last week of December, and the Avett Brothers are playing the third of five back-to-back, sold-out concerts. Sweat flies, strings break and fists pump inside Asheville’s Orange Peel club as the band performs a string of their own songs and covers of tunes made famous by Townes Van Zandt and Bob Wills. The audience cheers for an encore and the band complies, first with the ballad “If It’s the Beaches,” a song from their 2006 album The Gleam that’s been featured on the NBC drama Friday Night Lights. Then the concert ends with the anthemic “Salvation Song,” from the band’s 2004 album, Mignonette. As the song reaches the final chorus, band and audience become one as they sing together: “W e came for salvation We came for family We came for all that’s good That’s how we’ll walk away We came to break the bad We came to cheer the sad We came to leave behind the world a better way.” The lights dim with the band right where they spent many nights in 2008—on stage, performing for enthusiastic fans who love the music and seemingly know all the lyrics by heart. And with a new album coming out produced by the legendary Rick Rubin—the man who revived Johnny Cash’s career—many believe 2009 will be the year the band emerges as the next big thing in American music. If that does happen, it’s unlikely the Avett Brothers—Scott Avett and younger brother Seth, a graduate of UNC Charlotte, with bandmates Bob Crawford and Joe Kwon—will follow the path of so many bands before them, from discovery to sudden success, followed quickly by burnout and oblivion. They aren’t performing for the fame, the money, the attention. “Salvation Song” tells you exactly why the Avetts came. ‘Day by day—that’s the key’ It’s difficult to define the type of music the Avett Brothers play. The San Francisco Chronicle describes it as “the heavy sadness of Townes Van Zandt, the light pop concision of Buddy Holly, the tuneful jangle of the Beatles, the raw energy of the Ramones [which] allows them to express a full range of emotions and opt for honesty and optimism over irony and cynicism.” Scott primarily plays the banjo, and he also plays the guitar, piano, harmonica, and drums. Seth’s mainly a guitarist, while he too plays piano and drums. The brothers share most of the singing and songwriting duties. Crawford is the bassist, and Kwon plays cello. However you categorize the tunes, 2008 was a momentous year for the Avetts. The band released its 10th album, The Second Gleam, and continued building an ever-growing fan base through a grueling tour schedule. A visual artist as well as a musician, Scott showed paintings and other artwork at a gallery in New York City. On personal notes, he also became a father, and Seth got married. This year is shaping up as an even greater seminal period, with the much-anticipated new album and another heavy touring schedule on the way. The Avett Brothers will play several shows with the Dave Matthews Band, including an April 22 concert at Raleigh’s Time Warner Cable Music Pavilion at Walnut Creek and an April 24 show at Charlotte’s Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre. With all of that ahead, Scott says it’s more important than ever for him to keep focused on the family values he learned growing up in Concord, N.C., and the work ethic that earned him two degrees from East Carolina. “I can’t think about the big picture too much and what’s ahead because it’s way too overwhelming,” he says during an interview in his art studio in Concord, a suburb of Charlotte. “Day by day. That’s the key.” He credits his parents, Jim and Susie, for nurturing a love for family and the arts. A welder by trade, Jim Avett played guitar and had a collection of records and 8-tracks that he shared with his family. As children, Scott, Seth and sister Bonnie all learned to play the piano. Family sing-alongs were common, and the three siblings regularly sang with their father at church services. Some of those songs would make their way onto the 2008 album Jim Avett and Family, a collection of gospel tunes featuring the Avett patriarch along with his children, as well as Crawford and Kwon. “As far back as our memory goes, it’s there,” Scott recalls of his first exposure to music. “The earliest memories are of whatever my parents were listening to and my dad was playing. I always remember this sort of mid-’70s John Denver vibe, and Tom T. Hall. Those old country and country rock things were really inspiring, and they really impacted us as kids.” Interest in the visual arts also developed early, Scott says, recalling a game in which his father encouraged his children to create images out of simple shapes he would draw. “They had art around,” Seth Avett says of his parents. “We weren’t a family of means—there wasn’t a lot of money—but if we wanted to hear music, there was a record player in the living room. We could hear Dad playing guitar and singing to us. There were some art books in the bookshelves, and there was a lot of good literature around.” The brothers agree that the family bond has been essential in shaping who they are as people and as artists. “I’ve been very fortunate to grow up and realize how much that’s carried me,” Scott says. “Seth and I wouldn’t be able to do what we do if our parents hadn’t been so generous and forthcoming with supporting the music.” Now a father himself, Scott says he even more deeply appreciates the importance of family as he and his wife, Sarah, tend to their infant daughter. “Our family has stepped up,” he says. “We just do things for each other. There’s no talk about how anybody needs favors returned or how anybody is on borrowed time or anything like that. As I get older, I realize how important that is.” Coming to Greenville At East Carolina, Scott found a home in the College of Fine Arts and Communication. In 1999, he earned a BS degree in communication. A year later, he earned a BFA degree in Each week Time magazine asks a notable person what they’re reading, watching or listening to. In the Jan. 8 issue, John Grogan, author of the best-seller Marley & Me, said he’s listening to Emotionalism by the Avett Brothers: “I discovered the Avett Brothers while browsing in one of those iconic hippie shops in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. The album was playing on the store’s sound system, and I was instantly smitten. It is impossible not to grin while listening to this infectiously upbeat blend of folk, rock and bluegrass, all played on acoustic instruments and with whimsical, witty lyrics to boot.” The Avett Brothers—Joe Kwon, Bob Crawford, Scott Avett and Seth Avett, from left—perform at the sold-out Belk Theater in Charlotte on Dec. 30. They are joined by Bonnie Avett Rini, Scott and Seth’s sister. David Butler Crackerfarm 19 art, focusing mainly on painting. “ECU was absolutely awesome,” he says. He says his college experience was especially fruitful once he opened himself to the support his professors gave in shaping his craft. “ECU was there to offer whatever direction it was that I needed,” he adds. “It was there to guide me. There was nothing stopping me after I homed in on what I wanted to do. For that, I have ECU to thank.” Leland Wallin, a professor emeritus of painting, recalls Scott Avett the art student as “an individual with enormous potential,” and he encouraged the budding artist to continue in his studies. “The works he did with me were quite beautiful—painterly portraits, lush brushwork and color, with considerable amount of control,” he says. “Scott was one of my outstanding students. He’s a very talented guy in many ways, quite diversified in his abilities.” Scott also took an interest in printmaking and continues to keep in touch with professor Michael Ehlbeck. He regularly returns to campus to create elaborately crafted prints that commemorate the band’s annual New Year’s Eve and other big shows. “I have the highest opinion of Scott—the work he does, the work ethic that he has set up for himself, things that he does on the road, things that he does at home,” Ehlbeck says. “He wants to keep his hands in the printmaking and in the painting. He continues to make prints and paintings because he feels it’s important.” Scott says his music and visual artwork are pursuits that parallel and complement one another, adding that his time at East Carolina definitely shaped his dedication to both as career and artistic options. “The same year that Leland Wallin said, ‘You’ve got to stay in this [painting]; this is what you’re obligated to do,’ I picked up the banjo and started playing,” he says. “So I committed myself to both of them at the same time.” He sang in bands throughout his years at East Carolina. One, a rock outfit called Nemo, eventually brought Scott and Seth Avett together along with a few friends. In the late 1990s, a side project featuring acoustic instruments was born, and the Avetts began collaborating on songs over the phone. In 2000, Scott and Seth—along with Nemo guitarist John Twomey—released a CD under the Avett Brothers name. Since that first album, the Avett Brothers have continued a period of intensive songwriting, performing and recording. Their songs focus on many aspects of the examined life—love, loss, regret, resolve, truth and honesty among them. David Butler, who hosts an Americana music radio program on Guilford College’s WQFS in Greensboro, first heard the Avett Brothers’ music on a box set of Charlotte-area musicians. Later he saw the band perform at MerleFest, the perennial music festival in Wilkesboro. He says he knew he had seen and heard something special. “They impressed me more than anybody I saw at MerleFest that year,” Butler says of that 2004 performance. Since then he has been to nearly 70 of their shows and plays the band’s music regularly on his program. He says the artistry of their songs keeps his interest engaged. “I love them live, and I like the fact that you can see them several nights in a row and it’s radically different each night,” he says. “But to me, it’s their basic songwriting skills. They’ve got the ability to write great, amazing songs. Whether I’m listening to the studio things or listening to them live, it’s the songs that stick with me.” ‘They want to make great art’ In 2003, the Avett Brothers connected with Dolph Ramseur, a former tennis pro from Concord who owned an independent label called Ramseur Records. The Avetts have been with him ever since. “They want to make great art,” Ramseur says. “Their artwork is pretty much an extension of how they really live. They’re doing it the right way.” Even as they achieved early success with 18 In a recent post to the Ramseur Records blog (ramseurrecords.blogspot.com), Scott Avett talks about his passion for printmaking: My introduction to printmaking was by professor of printmaking at East Carolina University, Michael Ehlbeck. While focusing on painting as a concentration at the School of Art, I also found time and the good fortune to learn multiple printmaking processes under Ehlbeck’s instruction. Among these processes was relief block printing, which I initially learned on wood and then later on linoleum. The process has proven very useful in the moving world that I live in, where mobility is a must due to the changing workspace. Over the past five years I have used The Avett Brothers’ annual New Year’s shows as a commercial outlet to produce prints using this process. In between show posters I have also completed prints using other subject matter as well. The process of relief block printing starts with a drawing, usually in one of my many sketch books and then it is transferred, in parts, to a large piece of tracing paper to make up a unified composition. The image is then traced again on the opposite side of the tracing paper and then burnished onto a piece of linoleum. I then redraw the image over the lines I have transferred and add touches and possibly more elements to the image on the linoleum, sometimes changing it completely. Some images are drawn straight to linoleum when traveling with scrap pieces. After the image is completely drawn in black ink on the linoleum, I began carving the unmarked areas away. This creates the “negative” space that ink will not touch, and will leave the paper exposed creating the lighter value of the image. The black areas that make up the drawing become the surface in which the ink is carried and make up the dark value of the image. Once the linoleum block is entirely carved I began the printing process. Printing has been done in the printmaking department at East Carolina University with the help and support of Michael Ehlbeck and others. Without the faculty within the printmaking department at the School of Art at ECU, printmaking, for me, would not be possible. The prints are made in limited runs and are signed and numbered accordingly. Some will not be reproduced. Some of Avett’s artwork can be viewed and purchased at Envoy Gallery located in New York City’s Lower East Side or at www.envoygallery.com. Prints are also available through Applewood Gallery of Charlotte, N.C. D i s c o g r a p h y 2000 The Avett Bros. 2002 Country Was 2002 Live at the Double Door Inn 2003 A Carolina Jubilee 2004 Mignonette 2005 Live, Vol. 2 2006 Four Thieves Gone: The Robbinsville Sessions 2006 The Gleam 2007 Emotionalism 2008 The Second Gleam Scott Avett returned to campus in 2008 to create this print commemorating the band’s year-end concerts. 20 Town and Gown = Hand in Glove Jacqueta Thomas volunteers as a tutor at the Building Hope Community Life Center 21 Ramseur, the Avetts remained a small, do-it-yourself operation consisting of the band, the label, a road manager, a sound engineer, a booking agent and a distributor. Marketing has largely been by word of mouth and the support of fans who volunteer to hang up concert posters. To date, they’ve sold more than 150,000 albums. They’ve performed in all but a handful of the continental United States, and they’ve done a string of shows in the United Kingdom. They’ve built a successful business model based on good will and a handshake—the band and Ramseur never signed any contracts with one another. “I want the whole world to hear them,” Ramseur says. “I think they’ve got something that touches everybody. We started out just winning over a fan at a time and selling one record at a time. I feel we’ve grown at a great pace, and it’s just a good situation.” Megan Westbrook ’08 was won over as a freshman at East Carolina when she saw the band perform in Greenville. She’s seen them perform about 25 times since then. “It’s real music and honest lyrics, and they’re such great songwriters,” Westbrook says. “There’s a wide range of emotion you can feel in their songs. They write what they feel.” Their last two albums, Emotionalism and The Second Gleam, made it to the Billboard Top 200 chart. When Emotionalism debuted, it was No. 1 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart as well. The band has appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and won awards from the Americana Music Association. Scott Avett continues to immerse himself in visual work as well as his music. A self-portrait still in process is among a variety of paintings in various stages of life at his art studio. He recently began selling sketches through Envoy Gallery in New York, where he has shown his works on several occasions. And he still regularly visits Ehlbeck’s shop on campus to make prints, often accompanied by his brother. “You watch Scott and Seth printing together, and it’s like they’re good friends who haven’t seen each other in a couple of years—and they’ve been on the road for 200 days together,” Ehlbeck says. “It’s a pretty unique combination for all of them, and I think it feeds Scott’s work.” Working with a luminary The music world sat up and took notice last July when the band announced that its next album would be produced by Rick Rubin and released on his American Recordings label. Ramseur will stay on as manager. The Grammy-winning Rubin, co-founder of Def Jam Records, has produced albums by Johnny Cash, Metallica, the Dixie Chicks, Neil Diamond, the Beastie Boys and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. “It’s really amazing,” Scott says of working with Rubin. “Surreal at first, absolutely. The more we’ve grown, the more serious we’ve become as musicians and the more serious we’ve gotten as songwriters. The songs aren’t as light as they once were, and [Rubin] gravitated toward that. He gravitated toward the bigger, serious-topic songs.” The band was prepared to surrender a certain level of creative control to Rubin as they made the record, but Scott says 95 percent of the decisions made were the band’s own. Ramseur says the core organization that is the Avett Brothers remains intact. “It’s still a day-to-day operation,” he says. “There’s going to be a lot more hard work ahead, and we’re prepared for it. We could continue to put records out on Ramseur Records, and we could have done really well. But sometimes you���ve got to see the big picture and realize that if we partner with someone, maybe we can take this to a wider audience.” Scott recalls that it wasn’t too long ago that he and his brother were performing songs in front of 10 people on a Charlotte sidewalk. Last summer, the band played to 7,000 people at the Koka Booth Amphitheatre in Cary, near Raleigh. Whether the audience includes 10 or 7,000 people, the connection with them continues to be vital to him, Scott says. As he meets fans and hears their stories, he says he is nourished by their energy and feels a strong sense of obligation to continue producing art. “There’s a real goodness to this that has kind of blindsided me,” he says. “Where I’m at in my life, I want to grab at that obligation, and if we can make it into positives, then we ought to.” He pauses to consider his future in music and art. “I’m going to see to it that my skill and my craft are as well-refined in whatever way refined means,” he says. ��I am going to educate myself and learn. But everything learned and established and achieved amounts to nothing if there’s not some type of good coming from it. That takes a while to get to. “You can’t own enough to make yourself feel good. You can’t make enough to make yourself feel good. You can’t know enough to make yourself feel good. You’ve just got to do the best at what you do and try to return the favor by being positive.” East 23 One spring night 40 years ago, about 150 students came knocking on President Leo Jenkins’ front door asking tough questions about campus desegregation. They wanted to know why Dixie persisted at football games, why there were no black faculty members, and why the only other blacks on campus were janitors and housekeepers. The moment was tense but lines of communications were opened, and although the students continued pressing for answers that spring, the path to campus equality continued peacefully. Invisible no more The iconic photograph captures a moment when minds and history were changed: On the evening of March 26, 1969, a group of angry students surround President Leo Jenkins on the front porch of Dail House, their arms crossed, their faces intent. It was not a social call. Frustrated by lingering prejudice on campus, the students rose from a meeting and strode across Fifth Street to ask why, nearly seven years after the first black student enrolled at East Carolina, they still endured the playing of Dixie at football games. Why the Confederate battle flag appeared at sponsored events. Why there still were no black professors. The visitors felt campus desegregation had stalled, and they wanted Jenkins to take action. Because of Jenkins’ natural empathy for their cause, and the students’ own maturity, the face-off ended peacefully that night. The students went home with a promise the university would continue addressing their concerns, and Jenkins kept his word. That night marked an especially rocky stretch on East Carolina’s road to desegregation, which began in 1962 and perhaps culminated when the first group of African American faculty arrived in 1974. They were critical years for the university, marking its departure from provincialism into the ways and values of a modern, multicultural university. Behind the transformation were leaders like Jenkins and the late Dr. Andrew A. Best, Greenville’s first African American physician. Together, they crafted a thoughtful path to desegregation— avoiding the courts, the National Guard and federal intervention. In the weeks after the front porch summit, Jenkins held several high-profile meetings with students. By the next year, no one heard Dixie at games and the battle flag was unwelcome. Though it would be years before African American faculty were hired in significant numbers, the university was on its way toward full desegregation. b y m a r i o n b l a c k b u r n University Archives 24 First steps In 1962, a single African American student arrived on campus, Laura Marie Leary Elliot ’66. Two years later, a hopeful class of 16 other black students arrived with a sense that they weren’t just going to learn history, they were going to write it. “We stepped out on faith,” says Ray Rogers ’72 of Greenville. “If you live in a dorm with only four blacks and you walk across campus and you’re always in class by yourself, it takes a lot of inward peace and feeling good about yourself. Everywhere you went, there was a culture of 16 versus 10,000.” He later met and married another dynamic African American student, Eve (Everlena) Clark ’69, who arrived on campus in 1967. Rogers, a financial administrator, today works as a consultant, and his wife, a retired juvenile justice administrator, has been recognized with the Order of the Long Leaf Pine award. “We had a sense that there was a movement afoot concerning civil rights,” Eve Rogers says. Though without a lot of money, she says, her parents were keenly aware of the value of a good education for their daughter. She felt inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King to take part of the change happening around her. “We felt that however small, we were part of it,” she says. Meanwhile, out of the public eye, Jenkins and Dr. Best worked to accelerate desegregation. They knew strong forces beyond the university opposed them. They also knew what happened further south, where armed intervention ushered desegregation onto campuses in Mississippi and Georgia in the early 1960s. The two men held deep personal commitments to racial equality. Dr. Best befriended the trailblazing African American students, and tirelessly advocated for them. Jenkins instructed staff and faculty to welcome and support black students, seeing to it they received financial aid. That assistance was critical, because though they were high achievers, they likely could not have afforded college. For campus pioneers like Ray Rogers, an ordinary walk across campus took enormous inner strength. It was common to hear racial slurs whispered and sometimes shouted at him. He recalls a rally by the Ku Klux Klan at the site of today’s Minges Coliseum, and says his classmates were aware of their unspoken boundaries. “Downtown was not a place you were welcomed,” he says. When Rogers returned to ECU from overseas military service in 1970, he noticed quite a few changes. He no longer heard Dixie at sporting events; he didn’t feel so alone. By that time, about 200 black students were enrolled. Second wave In 1969, however, the mood was grim. Dr. Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated the year before and racial tensions were high throughout the nation. Black students numbered about 90 on a campus they felt was still largely segregated. Student William Lowe was quoted as saying in 1969, “When you see your race being cast in the role of invisible people, it gives you a feeling of inferiority.” There was work to be done. To unify their calls for progress, the students created SOULS, or Society of United Liberal Students. They developed a list of requests and in a dramatic move, presented them to Jenkins on his front porch on March 26, 1969. While by the late 1960s most universities had successfully desegregated, memories of the beatings, high-pressure water hoses and imprisonments could not have been far from the students’ minds that night. For them, Jenkins was a lightning rod. “If we were to be a true part of the campus, we needed to have our ideas heard,” says Luther Moore ’72, who was among the 150 or so students facing Jenkins that night. “One of the first concerns was with playing Dixie at football games…and displaying Confederate flags at school sponsored events. “Our job was to try to make the student body understand how we felt, why we didn’t like the playing of that song and what it stood for. It brings thoughts of slavery and Jim Crowism, those kinds of things that occurred after slavery was abolished.” Today, Moore works as a guidance counselor at Clinton High School and, as the county’s only African American male counselor, is still something of a pathfinder. He vividly remembers those heady days. “We were a small group of African Americans and bonded,” he says. “We became a group I could socialize with, and feel part of something. I am humble, but I knew we were pioneers, because there were very few of us. I felt like I had to be my best. Academically, I didn’t set the world on fire, but I was successful.” The students weren’t alone that night on the front porch of Dail House. Watching from the shadows were campus police, state troopers and an agent of the State Bureau of Investigation, who took the historic image. In the original photograph stored in the University Archives, you can see numbers written on several faces, an apparent attempt by the SBI agent to identify those involved. “We were aware of the fact that we were involved in events where there were people taking photographs,” says Roosevelt Morton ’84 of Raleigh, who works with the state Department of Public Instruction. “We didn’t know who the people were, but it wouldn’t have been a stretch to imagine that it was an official arm of the government.” As a result of that meeting, Jenkins initiated a series of roundtable discussions and eventually held a special convocation. Morton remembers those meetings. “He gave us the opportunity to sit down and talk about what was on our minds,” he says. “I think that was an initial step. But we also weren’t sure of the changes that would result, after our meeting. We didn’t see immediate change.” In his convocation, Jenkins asked students for patience during those turbulent times. “We will settle what we can here, but on matters requiring a broader consensus, we must be patient and we must take into consideration that we do not get everything Ray and Eve Rogers, at home with daughter Adeea 26 we want. I am aware that this may be taken as a statement for the maintenance of the status quo in a time of change. But you are well aware that I do not have the reputation of a defender of the status quo.” First black Greeks In 1969, Ken Hammond ’73 ’83 ’85 was among the change leaders who helped establish ECU’s first black fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha. These days Hammond pastors Union Baptist Church in Durham, a congregation of more than 5,100 members. He remembers how Dr. Best successfully negotiated a change in the rule barring students who received financial aid from joining a social organization, which effectively banned black fraternities and sororities. “That rule was suggested as a means of keeping blacks from joining white sororities and fraternities,” Hammond recalls. “Dr. Best had to negotiate with Dr. Jenkins to have it changed.” It’s no surprise that Dr. Best, himself a member of APA, paid the charter’s start-up fees. The university’s first black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, was founded in 1973. Hammond became senior class president and later worked at the university for many years before leaving his post in 1991 as associate director of student activities to assume leadership of the Durham church. During 2008 Homecoming festivities, he was named an Outstanding Alumni, one of the university’s highest honors. “From day one I was involved in campus life, and those are memories that I cherish,” he says. “ECU will always be a very special place. It provided an atmosphere to excel.” A legacy for tomorrow In 1974, the university hired several African American faculty, including Ledonia Wright, a community health professor originally from Rockingham County with a distinguished career in New York and Boston. She briefly served as adviser to SOULS before her death in 1976. In 2006, the university awarded the Jarvis Medal, its highest service award, posthumously to Dr. Best, who died in 2004. Ray and Eve Rogers today are proud of their daughter, Adeea Rogers ’05, for many reasons, but high on the list is a passion for leadership. You could say it runs in the family. Adeea Rogers works at the university union as an event planner, but she’s carrying on her parents’ legacy as staff adviser to the Black Student Union—the grandchild organization of SOULS. “I tell my students stories about my parents, and remind them they can learn from others,” Adeea Rogers says. “We have immense pride in ECU and the strides it has made. It’s important for students to know that history.” East Giselle E A S T C A R O L I N A U N I V E R S I T Y ® Thursday, April 2 www.ecu.edu/srapas TEH RUSSIAN AN TAILNO BAEL T In Volatile Economic Times, Invest In What You Believe In As you evaluate your top priorities, know that your investment in East Carolina University through one of our foundations (East Carolina University Foundation Inc., the East Carolina University Medical & Health Sciences Foundation Inc., and the East Carolina Educational Foundation Inc. [Pirate Club]) will ensure meaningful future opportunities for students. A revocable gift such as a bequest provision in your will, a beneficiary designation from your qualified retirement plan such as an IRA or 401(k), or an owner/beneficiary designation from an insurance policy serves as a meaningful gift that does not distribute assets from your estate during your lifetime. These options are an excellent way to leave a future gift (either dollar total or percentage) to ECU. Your planned gift enables you to designate your future contribution to any area for the purpose of your choice. Your support will help us attain our Second Century Campaign goal while you earn membership benefits in the Leo W. Jenkins Society. Please call Greg Abeyounis, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Development, at 252-328-9573 or e-mail at abeyounisg@ ecu.edu for more information or to schedule an appointment to discuss these or other planned giving options. www.ecu.edu/devt planed giving a t east ca r o l i na university® I n te g r at i o n T i me l i n e 1962 Laura Marie Leary Elliot ’66 of Vanceboro becomes East Carolina’s first black student. 1964 Sixteen African American students are enrolled, including Ray Rogers ’72. 1966 About 50 black students are enrolled. Paul D. Scott is the first black student to receive a football scholarship. Vincent Colbert and Marvin Simpson become the first black players on the basketball team. Elliott becomes the first black graduate. 1967 Dennis Chestnut is selected for the SGA Judiciary Board, the first black in a student leadership role. 1967 Bennie Teel, managing editor of The East Carolinian, is the first black from East Carolina in Who’s Who. Lillian T. Jones and Nellie Ross graduate. 1968-69 About 90 black students form the Society of United Liberal Students, or SO ULS. They come up with a list of demands at a March 3 meeting and present them to President Leo Jenkins. At SO ULS ’ next meeting on March 26, 1969, the students decide to march to Dail House to press Jenkins for faster action. In coming weeks Jenkins meets with SO ULS several times, then calls the entire student body and faculty together for a convocation in Ficklen Stadium. He urges patience and predicts progress will be slow, but he makes it clear that overt prejudice will no longer be tolerated. Referring to two professors accused of discrimination by SO ULS , Jenkins says “one of these is no longer with us, and the other is leaving at the end of this year.” 1970 Black enrollment grows to about 200. 1971 The Admissions Office turns to the SGA Office of Minority Affairs for help writing a recruitment brochure aimed at black high school students. Although brutally frank about the state of race relations on campus—it admits there have been “open displays of prejudice by some whites to some blacks” and that some white professors discriminate against black students—the brochure is highly effective and widely praised. Ken Hammond ’73 ’83 ’85 and other black students establish the Eta Nu chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha, ECU’s first black fraternity. Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first black sorority, is formed. 1973 Hammond is the first African American elected senior class president. 1974 The first black faculty members arrive on campus, including Ledonia Wright, a community health professor originally from Rockingham County who has had a distinguished career in New York and Boston. She becomes adviser to SO ULS. 1975 The old “Y” Hut is converted into the Afro- American Cultural Center. A year later, it is renamed the Ledonia Wright Cultural Center upon Wright’s sudden death. 1976 The separate black and white homecoming queen contests are merged, and Jeri Barnes becomes the school’s first black Homecoming Queen at ECU. 1981 Natalear Collins and Brenda Klutz became the first African American graduates of the Brody School of Medicine. from the classroom 28 29 Brian Love says most of the problems his students confront involve mixing materials, identifying variables and predicting what will happen in the ensuing chemical reaction. “We don’t have to study that sugar makes tea sweet,” he explains. Students just need to know that A+B=C. “We learn by doing and remembering.” However he explains it, Love says he knows he’s reached students when their facial expressions change from “What?” to “Now I get it!” Then he knows “they can solve a problem they couldn’t before.” Even some colleagues don’t fully understand Love’s specialty: organic synthesis and synthetic methodology. To those who say “all you’re doing is cooking” in his field of study, Love responds with the ever-present twinkle in his eye: “So? How do you eat? Someone has to make the molecules, so it’s not an insult to be accused of cooking.” As for culinary preferences, he loves desserts. That’s why there’s a Periodic Table of Desserts poster in his office peeking through hanging storage for his molecular models. It’s stylish efficiency: suspend the models from the ceiling and they don’t get tangled in a box. He says, “It’s quirky. It’s chemical. I just pluck them down when I need them for class.” Love has taught at East Carolina since 1994. He received his undergraduate degree from Texas Christian University in 1980. He received his doctorate from Princeton in 1986, completed his postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA the following year, and taught at Auburn University before settling in Greenville. He chose teaching as a career almost as an afterthought. “There was no big aha moment,” he says. In college he had many good teachers and some bad ones. He observed his professors’ lifestyles and thought, “I could do this.” Besides, teaching sounded better than company lab work, plus he likes “explaining stuff to people, not having to wear a suit to work, and picking my own projects.” Andrew Morehead, director of graduate studies, says Love is “a wonderful colleague and mentor to the young faculty. He tirelessly serves the department and students, but what I enjoy most about him is his sneaky sense of humor. As his many lucky students can attest, Brian’s dry wit and puns can enliven the driest of subjects—and fortunately for his colleagues, meetings.” Students don’t forget his influence. Love’s first thesis advisee, James Wynne ’94 ’96, now is senior research chemist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., and a professor at George Mason University. As a professor Wynne says he tries to pass on Love’s “immense passion for organic chemistry and immeasurable patience with new researchers.” He recalls a time when Love captured the imagination of the class by letting students create esters, or fragrances, and try to identify the starting ingredients. He says, “I still practice Dr. Love’s perfected technique of glassware cleaning—no bubbles allowed in the base bath!” Good Chemistry It isn’t easy explaining organic chemistry in terms students understand. But that’s a piece of cake for Brian Love, a fun-loving professor with an unique sense of humor. “If we were making cars instead of molecules,” he says, “we’d be building the drill presses and lathes to make the parts.” It’s not surprising that Love uses cars in his analogy because his hobby is maintaining his classic ’74 Camaro that’s often parked near the Sci-Tech building. By Leanne E. Smith from the classroom 30 Love teaches both undergraduate and graduate classes. He says the latter are fun for him because they are more like his lab work, and he can integrate current research. He has greater expectations for independence and gives take-home problem sets to be completed on the honor system, for which his analogy is: if two paratroopers jump out of a plane, one who studied and one who cheated, the one who studied is more likely to land safely. At the graduate stage, he assumes, “There’s a drive to learn instead of just get by.” One of his most vivid teaching memories challenged his preconceptions but showed he was doing something right. A student, unhappy with an exam grade, complained that the test wasn’t fair because some questions weren’t straight out of the book. He asked the student, “Do you think it’s unfair to expect students to think on exams?” Love says he was blown away when the student responded, “Yes.” He laughs about it now, calls it a “slap-my-forehead moment,” but his tests still have at least one question requiring students to explain something. “I try, anytime we’re talking about something we’ve done, to show connections,” he says. Sometimes students ask, “Do we need to remember that?” To which he responds: “Yes, we’re now using what seemed useless.” One of his biggest surprises about teaching is the fact that professors must keep updating their lectures and teaching strategies. But he’s philosophical about that and likens it to the near constant work he must do to keep his Camaro running. It’s the first car he ever drove; he says he keeps it around because “it seems silly to sell it now.” Keeping things running also is what he enjoys about being director of Organic Labs, a position he’s held for eight years. In that capacity he’s responsible for revising the lab course pack, scheduling classrooms, restocking supplies and many routine tasks such as repairing drawer locks. “His ability to organize labs has helped our students have the best learning experience possible in the lab classes,” says Morehead, the graduate studies director. “The job needs someone who can keep it together, so I’ll do it till it’s set so the next person won’t have trouble,” says Love, who admits he’s an “organization freak.” In research, too, he looks forward to a sense of accomplishment. He’s won numerous grants and published a dozen articles but says it’s a “way bigger thrill [when] something we did is getting used. When Love read in a journal article that someone was finally able to solve a problem using one of his methods, he thought, “Woohoo! Circle that!” Most of those revelations happen accidentally from working on projects where he found published research methods impractical. bent,” he says. “Like my students, I want something to be easy.” But his sense of humor shines through in the serious subject of research. “How can there be this many chemists, and we haven’t done everything already?” B o o k s b y E C U F a c u l ty If you think politics was hot and voters were demanding change in last fall’s presidential election, you should have been around in 1888, when an issues-dominated campaign produced an 80 percent voter turnout. That heated race between Democratic incumbent Grover Cleveland and the GO P’s Benjamin Harrison foreshadowed both the modern political campaign and the modern presidency, or so ECU history professor Charles W. Calhoun argues in his new book, Minority Victory. Americans had money in the Gilded Age and spent a lot of it on imported goods. Tariffs on those goods piled up as surpluses in the federal budget. Most Democrats, Cleveland among them, took the small-world view of government and supported slashing duties on imports, thereby cutting prices for consumers. Harrison stood on his front porch daily to rail against “Cleveland’s pinched sense of what the government could and should do.” Cleveland won the popular vote but Harrison took the Electoral College, becoming one of only four presidents (Bush is another) to lose the popular vote but win the White House. Harrison told Americans “Yes we can,” an outlook that kept his party in power for a generation. —Steve Tuttle Minority Victory By Charles W. Calhoun University Press of Kansas, 243 pages, $29.95 The Voice of the Pirate Nation arrrrgh listen free online www.pirateradio1250.com 32 33 Equity, Finally Women’s sports become ‘fully funded,’ meaning their teams offer the maximum number of scholarships allowed. By Bethany Bradsher Tracey Kee and Charina Sumner wore the same uniform and played the same sport. But 20 years have passed since Kee represented the Pirates on the softball diamond where Sumner stars today. And there’s a world of difference in how the two women athletes were treated. Kee, who is Sumner’s coach, came to East Carolina from Virginia on a partial scholarship and many of her teammates received only textbook money. Sumner was recruited all the way from Hawaii and was offered a full scholarship. When Kee was a player, the women’s softball team stayed in budget hotels, sometimes five to a room, and ate on $12 a day. For their away games this season, the Lady Pirates will stay in Marriotts and Hiltons, two to a room, and receive $30 a day for meals. Kee remembers walking along the railroad tracks in downtown Greenville to get to their weightlifting facility in a warehouse on 14th Street. Today’s teams lift in the Murphy Center, considered one of the finest collegiate fitness centers in the country. “I share lots and lots of stories from back in the day when I played,” says Kee, who is starting her 12th season as the women’s softball coach. “I want them to appreciate what they have, and appreciate those that helped build our program by playing with less.” Jay Clark 35 It’s a new day for the female athlete at East Carolina in terms of scholarships, amenities, facilities and victories. “It’s hard to compare where we were,” says Tom Morris, the women’s tennis coach and a 10-year veteran of the athletics staff. “Women’s sports are really on the rise here. And I think that’s going to continue to improve.” It’s been an uphill climb and no one can see the summit yet. That may come when new playing facilities for sports like softball, tennis and volleyball, now on the drawing board, actually become reality. Still, in the gauge that means the most to the coaches— scholarship numbers—East Carolina is finally right where it should be. In coach talk, the magic word is “fully funded,” which means that a sport is able to offer the maximum number of scholarships allotted to it by the NCAA. In 2001, at the urging of the NCAA, East Carolina drafted a gender equity plan and appointed a task force to make sure it was followed. That year basketball and golf were the only fully funded women’s teams. At the time, the women had a total of 63.5 scholarships overall out of a maximum allowed 99. “We just made sure we stayed on track and improved on the schedule as more funding became available,” athletic director Terry Holland says of the gender equity plan. “Having the maximum number of scholarships allowed by the NCAA is normally viewed as essential to having an equal opportunity to be competitive.” Today all sports teams are fully funded, which allows coaches to recruit superior players, compete with tougher opponents and amass more wins. “I don’t think it’s any mistake that we’re very close to being fully funded now, and you start to see some success in women’s programs with that,” says women’s soccer coach Rob Donnenwirth, who will use all 14 scholarships—the maximum—for the first time this fall. “That’s a big piece of the puzzle that is now there for us.” In the past, most women’s teams were led by the coach who also headed up the men’s team. Now, the swim team and track and field are the only teams that still have just one coach and one training program for both teams. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that as the number of scholarships available to women athletes rose, and coaching improved, there has been a corresponding increase in victories and other successes. Over the past three years: n Both the basketball and softball teams earned bids to the NCAA tournament. The basketball team stunned Conference USA by winning the tournament and making the field of 64 in 2007, and the softball team earned its first-ever NCAA at-large bid last spring after reaching the semifinals of the C-USA tournament. n The soccer team made a national name for itself last fall, becoming the first women’s team to clinch a C-USA regular season title after going 12 games without a loss in the heart of conference competition. They made it to the championship game of the C-USA tournament, where they fell to Memphis and narrowly missed an at-large bid for the NCAA field. n The golf team has finished second in the conference for the past two seasons. Junior Abby Bools—the reigning C-USA Golfer of the Year—finished in the top four in all but one of the fall tournaments the team played this season. And the competition for the golf team keeps getting steeper— their first tournament of the spring season is hosted by Ohio State and features 15 of the nation’s top Division I teams, including Florida, Notre Dame, Stanford and the University of Southern California. n The women’s swimmers finished the 2007– 08 season 7-1 in dual meets. The tennis team has compiled four consecutive winning seasons, including a 17-6 mark in 2008. More success, more pressure When the administration throws its support behind women’s sports with full funding, the coaches feel the need to set higher goals, Kee says. “When someone is putting that much money and care into your student athletes, then with that comes a lot of responsibility and a lot of pressure. You want to win.” And more victories by the women’s teams is translating into greater fan support of the rabid kind usually reserved for the “big three” of football, baseball and men’s basketball. “When we’re getting closer to these postseason invites and that kind of thing,” Kee says, “I think that’s when the regular fan notices us.” When the women’s soccer team started to climb the C-USA ladder last fall, the message boards on several Pirate fan sites were heavy with positive comments from fans who normally only follow football. Bodies in the bleachers are also a tangible gauge. “Every year that I’ve been here attendance has been up,” said basketball coach Sharon Baldwin-Tener. “The year before I got here we averaged 191 [fans per game in Minges], and this season it was 2,500. I think people are realizing that it’s a pretty good game.” The softball team benefits from close proximity to the baseball stadium. At times during the season, men’s baseball fans will stick around after that game ends to watch the women play. Kee remembers one of the first times that happened, in 2006, when the Lady Pirates were in extra innings against UNC Chapel Hill. “I bet they were 25 people deep along our sideline, just heckling [the Tar Heels]. You see a little bit more rowdy crowds, and I think that’s a good thing. People are getting a little bit more passionate about it.” Junior tennis player Brooke Walter says she��s seen public awareness and fan support—as well as the team’s expectations of itself—rise every year. “Last year we were nationally ranked for the first time in years, so that got some people’s attention.” Smart players, smart students Female athletes at ECU historically have excelled in the classroom, and that tradition is continuing even as the teams win more games. The volleyball, golf, soccer and softball teams all were honored by their coaching associations in the past year for their high cumulative team GPAs. In April the tennis team was the only sports program at ECU to receive a special NCAA honor for compiling a team GPA in the top 10 percent nationally. The softball team was recognized by C-USA in July for having the highest GPA of its sport among conference members The men’s basketball, men’s golf and men’s tennis programs also were at the top of their sports academically. While most women’s teams have achieved parity with the men in scholarships, coaching and equipment, they still largely lag behind in one major area—facilities. But that is changing with a plan adopted by the university that will see major enhancements to women’s sports facilities over the next two or three years: East Carolina has committed to a new women’s softball stadium; a new track and field facility; and a new auxiliary gym at Minges Coliseum that will house practice courts for the men’s and women’s basketball teams and the volleyball team. Also on the list are 12 new tennis courts, a women’s soccer field and practice facility, a women’s sports field house and a sports medicine facility. Funding for the new facilities is coming out of the student activity fee. When Rick Kobe started coaching the swim team in 1982, he had exactly one-half of a scholarship for a female swimmer. Today he is fully funded at 14, but his swimmers— both male and female—are still using the natatorium that was built in 1968. Kobe can promote an array of benefits to recruits who are considering ECU—decades of winning records, the team’s camaraderie, dedicated coaches—but he still occasionally loses swimmers to schools with superior facilities. Baldwin-Tener is competing in recruiting against schools that have three different dedicated gyms—one each for men’s basketball, women’s basketball and volleyball. ECU has one gym for all three sports, a facility that’s used by physical education classes in the mornings. The volleyball coaching staff can schedule up to 20 hours of practice a week according to the NCAA, but the team never comes close to that number because they have to share the gym with so many others. “We need a practice facility, and I think everyone knows that,” Baldwin-Tener said. “It’s a huge factor right now in recruiting.” No one denies that women’s sports have come a long way since 1932, when President Robert H. Wright refused a request for an organized girls’ basketball on the grounds that such “boisterous activity” would be unladylike for the young women who attended ECTC. Funding is up, success in many seasons is surpassing that in the men’s arenas, and talented recruits are choosing to be Pirates by the dozen. Once the physical accommodations catch up to the talent and motivation among the Lady Pirates, ECU’s evolution to a friendly place for female athletes will be complete. East Rob Goldberg 37 2008 Maggie O’Neil is the new executive director at Wake Forest Downtown Revitalization Corp. From Raleigh, she previously was deputy town clerk in Garner; town clerk and finance director in Bethel; and a management intern in Ayden, which was named a Small Town Main Street Town during her time there. 2007 Amanda Faye Hal of Fayetteville and John Delanion Fisher II of Stedman were married May 24 in Fayetteville and live in Buies Creek. She teaches business at West Johnston High School in Benson. Leslie An Hart and Jason Scott Mozingo were married July 12 at Yankee Hall Plantation in Pactolus and live in Winterville. She works at Golden Living Center of Greenville. Emery Derek Smith and Sonya Nichole Edens of Grifton were married June 28 in Winterville. He works at West Greene Elementary School in Snow Hill. Laci Le Stanley of Fuquay-Varina and Justin Keith McDonald of Winston-Salem were married Oct. 11 at the Cape Fear River Deck in Wilmington and live in Morrisville. She teaches at the Ballet School of Chapel Hill and Cary Ballet Conservatory. 2006 APRIL PAUL BAER, originally of Benson, is the project coordinator for university wellness at Frostburg State University in Maryland. His latest project is Creating Healthy Informed Lasting Lifestyles, where he will manage modeling a biomedical and health initiative that may be used at universities across the county. Nick D. Kistler is the new corporate sponsorship sales executive with ISP Sports’ University of Southern Mississippi property in Hattiesburg. Kistler was assistant general manager with a collegiate summer league baseball club in Edenton. Clayton McCullough is the youngest inductee for the J.H. Rose Walk of Fame at J.H. Rose High School in Greenville. After playing baseball and football at Rose and baseball at ECU, he was drafted by the Cleveland Indians, made AAA Buffalo, worked as a hitting coach and manager for minor league baseball operations in the Gulf Coast League for the Toronto Blue Jays, and now manages the rookie league Lansing Lugnuts in Michigan. Joanne Morace is a nurse practitioner at Eastern Psychiatric & Behavioral Specialists. An RN for 15 years, she worked with critical care patients at PCMH. 2005 Celeste Amstutz and David Leich ’06 were married July 26 at Airlie Gardens in Wilmington. At ECU, she was in Alpha Xi Delta, he was in Kappa Alpha, and both are in the MBA program. A l u m n i S p otlig h t CLASS NO TES In a ceremony in the Old House Chamber in the State Capital building, James R. Gorham ’81 of Kernersville (at podium) was promoted to brigadier general in the N. C. Army National Guard. State and Army officials congratulated Gorham on becoming the first African American to attain that rank in the state Guard. A vice president of First Citizens Bank, Gorham enlisted in the Army after high school and used the GI bill to earn a history degree from ECU. He’s been in the Guard for 34 years. In 2004, his unit was deployed to Iraq for 15 months, where he was promoted to colonel. He told the Winston-Salem Journal that his latest promotion is as much about opportunity as race. He said it “gives soldiers the knowledge that they can go from private to general.” Roger W. Newsom ’86 made a lot of birdies as a member of the ECU golf team from 1982-85, and he’s still sinking long putts, as evidenced by his win at the 2008 SunTrust State Open golf tournament. His July victory was followed by golfer of the year honors from the Virginia State Golf Association. Newsome, 44, is an ophthalmologist who practices in the Hampton Roads area. After ECU, Newsom studied at the Eastern Virginia Medical School, then did his residency at the Wake Forest University Eye Center, where he won a fellowship to study plastic and reconstructive surgery of the eye at the University of Toronto. He is especially skilled in cataract and implant treatment techniques and the treatment of other ocular problems. Dr. Newsom also serves as a diplomat on the National Board of Medical Examiners. pirate nation April is service month The university’s motto, Servire, meaning To Serve, is dear to the hearts of many East Carolina alumni and friends. To capture that spirit, the Alumni Association celebrates service month every April. Hundreds of alumni and friends will be volunteering their time helping their communities through service projects, helping others in need. The leaders of many regional Alumni Association groups are planning service projects in their corners of the Pirate Nation. We hope you will volunteer wherever help is needed. Have fun and be creative—there are plenty of ways to serve the environment, children, senior citizens, four-legged friends, nonprofit organizations, local hospitals and schools, and even those in your family. The Alumni Association is glad to assist you in promoting your planned service projects by spreading the word to fellow alumni in your area. Be sure to take plenty of photos, and remember to wear purple and gold to show your Pirate spirit! We’ll put all service project photos on our web site at PirateAlumni.com. Contact Kendra Alexander at 800-ECU-GRAD or Kendra.Alexander@PirateAlumni.com. Pirate Career Calls The Alumni Association has teamed up with the Career Center and ECU’s Human Resources office to offer monthly training sessions via teleconference. Pirate Career Calls offer career advice, tips and tools to help you get ahead in your profession. Offered the first Thursday of each month from noon to 1:00 p.m., Career Calls are free to alumni and friends. Topics that will be covered this spring include: Salary Negotiations (March 5), Career Changers (April 2) and Taking Advantage of Development Opportunities in Your Workplace (May 7). Visit PirateAlumni.com/careercalls to register. Call for nominations Vacancies will soon occur on the Alumni Association board, and Chair Sabrina Bengel is asking for nominations to fill the seats. Nominees must be dues-paying members of the association but do not have to be graduates. Members of the board serve three-year terms and can be reappointed for an additional term, including a term as an officer. A slate of candidates will be presented to the board in April. New directors will assume office July 1. Nominate someone today at PirateAlumni.com/boardnomination. Come out to run for fun Lace up your running shoes for a good cause—student scholarships. The Alumni Association will host its second annual Pirate Alumni 5K Road Race and 1 Mile Fun Run on Saturday, April 18, as part of PirateFest. All proceeds will benefit Alumni Association scholarships that are awarded to undergraduates who excel in the classroom, on campus and in the community. Our 5K race travels down historic 5th Street and is a USATF certified course. Awards are presented to the first three male finishers overall, the first three female finishers overall, and the top three male and female finishers in each of six age categories. Registration is $15 and includes a race packet and complimentary T-shirt. Visit PirateAlumni. com/roadrace or call the Alumni Center at 800-ECU-GRAD to register. Buy a Painted Pirate Last spring 16 “Painted Pirate” statues were unveiled during Greenville’s 2nd annual PirateFest. After spending a year on display at each sponsor’s business, 15 statues will be auctioned off during PirateFest 2009. Proceeds will benefit the Historic Fleming House Renovation Fund and the Alumni Association Scholarship Fund. The ECU Office of Centennial Events, the Greenville- Pitt Chamber of Commerce, and the Alumni Association sponsor this public arts project. Sa ve the Date ! April 4—Alumni Association Scholarship Luncheon April 16–19—26th Annual Pirate Purple/Gold Pigskin Pig-Out Party April 18—Pirate Alumni Road Race and Fun Run April 18—PirateFest 2009 The Alumni Association recognized its 2008 Alumni Award recipients during halftime of the Homecoming football game. Standing left to right are Chancellor Steve Ballard, Distinguished Service Award recipient Steve Showfety ’70, Alumni Association Board Chair Sabrina Bengel, Honorary Alumni Award recipients Charles Rogers, Mrs. JoAnn Eakin and Dr. Richard Eakin, Outstanding Alumni Award recipients Capt. (Ret.) David Fitzgerald ’66, Rev. Ken Hammond ’73, ’83, ’85, Dr. Jerry McGee ’66, and Lt. Gen. Gary North ’76. Brian E. Christiansen Amy Brit Askew and Stephen Douglas Craft III were married Sept. 20 in Kinston and live in Greenville. She is office manager of Hometown Pharmacy of Greenville. Nichole Dun ’05 ’08 is a student counselor at Edgecombe Community College. She was a rehabilitation counselor at Vocational Rehabilitation in Rocky Mount. Jef Gadis is a maintenance sales consultant at the Greenville office of Piedmont Air Conditioning. He previously worked with a property management company. Erin Marie Sowell and David Charles Davis of Greenville were married Nov. 1 in Wilmington. She is an advertising executive with Inner Banks Media. 2004 Jason Matthew Eldridge and Kendra Nicole Clement ’06 were married Oct. 18 at the Village Inn Golf and Conference Center in Clemmons, and they live in Mount Airy. He is a graphic artist with Encore Group in Winston-Salem, and she is a court counselor with the N.C. Department of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention in Stokes County. Michael Holt is a vice president and commercial banker in the Greenville office of The Little Bank. He worked for First Citizens Bank and Albemarle Bank & Trust. Marian Ione Lowe ’04 ’06 of Raleigh and Darryl Ros Kenedy ’05 of Goldsboro were married Oct. 25 in Winston-Salem. A 2001 debutante and member of Phi Kappa Phi and Kappa Omicron Nu honor societies, she is an early intervention service coordinator for the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services in Smithfield. He is a project manager for Hine Sitework in Goldsboro, where they live. Kristie Michele Peterson of Pfafftown and Jonathan Bruce Comer of Yadkinville were married Dec. 6 in Winston-Salem and live in King. In Winston-Salem, she is an R.N. at Forsyth Medical Center, and he is a quality engineer for BE Aerospace. Wiliam Le Percise II of Snow Hill is an attorney with White & Allen, a regional firm based in Kinston. He received his law license on Sept. 8. Erica Lyn Stocks and Christopher Brian Evans were married Aug. 2 at Yankee Hall Plantation and live in Greenville. She is self-employed. 2003 Christina Lyn Crawford ’03 ’08 and Frederick Casey Edwards of Ayden were married Oct. 4. She works for Pitt County Schools. Dena Marshal and Jeremy Konkel of Apex had a son, Nolan Adam, on May 2. She is assistant director of public affairs at the N.C. Medical Board. Leigh Ann Potter and Kely Christopher Hodges ’04 of Wilmington were married Oct. 11 in Greenville. She works at Cape Fear Academy, and he is a project superintendent with Harold K. Jordan Construction. Benjamin Taylor Wiliams and Jeanne Nicole Horne Wiliams ’04 of Pinehurst had a daughter, Kenley Nicole, on Sept. 6. class notes 2002 Dr. John Howard Brooks, a cardiologist at Scotland Memorial Hospital and a Pembroke native, opened Lumber River Cardiology in Laurinburg. At BSOM, where he completed a three-year cardiovascular-disease fellowship, he received the PCMH Presidential Service Award. Steve Setser of Belhaven was promoted to vice president and auditor for The East Carolina Bank. He was a staff auditor for four years, completed his third year at the N.C. Bankers Association School of Banking, and is in ECU’s MBA program. 2001 Patrick F. Abrams of Mount Olive was promoted to banking officer in the Warsaw office of Southern Bank. He previously was a repairman at Buddy’s Jewelry in Mount Olive. Jenifer Diane Angevine and James William Gentry of Winterville were married July 19 in Wilmington. She works at the N.C. Biotechnology Center in Greenville and is in Pitt Community College’s nursing program. Melisa Dawn Barrington and Matthew Douglas McClelland of Raleigh were married Aug. 23 in the Preston Woodall House gardens in Benson. She is a realtor for Keller-Williams in Raleigh. Melisa Dawn Casper ’01 ’04 and Christopher Aaron Reaves were married Sept. 17. She is a financial analyst for Time Warner Cable in Wilmington. Laurin Leonard Deaton and Zachary Noris Deaton ’04 ’07 had a son, Luke Zachary, on Nov. 6. Tod Alston Hales ’01 ’05 and Emily Kelly Fleming of Greenville were married Aug. 9 and live in Durham. He is a project analyst with PRA International. April Nicole Hering ’01 ’02 and John Patrick Garver ’03 of Goldsboro were married Nov. 8. She is marketing director at Southco Distributing Co. in Goldsboro. He is a sales representative with Eastern Turf Equipment in Fayetteville. Bryan Holey ’01 ’07 of Wilson, a fourth-grade teacher at Corinth-Holders Elementary School in Zebulon, received the Milken Family Foundation National Educator award, which includes $25,000 and a free trip to the Milken National Education Conference in Los Angeles. The award goes to no more than 80 teachers each year, and since the program’s start in 1985, 43 N.C. teachers have received the award. Joseph Hoover was promoted to assistant vice president with BB&T in Raleigh. From Greensboro, he joined the bank in 2005 and is an investment counselor. Donna Weler Stalls was promoted to vice president at BB&T. Since 2001, she was process and quality manager in BB&T’s branch operations department in Wilson. Chad Tracy , the Arizona Diamondbacks’ third baseman, visited Clark-LeClair Stadium for the first time during Homecoming 2008 and talked with the ECU baseball players. He is married to Katie Martin Tracy ’03. Ashley Wright of Newport News, Va., and Morgan Ryan Terry of Dallas, Tex., were married in Williamsburg, Va., on Nov. 1 and live in Charlotte. She is a transportation planner with PBS&J, a national planning and engineering consulting firm. 2000 Donna Des Aldredge, a Chi Omega sister, had a son, William Beecher Aldredge, on Jan. 23, 2008. Richardson Cowles Tally of Oakland, Calif., and Elise Marie Kopesky of Camden, Maine, were married July 27 outdoors at Garre Vineyard in Livermore, Calif., and live in Oakland. He is patron services manager for the Berkeley Symphony. 1999 Tamika “Mek” Jackson and Onjeinika “Polly” Brooks, sisters originally from Wilmington, founded Polly & Meek Partnership, a book writing company. Their first book, Sisters Are from Heaven, includes Meek’s photos and Polly’s lessons for children. A l u m n i S p otlig h t After a 33-year career, W. Kendall Chalk ’68 MBA ’71 retired from BB&T in September and the bank honored his 33 years of service, most recently as CFO, by donating $250,000 to East Carolina to endow two scholarships in the Access Scholarship program. The contribution creates the first two endowed Access Scholarships, which are given to students with the best academic potential and the least financial resources. The grant is the latest in a long list of gifts to East Carolina from BB&T. Three of the five executives who helped transform a regional farm lender in Wilson into the nation’s 14th largest bank are graduates of ECU’s business school and the MBA program. Of the three, only President and CEO Kelly King ’70 ‘71 still goes to the office every day. Henry Williamson ’69 ‘72, Chalk’s predecessor as CFO, retired earlier. All three are active supporters of the university. Ken Chalk is a former chair of the ECU Foundation board and currently is co-chair, with King, of the board of the BB&T Center for Leadership Development within the College of Business. “I am very grateful to my associates at BB&T, the executive management team, and the board of directors for this recognition,” Chalk said about the grant. “The Access Scholarship program is essential to help students who could not otherwise afford higher education to attend ECU and become successful leaders in their communities.” BB&T has contributed more than $1.6 million to date in support of ECU’s efforts to become the best leadership university in the state. 38 Chalk (center) with Williamson (left) and King 40 Jackson works in biotechnology in Washington, D.C., and owns Portraits by Tamika, a company specializing in affordable location and small wedding shoots. 1998 Debra An Bard and Gregory Thomas Fowler Jr. of Raleigh were married Oct. 4 at Haywood Hall in Raleigh. She is a pharmaceutical representative with Merck & Co. Ian Andrew Cary and Jenifer Joy Prevatt Cary ’99 of Statesville had their first child, Callum Andrew, on June 12. Joy Euban ks started the Marley Fund in 2001 to memorialize her cat who died of feline leukemia, and the Greenville-based program has expanded to the Triangle with a foster program called Marley’s Cat Tales for cats with feline AIDS. Ted Lockamon is recreation services supervisor for Henderson, Nev. There since 1998, he is married to Elizabeth Brussock ’95. Edward Wiliam Turcotte III and Meghann Rae Stubbs were married July 12 on the promenade deck of the Henrietta III in Wilmington. He is a sales associate with Carolina Jewelry in Wilmington, where they live. Rusel Vernon of Wentworth was named Rockingham County Schools 2008–2009 Assistant Principal of the Year. He taught science, and since receiving his master’s from Appalachian State in 2006, has been assistant principal at Wentworth Elementary School. CHRIS WALKER of Greensboro launched Produce-A-Pic, a company that sells film promo packs to help finance independent films in pre-production stages. Walker also owns 5Rings Design, a branded content development company, and Ve-Shan, a documentary and feature film company. 1997 Matthew Cave was promoted to senior project manager for the Target store construction team with John S. Clark Co., where he has worked at the corporate office in Mount Airy since 2003. He and his wife, Emily Cave ’05, live in Dobson, manage a family farm, and have three daughters. Jeny Gay and Jason Everett of Huntersville were married Sept. 13 in Clinton. She works with Stone Properties of Huntersville. Amanda Ros Mazey and her husband, Randy, had a daughter, Sierra Maranda Mazey, on Aug. 24. A WITN news/sports anchor/ reporter for eight years, Mazey is now a freelance broadcaster in Fort Worth, Texas, and also works for The Mountain Network. Janie Sowers Taylor is a licensed marriage and family therapist and an approved clinical supervisor at CareNet Counseling East in Greenville, and she is working on her doctorate in medical family therapy. 1996 Debra DAVis Bailey ’96 ’00 became director of student loans at ECU in July after eight years as the financial administrator at Philippi Church of Christ. Kathy Flick ’96 ’97 of Atlanta founded It’s Her Team, a women’s line of sportswear. Jenifer Hemink is the new owner of A Proper Setting in Greenville’s Arlington Village after teaching middle school for nine years. Dr. Scott Alan Kendrick ’96 ’02 is a nephrologist at the Greenville office of Eastern Nephrology Associates after completing his residency in Maine and fellowships in Alabama. 1995 Lisa Wright Cartwright and Clay Cartwright ’96 expanded their 10-year-old Halloween Express franchise to two locations in Greenville for the fall 2008 season. Lisa also owns Debu Cafe and Catering. Claire Culbreath of Winston-Salem started a new career as a singer-songwriter. A music therapy major, she went blind from juvenile diabetes in 1998 at age 28, and underwent years of rehabilitation that included learning to play piano by ear with the help of Michael “Zoo” Zeoli of the band Joe Next Door. She plays jazz, sacred and popular songs in a band called Shadowbox Two. Wiliam Hunter Lloyd Jr. and Kathryn Elizabeth Lenox ’01 of Greenville were married Nov. 22. 1994 Matt Holder returned to Greenville, reopened his hair salon and expanded his Matt Holder Hairstyling products to 14 shampoos, conditioners, sprays, mists, foams and smoothers. A stylist for 20 years, he was a product formulation educator for Joico in California, but left for lack of sweet tea and barbecue. He plans to start an apprenticeship-style education alternative to community college beauty school programs. Brian Johnson and Jamie Rothman of Raleigh and Jacksonville, Fla., were married Oct. 25 at Old St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Jacksonville. They work for a local television station. Charlie Le Meks Jr. of Newport and Erin Ruth Bradley of Garner were married Oct. 18 at Jones Chapel at Meredith College in Raleigh and live in Morehead City. He is a probation officer in Jacksonville. Jean M. Sug ’94 ’06 of Grifton is a legal administrator with White & Allen, a regional law firm based in Kinston. 1993 Kim Hampton ’93 ’05 is the new student support specialist at Edgecombe Community College. She was a counselor and taught French and Spanish at Southwest Edgecombe High School. Lisa Spiridopoulos Herman and her husband, Josh, of La Quinta, Calif., had their first child, Mackenzie Barbara, on June 17. Michael Polard ’93 ’06, assistant principal at Greenville’s Hope Middle School, was named Pitt County’s assistant principal of the year. In education for 16 years, he was president of the N.C. Bandmasters Association Eastern District and helps coordinate the “Stang Power” mentoring program. 1992 CHRISTIAN KEIBER of Los Angeles guest starred as Boston wise-guy Paul Reilly on TNT’s Raising the Bar, as ex-mobster Paulie on ABC’s General Hospital, and federal marshal Panicali on NBC’s ER in September. Keny Strickland of Fayetteville was appointed to the ECU Board of Visitors. Kendrick Whitehurst was promoted to senior vice president with BB&T in Greenville. From Wilson, he joined the bank in 2001 and is a group director in the private financial services department. He is president of Literacy Volunteers of Pitt County and treasurer of the United Way of Pitt County. 1991 David Crumpler of Greenville was promoted to assistant vice president for East Carolina Bank marketing, which works with all 24 ECB locations and ECB Bancorp. He previously was a marketing and public relations consultant in Wake County. MARK A. MOORE of Raleigh co-produced a surf-rock album, Encomium In Memoriam Vol. 1: Jan Berry of Jan & Dean, with Cameron Michael Parkes of Box o’ Clox. The album includes more than 20 guest artists, five of whom played or sang for original Jan & Dean material in the 1960s. It was also featured in The News & Observer. 1990 Susan Lanehart Rhodes of Fuquay-Varina received her National Board Certification in school counseling. She has 16 years of experience as a teacher and counselor in Wake County Public Schools. She and her husband, Michael Rhodes ’04, have three sons. Doug Walker, a Miami, Fla.-based steel drum artist, released a 17-track CD titled Caribbean Christmas: Holiday Songs in a Steel Band Style. 1989 Mark Klaich is the new manager of the ReStore at Habitat for Humanity of Pitt County. He previously worked with design and installation of commercial security systems. He is married to Karen Klaich ’83. Nancy McNeil Peterson ’89 ’93 and Jeff Peterson of Wilmington had a son, Chase McNeill Peterson, on Aug. 5. 1987 Charles Pilkey of Mint Hill exhibited his sculpture The Sound of Waves at the Mint Hill Arts November show “Three in One.” After growing up in Hillsborough, working for an oil company, sailing the East Coast, bartending in Wrightsville Beach, living in Japan for 15 years and teaching at Kyushu Sangyo University in Fujuoka, he paints and sculpts at his home studio. He teaches part time at Central Piedmont Community College and Spartanburg Community College; he has exhibited pieces in Japan, China, Korea, Turkey and Italy. 1986 Karen J. Renz was a finalist for Cincy Magazine’s ATHENA Award for women professionals and community leaders in the Greater Cincinnati Area. A partner in Graydon Head & Ritchey law firm, she co-chairs the firm’s communications and information industry and women’s professional development groups. She is involved in the Cincinnati Area Senior Services Board, Leadership Cincinnati Class XXVIII, Executive Women’s Golf Association, and volunteers in pet therapy at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and with VITAS. The West Chester Chamber Alliance named her a Woman of Excellence. Olivia Scott founded a promotional products company, Promotional Partners, in 2007. Based in Cary, it supports two high school intern programs, PTA school improvement teams, and business alliance committees. As an Apex Chamber ambassador, she is on an education committee that develops opportunities for youth and business leaders to interact. 1985 Kathee Brown Staton ’85 ’88 and Boyd Ingram of Nashville, Tenn., are married and live in Lebanon, Tenn. They were regulars on the Renfro Valley Barndance show in Kentucky, where he was a lead singer for The Casinos and she recently hosted the annual Alumni Day performance. 1984 Tom Hales of Greenville received the Regional Service Award from the N.C. Association of Realtors. He was president of his local association in 1994, director and chair of the Legislative Committee and Professional Standards, and for 20 years has been a member of the Greenville-Pitt Association of Realtors. BETH A. WOOD of Raleigh, a Durham CPA, was elected North Carolina state auditor. It was her first run for office. When not crunching numbers, she enjoys shag dancing, snow and water skiing, and reading bestsellers. class notes A l u m n i S p otlig h t Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst ’66, director of the Institute of Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education, won the prestigious Peter H. Rossi Award for contributions to the theory or practice of program evaluation. The Association for Public Policy and Management presents the award annually. Whitehurst has led IES since it was established in 2002. He previously was assistant secretary for the Office of Educational Research and Improvement. Before that he was chairman of the Department of Psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the author or editor of five books and has published more than 100 scholarly papers. Whitehurst was born and reared in Washington, N. C. After majoring in psychology at ECU, he obtained a Ph.D. in experimental child psychology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is married and has two children. Professor Emeritus and former swim coach Ray Scharf won f |
OCLC number | 51556012 |