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E A S T C A R O L I N A U N I V E R S I T Y r e s e a r c h a n d c r e a t i v e a c t i v i t y SPRING 2000 AFTERMATH OF A FLOOD Also in this issue: History Off the Record, Opera at Full Throttle, Safety First and Erasmus, Man of Letters easing the tension East Carolina University is in the midst of enormous change. We expect our student body to grow significantly over the course of the next few years. We are evolving into a more research- and creative-activity-intensive university. We are striving to nurture and grow our graduate education programs and are continuing to add new, relevant doctoral programs. We are strengthening our engagement with the entire region of eastern North Carolina. All this, of course, creates a certain tension as many members of our community worry that we will not be able to accomplish all of this without damage to our undergraduate programs. This concern is justified as we have seen in many major research universities where faculty have time only for their research activities, undergraduate students are taught primarily by graduate assistants and university resources are rarely used to benefit the communities in which they reside. I am convinced that these worries are unfounded at East Carolina. In fact, research and creative activity are endeavors that everyone at the university can and should be involved in. Done well, these activities can and will improve undergradu-ate education. Consider these benefits: • Faculty members engaged in research and creative activity are more energized. They are better prepared to teach because they are on the cutting edge of their disciplines. • Undergraduate students are provided the opportunity to know the thrill and excitement of research. • As ECU nurtures its reputation for scholarly achievement, the quality of students who want to enroll here will increase, and this benefits everyone. • As the university grows and matures and establishes its expertise, it can more readily fuel economic development. • Faculty members develop expertise in many fields that can be made available to communities as they solve old problems and plan more vibrant futures. This is especially important in the wake of Hurricane Floyd. Clearly at this stage in East Carolina’s development, research and creative activity go hand-in-hand with undergraduate education. Everyone wins. In this, the third issue of edge, you will find superb examples of how our research is directed toward producing a better, more engaged university with wonderful opportunities for both undergraduate and graduate students. — Dr. Thomas L. Feldbush, Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Studies edge r e s e a r c h & c r e a t i v e a c t i v i t y EAST CAROLINA UNIVERSITY Spring 2000 w w w . e c u . e d u / r e s e a r c h / e d g e PUBLISHER Dr. Thomas L. Feldbush Vice Chancellor, Research and Graduate Studies EXECUTIVE EDITOR John Durham Director, News and Communications Services EDITORIAL BOARD Tom Fortner Director, Medical Center News and Information Dr. Alan A. Schreier Director, Office of Sponsored Programs Dr. Emilie S. Kane Associate Director, Office of Sponsored Programs EDITOR Garnet Bass DESIGNER Linda Noble PHOTOGRAPHERS Cliff Hollis News and Communications Services Tony Rumple News and Communications Services edge is published by the Division of Research and Graduate Studies at East Carolina University. Any written portion of this publication may be reprinted with appropriate credit. COMMENTS OR QUESTIONS John Durham East Carolina University News and Communications Services Howard House Greenville, NC 27858-4353 252-328-6481 d u r h a m j @ m a i l . e c u . e d u © 2000 by East Carolina University Printed by Theo Davis Sons, Zebulon, NC Printed on recycled paper. 4,000 copies of this public document were printed at a cost of $10,060.00, or $2.52 per copy. profile 18 T H E R E L U C T A N T D I V A Louise Toppin never meant to be a singer, but talent will out. Today the soprano’s performance schedule takes her around the globe. explorations 27 H O P E F O R F L U E N C Y Patented device may eliminate stuttering. 28 T H E T R E A S U R E O F T H E A L T I P L A N O Through hindcasting, cores from the Bolivian Andes may yield clues to future global climate. 30 S O U N D S F I S H Y Love songs of spawning fish point the way to better management plans. 31 L O S I N G P L A C E , L O S I N G H O P E Social and economic upheavals batter African refugees. in print 32 A look at recent publications by ECU faculty. inside ECU 34 • Newest Ph.D. students jump into research, presentations • Telemedicine grant to advance work on Next Generation Internet • License income up as inventions roll in on the cover A toy fire truck left behind in a Princeville home tells of the heartbreak of the flood of ’99. ECU geographers Paul Gares and Scott Lecce (on the back cover) examine the exterior of the ruins. Photograph by Cliff Hollis. Story, page 6. abstracts 2 • Seeking the signals to halt MS • Robotics surgery system comes to ECU • ECU joins elite on high-speed network • A smoother path to distance education • A dollar figure for the environment • A tree grows in Howell • Life on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean • Getting work teams to work features 6 N O T I N A T H O U S A N D Y E A R S Eastern North Carolina was stunned by the flood of ’99. ECU seeks to learn from the event and aid the region’s recovery. • ECU Conference on Floyd, Flooding Attracts Big Names in Disaster Planning 13 O F F T H E R E C O R D Because written records reveal only part of the story, many scholars go straight to the source to understand history and culture. • Reflected values • Sandhills memories 2 2 H A R D H A T S O N L Y Bicycle helmets get a big push in an effort to reduce injuries in eastern North Carolina. 2 4 R E N A I S S A N C E M A N In the 16th century, Erasmus opened the eyes of the world to a new way of thinking. Today, an international team of scholars hopes to open the eyes of the world to Erasmus. 1 • SPRING 2000 • i n s i d e e d g e • SPRING 2000 • 2 abstracts Robotics surgery system comes to ECU Surgeons at the School of Medicine have begun training on one of only two da Vinci computer-assisted surgical systems in the United States. The manufac-turer, Intuitive Surgical of California, selected the ECU-affiliated University Health Systems of Eastern Carolina and the Ohio State University Medical Center to install and test the $1 million system in November. The computer-guided robotics system aids surgeons during heart valve and bypass r e s e a r c h b r i e f s T he National Institutes of Health estimates that more than 250,000 Americans have been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, or MS, a chronic, progressive disease in which the body’s immune system attacks the protective covering of nerve cells in the spinal cord and brain. The disease impairs the ability of nerves to transmit signals, sometimes resulting in the temporary or permanent loss of function. No cure exists today, and the primary therapy calls for suppressing the general immune system, which leaves patients susceptible to infection. In his lab at the School of Medicine, Dr. Mark D. Mannie, associate professor of microbiology and immunology, is trying to understand the immune system’s self-regulating mechanisms in hopes of activating them against the disease. The immune system is so complex, Mannie said, that “it’s very difficult to understand why we don’t all have auto-immune disease.” It must learn, for example, to distinguish what belongs in the body from what doesn’t, even though the two may be closely related, such as the bacteria that cause infection and the bacteria that help the intestines to function properly. The distinction is crucial. When the system goes awry, as with MS, the Seeking the signal to halt MS immune system incorrectly identifies the body’s own tissue as foreign and attacks it. The brains of the immune system are the T-helper lymphocytes, or T cells, which make the call on whether to launch an immune response. Each T cell is designed to react to a specific foreign protein, or antigen. When it detects the trigger antigen, the T cell activates and divides repeatedly to marshal large forces against the foreigner. Mannie is looking into this activation process and a second process that causes activated T cell clones to acquire and display the trigger antigen. When this happens, the T cells kill each other and stop the immune response. His goal is to learn how to turn this self-regulating mechanism into a defense against rogue T cells that attack the nervous system in MS. The research is funded by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. Immunology, Mannie said, is a relatively young field that has shown tremendous growth in recent years. “I think over the next five to 10 years, we may work out [the fundamentals], and then immunology will come into a golden age,” he said. “During this period, we’ll find specific therapies for autoimmune disease, organ rejection and allergic disease.” • procedures, enabling them to operate through dime-size incisions. The result should be less post-operative pain, shorter hospital stays and faster recovery, said Dr. Randolph Chitwood, director of the Greenville Heart Center. Traditional open-heart surgery involves making a 12-inch incision in the patient’s chest and opening the rib cage. With the da Vinci system, small robotic arms are inserted into the patient’s chest through three half-inch incisions. One arm holds a tiny camera that projects three-dimensional images onto a monitor in front of the surgeon. The other two arms hold the pencil-size instruments. Using the camera as his eyes, the surgeon guides the instruments from a computerized master control console. ECU will conduct a national clinical study of robotics-assisted surgery for the replacement and repair of mitral valves, located between the chambers on the left side of the heart. Ohio State will focus on performing coronary artery procedures with da Vinci. In Europe, where it has been approved for use, the da Vinci system has assisted in more than 100 cardiac procedures and more than 150 general surgical procedures. ECU’s Chitwood became the first American to perform a mitral valve repair using da Vinci in February 1999 in Germany. He predicted that the robotics system eventually will benefit patients undergoing general surgery and gynecologic, thoracic and urologic procedures. • Mark Mannie hopes the immune system’s self-regulating mechanisms may be activated to stop the progression of multiple sclerosis. 3 • SPRING 2000 • a b s t r a c t s ECU joins elite on high-speed network ECU is preparing to tap into the nation’s highest-performance computer networking system. The National Science Foundation has awarded the university a $341,000, two-year grant to connect the campus to NSF’s high-performance Backbone Network Service. The high speed and bandwidth of the new service will allow scientists and engineers to collaborate and share powerful computer and information resources. The service network connecting the ECU campus to the Internet is 15 times faster than the previous connection. It now runs at 155 million bits per second and has begun a move upward in speed to 2.4 gigabits per second, compared with the previous 10 million bits per second. This spring, the internal campus backbone will be upgraded from the current 155 million bits per second to 1 billion bits per second, full duplex. In a related move, the university has joined the ranks of 163 universities connected to the nation-wide high-speed research network system called Internet2. Together they form the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development. Only four other North Carolina universities share this distinction: UNC-Chapel Hill, N.C. State, Duke and Wake Forest. “Our participation in this high-speed data system will provide a boost to our research abilities in the sciences and technology,” said Dr. Jeffrey Huskamp, ECU’s associate vice chancellor and the chief information technology officer. Three research programs are targeted for the first applications of the high band width: telemedicine, biochemistry and physics experimenta-tion in violin acoustics. Other applications — from research projects to distance education and library services — will be phased in over the next year. The university is developing procedures for allocating time and space on the bandwidth to ensure quality of service for data-intensive applications. Huskamp said the NSF grant recognizes the quality of ECU’s research and its ongoing commit-ment to technology. The university has spent $16 million over the past five years upgrading the campus network. It also has committed to upgrading faculty desktop computers every three years and to maintaining student computer labs at the state-of-the-art level. • The School of Industry and Technology has partnered with Ericsson Wireless Internet Solutions to devise strategies and technologies for improved distance education. The school began working with distance learning in 1994, delivering courses to students at Black and Decker plants in North Carolina and Maryland. “What we found was that the Internet chokes down when tools such as video and graphics are being used,” said Dr. David Hillis, co-director of the project with Dr. Barry DuVall. “But the performance of Internet-based education was so promising that we wanted to take it to a third level that will allow us to bypass the choke point of the Internet while still making use of the Internet tools and the interactive things that we want to do over the Internet.” ECU’s new network service (see story, this page) will improve capabilities from campus, but students working from homes and offices do not have access to the same high-speed service. The partnership with Ericsson seeks to overcome such inherent problems. Ericsson Wireless Internet Solutions focuses on developing wireless data technologies to enable faster, easier and more secure access for mobile professionals in handling e-mail, accessing and transferring files and browsing the Internet from remote locations. The $4.6 million project is called On-line Wireless Learning Solutions. Ericsson’s wireless division, based in Research Triangle Park, is providing major funding and technology support. The U.S. Department of Education also is contributing $924,437 through a “Learn Anywhere, Anytime” partnership. ECU was one of 29 campuses selected to receive the federal funding last fall. The new technologies will be tested over the next three years through a distance learning consortium offering more than 40 courses from nine universities. In addition to ECU, those schools are Eastern Michigan Univer-sity, Central Missouri State University, Indiana State University, the University of Wisconsin/Stout, Texas Southern University, Bowling Green State Univer-sity and the University of Louisiana, de Lafayette. • A smoother path to distance education Wireless communication technology will enable the creation of a global classroom, says Barry DuVall, co-director of the On-line Wireless Learning Solutions project. • SPRING 2000 • 4 abstracts How much is clean air worth to you? Or clean water? What would you be willing to pay to ensure the health of coastal fisheries? For the past five years, Drs. John Whitehead and Timothy Haab in the Depart-ment of Economics have collaborated on a series of studies examining just such questions. Their goal is to help policy makers understand the economic value of natural resources and, by extension, the cost of public policies that protect — or fail to protect — the environment. “The environment is something we don’t think of in terms of economics,” Whitehead said. “With a car or a candy bar, we know what it’s worth by what people will pay. If we can put the same kind of economic valuation on natural resources, then we can figure the true cost of policies. And if the value of the resource is higher than the cost of the policy to protect it, that’s good public policy.” Their projects have crisscrossed the state. In Gaston County, commuters driving into Charlotte were willing to ante up $14 a month for vehicle emissions testing and other measures to improve air quality in the region. In another study, the researchers found that 86 percent of coastal fishermen were willing to pay for recreational fishing licenses and estimated the net value to the state at about $21 million annually. (The legislature nonetheless declined to implement the licensing require-ment.) They also found that farmers in the Neuse River basin were less willing than other property owners to spend money to improve water quality in the river. Whitehead and Haab also have put their methodology, which involves household A dollar figure for the environment r e s e a r c h b r i e f s surveys, to the test. “When you ask hypothetical questions about the environment, people give responses that are realistic and can be used to develop policies,” Haab said. Some courts have begun accepting data from similar surveys in assigning monetary damages from manmade environmental disasters. Two current projects have turned the re-searchers’ attention back to fisheries. The Na-tional Marine Fisheries Service has contracted with them to study the value of marine recre-ational fishing throughout the Southeast. In an-other project, they will look at how people re-spond to news reports of seafood risk. Funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Ad-ministration, Seagrant and the Environmental Protection Agency, the project will establish a method for determining the economic impact of Pfiesteria outbreaks in the Mid-Atlantic states. • A tree grows in Howell You must look closely to see the forest growing in Dr. Ronald Newton’s laboratory in Howell Science Complex. There, on shelf after shelf full of petri dishes, thousands of microscopic fraser firs and Virginia pines are being coaxed into existence. It is the first step in a long, slow process that may one day lead to healthier stands of trees. Newton, a plant physiologist and chairman of the Biology Department, seeks to use genetic engineering to produce trees with greater resistance to environmental stress. His primary target: fraser firs and Virginia pines that can withstand drought. Traditional tree-breeding through cross-pollination is largely a hit-or-miss proposition. Biotechnology, on the other hand, presents scientists with a way to pinpoint the gene or genes that control a characteristic like drought tolerance, insert those specific genes into the DNA of other trees, then clone these tough, new trees to get millions just like them. Just don’t expect results tomorrow. “Technology and research take time,” Newton said. Before coming to ECU in 1998, Newton worked with scientists at Texas A&M University who developed technology for isolating genes that respond to environmental stresses. The group isolated 20 genes in loblolly pines that “turn on” when drought begins to stress a tree. Newton then identified the proteins that five of those genes produce. The proteins help explain how the genes work. Because of similarities among conifers, he said, the same technology will advance his work at ECU with Virginia pines and fraser firs. For now, Newton is concentrating on developing technology that will allow him to clone trees efficiently. In one line of experi-ments, he takes tissue from seeds and treats it with hormones to encourage multiple embryos to develop. A second approach encourages the tissue to develop shoots and the shoots to develop roots. So far, only 1 percent of every 4,000 to 5,000 attempts will produce viable seedlings, and it can take several months of careful nurturing to know which petri dish will bear fruit. Eventually, immature plants like these will become the targets for gene transfer experiments. Cloning also will be important for propagating any trees that are developed. • Ronald Newton nurtures fraser fir seedlings in the greenhouse where, eventually, he plans to raise genetically improved firs and pines. 5 • SPRING 2000 • a b s t r a c t s Flexibility and speed have made small-group work teams a mainstay of modern business. College classrooms have been slower to adapt. “A major criticism of collegiate education that we hear from business is, ‘We work in teams, but you’re sending us people who don’t know how,’ ” said Michael E. McLeod, associate professor of business. To answer the criticism, McLeod and two colleagues turned a core business course into an experiment in how to make small groups work better. Over several semesters, they assigned students to work in project teams but gave T Getting work teams to work sections of the course different amounts of guidance. Some received the assignment with no additional instruction. Some received the assignment with a description of the roles needed to make the group function smoothly — such as team leader and meeting coordina-tor. Still others received the project assignment, the information on roles and short training sessions in such topics as conflict resolution and time management. In the end, the professors found that with more guidance up front, the groups developed greater cohesive-ness and did higher quality work. “The bottom line for education is don’t just put teams together and turn them loose,” said Dr. John Bradley, associate professor of business. “The more you help them understand roles, the more you help them know how to function in a team. And the same thing would apply to any new job in industry.” Bradley and McLeod conducted the project with Dr. Brian Mennecke, who has since moved on to Iowa State University. Their report on the project won the award for best paper at the December 1998 conference of the International Academy for Information Management and appeared in the fall ’99 issue of the Journal of Informatics Education and Research. • It only makes sense that critters on the floor of the Arctic Ocean take a while to warm up and become active after winter’s deep freeze. Or so scientists once theorized. Dr. Lisa M. Clough, assistant professor of biology, has discovered a different scenario. By late May, still early in the Arctic spring, creatures from bacteria to starfish are revved up and running despite the frigid temperatures. This is well ahead of activity by animals in the water column itself. Furthermore, Clough has found that these bottom creatures are feasting on pieces of ice algae, which disputes another theory. Ice algae are collections of single-cell plants held together by mucus in strands up to 30 feet long. They generally hang down from the thick sheet of ice covering the surface, and scientists who study the water column had suggested that ice algae always float. Clough’s studies, however, show that at least some of that ice algae fall to the ocean’s floor to become an important source of food for animals living there. As a benthic ecologist, Clough studies the bottom of the marine ecosystem with a special emphasis on the Arctic Ocean. She is particularly interested in the food chain and the chemical interactions that take place as animals feed on plants and each other, only to decay (eventually) and cycle nutrients back to the plants. The process is known as carbon cycling, carbon being the common element in all life forms. Because organic carbon locked up in plants and animals is not available to form carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, understand-ing carbon cycling in the Arctic may eventually help scientists decipher the Arctic’s role in regulating global climate. Arctic research carries its challenges. Clough vies for space with other scientists on Coast Guard icebreakers and relies on a giant underwater steam shovel to scoop boxes of mud and ocean life from two miles below the water’s surface. It takes three hours on the ship’s deck in freezing temperatures to process each scoopful for the lab. Then for two days, Clough takes round-the-clock measurements of oxygen consumption in the ship’s lab. These help her determine the animals’ metabolic rates. She also bring frozen samples back to campus for carbon studies that pinpoint food sources. In addition to doing her own research, Clough was the chief scientist in charge of coordinating the research efforts of more than 30 colleagues onboard a 1998 Arctic cruise. She also serves on a committee overseeing science taking place on the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker fleet. A new icebreaker holds special promise. Larger and potentially more powerful than the current 400-foot models, it should be able to plow its way into the Arctic Ocean in winter. So far, Clough has found that bottom-dwelling animals are most active in spring, then slow down by July. “I would love to get up there in winter to see if they’ve shut down and find out how they know to turn on again in spring,” she said. “This new icebreaker may be able to get us there.” Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Undersea Research Program. • Life on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean In her lab, Lisa Clough studies organisms from the Arctic to learn about their food sources. Not in a Thousand Years Pattillo Elementary fourth-graders take the field for a game of kickball Two elementary schools were destroyed, and of the 57,000 homes flooded, about 7,000 were damaged beyond repair. In Pitt County, home of East Carolina University, the Tar River crested at 17 feet above flood stage. One-third of the county was under water. The campus suffered $7 million in damages when Green Mill Run, a tributary of the Tar, overflowed. Hundreds of students and staff living off campus lost their homes, clothes and cars. Even scientists who had long warned of the potential for such events were stunned. Dr. Stanley R. Riggs, professor emeritus of geology, canoed through tree tops to check on a cabin he owns on the south side of the Tar River. “I wouldn’t have thought in a thousand years I’d see my cabin in the river,” he said. Despite the personal loss, Riggs saw the beauty of a deep blue sky reflected in the flowing water. Then a strong north wind brought the mooing of cattle from the far side of the river. “As I was standing there, the bawling from the cattle became louder and more and more frantic,” he said. “Then after 10 or 15 minutes, it went totally silent. Three hundred head of cattle drowned. It brought very clearly into focus that this was a serious economic disaster for a lot of people.” Throughout the crisis, the ECU family pitched in to help. Faculty and staff of the School of Medicine helped guide Pitt County Memorial Hospital as it coped with loss of power and water and called in the National Guard to ferry supplies and patients from areas cut off by flood water. University students, faculty and staff • SPRING 2000 • 6 EASTERN NORTH CAROLINA WAS STUNNED BY THE FLOOD OF ’99. ECU SEEKS TO LEARN FROM THE EVENT AND AID THE REGION’S RECOVERY. E astern North Carolinians gained a new measuring stick for hurricanes in the fall of 1999. To measures of wind and storm surge, they now add rain. By the time Hurricanes Dennis, Floyd and Irene had done their damage, dumping more than 36 inches of rain in some places, people knew the meaning of a 400-year-flood event. All told, 19,000 square miles of farms, towns and forests were flooded — an area nearly twice the size of the state of Maryland. between rows of trailers that serve as classrooms, library and administrative offices. mucked out the homes of neighbors and friends, retrieved salvageable belongings and raised money for relief efforts. Faculty monitored water quality and advised state and local officials on environmental safety and structural damage. As the immediate crisis passed, the university turned its attention to the future. Chancellor Richard Eakin led a three-day fact-finding tour of affected counties and offered ECU’s expertise in helping map the recovery process. More than 250 faculty, staff and other professionals volunteered their services free of charge to communities, businesses and individuals. Many did not wait to be asked. They launched service and research projects to help people cope with the disaster and to learn from it. A few of their stories follow. COPING WITH TRAUMA Six months after the flood, gutted homes and piles of trash attest that life has yet to return to normal in eastern North Carolina. At the United Methodist Church in Grifton, where the School of Medicine is running a twice-a-month mental health clinic, other signs appear: depression, fatigue, irritability and a host of symptoms that add up to the condition known as post-traumatic stress disorder. “The moment the weather changes, especially if it clouds up or starts to rain, they get anxious,” said Dr. Thaddeus Ulzen, associate professor of psychiatry. “People are more affected by what happened than they thought they would be. The flood has left the headlines, but people are still struggling to get their lives together.” 7 • SPRING 2000 • C o n t i n u e d • SPRING 2000 • 8 Rising waters forced 700 people to flee their homes in this small Pitt County town. One Saturday in mid-February, 40 of them visited the clinic. There the team of psychia-trists, family physicians, psychologists, pharmacists and clinical social workers tried to help them begin to reorder their lives and to understand that their feelings are normal, even if their circumstances aren’t. The clinic will run into the summer. In Pitt County Schools, another ECU group is assessing and helping students traumatized by the flood through school- and home-based interventions. “We know that over 2,000 kids lived in homes that had serious damage,” said Dr. Lane Geddie, assistant professor of psychology. “We saw ourselves as one of the few organizations with the manpower to reach such a large number.” Eight faculty members and 30 students from psychology, marriage and family therapy, nursing and psychiatry are involved in the project. One is Dr. Kaye McGinty, assistant professor of psychiatry. She spoke of a pre-holiday workshop for students. “Their parents were working three or four jobs to try to get their families back on their feet,” she said. “The teenagers talked about getting jobs to help the families. The people in our group were flabbergasted. The teens seemed to be coping pretty well, but the stress in their families is extreme.” The N.C. Division of Mental Health is looking into expanding school-based interventions. It has applied for a grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to train social workers and psychologists in 31 counties to lead group sessions for children on coping with trauma. It has asked McGinty and others in the Department of Psychiatry to act as trainers and advisers. STRESS RELIEF In Edgecombe County, a different kind of school-based intervention is taking place. On a sunny day in November, about 25 fourth-graders huddled on the makeshift playground at the makeshift school. “All right, let’s go over the rules,” Dr. Carmen Russoniello told them. “No fighting. No hitting. If you break the rules, it’s over.” Then Russoniello, assistant professor of recreation and leisure studies, mentioned the event that shadowed their young lives. Who lost something in the flood? Almost every youngster raised a hand. “I lost my house, my grandma’s house and my uncle’s house,” one said, “and my clothes and my shoes.” A minute more of quiet talk, and they broke the huddle with a mighty yell. For the next 40 minutes they ran relays, played kickball and tossed Frisbees ��� working off more energy than the average adult can even remember. “What we’re trying to do, in addition to normal growth and development, is to do things that address the behavioral problems that are emerging,” Russoniello said. “This is an opportunity to plant seeds that will help them deal with trauma.” Russoniello brought this combination of mental and recreational therapy to Edgecombe County in answer to a cry for help. About half of the 500 fourth- and fifth-graders in Tarboro’s Pattillo Elementary lost their homes in the flood. They also lost their school. Pattillo now operates out of mobile classrooms set up on the grounds of the National Guard Armory. For nearly the entire day, even lunchtime, the children are confined to a single classroom. Soon after school reopened, children and teachers neared their limits. Then Dana Alexander, the school social worker, made a phone call, and Russoniello and his students arrived, armed with recre-ational equipment and almost as much energy as the children. “You could see the difference in the children immediately,” Alexander said. “They can learn math much better at 2 o’clock if they’ve been outside and run off some of that energy.” What began as impromptu assistance has become a formal alliance. Russoniello’s students travel to Pattillo three days a week as part of their classwork. Some lead youngsters in group activities while others work one-on-one with children having emotional and behavioral problems. A special stress-reduction workshop answered the needs of teachers. The university funded a graduate student to coordinate the project and provides a university van. As the recreation students arranged donations of playground equipment, others at 9 • SPRING 2000 • ECU also adopted Pattillo. One volunteer group launched a “T’s and Tales” drive to collect T-shirts and new books for the children. Another group raised enough money to bus the entire school to Greenville for a theater production of Charlotte’s Web. Russoniello said the alliance will last until the children get into their new school — or longer. BEFORE AND AFTER A broader perspective on mental health comes from the social sciences. “There are a lot of articles about how a natural disaster affects your mental health, but almost none of it has any indication of mental health beforehand for comparison,” said Dr. Marieke Van Willigen, assistant professor of sociology. She can now supply the missing information. Luck played a role. Early last fall, Van Willigen was studying the social and psychological benefits of volunteering. As part of her research, she had included questions about three key indicators of mental health on the Annual Survey of Eastern North Carolina conducted by the ECU Survey Research Lab beginning last August. The flood interrupted the survey. When it was completed, Van Willigen was able to compare the psychologi-cal well-being of respondents before and after the flood. Her questions included three measures recognized as indicators of psychological well-being: whether people feel a sense of control over their lives, whether they feel part of a support network of people and whether they feel their lives have meaning or purpose. The flood hit women particularly hard on two of the three measures. When it came to the sense of control over their lives, both men and women scored lower after the flood without any major differences between the sexes. In terms of social support and sense of purpose, women scored much lower than men. “With social support, that’s significant because women tend to have higher levels of social support, and here it actually flipped,” she said. “Women were higher before the flood and lower after it. The results concerning sense of purpose or meaning were interesting, too. [My students] thought people would have had eye-opening experiences that added meaning to their lives, but that is not reinforced at all.” EVACUATIONS Van Willigen is part of a team of social scientists examining the impact of the flood from several angles. The team is led by sociology professor Dr. John Maiolo and also includes Drs. Bob Edwards and Ken Wilson in sociology and John Whitehead in economics. The collaboration began in 1998. After Hurricane Bonnie, the N.C. Division of Emer-gency Management contracted with them to study the evacuation patterns of households and businesses in the eight counties that touch the Atlantic Ocean. They also collected informa-tion on property damage. The study involved surveying 1,000 residents and 600 businesses and created a tool the state can use to estimate the economic effects of an evacuation order. Among their findings: • 26 percent of residents on the coast evacuated. • Evacuation cost the average household about $200. • The cost of an evacuation to businesses varied substantially according to the type of business and timing of the evacuation. • People with disabilities were less likely to evacuate than were able-bodied people. C o n t i n u e d FACING PAGE: From the top, retired professor Caroline Ayers sorts donations for flood victims. Gary Galloway rows by his home in Grimesland. Floodwaters swamp U.S. 64 Bypass at Tarboro. THIS PAGE: Carmen Russoniello brings a combination of mental and recreational therapy to the displaced students of Pattillo Elementary. • SPRING 2000 • 10 • Property owned by blacks was more likely to suffer damage, but the damage was less severe than to property owned by whites. • Households where there was a disability were more likely to suffer damage and the damage amounted to a substantially larger percentage of household income than for households without a disability. Now they plan to repeat the survey in those eight counties and to extend it to 31 inland counties, refining the economic assessment tool and teasing out more information along the way. BUSINESS LOSSES The team was on a faster track to assess Floyd’s damage to businesses in eastern North Carolina. They had 30 days to complete the study and turn in a report to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In most disaster areas, FEMA contacts businesses individually to gather damage assessments. In this case, that would have meant calling on 100,000 business owners. FEMA sought another way. Using their experience with the Bonnie study, the social scientists surveyed a random sample of 3,000 business in the 44 counties. Based on the survey, they projected a total of $1 billion in physical damages and $4 billion in lost revenue. Wilson was stunned by some of the particulars. Going in, he expected that any job loss figures would reflect plants that had to close because of flood damage. Not so. “Eastern North Carolina lost over 30,000 jobs,” he said, “but most of those were in businesses laying off one or two people. These are very small cutbacks, but when you get 30,000 pinpricks, it can have an effect on the economy.” Another finding also had long-term consequences. Of all the businesses that had been planning to expand before the flood, only half expected to carry through with those plans at the time of the survey. “I’m not sure that it won’t bounce back over time as the economy gets more positive,” Wilson said. “But at least for a while they’re waiting to see what happens.” THE FUTURE The flood exacerbated already dire conditions in eastern North Carolina. The area has long been mired in poverty. Recent developments in the tobacco industry and declining prices for pork and other agricultural commodities promised to drag the economy down further. How, many asked, can an area with so few resources rebound? “This is so huge that no one knows what the first step should be,” said Albert A. Delia, associate vice chancellor for regional development. “We need a coordinated response.” To lead the response, ECU has estab-lished the Sustainable Economic Recovery and Growth Center. The center’s purpose is to focus the resources of ECU and other institutions on revitalizing the 40-county region. Its multi-pronged approach will include applied research, policy analysis, a venture capital fund and new models for community development and transportation planning. Eastern North Carolina legislators have pledged to push the General Assembly to allocate funds for a permanent endowment for the center. THE FLOODPLAIN Snow and ice dotted the landscape on a February Saturday when a team of ECU scientists piled out of a van at a deserted filling station. Time was precious. Before spring growth could disguise the landscape, they had a chance to study sediment deposited by a massive flood. So in the early morning chill, they pulled on rubber boots, collected their gear and headed off down the dike that once protected the town of Princeville from the Tar River. “The question geomorphologists have is whether a rare event like this deposits a lot of sediment,” said Dr. Scott Lecce, assistant 11 • SPRING 2000 • professor of geography. “The answers have a lot of implications for how we interpret the stratigraphic record.” Along with Lecce, the group consists of Drs. Paul Gares and Pat Pease in geography and Catherine Rigsby in geology. From Tarboro to Washington, they are surveying the floodplain to see what the Tar River left behind. Along the way, they collect samples to be analyzed for soil type, heavy metal content and chemical contamination. They plot each location using the satellite-based Global Positioning System. In the end, they will map the patterns of distribution and link those with the typography, land use and flood records. They also will be able to compare actual sediment distribution with estimates prepared by the U.S. Geological Survey. “If I were guessing ahead of time, I would have thought we’d find two to three centimeters of sediment,” Lecce said. “It would have been that noticeable.” In most places, however, they find so little they must carefully separate flood-deposited soil from autumn’s leaf fall. When one small area turned up an inch-thick layer of crusted and cracked mud, it was enough to start the speculation. “I think the interesting thing is why here,” Gares said. “Where does this stuff come from and why is it deposited here and not elsewhere?” The group huddled. Perhaps frequent low-level flooding routinely flushes out the system. Maybe it had to do with the sequence of events last fall. North Carolina had been in a drought before hurricane season and the river level was exceptionally low. Then when Dennis, the first major storm hit, maybe it eroded most of the loose soil and carried it to the estuary before the river topped its banks. Or maybe this river simply doesn’t carry much sediment. Somewhere in the muck, they hope to find the answers. THE SOUND For biologists, the flood has left a different set of questions. One of the most serious question marks hangs over Pamlico Sound, the largest body of water in the state and a major nursery for East Coast fisheries. As flood waters washed out hog lagoons and municipal sewage treatment plants and swept across fields and lawns, it bypassed nature’s normal filtering process and carried an extraordinary load of nutrients straight into the sound. There, trapped by the Outer Banks, these nutrients hold the potential to wreak havoc in the delicate ecosystem. Last fall, the strain was already showing. The huge quantity of fresh water had trapped the heavier, oxygen-poor brackish water at the bottom. Hurricane Irene came along and stirred the waters. Disaster averted. The next critical time is approaching fast. “We don’t know what the consequences will be next summer,” said Dr. Robert Christian, professor of biology. “The temperature will be higher and the ability of the water to hold oxygen will be lower. What happens when the bacteria and algae start growing?” The concern is that the nutrients will feed an unusually large crop of algae. As it dies, it will add even more nutrients to the shallow waters. Natural bacteria feasting on all the decaying matter will rob the water of oxygen. In a worst case scenario, this could lead to massive fish kills. With little chance to exchange water with the open ocean, the sound’s recovery could be slow. Despite the sound’s importance for fisher-ies and tourism, Christian said, little attention has been directed to understanding its response to events like floods and hurricanes. Working with Dr. Hans Paerl, professor of marine and C o n t i n u e d FACING PAGE: Scott Lecce (top) checks a layer of sediment deposited on a discarded lawnmower in Princeville. (Bottom) Scientists carefully separate sediment from leaf litter to determine what the flood left behind. THIS PAGE: (Top) ECU scientists skirt a breach in the Princeville dike as they return from surveying the floodplain. (Bottom) A composite of images from the Landsat 7 Thematic Mapper satellite reveals the extent of flooding in Pitt County. The blue color represents permanent bodies of water, as shown in a July 28 image. By Sept. 30, water covered the area in red. Dense vegetation may conceal additional flood waters in some areas near the river channel. ECU Conference on Floyd, Flooding Attracts Big Names in Disaster Planning • SPRING 2000 • 12 environmental sciences at UNC-CH, Christian wants to remedy that. They will be keeping close tabs on the sound’s nutrient levels and biological activity for the next year or longer. They hope to assess the impact of the flood and to create a model that will predict the likely biological impact of any future storms. The predictive capacity may be as impor-tant as understanding current conditions. Cli-matologists expect more and stronger hurri-canes over the next two to three decades. THE MAPS The extent of the flooding drove home an important point for almost everyone. Floodplain maps need to be updated and expanded. Three geographers are examining the tools available for quick-response flood mapping and modeling and for updating floodplain maps. Digital elevation models from the U.S. Geological Survey are a readily available and inexpensive tool for estimating the extent of the flooding. They have just one problem. “There are some questions about how accurate they are in areas of low relief, like it is here,” said Dr. Jeffrey Colby, assistant professor of geography. Images from the new Landsat 7 satellite offer another possibility, but dense vegetation can obscure flooding in some areas. The geographers, Colby and Drs. Karen Mulcahy and Yong Wang, are investigating whether these tools can be combined for better results. Their first step is to compare both the digital models and satellite imagery taken before and during the flood with actual flood level readings. THE RIVER Only the magnitude of the flood surprised geologist Stan Riggs. “If you look at the natural process, the river was doing exactly what it was made to do, and we got in the way,” he said. “Moving water is a very powerful force. It erodes mountains and canyons and sculpts the land in a very vigorous fashion. It always has, and it always will.” The question he is trying to solve now is how much people contributed to their own undoing last fall. Ditches drain thousands of acres of forest and farmland. Streams have been channelized to move water faster. Urban Mileti, director of the Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center in Boulder, Colo., and author of Disasters by Design: A Reassessment of Natural Hazards in the United States. • “Mitigation in an Institutional Context” — Dr. Rutherford Platt, author of Disasters and Democracy: The Politics of Extreme Natural Events and professor of geography and planning law at the University of Massachu-setts. • “Prospects for Mitigation in Eastern North Carolina Creating Resilient Communi-ties” — Dr. David Godschalk, author of Natural Hazard Mitigation: Recasting Disaster Policy and Planning and Catastrophic Coastal Storms: Hazard Mitigation and Development Management. Godshalk also is professor and former chair of city and regional planning at UNC-Chapel Hill. • “Extreme Weather Events in Eastern North Carolina’s Future” — Dr. Robert Sheets, former director of the National Hurricane Center. The conference also will include a series of workshops reporting on research related to the natural, physical, social and economic impacts of Hurricane Floyd and the floods, a panel discussion on “Living in the Eye of the Storm” and roundtable discussions on selected topics. More details on the conference are available from the website www.ecu.edu/coas/ floyd or by contacting Laura Edwards at 252- 328-2484, email EdwardsL@mail.ecu.edu. The deadline for registration is May 10. • Some of the nation’s leading authorities on natural disasters will address a three-day conference at ECU on the effects of Hurricane Floyd. The conference, to be held May 24-26, is expected to bring together policymakers, research scientists, relief and recovery specialists, federal and local disaster experts, and citizens of eastern North Carolina. “We expect this conference to provide the first organized assessment not only of Floyd’s place among other natural disasters but equally important, how we can use the lessons of this storm to mitigate loss of life and property in future calamities,” said Dr. John Maiolo, conference chair and professor of sociology. Among the highlights will be: • “Disasters by Design” — Dr. Dennis development has increased runoff. Roads and bridges, on the other hand, often block the natural flow of water. “We probably exacer-bated this flood significantly through our lack of attention to what we’ve been doing,” he said. With a multidisciplinary team, Riggs hopes to detail what happened on the Tar River and its tributaries: how the natural system worked where it was relatively intact and how human modifications altered the outcome. He has enlisted the aid of Dr. Richard Spruill, a hydrologist, and Drs. Robert Christian and Mark Brinson in biology. Their end product, he said, will be a database to help people judge the wisdom of policies and practices. “No one even knows how many streams have been channelized or how many bridge dams there are and where they are,” he said. “A bridge dam on one kind of stream might actually be good because it might hold some of the storm water back whereas on another part of the stream it might be bad because it holds the water back right into town. This is where understanding the dynamics is so crucial to society. You can’t have one rule that fits everything. It’s a complex system.” • Because written records reveal only part of the story, many scholars go straight to the source to understand history and culture. 13 • SPRING 2000 • I n a photograph over her desk, Dr. Lu Ann Jones sits on the tailgate of a pickup truck, holding a microphone and talking with an elderly Mississippi Delta farmer named Charles Bailey. “I feel like that’s my natural habitat,” she says now. It is her habitat in more ways than one. The daughter of Gates County farmers, she feels connected to the land and the people who tend it. As an oral historian and assistant professor of history, she inhabits another kind of field, one that takes her to the people who can share with her the history they have lived. “Oral history lends itself to subjects where the written records are silent or where they aren’t as abundant as we might like for them to be,” she said recently. “So if you’re doing a topic where the best sources are still living human beings, you go and talk with them.” Once, all history was oral. Parents and grandparents passed family stories on to children, and village elders told the stories of a whole people. Then, as formal education became more widespread, reliance on the spoken word declined. We wanted our history in books. For source material, these written histories often depended on official documents and other written records. History became the story of the powerful and elite. A course correction was in order. About half a century ago, as social historians began to dig into diaries and letters to examine the lives of ordinary people, another group of modern historians set out to get people talking again. The academic discipline of oral history was born. At ECU, historians are joined by scholars from English, nursing, anthropology and folklore — among others — in capturing the first-person accounts of modern history. Working on a host of independent projects, they seek to record the stories of people who might otherwise be passed over, to fill gaps in written documents, to heal society’s wounds. With her own roots tugging at her, Jones is drawn to the stories of people who have shaped farming and rural life. Currently, she directs her students in collecting oral histories of eastern North Carolina schoolteachers. A larger part of her work continues to flow from what she learned on the back of Charles Bailey’s pickup and many others like it. Before coming to ECU, Jones spent five years working with the Smithsonian Institution on a project documenting the changes in Southern agriculture since the 1930s. She interviewed more than 200 men and women in eight Southeastern states, from Louisiana to Virginia. “These were people who had grown up with mule farming and had retired or grown old with these enormous machines, and it was costing more and more every year to stay in business, if they were able to stay in business,” she said. “They were a generation that had witnessed change and had made the choices that brought about the changes.” As the farmers looked back, she said, they had a realistic attitude about progress. Running water, indoor toilets and machinery that saved back-breaking labor improved life, but improvement came at a price. ���At the time, I caught from many people a sense of ambiguity about the changes that had taken place in farming,” she said. “Perhaps without being able to articulate it, they realized they had made some choices 20 and 30 years before that were now having the unintended consequences of really making it impossible for their own children to continue farming. By surrendering to the notion that bigger is always better, which means you’re going to have to borrow a lot of money and assume a lot more risk, ultimately they wound up closing off options for their own children, which many of them found very saddening. Many also question the wisdom of having adopted so many pesticides. They talked about how they felt insects had developed immunity (making the pesticides) far less effective. At the same time, they were hard pressed to look back and C o n t i n u e d Lu Ann Jones captures farmer Charles Bailey’s words on tape as part of a project documenting changes in Southern agriculture since the 1930s. Off the record Photo by Laurie Minor-Penland, Smithsonian Institution • SPRING 2000 • 14 see what the alternatives may have been.” Jones has written several articles about the interviews and is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press to publish a collection of edited interviews. They also undergird her dissertation, to be published in 2001 by UNC Press as Re-Visioning the Countryside: Southern Women, Rural Reform, and the Farm Economy in the 20th Century. “In any anecdotal history, you hear about swapping eggs at the country store,” she said. “If you accumulate enough of these stories, you can make the case that this was the important part of the rural economy that everyone knew about but no one stopped to take seriously.” By combining the stories with written records, such as store ledgers, Jones concluded that the commodities under the farm woman’s control — primarily butter, eggs and chickens — eased the cash-strapped family whose tobacco or cotton crop paid off only once a year. “It made a difference,” she said. “It was not just something to be relegated to the pile of anecdotal history.” Audiotapes and transcriptions of Jones’ farm interviews, some with photographs, are held in the Smithsonian archives. Pete Daniel, curator of agriculture at the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History, compares the interviews with those from the Federal Writers’ Project. Since the 1960s, social historians have mined those New Deal interviews for a better understanding of life around the time of the Great Depression. “Reading [Jones’] interviews is like visiting these farmers and hearing them tell their life stories,” he said. “As farming continues to change and as family farms disappear, these interviews will take on even more significance as a source of study.” A source of study is precisely the purpose of the 200-plus oral histories in the Special Collections Division of ECU’s Joyner Library. The library has built substantial holdings of papers from prominent North Carolinians and from missionaries, tobacconists and military personnel. The oral histories complement the papers. “Quite often, when you receive a person’s papers, there’s a lot that went into their careers that never winds up in black and white,” said Donald Lennon, who retired recently as coordinator of Special Collections. “Not many people keep diaries, so oral history is a way to supplement the documentation. At the same time, written documentation is a way to help clarify dates and places in the oral histories.” The number of interviews in the collection, he said, is limited by the time involved in making each one. “Our philosophy is that the tapes alone are meaningless unless they are transcribed and checked for accuracy and made available in transcript form,” he said. “So we’ve done a measured oral history program because we didn’t want the interviews to outrun our ability to transcribe and proofread and correct.” An oral history may consist of one 30- minute interview or 10 two-hour interviews. “We’ll keep coming back for interviews as long as they have something to tell us,” Lennon said. A series of interviews with the late U.S. Judge John Davis Larkins typed out at more than 500 pages. Interviews with Rear Adm. William Henry Ashford Jr. ran more than 400 pages. The naval history collection alone attracts researchers from all over the country. In his biography Bull Halsey, for example, author E.B. Potter cited the Ashford interviews as “the single most useful oral history for this book.” Ashford served as an aide to Adm. Halsey aboard the USS Enterprise during much of World War II. For the last 15 years, Lennon made it his special mission to collect the papers and oral histories of the Naval Academy Class of 1941 — the men who entered service in time to help win World War II and then led the Navy through the Cold War years. With each interview, Lennon took the officer from his youth and decision to enter the Navy to the present. “I like to go through his career in as much detail as possible because while one researcher may be interested in this individual’s involvement aboard ship in Reginald Watson, left, listens to Louis Raynor, the man whose career launched the oral history project. “When people give you a story, it’s like giving you a gift,” says Lu Ann Jones, shown here talking with Grace Whitehurst at Cypress Glen retirement home in Greenville. As a soldier in Vietnam, Louis Raynor celebrates receiving Valentine’s Day candy from his wife. Finding mementos of her father’s military career propelled Sharon Raynor to learn more about the black experience in Vietnam through oral history. 15 • SPRING 2000 • Guadalcanal in World War II, another may be interested in his involvement in the administra-tion of Guantanamo Naval Base later in his career or that individual’s duties as a research scientist developing some advanced radar program,” he said. The results were often astounding. One officer had the most phenomenal memory Lennon had ever encountered — recalling dates, times and places of even the most trivial events. Another, he said, “describes the Battle of Guadalcanal in such graphic detail that you duck.” A later war has led three members of the English Department into the realm of oral history. Their project, “Breaking the Silence: The Unspoken Brotherhood of Vietnam Veterans,” seeks to provide insight into the problems black soldiers faced before, during and after America’s most unpopular war. Did racism make their lot more difficult, leading to higher rates of depression and drug use? Preliminary interviews indicate the answer is yes, but a qualified yes. As one veteran from Norfolk told assistant professor Dr. Reginald Watson: “In battle there was no time for racism. When the battle’s over, that’s when racism showed up.” Problems continued after service. “White and black soliders came home to a different reality,” Watson said. “They all had the stigma of having served in a war the country didn’t like, but black soldiers had the double burden of being a Vietnam vet and dark.” The two-year project got under way in fall 1999 with a grant from the North Carolina Humanities Council. In the end, Watson and his collaborators, lecturer Sharon Raynor and assistant professor Dr. Seodial Deena, hope to heal some of the wounds through public forums based on the materials they gather. “We want to understand what went wrong so we can construct a different future,” Deena said. In the School of Nursing, associate professor Dr. Russell E. “Gene” Tranbarger is trying to capture the experience of another group of forgotten men: graduates of male nursing schools. At least four male nursing schools existed between 1888, when the first one opened, and the 1960s, when they all closed. Tranbarger himself graduated from the largest of these, the Alexian Brothers School of Nursing in Chicago, and he is annoyed that these schools have received little public acknowledgment. The premier book on nursing history includes only one paragraph on male nursing schools, he said, and a historical outline produced by the American Journal of Nursing makes no mention of male nurses, even though half of all nurses at the turn of the century were male. With no one else eager to write their history, Tranbarger, who teaches nursing administration, took on the task and began collecting oral histories of the graduates. It is a personal mission. He works on his own time, using his own money. So far, he has taped interviews with five graduates. One interview stretched over three days. In time, he plans to write about each school and its contributions to the profession. “Eventually, I think it can be a book,” he said. “I’m determined the literature will include something.” Among the varied oral historians are an equally varied assortment of philosophies — to transcribe or not to transcribe, to edit or not to edit; of end products — a tape and transcript, a public forum, a book; and of goals — to inform here, to heal wounds there. Almost universally, however, oral history becomes a transforming process for interviewee and interviewer. The Vietnam project began with a single veteran, Louis J. Raynor of Clinton — Sharon Raynor’s father. Although he was a decorated veteran, Sharon Raynor said, “I wouldn’t have known he was in Vietnam if I hadn’t found his diary.” His silence drove her to learn more. She said he and other veterans have been surprised and pleased when they realized someone was willing to listen to their experiences. “I’m just hoping this project will help more people understand Vietnam vets,” she said. “They feel betrayed.” Lu Ann Jones’ interviews may have begun on a less personal note, but they didn’t end that way. She has stayed in touch with several of the farmers, who take pride in introducing her to friends as “that woman from the Smithsonian who’s written about me.” It can be a humbling experience. “Doing oral history brings with it a lot of responsibility in terms of learning to respect other human beings and listen to their stories,” she said. “When people give you a story, it’s like giving you a gift. You should be very responsible with what you do with that gift.” • Sharon Raynor opens a “Breaking the Silence” public forum. • SPRING 2000 • 16 cooked up by a hundred or more groups competing for the barbecue blue ribbon — merits a two-week fast beforehand to make room for seconds and thirds. But why the elaborate decorations and costumes, the meticulous arrangement of the finished pig? “It seems to me that part of what’s happening is the presentation of food as art,” said Baldwin, who edits the North Carolina Folklore Journal and won the 1992 Brown- Hudson Folklore Award from N.C. Folklore Society. “But we’re also in an area and time when agriculture is in deep trouble, and hog farming in particular is presenting all kinds of problems to the region. Part of what’s going on is a way of talking about the importance of hogs and farming to the region by setting up this really eloquent contrast between the adulation of the pig as food and the kinds of hazards that intensive agriculture are presenting to the region. At least that’s my folklorist interpreta-tion.” Such interpretation and an emphasis on the aesthetic help set Baldwin’s discipline apart from its near relative, oral history. Consider it oral history with a twist. Researchers in both fields employ similar tools and methods. In the folklore archives next to Baldwin’s office, thick manila envelopes pack shelf after shelf. The contents would be familiar to any oral historian: cassette tapes of interviews, transcripts, photos, written reports. “Folklorists link up with oral historians at one end of the academic thought about how people render accounts of their history and verbal accounts of their culture,” she said. “(Like oral historians) folklorists are very much involved with listening to people talk about family tradition and community tradition, but folklorists may be more interested in the aesthetic dimensions of such narrative and how it carries over into traditional aspects of narrative, such as legend.” Legends like the recurring tales of mysterious lights. To Baldwin, it’s only natural that these legends grow up along deserted lumbering tracks. What are called ghost lights symbolically recall the lumbermen who once labored there and the towns that vanished as the timber dwindled. “Folklorists do a lot of interpretation,” she said. “We’re given license to pull together all sorts of interesting threads about what this could mean without having to prove it in a scientific lab. It comes out of the methodol-ogy. We’re used to looking at artistic metaphors (such as those found in) folk tales and ballads and applying them in different areas.” Artistic metaphors crop up, not only in festivals and legends, but in yards. Baldwin marveled at the creativity of a retired farmer who filled his yard and garden with windmills he crafted out of old bicycle wheels. He was a quiet but friendly man. The windmills, she said, were his way to greet the community as it passed by on the road in front of his home. Another man used an elaborate outdoor Christmas display to raise money for the local homeless shelter. “Sometimes words fail me to describe how articulate the connection is between the symbols these people are creating and what they do with them,” she said. • A s Karen Baldwin put the finishing touches on a book for the University of Mississippi Press, she half-heartedly chastised herself. The book was supposed to be an overview of coastal North Carolina folklife, but the chapter on community festivals had gotten out of hand. It called for another book. Certainly material isn’t lacking. For the past 20 years Dr. Baldwin, an award-winning folkorist and associate professor of English, has haunted festivals throughout eastern North Carolina. The Ayden Collard Festival. The Newport Pig Cooking. The Blessing of the Fleet in Hobucken. The Fourth of July celebration in Whortonsville. The Core Sound Decoy Festival on Harkers Island. The Herring Festival in Jamesville. The Mill Creek Oyster Festival. She has watched some spring to life and others transform. Seen through her eyes, these festivals represent more than the obvious good time. They are symbolic conversations about community values. “The idea of a festival is to create a ceremonial space that’s separate from daily happenings so things out of the ordinary can go on,” she said. Take the Newport Pig Cooking. Sure, it raises money for the volunteer fire department and the Girl Scouts. And sure, the food — Reflected values Dr. Karen Baldwin, associate professor of English The war to end all wars also brought an end to a way of life in the one section of the North Carolina Sandhills. Claiming the pressing needs of the war effort, the federal government in 1918 asserted its power of eminent domain, bought out scores of often unwilling families and established Camp Bragg, a U.S. Field Artillery training center. Over the next 60 years, more land was taken. Today Fort Bragg encompasses more than 200 square miles. But what of the families forced off the land? “There are still people who feel very sad about that loss,” said Dr. Lorraine Aragon, visiting associate professor of anthropology. “It was their ancestral home, and no money could replace that. Others, often those who had 17 • SPRING 2000 • moved out of the area, said it was a good thing. The land was very poor for farming. [Eviction] often got them to areas with better educational opportunities or where they could find other ways to earn a living.” Aragon recently completed a project detailing the recollections of people whose families once lived on land now occupied by the military base. Funded by the base and the Army Construc-tion Engineering Research Laboratories, the project was intended to help the base archaeologist pinpoint sites of historic or prehistoric value. The Army also plans to make a report of this pre-military history available to the public. As part of her research, Aragon conducted extensive taped interviews with 24 former residents or their descendants, ranging in age from 50 to 105, and talked with many others. She led her subjects through as much detail as they could remember from their own lives and family stories. “One African- American woman still remembers where the foundations of her house and the buildings were and where the fields were,” Aragon said. “Her family had owned hundreds of acres, paid for by profits from working turpentine. They had bought it from a white family that probably owned thousands and thousands of acres.” She found distinct differences in the way the region’s major ethnic groups looked back on their history. “For Highland Scots, the point of pride was how their ancestors came from foreign places and conquered this land that was so difficult,” she said. “Some of their genealogical records go back quite far. They know which ancestor came on the boat, which island in Scotland he came from and what he did here.” For African-Americans, stories as well as family records begin in 1865. The pride is in freed ancestors. “It was often not stated, but it was where they began,” Aragon said. “Great-grandfather was a freed slave who was able to buy a piece of property or enter a profession, or he was a preacher or a postman after the Civil War.” Native Americans focus on the present. Their ancestors had viewed the Sandhills — a territory disputed by North and South Carolina — as a good place to hide from an oppressive white government. “They were often dispersed, pushed about, hiding in forests,” she said. “You get a sense of tremendous disruption for a long period of time. Some didn’t even know which group they belonged to, Tuscarora or Lumbee. They often pushed aside the question and said just being Native American is what was important.” For the Army, the project is a commu-nity service venture and a reconnaissance mission. Before it can develop new tracts of land within the base, federal law requires that it document any sites of historical or cultural significance. Aragon’s report will help guide the search. Some of the richest archaeological evidence may be found where the stories of the ethnic groups cross. A ridge running east-west divides the base into two drainage basins. Buffalo trails once followed the ridge. Native Americans followed the buffalo trails to hunt and trade. Later, Europeans took the same paths and eventually turned some into plank roads. “So you have this layering and layering,” Aragon said. “In talking with the archaeologists, they say, coincidentally, they’re finding sites along the ridge.” • Sandhills memories Dr. Lorraine Aragon, visiting associate professor of anthropology • SPRING 2000 • 18 D estiny must have laughed when Louise Toppin met her first opera star. Edgar Toppin, a history professor at Virginia State University, had taken his young daughter backstage after a performance of Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors to meet his colleague. Willis Patterson was still in costume as one of the kings. “He said hello in this very deep voice and scary costume, and I went screaming in the other direction,” Dr. Louise Toppin recalled. Try as she might, Toppin couldn’t run away from opera. Today, this professor of voice is also a coloratura soprano — the highest of the highs — performing in such venues as New York City’s Lincoln Center and Barcelona’s Licieu Theatre. In August, after a performance at the N.C. Museum of Art in Raleigh, she flew to Sweden to sing the role of Bess in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. That was followed Coloratura soprano Louise Toppin, at top and right in the blue dress, performs the role of Mary in Highway One with the Longleaf Opera in Durham. Louise Toppin never meant to be a singer, but talent will out. Today the soprano’s performance schedule takes her around the globe. DT H E R Ei L Uv C T aA N T 19 • SPRING 2000 • C o n t i n u e d immediately by performances in the role of Mary in William Grant Still’s Highway One with the Longleaf Opera in Durham and the title role in Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha with the Roanoke Opera in Roanoke, Va. In April of 2000, she will sing the title character in the world premiere of Luyala, a role composer William Banfield created for her, and she’s booked for China in 2001. She has studied with the best — Phyllis Bryn-Julson, George Shirley, Joan Sutherland, Elly Ameling. “Louise’s talent ranks up there among the highest,” said tenor William Brown of Jacksonville, Fla., who performs with Toppin in a revue of popular music called A Gershwin Party. “The only reason she’s not Kathleen Battle is because she didn’t get to (conductor) James Levine first.” To sit and talk with Toppin on a rare day off, you’d have no idea of her international reputation. On-stage her first syllable fills the farthest reaches of the theater, yet in conversation she speaks softly, reluctantly. Instead of costumes and glitter, she dresses casually, leaning toward shorts and bare feet in warm weather. The suitcase-size black bag she carries everywhere — with Daytimer, cell phone and anything else needed to keep her organized and moving from place to place — threatens to create back problems. The last thing she wants is another injury. Two years ago, as she rushed down some stairs on the way to celebrate her birthday, she tripped. Friends found her in a daze and rushed her to the hospital. The injuries — sprains, cuts, bruises and loose teeth — forced her to cancel five months of performances. She missed only one week of school, but each day left her exhausted. She would teach and sleep, little else. Now, she’s back at full throttle. She performs on the road almost every weekend and arrives at each rehearsal in full command of the music. For Toppin, learning the music means not only memorizing her part, but researching past performances, the composer, the period of history and more. While performing one score, she learns the next. “She gobbles new music like a vortex,” said George Shirley, the longtime Metropolitan Opera star and Toppin’s former teacher. Her voice, he said, has a “pristine, pure, lyrical quality and is always highly enjoyable because of the purity.” Because performing is only part of her life, Toppin runs nonstop from dawn to well past dusk. When in Greenville, she doubles up on lessons with students. Into scattered moments, she squeezes time to record and produce CDs and concerts for Videmus, a nonprofit organization she heads; to organize events for the Pitt County Arts Council; and to direct subscription sales as president of the Pitt County Chapter of the North Carolina Symphony Society. Toppin considers this an easy schedule. Her track record explains why. She completed her college course work in three years, staying a fourth year only to give a senior recital; earned two master’s degrees over the next three years while teaching school to support herself; and in the following three, finished a doctorate that normally takes five years while also teaching at two universities. “A 13- to 14-hour day doesn’t faze me in the least,” she said. “That gives me 10 whole hours for myself, one hour for exercise, one hour for devotional....” Four days after returning from an extended road trip, she still had no food in the house. A year after moving into her first home, furnish-ings remained scant, not even a piano. She had no time for shopping, she said, and as for the piano, well, she has a Steinway grand in her office, and, with perfect pitch, she doesn’t need one to practice singing at home. For relaxation, she goes to movies or turns to her collection of Disney videos. Peter Pan is her favorite. Or she may kick back with a murder mystery or one of several biographies. Last fall, she was alternating among books about Christopher Darden (assistant prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson trial), Billy Graham, Patti LaBelle and Luciano Pavarotti, and she had just completed a biography of Louis XIV. Toppin’s schedule demands that she be organized, and she makes the same demand of her students. “My students know exactly what they’re to do,” she said. If they can’t work independently, if they aren’t willing to practice on their own and to research their music, if they can’t be prompt, she recommends they seek another teacher. Working with Toppin requires dedication and flexibility. For those who make the extra effort, Toppin gives as much or more in return. During a late-afternoon master class, she looked ready for the stage in a black dress and orange sweater and praised the students who had dressed for the parts they would perform for the class. Then she questioned, coaxed and demonstrated technique as the students honed their performance skills. “Can you believe she did that?” she asked the class after quizzing one student. “There are 25 different notes in this piece, and she’s psyched out over one note.” After class, a half-dozen students gathered round. “She’s my mama, my friend,” said Nicole Sonbert, who has studied with Toppin for three years. “She’s not just a teacher. You can go in her office and cry for an hour if you need to, and unless she absolutely has to be somewhere at a certain time, she’ll stay there with you as long as you need her to be.” Charles Oakley nodded. “I had one of those days today,” he said. “I just transferred here this year, and I was thinking I didn’t belong.” • SPRING 2000 • 20 And the music? “She goes out and looks for music others aren’t doing,” said Kenneth Tice. “She’s the repertoire queen,” Sonbert added. “And she works with you on every detail. She’s really concerned about making sure you can sing it correctly.” Toppin’s old teacher can only shake his head. Shirley called her one of the most impressive students he has ever had. “It has always amazed me that she is able to carry on a successful performance career and a successful academic career, to teach as many students as she does while carrying administrative responsibility and extracurricular work,” he said. “I admonish her to pull it back. She’ll do so for a short period, but then she speeds back up. It’s in her nature to need to be very busy.” Into a life of such rigor, a little weakness must fall. For Toppin, it comes with a peanut center, milk chocolate layer and candy coating. She eats peanut M&Ms by the pound. Colleagues tease her. Students begging leniency dangle them before her. Word has even reached audiences. After one standing-ovation performance in Atlanta, the entire front row presented her with bags and bags of M&Ms. She took her second bow munching on candy. Toppin never meant to be singer. She never meant to be any kind of musician, but talent will out. Her mother, Antionette, who taught English at Virginia State, could sing and play. Her father could do neither, but loved music. Recordings of Beethoven symphonies and Tchaikovsky concertos filled the Toppin home, and the parents took their three children to concerts by the Richmond Symphony, the Virginia Opera and jazz greats such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Sarah Vaughan. Piano lessons began as soon as the children were old enough. Louise, the youngest, learned to play as a 5-year-old by tagging along to her siblings’ lessons. By age 9, when her formal lessons began, she was playing Beethoven sonatas. At 10, she played hour-long recitals from memory. Still, she never sang, except around the house and in the church choir. Music was fun, not her future. In high school, she won prizes in calculus and physics. She wanted to be a cardiologist and entered the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with an eye toward medical school. That the university also had a strong music program meant she could continue her work on piano, just for fun. Her first real push came when she mentioned to her father how much she enjoyed the piano lessons. “He has never interfered with our choices, any of them,” she said. This time was different. “He said, ‘You’d make a wonderful doctor, but God has given you talent as a musician. You can help people with what you do with your music. I think you ought to seriously consider a career in music.’ ” Over the next few years, she turned toward singing one reluctant step at a time. After talking with her father, Toppin did change her major to music, but in piano, not voice. She sang in the Carolina choir only because it was required of all music majors and — encouraged by Donna Deese, who would later recruit Toppin to ECU — took her first voice lesson in her senior year. When Toppin headed off to the Peabody Conservatory, it was to earn a master’s degree in piano. Her goal: to become an accompanist. On the side, she joined the school’s prep opera, which gave non-voice majors an opportunity to perform. Phyllis Bryn-Julson, a voice teacher Toppin considered one of the best, heard her in the prep opera. If she could gain admission to the master’s program in voice, Bryn-Julson volunteered, she had a teacher. So Toppin taught herself an audition program — with selections in German, French, Italian, Russian and English — and was on the way to a second master’s. Her plan was to become an accompanist and opera coach. “I did the whole master’s degree never expecting to be a singer,” Toppin said. “I wanted to be the best vocal coach I could be.” To improve her on-stage acting, a teacher referred Toppin to Shirley, who was known as the acting tenor. It was Shirley who gave her the necessary push toward singing and a doctorate in voice. “I felt like I was hearing my father all over again,” Toppin said. Still uneasy with her prospects, she pushed herself through the doctoral work in three years. “I said to myself, if we’re not going to get a job anyway, let’s go ahead and find out we’re not going to get a job so there’s still time to go back and get a bachelor of science and go to medical school.” Toppin requires dedication and flexibility in her students, but gives as much or more in return. Toppin with her co-star in Highway One, Bill McMurray. While performing one role, she is learning the next. 21 • SPRING 2000 • BENCHMARKS OF LOUISE TOPPIN’S CAREER Validation came early, when she made it to the fifth round of the 1990 Munich International Competition. Years earlier, Jessye Norman had won the competition and begun her ascent to stardom. “When I got to the final round, I freaked,” Toppin said. “Up until then, my attitude was, I’m going home at any minute. At that point, I was a novice singer. I was competing with people who had 15 or 16 years of singing. I had only been studying four.” Talent paved Toppin’s way, but shyness erected a major roadblock. As a student, she was terrified of performing in public. Working with her teachers wasn’t much easier. She recalled her early lessons with Shirley: “He worked and worked, and finally he said, ‘You have to look in my direction at some point.’ That’s how bad it was.” Even now, at receptions after performances, she’s likely to find a quiet corner where she can observe instead of mingle. Although Toppin may have inherited musical talent from her mother, the family knows it is her father she most resembles, both in appearance and in habit. He has published 12 books of African- American history and is working on three more. “He’s very industri-ous,” his wife said. “He says he knows how to sleep fast.” Her brother drowned in an accident at 17. The rest of the family remains close. Toppin visits her sister, an accountant, and her family in California. Her parents often travel wherever she does. They came to Greenville when she interviewed for the ECU job in 1990. They flew to Prague when she sang there, to Colorado for the Aspen Music Festival, to Atlanta for Metropolitan Opera auditions. For a Videmus-sponsored concert in Canton, Ohio, Edgar Toppin joined his daughter on-stage, presenting the history behind the works she performed. For Toppin, Videmus is a mission more than an activity. Pianist Vivian Taylor founded the Boston-based group in 1986 to promote recordings and live performances of music by African-Americans, other minorities and women. When Taylor retired in October 1997, Toppin was named the new artistic director and president. Her goal is to broaden the audience for classical music by embracing all cultures. “All of the arts have been seen so long as elitist,” she said. “They really can be enjoyed by everybody. This is a way to open their eyes.” • Finalist, Munich International Competition, 1990. • Leading roles (Silverpeal and Goldentrill) in a Kennedy Center production of Mozart’s The Impresaria, 1992. • First prize district winner and regional finalist, Metropolitan Opera Auditions, 1994. • Christmas concert at Carnegie Hall, 1995. • Begins touring production A Gershwin Party with Leon Bates and William Brown, 1996. • Named artistic director and president, Videmus, 1997. • Release of first orchestral CD Paul Freeman Speaks Volume II with the Czech National Symphony (Albany Records), 1998. • First performance as Bess in a full production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in Sweden, 1999. • Release of Fare Ye Well, her first recording as a producer, 1999. • World premiere of William Banfield’s opera Luyala with Toppin in the title role, 2000. She knows firsthand the difference it can make to feel included. She pulled out a record album of Aida from her parents’ old collection. The cover shows Leontyne Price with her hair in an Afro. “I remember looking at the cover and being fascinated because this was something I had not seen (in person),” she said. “We would go to the Virginia Opera and the Richmond Symphony, and what I didn’t see were any black artists, and here was this woman on the cover. It let me know this was a possibility.” As a shy student appearing in her first operas, Toppin welcomed the costumes and role-playing. “I felt I could be someone else and people weren’t staring at me,” she said. Those who know her wouldn’t want Toppin to be anyone else. They describe a cheerful, smiling daughter. An industrious pupil. An honest and loyal friend. “She’s someone you’d want in a boat with you if you were out in the ocean,” singing partner William Brown said. Even those who have met her only in passing find her impossible to forget. When Toppin visited the University of Michigan to audition for admission to the doctoral program, the deep voice of her father’s former colleague rose from the faculty. “Toppin?” Willis Patterson said. “That’s a Toppin all right, but I don’t know which one. Are you the one that ran away from me?” • Toppin takes a day off work in September 1998 to visit Louis XIV’s home at Versailles while in Europe to present concerts and record a CD with the Czech National Symphony. B i c y c l e h e l m e t s g e t • SPRING 2000 • 22 If the Pitt County Safe Communities Coalition needed a poster child, a baby from Ayden would be a top contender. Last spring the coalition helped the Ayden Police Department conduct a “rodeo” to promote bicycling safety and handed out free bike helmets. One helmet went to an 11-month-old child who rides in a back seat while mom cycles. Within hours of the rodeo, mom had an accident. “The child’s head hit the railroad tracks,” said Officer Kelly Guard, Ayden’s community policing coordinator. “The helmet saved that child’s life.” Chalk up another victory for the Safe Communities Coalition, which has made bicycle safety its No. 1 issue, and for the coalition’s sponsor, the Eastern Carolina Injury Prevention Program. A joint effort of the ECU School of Medicine and Pitt County Memorial Hospital, the Injury Prevention Program seeks to stop the flow of accident victims into emergency departments throughout eastern North Carolina. At Pitt Memorial alone, 13,000 people a year — one-fourth of all ER patients — come in as a result of car wrecks, bicycle accidents, falls, hunting mishaps and all the other unintentional ways human beings hurt themselves. “In the spirit of real health and medicine, we need to keep those people from being injured,” said Dr. Herbert G. Garrison, professor of emergency medicine and director of the Injury Prevention Program. The program’s approach consists of research, demonstration and service. “We take what we know works, apply it and see if it makes a difference,” Garrison said. In the four years since it was organized, the program has received nearly $2 million in external funding to conduct its work. Its projects cover a range of behaviors: • Pitt County SAFEKIDS Coalition. This affiliate chapter of the National SAFEKIDS Campaign distributes national campaign materials and conducts child-safety-seat clinics and other interventions. • Project Replace. Working with the Governor’s Highway Safety Commission, the program gave away 2,400 child safety seats to replace those in automobiles destroyed in the 1999 flood. The seats were distributed at clinics where proper installation was taught. The project ran from Oct. 1 through the end of the year. • REACT. The Rural Enhancement of Access and Care for Trauma Project was funded by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to devise and test treatment standards and training to further reduce deaths of patients being treated by rescue squads and emergency departments in eastern North Carolina. Before and after measurements show a decrease in deaths, but Garrison declined to assign the project full credit. During the same period, he noted, the ECU School of Medicine graduated many emergency room physicians who stayed in the area to practice. • RID. The Reduction of Impaired Driving Project, funded by the Carolinas Medical Center, helped conduct a study of procedures to identify alcohol-impaired drivers seen as patients in emergency departments and to refer them for treatment of alcohol dependency. The results are being analyzed. • CAPTAIN. With a grant from the Duke Endowment, the program is running nurturing courses for families in Pitt, Greene and Martin counties. The program is called CAPTAIN, for Child Abuse Prevention Through Advocacy, Interven-tion and Nurturing. More than 230 families have participated and 150 volunteers have been trained to work with other families to prevent child abuse. • Teen Suicide Prevention. This new project is designed to encourage teenagers to ask for help when they feel depressed or stressed. The Safe Communities Coalition provides another case in point. In 1996, the National Highway Traffic Safety Adminis-tration sought local organizations to test the theory that the best way to reduce traffic injuries is to get broad partnerships of local people involved in analyzing the problems HARD a b i g p u s h i n a n e f f o r t HATS t o r e d u c e i n j u r i e s i n ONLY e a s t e r n N o r t h C a r o l i n a 23 • SPRING 2000 • and devising solutions. The Eastern Carolina Injury Prevention Program won one of four grants to set up a national demonstration under the acronym PISCES, for Pitt Initiative for Safe Communities Evolving Successfully. Garrison hired a project coordinator, Jennifer Smith, and pulled together a coalition of about 60 individuals represent-ing health care, rescue squads, law enforcement, human services, business, traffic engineering, the legal community, the insurance industry, parents and the community at large. Together, they pored over local accident data, examined existing injury prevention programs and targeted bicycle safety as their top priority. While it’s too soon to determine how much the coalition has affected injuries showing up in the emergency room, it can boast that: • Three Pitt County municipalities — Greenville, Grifton and Ayden — have passed laws requiring bicyclists age 15 and younger to wear helmets along public roads. No other county in North Carolina can say as much. • It has given away or sold at a reduced cost more than 600 helmets. • More than 1,000 children have participated in bicycle safety schools and events, such as the Ayden rodeo. • Surveys in Greenville showed that helmet use rose from 7 percent to 20 percent during the first year the helmet law was in effect. In a nearby community without a helmet law, helmet use went from zero to 7 percent during the same period. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that helmets reduce the risk of head injury 85 percent and of brain injury 88 percent. “Helmets won’t prevent accidents,” Garrison said, “but they will prevent the injuries that are most likely to kill.” Although focusing on bicycle safety, the coalition has not ignored other ways to reduce accidents. It lobbied successfully to establish a Safe Driving School, operated by Pitt Community College, as a sentencing alternative for drivers charged with speeding at least 15 miles an hour over the limit. Approxi-mately 250 people have gone through the school. A follow-up study will assess whether the graduates were any less likely to be charged with later traffic violations. The coalition also has applied for a state grant to install audible crosswalk signals for the visually impaired. Dr. Carolyn Crump and Robert Letourneau of the Injury Prevention Research Center at UNC-Chapel Hill, brought in to assess the project, were so impressed they nominated it for the Allstate Insurance Safety Leadership Award Program. And other groups — representing Craven and Wilson counties, the Marine Corps and Bowman Gray Medical Center — are calling Greenville to ask how they can follow suit. “In some communities you can’t even get everyone in the same room to have a conversa-tion,” said Sarah Minges, a consultant to non-profit organizations who serves on the coalition and on the Governor’s Highway Safety Commission. “But here we bring everyone in and respect everyone’s expertise. Dr. Garrison has a talent for bringing out the best in people.” Crump and Letourneau watched the coalition evolve over its two-year start-up and are detailing its record in a report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administra-tion. It was particularly telling, they said, that a survey of coalition members showed that three-quarters reported being “very” or “extremely” satisfied with their involvement and 97 percent said they felt the coalition had been “very” or “extremely” effective in getting things done. As the grant period ran out at the end of 1999, the coalition’s members vowed to continue the work and began drawing up papers to establish a non-profit organization. That’s the kind of result Barbara Sauers, who oversees the Safe Communities program for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, wants to hear. “Coalitions are challenging,” she said. “You have to find ways to keep them alive and vibrant. One of the pleasant aspects of the Greenville project is that they’ve been able to address and overcome turf problems.” • In the 16th century, Erasmus opened the eyes of the world to a new way of thinking. Today, an international team of scholars hopes to open the eyes of the world to Erasmus. Renaissance • SPRING 2000 • 24 Few people have had so profound an influence on modern thought while remaining virtually anonymous as the 16th century Dutch-born Erasmus. This theologian, educator, author and adviser to popes and kings left behind a legacy that continues to influence the Western world. He helped launch the Reformation, introduced a new approach to education and changed forever the way Christians read the New Testament. Yet of his writings, only the satirical work The Praise of Folly is likely to be found on library shelves, and for name recognition, he pales alongside such contemporaries as Martin Luther and Henry VIII. Soon, however, Erasmus may get his due — or at least some portion of it. About 100 scholars from around the world are in-volved in a project to translate 90 volumes of Erasmus’ literature and letters from Latin into English, complete with annotations ex-plaining historical and literary references. The University of Toronto Press project — called the Collected Works of Erasmus — is predicted by one reviewer to become “one of the century’s great scholarly achievements.” “At one time, Erasmus could be read because Latin was more widely known,” said classics pro-fessor Dr. Charles Fantazzi. “Until recently, at least those who taught the Renaissance and theol-ogy could read Latin, but now the language is not known by many people, so it’s very important to make these works available, not only for the knowledge of his period in his-tory, but of our own.” Fantazzi serves on the project’s execu-tive and editorial boards. He also has had a hand in translating and annotating four of the 40 volumes that have been released so far, including the Handbook of the Christian Soldier, with two volumes of correspon-dence in preparation. The work is rigorous, he said. The board demands accurate and elegant translations. “Erasmus wrote very good Latin so he must be rendered into equally good English,” he said. “We insist on a readable presentation for the ordinary reader.” edge talked with Fantazzi to learn more about Erasmus, who was both literally and figuratively a Renaissance man. EDGE: What was Erasmus’ greatest single achievement? FANTAZZI: Without question, his work on the New Testament, including an edition of the Greek text, his own Latin translation and annotations on the text, which took up almost as much space as the Latin and Greek texts put together. It was a huge success, going through five editions. Erasmus’ Greek text was the first ever published and became the basis of the received or standard text, which remained unchallenged for three centuries. It lies behind the King James Version of the Bible. His Latin version was also published separately and was widely disseminated. It was the basis of Luther’s German translation and other Protestant translations. EDGE: Still, his texts were not without controversy, were they? FANTAZZI: Erasmus was fiercely at-tacked for daring to tamper with the sacro-sanct Latin version of the Bible known as the Vulgate, or common version, which was at-tributed to St. Jerome. But, as Erasmus pointed out, Jerome himself had corrected previous Latin versions of the New Testament by comparing them with the original Greek manuscripts, just as he did. He contended that the text of the Vulgate then current was not all by Jerome and contained many scribal errors. As for the divine inspiration of this version, he quoted Jerome’s own words in a letter to a certain Desiderius: “It is one thing to be a prophet, another to be a translator.” The theo-logians of Paris and Louvain were particularly irritated by all this because their explanations of doctrinal matters were based on the form of the Vulgate then in use. Erasmus was thus undermining their authority. EDGE: The encyclopedia calls Erasmus a Christian humanist. What does that mean? FANTAZZI: Humanism was a scholarly movement of the Renaissance period that redis-covered classical Latin and Greek literature. Erasmus thought — just as earlier church fa-thers like Jerome and Augustine did — that there was a true link between pagan and Chris-tian wisdom. One could read Plato and Cicero, for example, and take what was good in them and harmonize it with Christianity. So Christian humanism is just that, using pagan classics to help us understand our Christian beliefs and live a Christian life. Erasmus believed that just reading these works could make you a better Christian. He once said that reading good books is more beneficial to the soul than food is to the body. EDGE: Erasmus lived at the time the Reformation was ripping apart the Catholic Church. Where did he stand in this struggle? FANTAZZI: He was right in the middle of it because he was trying to convince the pope, the cardinals and other high officials of the church to be more understanding instead of punitive toward some of the reformers, espe-cially Luther. He wanted reconciliation, to keep the church together. At the same time, he knew the church needed reform. Although he dis-agreed with Luther on some points, particularly on free will, he admired him as pious and well-meaning, but in the end Luther’s intransigence became intolerable to him. Erasmus is con-stantly saying that he realizes how bad things are getting and isn’t sure where it’s going to end up, but he often comments, “I think I see the hand of God in all this.” The church, of course, didn’t listen to Erasmus. Many of the prominent theologians in Paris and Rome thought of Erasmus as a heretic and a sympathizer with Luther. Erasmus thought they were using this as an excuse to put down his ideas about humanism by connecting the study of the classics, what he called “bonae litterae,” or “good letters,” with religious rebel-lion. He was right in this, but they were never able to condemn him for anything heretical. 25 • SPRING 2000 • Man C o n t i n u e d Erasmus of Denmark, Musée du Louvre, Cliche des Musées Nationaux • SPRING 2000 • 26 EDGE: Where did he see the need for reform? FANTAZZI: Erasmus attacked the church as an institution with its empty ceremo-nies and manmade laws like those on fasting, clerical celebacy, divorce and the granting of indulgences. His philosophy of Christ stressed a personal and direct relationship with God, rather than mediation by sacraments. In his new interpretations of scriptural passages, he undermined church teachings. He explained, for example, that when John the Baptist ex-horts his followers to repentance, the Greek word used, “metanoeite,” means a “change of heart” and has nothing to do with penances handed out in sacramental confession. Erasmus had no use for the superstitious wor-ship of relics, saying that there were enough relics of the true cross in circulation to fill a cargo ship. His trenchant wit and biting satire won him many enemies. EDGE: In terms of his theology, did Erasmus have a continuing influence? FANTAZZI: Most Catholics saw him as subversive, but his approach to the reading of the Bible had a profound influence on the Prot-estants. He applied the scientific study of phi-lology — the study of language itself — to the Bible, which previously had been something sacrosanct, not subject to philological interpre-tation. He sought to unite learning and piety. He said it was not sufficient to be pious. You have to cultivate the mind, to study in order to understand the message of the Gospel. He also wanted to get away from the minute dis-cussion of the fine points of dogma and make Christianity more genuine, a lived Christian-ity. He said you should not only learn the Bible, but put it into practice. EDGE: Were all of his books religious in nature? FANTAZZI: He published both reli-gious and secular books. After the New Testa-ment, he wrote paraphrases of all the Gospels and Epistles that made those books more un-derstandable to the common person. These were later translated from Latin into the ver-nacular languages so that everyone could have access to them. In the Church of England, the English version of his paraphrases of the Gos-pel and Epistle for the day had to be posted outside the door every Sunday. His Handbook of the Christian Soldier, a guide to true piety, was also important. It was translated immedi-ately into the vernacular languages and had great influence, especially in Spain. He also wrote fine poetry — in Latin, of course. Everything he wrote was in Latin. Even his letters may be regarded as models of good Latin style. And he published a couple of reference books that became very popular. One was De Copia, or The Foundations of the Abundant Style, which was a textbook on how to write good Latin. Shakespeare was brought up on it. And he published a book of about 4,000 adages that he collected over many years. Probably no other work of Erasmus had such a profound impact on European culture. Most of the sayings still in use today come from this compilation, such as “a flash in the pan,” “to have one foot in the grave,” “to break the ice,” “to blow your own horn.” Erasmus gives the origins of all these sayings in Greek and in Latin and adds his own com-mentary, which sometimes becomes a full-fledged essay. EDGE: Erasmus was an educator, too. Was this an important aspect of his work? FANTAZZI: Erasmus is regarded as one of the greatest figures in the history of educa-tion. He was the chief spokesman of the new learning in the north of Europe, where he estab-lished the educational principles of the Italian humanists. He did this through a series of manuals that touched on every aspect, theoreti-cal and practical, of education — curriculum, methods of study, pedagogy and the training of the teacher. These had a great diffusion throughout Europe during his lifetime and after his death. He reformed the teaching of Greek in his brief career at Oxford and Cambridge. He was instrumental in the foundation of the Col-lege of the Three Languages in Louvain, which added Hebrew to Greek and Latin as the lan-guages to be taught in the study of the Scripture. It is often said of Erasmus that he laid the egg of the Reformation and Luther hatched it. But he also laid the egg of a whole new type of educa-tion, and it was hatched by his many disciples. EDGE: A large portion of the Collected Works of Erasmus will consist of the transla-tions and annotations of his letters. Why are they so important? FANTAZZI: It’s often said that his letters are, without comparison, the best documenta-tion we have of the intellectual history of the first half of the 16th century. He traveled throughout Europe and had contacts with all the leading princes and prelates of his time. He lived at various times in England, the Low Countries, Germany, France, Italy. He corre-sponded with such potentates as Pope Leo X, England’s Henry VIII and King Sigismund I of Poland. All of them wanted Erasmus to take up residence in their country. He also wrote to fellow scholars all over Europe so that one can now follow in his correspondence the historical and political events of the time. Erasmus often said that his writings would give a more accu-rate picture of him than any artistic likeness. The letters are the most intimate portrait. • “Erasmus wrote in very good Latin so he must be rendered in equally good English,” says Charles Fantazzi. The abundance of colors (top) indicates excessive electrical activity in a stutterer’s brain. With frequency altered feedback, the activity drops to near normal levels (bottom). their brain, compared with a fluent person. Specifically, they display Beta band hyperreactivity, and it is most pronounced in the posterior-temporal- parietal electrode sites. The researchers also looked at what happens to those signals under experimental conditions. They found significant changes. When stutterers heard their electronically altered voices, not only did their speech improve, but their brains’ electrical signals looked more like those of fluent people. They showed less activity on the right side of the brain and more on the left. Altogether, this boils down to a new theory of the cause of stuttering. Perhaps it’s not a motor control problem after all. Instead, Rastatter suggested, the signals from the right side of the brain are overloading the neurological pathways and thus interfering with the left side’s ability to send out clear messages. With their technology proven, the researchers’ next challenge is to make it practical for everyday use, which means shrinking it to the size of a hearing aid. For this, they’ve teamed up with the College of Engineering at North Carolina State University. They anticipate a first-generation prototype by August 2000. The team has applied for a grant to field test the device with hundreds of adults and children in Pitt County who stutter. The therapy also may prove useful for other communication disorders. Rastatter, chair of the department, said trials with dyslexic children have produced dramatic improvements in reading and comprehension. For Kalinowski, whose experiments with digital signal process-ing launched the team’s current line of research, the success has brought personal as well as professional satisfaction. He knows firsthand the frustration of stuttering, even after 190 hours of speech therapy. Recalling one therapist, he shook his head. “She thought I didn’t know how to speak,” he said. “I know how. It’s just that the system breaks down.” • 27 • SPRING 2000 • The 17-year-old boy was too stunned to smile. “How did I do that?” he asked. What he had done was simply to read aloud, clearly and fluently. Behind a glass wall, his parents wept. They had never before heard their son speak without a severe, agonizing stutter. For most of his life, a 55-year-old Raleigh man had avoided speech as much as possible. But when he donned headphones in a laboratory at the School of Allied Health Sciences, his stutter disappeared. He could speak without embarrassment. For these individuals and millions like them who stutter, researchers at ECU now offer the hope of fluency. Drs. Michael Rastatter, Joseph Kalinowski and Andrew Stuart of the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders have demonstrated that slight alterations in hearing can bring dramatic improvements in a stuttering person’s ability to speak clearly. They recently received a patent on a device that may one day extend this laboratory-borne fluency to the outside world. Stuttering afflicts an estimated 2 to 3 percent of the world’s population. The cause is unknown. Numerous therapies have been tried through the centuries, but none has shown significant, long-term effectiveness. Currently the dominant therapy involves slowing the stutterer’s speech, on the theory that the underlying problem is one of speech motor control. The ECU experiments, on the other hand, enable stutterers to speak clearly at both a normal and a fast pace. Success also has been measured in telephone conversations, one of a stutterer’s most difficult challenges. The scientists use a digital signal processor — similar to the sound board and headphones musicians use in a recording studio — to alter the speed or pitch at which a stutterer hears his own voice. It’s called altered auditory feedback. With as little as a fraction of a second’s delay or a half-octave change up or down, the stutter lessens and often disappears completely. They have tested their methodology with more than 300 stutterers. Fluency improved between 50 and 100 percent in nearly all cases. “And it happens just like that,” Rastatter said with a snap of his fingers. This speed, combined with the degree of fluency, told Rastatter and his colleagues that something other than speech motor control accounted for the improvements. To learn more, the researchers looked inside the brain itself. Using quantitative electroencephalograms, they have studied the brain’s neurological signaling during speech in fluent persons and in stutterers. The left side of the brain controls language functions. Stutterers, however, show excess electrical activity on the right side of Hope for F l u e n c y Patented device may eliminate stuttering. • SPRING 2000 • 28 The noise never stopped. For three weeks, the pounding, squealing, grinding of the truck-mounted drill accompanied Dr. Catherine Ann Rigsby day and night. The walls of her tent afforded little protection from the roar or from temperatures that dropped below zero every night. Fortunately, the souvenirs made the whole trip worthwhile. The souvenirs were eight 50-meter cores from the Altiplano, or High Plain, of the Bolivian Andes. The cores will help Rigsby, associate professor of geology, interpret more than 40,000 years of climatic history. This history in turn may help us better understand how the buildup of greenhouse gases is likely to affect future global climate. The need to improve climate models drives the project. Human activity has resulted in significant increases in the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases being released into the atmosphere, and there are short-term indications of resulting global warming. If this continues, sea level could rise as the polar ice caps melt, and severe drought could overtake the U.S. grain belt, just for starters. On the other hand, higher temperatures and resulting evaporation could set off a cascading effect that shuts down such warm water currents as the Gulf Stream and sends northern latitudes into another ice age. “Even the best models we have for predicting climate change are not very accurate,” Rigsby said. “Some say the Clockwise from top: In the Bolivian Andes, a glacier once filled the curving valley still discernible in the hills behind the drilling rig. Drilling cores reveal layers of sediment that will help unravel 40,000 years of climate history. “A lot of sand tells you this was a shoreline,” Catherine Rigsby says about her coring samples. Through hindcasting, cores from the Bolivian Andes may yield clues to future global climate. The treasure of the A l t i p l a n o Photo by Catherine Ann Rigsby 29 • SPRING 2000 • temperature will be higher, and some say lower. So what the scientific community wants to do is something called hindcasting. We find out all we can about major episodes of climate change in the past, and then we use the known information to test the models and in that way figure out which are most accurate.” So far, most of the evidence has been gathered from ice cores taken from the poles. Rigsby and others now seek to correlate the ice core data with information from equatorial regions. It will be a vital component of any climate change model. The tropics collect most of the Earth’s heat from the sun and, through a combination of heat and water vapor, power the planet’s atmospheric circulation. In the Western Hemisphere, this search leads to South America. Because erosion has washed evidence of the ancient past from the Amazon River basin, Rigsby is concentrating her research on an area about 12,000 feet up in the Andes Mountains of Bolivia. Here, a stable geologic history has left a thick and continuous record of sedimentation and vegetation. Rigsby hopes to chart how lakes and rivers on the Altiplano grew and shrank through the ages — telltale evidence of fluctuating precipitation. Four years of preliminary studies paid off in late spring 1999, when the National Science Foundation awarded her a three-year, $300,000 grant for a large-scale research effort. The timing gave her only three weeks to assemble a team and equipment for field work during ECU’s summer break, which coincides with Bolivia’s winter. Despite a limited knowl-edge of Spanish, a remote location and extreme cold, she pulled together the monthlong expedition, which included three weeks of camping and round-the-clock drilling in the now-dry valley floor. By September, she was back in Greenville analyzing the first set of cores. In her lab last fall, she pointed to the different colors of sediment. ��These cores show the transition between lake and river,” she said. “A lot of sand tells you this was a shoreline. Where there’s an abrupt shift from sand to clay, we know the environment has gotten wetter. The clays were deposited in ancient lakes.” Colleagues will help her tease out other vital pieces of climate history. Radiocarbon-dating will attach dates to the different layers of sediment. Salt content will tell the rate of evaporation. Plant and animal remains will reveal the temperature range. All together, these cores should contain a 40,000-year record of the climate in a key area of the planet. Rigsby plans a second drilling expedition for summer 2000. “I know it sounds exotic, but this field work has global implications,” she said. “It’s important for understanding climate change, and for people in places like coastal North Carolina, climate change could have a big impact in terms of rising sea level.” • • SPRING 2000 • 30 Into the often rancor-ous debate over fisheries regu-lations, ECU scientists have inserted more harmonious sounds: the burping, purring and drumming of amorous fish. These sounds — or, more precisely, the information they provide on spawning — are guiding efforts to preserve several valuable but dwindling coastal species. For more than a decade, fisheries managers on the East Coast have noted dramatic declines in the harvest of weakfish, spotted sea trout and red drum, important species for both commercial and recreational fishing. The 1998 commercial catch in North Carolina, for example, was only half that of 1989. The declining catch and other indicators tell state and federal fisheries managers that they need better regulations to protect these species from overfishing and to allow their populations to recover. A necessary element in any recovery plan is protection for the fish during spawning season. To design these regulations, the managers need to be able to identify more precisely when and where the fish spawn. That’s where the ECU scientists enter the picture. Led by Drs. Joseph J. Luczkovich, Hal J. Daniel III and Mark W. Sprague, they have used the mating calls of male fish to create a timetable and habitat chart for spawning activities in a large section of the Pamlico Sound. “We’re not the first to record fish sounds, but we are the first to apply them to management issues,” said Luczkovich, associate professor of biology and associate scientist with the Institute for Coastal and Marine Studies. In doing so, they’ve shown managers a way to identify spawning habitat that is simpler, less time-consuming and more accurate than any previously used. Before, managers would collect eggs and estimate the time and place they were laid. Or they would catch fish and estimate their readiness for spawning based on the weight of their reproductive organs. State and federal agencies have taken note and are citing the team’s work as they draw up plans for red drum restoration and for coastal habitat protection, according to Dr. Louis Daniel, executive assistant for federal councils with the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries. The ECU method builds on existing knowledge of fish behavior and the laws of physics. Male fish “vocalize” during mating by contracting the muscle along their swim bladder, an organ that also allows them to ad-just their depth in the water. Different fish make different sounds. While the red drum attracts his lady love with a knocking sound, the spotted sea trout creates burps, and the weakfish purrs like the rotors on a helicopter. These sounds, unlike light, travel through the murky waters of the Pamlico Sound. “If something makes a sound, you can learn a lot about that object by measuring the sound,” said Sprague, assistant professor of physics. “Loudness can give you information about distance and the number of fish.” According to Daniel, professor of biology, you also can learn something about the size of the fish from the frequency, or pitch, of its sound production. Big fish produce sounds with a lower pitch, and small fish produce higher-pitched sounds. But eavesdropping on fish in such a large body of water presented a real challenge. How could they do it economically? Answer: with a little ingenuity and some off-the-shelf equipment. Armed with Radio Shack talking alarm clocks and microcassette recorders, they built sonar buoys that they program to turn on and off at certain times. They could set the buoys out, then come back the next day to collect them for analysis. Early experiments confirmed that fish spawn only at night and showed the scientists they could get maximum information on a one-hour tape by recording for two minutes every half hour for 12 hours. Back in the lab, a student would log the fish sounds, aided by the alarm clock’s announcement of the time of each recording. Eventually, such tedious work will be turned over to a computer. The team also collected fish eggs from the buoy sites and took those eggs back to the lab for positive identification. (The eggs of these species are practically identical to the naked eye.) Mitochondrial DNA analysis verified that the species the scientists heard were the ones spawning. Another important finding was confirmation that red drum spawn in the estuaries. Previous models had located their spawning habitat only in the open ocean. The egg collections revealed something else, too. The louder the fish sounds on the tape, the more eggs were laid. “The physics predicts the biological measurements almost perfectly,” Sprague said. Some incidental discoveries proved almost as interesting. On many recordings, the scientists picked up the mating sounds of yet another species, the silver perch. “Sometimes the sound would be quite loud, and all of a sudden it would go quiet,” Luczkovich said. “Then we’d hear a dolphin’s whistle.” The dolphin, which possesses the best sonar in the natural world, has a distinct taste for silver perch. An experiment in the marine lab at Beaufort confirmed the scientists’ suspicions. The fishes’ mating sounds were giving their location away to predators. “We think we’re the first to record the sounds of sex and death in the sea,” Luczkovich said. • Love songs of spawning fish point the way to better management plans. Sounds f i s h y A sample of the sounds Joe Luczkovich and his team collected with their homemade sonar buoys may be heard at http://croaker.physics.ecu.edu. Photo by Johnathan Bascom 31 • SPRING 2000 • As soon as the war ended, they would return home and life would be better. Through three decades of exile, that thought sustained Eritrean refugees eking out an existence in the hot, dry lands of eastern Sudan. Their opportunity came in 1993, when the civil war in Ethiopia ended and Eritrea gained its independence, yet the anticipated floods of repatriation never materialized. Today, 300,000 Eritreans remain hunkered down in the dusty poverty of a land n
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Full Text | E A S T C A R O L I N A U N I V E R S I T Y r e s e a r c h a n d c r e a t i v e a c t i v i t y SPRING 2000 AFTERMATH OF A FLOOD Also in this issue: History Off the Record, Opera at Full Throttle, Safety First and Erasmus, Man of Letters easing the tension East Carolina University is in the midst of enormous change. We expect our student body to grow significantly over the course of the next few years. We are evolving into a more research- and creative-activity-intensive university. We are striving to nurture and grow our graduate education programs and are continuing to add new, relevant doctoral programs. We are strengthening our engagement with the entire region of eastern North Carolina. All this, of course, creates a certain tension as many members of our community worry that we will not be able to accomplish all of this without damage to our undergraduate programs. This concern is justified as we have seen in many major research universities where faculty have time only for their research activities, undergraduate students are taught primarily by graduate assistants and university resources are rarely used to benefit the communities in which they reside. I am convinced that these worries are unfounded at East Carolina. In fact, research and creative activity are endeavors that everyone at the university can and should be involved in. Done well, these activities can and will improve undergradu-ate education. Consider these benefits: • Faculty members engaged in research and creative activity are more energized. They are better prepared to teach because they are on the cutting edge of their disciplines. • Undergraduate students are provided the opportunity to know the thrill and excitement of research. • As ECU nurtures its reputation for scholarly achievement, the quality of students who want to enroll here will increase, and this benefits everyone. • As the university grows and matures and establishes its expertise, it can more readily fuel economic development. • Faculty members develop expertise in many fields that can be made available to communities as they solve old problems and plan more vibrant futures. This is especially important in the wake of Hurricane Floyd. Clearly at this stage in East Carolina’s development, research and creative activity go hand-in-hand with undergraduate education. Everyone wins. In this, the third issue of edge, you will find superb examples of how our research is directed toward producing a better, more engaged university with wonderful opportunities for both undergraduate and graduate students. — Dr. Thomas L. Feldbush, Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Studies edge r e s e a r c h & c r e a t i v e a c t i v i t y EAST CAROLINA UNIVERSITY Spring 2000 w w w . e c u . e d u / r e s e a r c h / e d g e PUBLISHER Dr. Thomas L. Feldbush Vice Chancellor, Research and Graduate Studies EXECUTIVE EDITOR John Durham Director, News and Communications Services EDITORIAL BOARD Tom Fortner Director, Medical Center News and Information Dr. Alan A. Schreier Director, Office of Sponsored Programs Dr. Emilie S. Kane Associate Director, Office of Sponsored Programs EDITOR Garnet Bass DESIGNER Linda Noble PHOTOGRAPHERS Cliff Hollis News and Communications Services Tony Rumple News and Communications Services edge is published by the Division of Research and Graduate Studies at East Carolina University. Any written portion of this publication may be reprinted with appropriate credit. COMMENTS OR QUESTIONS John Durham East Carolina University News and Communications Services Howard House Greenville, NC 27858-4353 252-328-6481 d u r h a m j @ m a i l . e c u . e d u © 2000 by East Carolina University Printed by Theo Davis Sons, Zebulon, NC Printed on recycled paper. 4,000 copies of this public document were printed at a cost of $10,060.00, or $2.52 per copy. profile 18 T H E R E L U C T A N T D I V A Louise Toppin never meant to be a singer, but talent will out. Today the soprano’s performance schedule takes her around the globe. explorations 27 H O P E F O R F L U E N C Y Patented device may eliminate stuttering. 28 T H E T R E A S U R E O F T H E A L T I P L A N O Through hindcasting, cores from the Bolivian Andes may yield clues to future global climate. 30 S O U N D S F I S H Y Love songs of spawning fish point the way to better management plans. 31 L O S I N G P L A C E , L O S I N G H O P E Social and economic upheavals batter African refugees. in print 32 A look at recent publications by ECU faculty. inside ECU 34 • Newest Ph.D. students jump into research, presentations • Telemedicine grant to advance work on Next Generation Internet • License income up as inventions roll in on the cover A toy fire truck left behind in a Princeville home tells of the heartbreak of the flood of ’99. ECU geographers Paul Gares and Scott Lecce (on the back cover) examine the exterior of the ruins. Photograph by Cliff Hollis. Story, page 6. abstracts 2 • Seeking the signals to halt MS • Robotics surgery system comes to ECU • ECU joins elite on high-speed network • A smoother path to distance education • A dollar figure for the environment • A tree grows in Howell • Life on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean • Getting work teams to work features 6 N O T I N A T H O U S A N D Y E A R S Eastern North Carolina was stunned by the flood of ’99. ECU seeks to learn from the event and aid the region’s recovery. • ECU Conference on Floyd, Flooding Attracts Big Names in Disaster Planning 13 O F F T H E R E C O R D Because written records reveal only part of the story, many scholars go straight to the source to understand history and culture. • Reflected values • Sandhills memories 2 2 H A R D H A T S O N L Y Bicycle helmets get a big push in an effort to reduce injuries in eastern North Carolina. 2 4 R E N A I S S A N C E M A N In the 16th century, Erasmus opened the eyes of the world to a new way of thinking. Today, an international team of scholars hopes to open the eyes of the world to Erasmus. 1 • SPRING 2000 • i n s i d e e d g e • SPRING 2000 • 2 abstracts Robotics surgery system comes to ECU Surgeons at the School of Medicine have begun training on one of only two da Vinci computer-assisted surgical systems in the United States. The manufac-turer, Intuitive Surgical of California, selected the ECU-affiliated University Health Systems of Eastern Carolina and the Ohio State University Medical Center to install and test the $1 million system in November. The computer-guided robotics system aids surgeons during heart valve and bypass r e s e a r c h b r i e f s T he National Institutes of Health estimates that more than 250,000 Americans have been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, or MS, a chronic, progressive disease in which the body’s immune system attacks the protective covering of nerve cells in the spinal cord and brain. The disease impairs the ability of nerves to transmit signals, sometimes resulting in the temporary or permanent loss of function. No cure exists today, and the primary therapy calls for suppressing the general immune system, which leaves patients susceptible to infection. In his lab at the School of Medicine, Dr. Mark D. Mannie, associate professor of microbiology and immunology, is trying to understand the immune system’s self-regulating mechanisms in hopes of activating them against the disease. The immune system is so complex, Mannie said, that “it’s very difficult to understand why we don’t all have auto-immune disease.” It must learn, for example, to distinguish what belongs in the body from what doesn’t, even though the two may be closely related, such as the bacteria that cause infection and the bacteria that help the intestines to function properly. The distinction is crucial. When the system goes awry, as with MS, the Seeking the signal to halt MS immune system incorrectly identifies the body’s own tissue as foreign and attacks it. The brains of the immune system are the T-helper lymphocytes, or T cells, which make the call on whether to launch an immune response. Each T cell is designed to react to a specific foreign protein, or antigen. When it detects the trigger antigen, the T cell activates and divides repeatedly to marshal large forces against the foreigner. Mannie is looking into this activation process and a second process that causes activated T cell clones to acquire and display the trigger antigen. When this happens, the T cells kill each other and stop the immune response. His goal is to learn how to turn this self-regulating mechanism into a defense against rogue T cells that attack the nervous system in MS. The research is funded by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. Immunology, Mannie said, is a relatively young field that has shown tremendous growth in recent years. “I think over the next five to 10 years, we may work out [the fundamentals], and then immunology will come into a golden age,” he said. “During this period, we’ll find specific therapies for autoimmune disease, organ rejection and allergic disease.” • procedures, enabling them to operate through dime-size incisions. The result should be less post-operative pain, shorter hospital stays and faster recovery, said Dr. Randolph Chitwood, director of the Greenville Heart Center. Traditional open-heart surgery involves making a 12-inch incision in the patient’s chest and opening the rib cage. With the da Vinci system, small robotic arms are inserted into the patient’s chest through three half-inch incisions. One arm holds a tiny camera that projects three-dimensional images onto a monitor in front of the surgeon. The other two arms hold the pencil-size instruments. Using the camera as his eyes, the surgeon guides the instruments from a computerized master control console. ECU will conduct a national clinical study of robotics-assisted surgery for the replacement and repair of mitral valves, located between the chambers on the left side of the heart. Ohio State will focus on performing coronary artery procedures with da Vinci. In Europe, where it has been approved for use, the da Vinci system has assisted in more than 100 cardiac procedures and more than 150 general surgical procedures. ECU’s Chitwood became the first American to perform a mitral valve repair using da Vinci in February 1999 in Germany. He predicted that the robotics system eventually will benefit patients undergoing general surgery and gynecologic, thoracic and urologic procedures. • Mark Mannie hopes the immune system’s self-regulating mechanisms may be activated to stop the progression of multiple sclerosis. 3 • SPRING 2000 • a b s t r a c t s ECU joins elite on high-speed network ECU is preparing to tap into the nation’s highest-performance computer networking system. The National Science Foundation has awarded the university a $341,000, two-year grant to connect the campus to NSF’s high-performance Backbone Network Service. The high speed and bandwidth of the new service will allow scientists and engineers to collaborate and share powerful computer and information resources. The service network connecting the ECU campus to the Internet is 15 times faster than the previous connection. It now runs at 155 million bits per second and has begun a move upward in speed to 2.4 gigabits per second, compared with the previous 10 million bits per second. This spring, the internal campus backbone will be upgraded from the current 155 million bits per second to 1 billion bits per second, full duplex. In a related move, the university has joined the ranks of 163 universities connected to the nation-wide high-speed research network system called Internet2. Together they form the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development. Only four other North Carolina universities share this distinction: UNC-Chapel Hill, N.C. State, Duke and Wake Forest. “Our participation in this high-speed data system will provide a boost to our research abilities in the sciences and technology,” said Dr. Jeffrey Huskamp, ECU’s associate vice chancellor and the chief information technology officer. Three research programs are targeted for the first applications of the high band width: telemedicine, biochemistry and physics experimenta-tion in violin acoustics. Other applications — from research projects to distance education and library services — will be phased in over the next year. The university is developing procedures for allocating time and space on the bandwidth to ensure quality of service for data-intensive applications. Huskamp said the NSF grant recognizes the quality of ECU’s research and its ongoing commit-ment to technology. The university has spent $16 million over the past five years upgrading the campus network. It also has committed to upgrading faculty desktop computers every three years and to maintaining student computer labs at the state-of-the-art level. • The School of Industry and Technology has partnered with Ericsson Wireless Internet Solutions to devise strategies and technologies for improved distance education. The school began working with distance learning in 1994, delivering courses to students at Black and Decker plants in North Carolina and Maryland. “What we found was that the Internet chokes down when tools such as video and graphics are being used,” said Dr. David Hillis, co-director of the project with Dr. Barry DuVall. “But the performance of Internet-based education was so promising that we wanted to take it to a third level that will allow us to bypass the choke point of the Internet while still making use of the Internet tools and the interactive things that we want to do over the Internet.” ECU’s new network service (see story, this page) will improve capabilities from campus, but students working from homes and offices do not have access to the same high-speed service. The partnership with Ericsson seeks to overcome such inherent problems. Ericsson Wireless Internet Solutions focuses on developing wireless data technologies to enable faster, easier and more secure access for mobile professionals in handling e-mail, accessing and transferring files and browsing the Internet from remote locations. The $4.6 million project is called On-line Wireless Learning Solutions. Ericsson’s wireless division, based in Research Triangle Park, is providing major funding and technology support. The U.S. Department of Education also is contributing $924,437 through a “Learn Anywhere, Anytime” partnership. ECU was one of 29 campuses selected to receive the federal funding last fall. The new technologies will be tested over the next three years through a distance learning consortium offering more than 40 courses from nine universities. In addition to ECU, those schools are Eastern Michigan Univer-sity, Central Missouri State University, Indiana State University, the University of Wisconsin/Stout, Texas Southern University, Bowling Green State Univer-sity and the University of Louisiana, de Lafayette. • A smoother path to distance education Wireless communication technology will enable the creation of a global classroom, says Barry DuVall, co-director of the On-line Wireless Learning Solutions project. • SPRING 2000 • 4 abstracts How much is clean air worth to you? Or clean water? What would you be willing to pay to ensure the health of coastal fisheries? For the past five years, Drs. John Whitehead and Timothy Haab in the Depart-ment of Economics have collaborated on a series of studies examining just such questions. Their goal is to help policy makers understand the economic value of natural resources and, by extension, the cost of public policies that protect — or fail to protect — the environment. “The environment is something we don’t think of in terms of economics,” Whitehead said. “With a car or a candy bar, we know what it’s worth by what people will pay. If we can put the same kind of economic valuation on natural resources, then we can figure the true cost of policies. And if the value of the resource is higher than the cost of the policy to protect it, that’s good public policy.” Their projects have crisscrossed the state. In Gaston County, commuters driving into Charlotte were willing to ante up $14 a month for vehicle emissions testing and other measures to improve air quality in the region. In another study, the researchers found that 86 percent of coastal fishermen were willing to pay for recreational fishing licenses and estimated the net value to the state at about $21 million annually. (The legislature nonetheless declined to implement the licensing require-ment.) They also found that farmers in the Neuse River basin were less willing than other property owners to spend money to improve water quality in the river. Whitehead and Haab also have put their methodology, which involves household A dollar figure for the environment r e s e a r c h b r i e f s surveys, to the test. “When you ask hypothetical questions about the environment, people give responses that are realistic and can be used to develop policies,” Haab said. Some courts have begun accepting data from similar surveys in assigning monetary damages from manmade environmental disasters. Two current projects have turned the re-searchers’ attention back to fisheries. The Na-tional Marine Fisheries Service has contracted with them to study the value of marine recre-ational fishing throughout the Southeast. In an-other project, they will look at how people re-spond to news reports of seafood risk. Funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Ad-ministration, Seagrant and the Environmental Protection Agency, the project will establish a method for determining the economic impact of Pfiesteria outbreaks in the Mid-Atlantic states. • A tree grows in Howell You must look closely to see the forest growing in Dr. Ronald Newton’s laboratory in Howell Science Complex. There, on shelf after shelf full of petri dishes, thousands of microscopic fraser firs and Virginia pines are being coaxed into existence. It is the first step in a long, slow process that may one day lead to healthier stands of trees. Newton, a plant physiologist and chairman of the Biology Department, seeks to use genetic engineering to produce trees with greater resistance to environmental stress. His primary target: fraser firs and Virginia pines that can withstand drought. Traditional tree-breeding through cross-pollination is largely a hit-or-miss proposition. Biotechnology, on the other hand, presents scientists with a way to pinpoint the gene or genes that control a characteristic like drought tolerance, insert those specific genes into the DNA of other trees, then clone these tough, new trees to get millions just like them. Just don’t expect results tomorrow. “Technology and research take time,” Newton said. Before coming to ECU in 1998, Newton worked with scientists at Texas A&M University who developed technology for isolating genes that respond to environmental stresses. The group isolated 20 genes in loblolly pines that “turn on” when drought begins to stress a tree. Newton then identified the proteins that five of those genes produce. The proteins help explain how the genes work. Because of similarities among conifers, he said, the same technology will advance his work at ECU with Virginia pines and fraser firs. For now, Newton is concentrating on developing technology that will allow him to clone trees efficiently. In one line of experi-ments, he takes tissue from seeds and treats it with hormones to encourage multiple embryos to develop. A second approach encourages the tissue to develop shoots and the shoots to develop roots. So far, only 1 percent of every 4,000 to 5,000 attempts will produce viable seedlings, and it can take several months of careful nurturing to know which petri dish will bear fruit. Eventually, immature plants like these will become the targets for gene transfer experiments. Cloning also will be important for propagating any trees that are developed. • Ronald Newton nurtures fraser fir seedlings in the greenhouse where, eventually, he plans to raise genetically improved firs and pines. 5 • SPRING 2000 • a b s t r a c t s Flexibility and speed have made small-group work teams a mainstay of modern business. College classrooms have been slower to adapt. “A major criticism of collegiate education that we hear from business is, ‘We work in teams, but you’re sending us people who don’t know how,’ ” said Michael E. McLeod, associate professor of business. To answer the criticism, McLeod and two colleagues turned a core business course into an experiment in how to make small groups work better. Over several semesters, they assigned students to work in project teams but gave T Getting work teams to work sections of the course different amounts of guidance. Some received the assignment with no additional instruction. Some received the assignment with a description of the roles needed to make the group function smoothly — such as team leader and meeting coordina-tor. Still others received the project assignment, the information on roles and short training sessions in such topics as conflict resolution and time management. In the end, the professors found that with more guidance up front, the groups developed greater cohesive-ness and did higher quality work. “The bottom line for education is don’t just put teams together and turn them loose,” said Dr. John Bradley, associate professor of business. “The more you help them understand roles, the more you help them know how to function in a team. And the same thing would apply to any new job in industry.” Bradley and McLeod conducted the project with Dr. Brian Mennecke, who has since moved on to Iowa State University. Their report on the project won the award for best paper at the December 1998 conference of the International Academy for Information Management and appeared in the fall ’99 issue of the Journal of Informatics Education and Research. • It only makes sense that critters on the floor of the Arctic Ocean take a while to warm up and become active after winter’s deep freeze. Or so scientists once theorized. Dr. Lisa M. Clough, assistant professor of biology, has discovered a different scenario. By late May, still early in the Arctic spring, creatures from bacteria to starfish are revved up and running despite the frigid temperatures. This is well ahead of activity by animals in the water column itself. Furthermore, Clough has found that these bottom creatures are feasting on pieces of ice algae, which disputes another theory. Ice algae are collections of single-cell plants held together by mucus in strands up to 30 feet long. They generally hang down from the thick sheet of ice covering the surface, and scientists who study the water column had suggested that ice algae always float. Clough’s studies, however, show that at least some of that ice algae fall to the ocean’s floor to become an important source of food for animals living there. As a benthic ecologist, Clough studies the bottom of the marine ecosystem with a special emphasis on the Arctic Ocean. She is particularly interested in the food chain and the chemical interactions that take place as animals feed on plants and each other, only to decay (eventually) and cycle nutrients back to the plants. The process is known as carbon cycling, carbon being the common element in all life forms. Because organic carbon locked up in plants and animals is not available to form carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, understand-ing carbon cycling in the Arctic may eventually help scientists decipher the Arctic’s role in regulating global climate. Arctic research carries its challenges. Clough vies for space with other scientists on Coast Guard icebreakers and relies on a giant underwater steam shovel to scoop boxes of mud and ocean life from two miles below the water’s surface. It takes three hours on the ship’s deck in freezing temperatures to process each scoopful for the lab. Then for two days, Clough takes round-the-clock measurements of oxygen consumption in the ship’s lab. These help her determine the animals’ metabolic rates. She also bring frozen samples back to campus for carbon studies that pinpoint food sources. In addition to doing her own research, Clough was the chief scientist in charge of coordinating the research efforts of more than 30 colleagues onboard a 1998 Arctic cruise. She also serves on a committee overseeing science taking place on the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker fleet. A new icebreaker holds special promise. Larger and potentially more powerful than the current 400-foot models, it should be able to plow its way into the Arctic Ocean in winter. So far, Clough has found that bottom-dwelling animals are most active in spring, then slow down by July. “I would love to get up there in winter to see if they’ve shut down and find out how they know to turn on again in spring,” she said. “This new icebreaker may be able to get us there.” Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Undersea Research Program. • Life on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean In her lab, Lisa Clough studies organisms from the Arctic to learn about their food sources. Not in a Thousand Years Pattillo Elementary fourth-graders take the field for a game of kickball Two elementary schools were destroyed, and of the 57,000 homes flooded, about 7,000 were damaged beyond repair. In Pitt County, home of East Carolina University, the Tar River crested at 17 feet above flood stage. One-third of the county was under water. The campus suffered $7 million in damages when Green Mill Run, a tributary of the Tar, overflowed. Hundreds of students and staff living off campus lost their homes, clothes and cars. Even scientists who had long warned of the potential for such events were stunned. Dr. Stanley R. Riggs, professor emeritus of geology, canoed through tree tops to check on a cabin he owns on the south side of the Tar River. “I wouldn’t have thought in a thousand years I’d see my cabin in the river,” he said. Despite the personal loss, Riggs saw the beauty of a deep blue sky reflected in the flowing water. Then a strong north wind brought the mooing of cattle from the far side of the river. “As I was standing there, the bawling from the cattle became louder and more and more frantic,” he said. “Then after 10 or 15 minutes, it went totally silent. Three hundred head of cattle drowned. It brought very clearly into focus that this was a serious economic disaster for a lot of people.” Throughout the crisis, the ECU family pitched in to help. Faculty and staff of the School of Medicine helped guide Pitt County Memorial Hospital as it coped with loss of power and water and called in the National Guard to ferry supplies and patients from areas cut off by flood water. University students, faculty and staff • SPRING 2000 • 6 EASTERN NORTH CAROLINA WAS STUNNED BY THE FLOOD OF ’99. ECU SEEKS TO LEARN FROM THE EVENT AND AID THE REGION’S RECOVERY. E astern North Carolinians gained a new measuring stick for hurricanes in the fall of 1999. To measures of wind and storm surge, they now add rain. By the time Hurricanes Dennis, Floyd and Irene had done their damage, dumping more than 36 inches of rain in some places, people knew the meaning of a 400-year-flood event. All told, 19,000 square miles of farms, towns and forests were flooded — an area nearly twice the size of the state of Maryland. between rows of trailers that serve as classrooms, library and administrative offices. mucked out the homes of neighbors and friends, retrieved salvageable belongings and raised money for relief efforts. Faculty monitored water quality and advised state and local officials on environmental safety and structural damage. As the immediate crisis passed, the university turned its attention to the future. Chancellor Richard Eakin led a three-day fact-finding tour of affected counties and offered ECU’s expertise in helping map the recovery process. More than 250 faculty, staff and other professionals volunteered their services free of charge to communities, businesses and individuals. Many did not wait to be asked. They launched service and research projects to help people cope with the disaster and to learn from it. A few of their stories follow. COPING WITH TRAUMA Six months after the flood, gutted homes and piles of trash attest that life has yet to return to normal in eastern North Carolina. At the United Methodist Church in Grifton, where the School of Medicine is running a twice-a-month mental health clinic, other signs appear: depression, fatigue, irritability and a host of symptoms that add up to the condition known as post-traumatic stress disorder. “The moment the weather changes, especially if it clouds up or starts to rain, they get anxious,” said Dr. Thaddeus Ulzen, associate professor of psychiatry. “People are more affected by what happened than they thought they would be. The flood has left the headlines, but people are still struggling to get their lives together.” 7 • SPRING 2000 • C o n t i n u e d • SPRING 2000 • 8 Rising waters forced 700 people to flee their homes in this small Pitt County town. One Saturday in mid-February, 40 of them visited the clinic. There the team of psychia-trists, family physicians, psychologists, pharmacists and clinical social workers tried to help them begin to reorder their lives and to understand that their feelings are normal, even if their circumstances aren’t. The clinic will run into the summer. In Pitt County Schools, another ECU group is assessing and helping students traumatized by the flood through school- and home-based interventions. “We know that over 2,000 kids lived in homes that had serious damage,” said Dr. Lane Geddie, assistant professor of psychology. “We saw ourselves as one of the few organizations with the manpower to reach such a large number.” Eight faculty members and 30 students from psychology, marriage and family therapy, nursing and psychiatry are involved in the project. One is Dr. Kaye McGinty, assistant professor of psychiatry. She spoke of a pre-holiday workshop for students. “Their parents were working three or four jobs to try to get their families back on their feet,” she said. “The teenagers talked about getting jobs to help the families. The people in our group were flabbergasted. The teens seemed to be coping pretty well, but the stress in their families is extreme.” The N.C. Division of Mental Health is looking into expanding school-based interventions. It has applied for a grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to train social workers and psychologists in 31 counties to lead group sessions for children on coping with trauma. It has asked McGinty and others in the Department of Psychiatry to act as trainers and advisers. STRESS RELIEF In Edgecombe County, a different kind of school-based intervention is taking place. On a sunny day in November, about 25 fourth-graders huddled on the makeshift playground at the makeshift school. “All right, let’s go over the rules,” Dr. Carmen Russoniello told them. “No fighting. No hitting. If you break the rules, it’s over.” Then Russoniello, assistant professor of recreation and leisure studies, mentioned the event that shadowed their young lives. Who lost something in the flood? Almost every youngster raised a hand. “I lost my house, my grandma’s house and my uncle’s house,” one said, “and my clothes and my shoes.” A minute more of quiet talk, and they broke the huddle with a mighty yell. For the next 40 minutes they ran relays, played kickball and tossed Frisbees ��� working off more energy than the average adult can even remember. “What we’re trying to do, in addition to normal growth and development, is to do things that address the behavioral problems that are emerging,” Russoniello said. “This is an opportunity to plant seeds that will help them deal with trauma.” Russoniello brought this combination of mental and recreational therapy to Edgecombe County in answer to a cry for help. About half of the 500 fourth- and fifth-graders in Tarboro’s Pattillo Elementary lost their homes in the flood. They also lost their school. Pattillo now operates out of mobile classrooms set up on the grounds of the National Guard Armory. For nearly the entire day, even lunchtime, the children are confined to a single classroom. Soon after school reopened, children and teachers neared their limits. Then Dana Alexander, the school social worker, made a phone call, and Russoniello and his students arrived, armed with recre-ational equipment and almost as much energy as the children. “You could see the difference in the children immediately,” Alexander said. “They can learn math much better at 2 o’clock if they’ve been outside and run off some of that energy.” What began as impromptu assistance has become a formal alliance. Russoniello’s students travel to Pattillo three days a week as part of their classwork. Some lead youngsters in group activities while others work one-on-one with children having emotional and behavioral problems. A special stress-reduction workshop answered the needs of teachers. The university funded a graduate student to coordinate the project and provides a university van. As the recreation students arranged donations of playground equipment, others at 9 • SPRING 2000 • ECU also adopted Pattillo. One volunteer group launched a “T’s and Tales” drive to collect T-shirts and new books for the children. Another group raised enough money to bus the entire school to Greenville for a theater production of Charlotte’s Web. Russoniello said the alliance will last until the children get into their new school — or longer. BEFORE AND AFTER A broader perspective on mental health comes from the social sciences. “There are a lot of articles about how a natural disaster affects your mental health, but almost none of it has any indication of mental health beforehand for comparison,” said Dr. Marieke Van Willigen, assistant professor of sociology. She can now supply the missing information. Luck played a role. Early last fall, Van Willigen was studying the social and psychological benefits of volunteering. As part of her research, she had included questions about three key indicators of mental health on the Annual Survey of Eastern North Carolina conducted by the ECU Survey Research Lab beginning last August. The flood interrupted the survey. When it was completed, Van Willigen was able to compare the psychologi-cal well-being of respondents before and after the flood. Her questions included three measures recognized as indicators of psychological well-being: whether people feel a sense of control over their lives, whether they feel part of a support network of people and whether they feel their lives have meaning or purpose. The flood hit women particularly hard on two of the three measures. When it came to the sense of control over their lives, both men and women scored lower after the flood without any major differences between the sexes. In terms of social support and sense of purpose, women scored much lower than men. “With social support, that’s significant because women tend to have higher levels of social support, and here it actually flipped,” she said. “Women were higher before the flood and lower after it. The results concerning sense of purpose or meaning were interesting, too. [My students] thought people would have had eye-opening experiences that added meaning to their lives, but that is not reinforced at all.” EVACUATIONS Van Willigen is part of a team of social scientists examining the impact of the flood from several angles. The team is led by sociology professor Dr. John Maiolo and also includes Drs. Bob Edwards and Ken Wilson in sociology and John Whitehead in economics. The collaboration began in 1998. After Hurricane Bonnie, the N.C. Division of Emer-gency Management contracted with them to study the evacuation patterns of households and businesses in the eight counties that touch the Atlantic Ocean. They also collected informa-tion on property damage. The study involved surveying 1,000 residents and 600 businesses and created a tool the state can use to estimate the economic effects of an evacuation order. Among their findings: • 26 percent of residents on the coast evacuated. • Evacuation cost the average household about $200. • The cost of an evacuation to businesses varied substantially according to the type of business and timing of the evacuation. • People with disabilities were less likely to evacuate than were able-bodied people. C o n t i n u e d FACING PAGE: From the top, retired professor Caroline Ayers sorts donations for flood victims. Gary Galloway rows by his home in Grimesland. Floodwaters swamp U.S. 64 Bypass at Tarboro. THIS PAGE: Carmen Russoniello brings a combination of mental and recreational therapy to the displaced students of Pattillo Elementary. • SPRING 2000 • 10 • Property owned by blacks was more likely to suffer damage, but the damage was less severe than to property owned by whites. • Households where there was a disability were more likely to suffer damage and the damage amounted to a substantially larger percentage of household income than for households without a disability. Now they plan to repeat the survey in those eight counties and to extend it to 31 inland counties, refining the economic assessment tool and teasing out more information along the way. BUSINESS LOSSES The team was on a faster track to assess Floyd’s damage to businesses in eastern North Carolina. They had 30 days to complete the study and turn in a report to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In most disaster areas, FEMA contacts businesses individually to gather damage assessments. In this case, that would have meant calling on 100,000 business owners. FEMA sought another way. Using their experience with the Bonnie study, the social scientists surveyed a random sample of 3,000 business in the 44 counties. Based on the survey, they projected a total of $1 billion in physical damages and $4 billion in lost revenue. Wilson was stunned by some of the particulars. Going in, he expected that any job loss figures would reflect plants that had to close because of flood damage. Not so. “Eastern North Carolina lost over 30,000 jobs,” he said, “but most of those were in businesses laying off one or two people. These are very small cutbacks, but when you get 30,000 pinpricks, it can have an effect on the economy.” Another finding also had long-term consequences. Of all the businesses that had been planning to expand before the flood, only half expected to carry through with those plans at the time of the survey. “I’m not sure that it won’t bounce back over time as the economy gets more positive,” Wilson said. “But at least for a while they’re waiting to see what happens.” THE FUTURE The flood exacerbated already dire conditions in eastern North Carolina. The area has long been mired in poverty. Recent developments in the tobacco industry and declining prices for pork and other agricultural commodities promised to drag the economy down further. How, many asked, can an area with so few resources rebound? “This is so huge that no one knows what the first step should be,” said Albert A. Delia, associate vice chancellor for regional development. “We need a coordinated response.” To lead the response, ECU has estab-lished the Sustainable Economic Recovery and Growth Center. The center’s purpose is to focus the resources of ECU and other institutions on revitalizing the 40-county region. Its multi-pronged approach will include applied research, policy analysis, a venture capital fund and new models for community development and transportation planning. Eastern North Carolina legislators have pledged to push the General Assembly to allocate funds for a permanent endowment for the center. THE FLOODPLAIN Snow and ice dotted the landscape on a February Saturday when a team of ECU scientists piled out of a van at a deserted filling station. Time was precious. Before spring growth could disguise the landscape, they had a chance to study sediment deposited by a massive flood. So in the early morning chill, they pulled on rubber boots, collected their gear and headed off down the dike that once protected the town of Princeville from the Tar River. “The question geomorphologists have is whether a rare event like this deposits a lot of sediment,” said Dr. Scott Lecce, assistant 11 • SPRING 2000 • professor of geography. “The answers have a lot of implications for how we interpret the stratigraphic record.” Along with Lecce, the group consists of Drs. Paul Gares and Pat Pease in geography and Catherine Rigsby in geology. From Tarboro to Washington, they are surveying the floodplain to see what the Tar River left behind. Along the way, they collect samples to be analyzed for soil type, heavy metal content and chemical contamination. They plot each location using the satellite-based Global Positioning System. In the end, they will map the patterns of distribution and link those with the typography, land use and flood records. They also will be able to compare actual sediment distribution with estimates prepared by the U.S. Geological Survey. “If I were guessing ahead of time, I would have thought we’d find two to three centimeters of sediment,” Lecce said. “It would have been that noticeable.” In most places, however, they find so little they must carefully separate flood-deposited soil from autumn’s leaf fall. When one small area turned up an inch-thick layer of crusted and cracked mud, it was enough to start the speculation. “I think the interesting thing is why here,” Gares said. “Where does this stuff come from and why is it deposited here and not elsewhere?” The group huddled. Perhaps frequent low-level flooding routinely flushes out the system. Maybe it had to do with the sequence of events last fall. North Carolina had been in a drought before hurricane season and the river level was exceptionally low. Then when Dennis, the first major storm hit, maybe it eroded most of the loose soil and carried it to the estuary before the river topped its banks. Or maybe this river simply doesn’t carry much sediment. Somewhere in the muck, they hope to find the answers. THE SOUND For biologists, the flood has left a different set of questions. One of the most serious question marks hangs over Pamlico Sound, the largest body of water in the state and a major nursery for East Coast fisheries. As flood waters washed out hog lagoons and municipal sewage treatment plants and swept across fields and lawns, it bypassed nature’s normal filtering process and carried an extraordinary load of nutrients straight into the sound. There, trapped by the Outer Banks, these nutrients hold the potential to wreak havoc in the delicate ecosystem. Last fall, the strain was already showing. The huge quantity of fresh water had trapped the heavier, oxygen-poor brackish water at the bottom. Hurricane Irene came along and stirred the waters. Disaster averted. The next critical time is approaching fast. “We don’t know what the consequences will be next summer,” said Dr. Robert Christian, professor of biology. “The temperature will be higher and the ability of the water to hold oxygen will be lower. What happens when the bacteria and algae start growing?” The concern is that the nutrients will feed an unusually large crop of algae. As it dies, it will add even more nutrients to the shallow waters. Natural bacteria feasting on all the decaying matter will rob the water of oxygen. In a worst case scenario, this could lead to massive fish kills. With little chance to exchange water with the open ocean, the sound’s recovery could be slow. Despite the sound’s importance for fisher-ies and tourism, Christian said, little attention has been directed to understanding its response to events like floods and hurricanes. Working with Dr. Hans Paerl, professor of marine and C o n t i n u e d FACING PAGE: Scott Lecce (top) checks a layer of sediment deposited on a discarded lawnmower in Princeville. (Bottom) Scientists carefully separate sediment from leaf litter to determine what the flood left behind. THIS PAGE: (Top) ECU scientists skirt a breach in the Princeville dike as they return from surveying the floodplain. (Bottom) A composite of images from the Landsat 7 Thematic Mapper satellite reveals the extent of flooding in Pitt County. The blue color represents permanent bodies of water, as shown in a July 28 image. By Sept. 30, water covered the area in red. Dense vegetation may conceal additional flood waters in some areas near the river channel. ECU Conference on Floyd, Flooding Attracts Big Names in Disaster Planning • SPRING 2000 • 12 environmental sciences at UNC-CH, Christian wants to remedy that. They will be keeping close tabs on the sound’s nutrient levels and biological activity for the next year or longer. They hope to assess the impact of the flood and to create a model that will predict the likely biological impact of any future storms. The predictive capacity may be as impor-tant as understanding current conditions. Cli-matologists expect more and stronger hurri-canes over the next two to three decades. THE MAPS The extent of the flooding drove home an important point for almost everyone. Floodplain maps need to be updated and expanded. Three geographers are examining the tools available for quick-response flood mapping and modeling and for updating floodplain maps. Digital elevation models from the U.S. Geological Survey are a readily available and inexpensive tool for estimating the extent of the flooding. They have just one problem. “There are some questions about how accurate they are in areas of low relief, like it is here,” said Dr. Jeffrey Colby, assistant professor of geography. Images from the new Landsat 7 satellite offer another possibility, but dense vegetation can obscure flooding in some areas. The geographers, Colby and Drs. Karen Mulcahy and Yong Wang, are investigating whether these tools can be combined for better results. Their first step is to compare both the digital models and satellite imagery taken before and during the flood with actual flood level readings. THE RIVER Only the magnitude of the flood surprised geologist Stan Riggs. “If you look at the natural process, the river was doing exactly what it was made to do, and we got in the way,” he said. “Moving water is a very powerful force. It erodes mountains and canyons and sculpts the land in a very vigorous fashion. It always has, and it always will.” The question he is trying to solve now is how much people contributed to their own undoing last fall. Ditches drain thousands of acres of forest and farmland. Streams have been channelized to move water faster. Urban Mileti, director of the Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center in Boulder, Colo., and author of Disasters by Design: A Reassessment of Natural Hazards in the United States. • “Mitigation in an Institutional Context” — Dr. Rutherford Platt, author of Disasters and Democracy: The Politics of Extreme Natural Events and professor of geography and planning law at the University of Massachu-setts. • “Prospects for Mitigation in Eastern North Carolina Creating Resilient Communi-ties” — Dr. David Godschalk, author of Natural Hazard Mitigation: Recasting Disaster Policy and Planning and Catastrophic Coastal Storms: Hazard Mitigation and Development Management. Godshalk also is professor and former chair of city and regional planning at UNC-Chapel Hill. • “Extreme Weather Events in Eastern North Carolina’s Future” — Dr. Robert Sheets, former director of the National Hurricane Center. The conference also will include a series of workshops reporting on research related to the natural, physical, social and economic impacts of Hurricane Floyd and the floods, a panel discussion on “Living in the Eye of the Storm” and roundtable discussions on selected topics. More details on the conference are available from the website www.ecu.edu/coas/ floyd or by contacting Laura Edwards at 252- 328-2484, email EdwardsL@mail.ecu.edu. The deadline for registration is May 10. • Some of the nation’s leading authorities on natural disasters will address a three-day conference at ECU on the effects of Hurricane Floyd. The conference, to be held May 24-26, is expected to bring together policymakers, research scientists, relief and recovery specialists, federal and local disaster experts, and citizens of eastern North Carolina. “We expect this conference to provide the first organized assessment not only of Floyd’s place among other natural disasters but equally important, how we can use the lessons of this storm to mitigate loss of life and property in future calamities,” said Dr. John Maiolo, conference chair and professor of sociology. Among the highlights will be: • “Disasters by Design” — Dr. Dennis development has increased runoff. Roads and bridges, on the other hand, often block the natural flow of water. “We probably exacer-bated this flood significantly through our lack of attention to what we’ve been doing,” he said. With a multidisciplinary team, Riggs hopes to detail what happened on the Tar River and its tributaries: how the natural system worked where it was relatively intact and how human modifications altered the outcome. He has enlisted the aid of Dr. Richard Spruill, a hydrologist, and Drs. Robert Christian and Mark Brinson in biology. Their end product, he said, will be a database to help people judge the wisdom of policies and practices. “No one even knows how many streams have been channelized or how many bridge dams there are and where they are,” he said. “A bridge dam on one kind of stream might actually be good because it might hold some of the storm water back whereas on another part of the stream it might be bad because it holds the water back right into town. This is where understanding the dynamics is so crucial to society. You can’t have one rule that fits everything. It’s a complex system.” • Because written records reveal only part of the story, many scholars go straight to the source to understand history and culture. 13 • SPRING 2000 • I n a photograph over her desk, Dr. Lu Ann Jones sits on the tailgate of a pickup truck, holding a microphone and talking with an elderly Mississippi Delta farmer named Charles Bailey. “I feel like that’s my natural habitat,” she says now. It is her habitat in more ways than one. The daughter of Gates County farmers, she feels connected to the land and the people who tend it. As an oral historian and assistant professor of history, she inhabits another kind of field, one that takes her to the people who can share with her the history they have lived. “Oral history lends itself to subjects where the written records are silent or where they aren’t as abundant as we might like for them to be,” she said recently. “So if you’re doing a topic where the best sources are still living human beings, you go and talk with them.” Once, all history was oral. Parents and grandparents passed family stories on to children, and village elders told the stories of a whole people. Then, as formal education became more widespread, reliance on the spoken word declined. We wanted our history in books. For source material, these written histories often depended on official documents and other written records. History became the story of the powerful and elite. A course correction was in order. About half a century ago, as social historians began to dig into diaries and letters to examine the lives of ordinary people, another group of modern historians set out to get people talking again. The academic discipline of oral history was born. At ECU, historians are joined by scholars from English, nursing, anthropology and folklore — among others — in capturing the first-person accounts of modern history. Working on a host of independent projects, they seek to record the stories of people who might otherwise be passed over, to fill gaps in written documents, to heal society’s wounds. With her own roots tugging at her, Jones is drawn to the stories of people who have shaped farming and rural life. Currently, she directs her students in collecting oral histories of eastern North Carolina schoolteachers. A larger part of her work continues to flow from what she learned on the back of Charles Bailey’s pickup and many others like it. Before coming to ECU, Jones spent five years working with the Smithsonian Institution on a project documenting the changes in Southern agriculture since the 1930s. She interviewed more than 200 men and women in eight Southeastern states, from Louisiana to Virginia. “These were people who had grown up with mule farming and had retired or grown old with these enormous machines, and it was costing more and more every year to stay in business, if they were able to stay in business,” she said. “They were a generation that had witnessed change and had made the choices that brought about the changes.” As the farmers looked back, she said, they had a realistic attitude about progress. Running water, indoor toilets and machinery that saved back-breaking labor improved life, but improvement came at a price. ���At the time, I caught from many people a sense of ambiguity about the changes that had taken place in farming,” she said. “Perhaps without being able to articulate it, they realized they had made some choices 20 and 30 years before that were now having the unintended consequences of really making it impossible for their own children to continue farming. By surrendering to the notion that bigger is always better, which means you’re going to have to borrow a lot of money and assume a lot more risk, ultimately they wound up closing off options for their own children, which many of them found very saddening. Many also question the wisdom of having adopted so many pesticides. They talked about how they felt insects had developed immunity (making the pesticides) far less effective. At the same time, they were hard pressed to look back and C o n t i n u e d Lu Ann Jones captures farmer Charles Bailey’s words on tape as part of a project documenting changes in Southern agriculture since the 1930s. Off the record Photo by Laurie Minor-Penland, Smithsonian Institution • SPRING 2000 • 14 see what the alternatives may have been.” Jones has written several articles about the interviews and is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press to publish a collection of edited interviews. They also undergird her dissertation, to be published in 2001 by UNC Press as Re-Visioning the Countryside: Southern Women, Rural Reform, and the Farm Economy in the 20th Century. “In any anecdotal history, you hear about swapping eggs at the country store,” she said. “If you accumulate enough of these stories, you can make the case that this was the important part of the rural economy that everyone knew about but no one stopped to take seriously.” By combining the stories with written records, such as store ledgers, Jones concluded that the commodities under the farm woman’s control — primarily butter, eggs and chickens — eased the cash-strapped family whose tobacco or cotton crop paid off only once a year. “It made a difference,” she said. “It was not just something to be relegated to the pile of anecdotal history.” Audiotapes and transcriptions of Jones’ farm interviews, some with photographs, are held in the Smithsonian archives. Pete Daniel, curator of agriculture at the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History, compares the interviews with those from the Federal Writers’ Project. Since the 1960s, social historians have mined those New Deal interviews for a better understanding of life around the time of the Great Depression. “Reading [Jones’] interviews is like visiting these farmers and hearing them tell their life stories,” he said. “As farming continues to change and as family farms disappear, these interviews will take on even more significance as a source of study.” A source of study is precisely the purpose of the 200-plus oral histories in the Special Collections Division of ECU’s Joyner Library. The library has built substantial holdings of papers from prominent North Carolinians and from missionaries, tobacconists and military personnel. The oral histories complement the papers. “Quite often, when you receive a person’s papers, there’s a lot that went into their careers that never winds up in black and white,” said Donald Lennon, who retired recently as coordinator of Special Collections. “Not many people keep diaries, so oral history is a way to supplement the documentation. At the same time, written documentation is a way to help clarify dates and places in the oral histories.” The number of interviews in the collection, he said, is limited by the time involved in making each one. “Our philosophy is that the tapes alone are meaningless unless they are transcribed and checked for accuracy and made available in transcript form,” he said. “So we’ve done a measured oral history program because we didn’t want the interviews to outrun our ability to transcribe and proofread and correct.” An oral history may consist of one 30- minute interview or 10 two-hour interviews. “We’ll keep coming back for interviews as long as they have something to tell us,” Lennon said. A series of interviews with the late U.S. Judge John Davis Larkins typed out at more than 500 pages. Interviews with Rear Adm. William Henry Ashford Jr. ran more than 400 pages. The naval history collection alone attracts researchers from all over the country. In his biography Bull Halsey, for example, author E.B. Potter cited the Ashford interviews as “the single most useful oral history for this book.” Ashford served as an aide to Adm. Halsey aboard the USS Enterprise during much of World War II. For the last 15 years, Lennon made it his special mission to collect the papers and oral histories of the Naval Academy Class of 1941 — the men who entered service in time to help win World War II and then led the Navy through the Cold War years. With each interview, Lennon took the officer from his youth and decision to enter the Navy to the present. “I like to go through his career in as much detail as possible because while one researcher may be interested in this individual’s involvement aboard ship in Reginald Watson, left, listens to Louis Raynor, the man whose career launched the oral history project. “When people give you a story, it’s like giving you a gift,” says Lu Ann Jones, shown here talking with Grace Whitehurst at Cypress Glen retirement home in Greenville. As a soldier in Vietnam, Louis Raynor celebrates receiving Valentine’s Day candy from his wife. Finding mementos of her father’s military career propelled Sharon Raynor to learn more about the black experience in Vietnam through oral history. 15 • SPRING 2000 • Guadalcanal in World War II, another may be interested in his involvement in the administra-tion of Guantanamo Naval Base later in his career or that individual’s duties as a research scientist developing some advanced radar program,” he said. The results were often astounding. One officer had the most phenomenal memory Lennon had ever encountered — recalling dates, times and places of even the most trivial events. Another, he said, “describes the Battle of Guadalcanal in such graphic detail that you duck.” A later war has led three members of the English Department into the realm of oral history. Their project, “Breaking the Silence: The Unspoken Brotherhood of Vietnam Veterans,” seeks to provide insight into the problems black soldiers faced before, during and after America’s most unpopular war. Did racism make their lot more difficult, leading to higher rates of depression and drug use? Preliminary interviews indicate the answer is yes, but a qualified yes. As one veteran from Norfolk told assistant professor Dr. Reginald Watson: “In battle there was no time for racism. When the battle’s over, that’s when racism showed up.” Problems continued after service. “White and black soliders came home to a different reality,” Watson said. “They all had the stigma of having served in a war the country didn’t like, but black soldiers had the double burden of being a Vietnam vet and dark.” The two-year project got under way in fall 1999 with a grant from the North Carolina Humanities Council. In the end, Watson and his collaborators, lecturer Sharon Raynor and assistant professor Dr. Seodial Deena, hope to heal some of the wounds through public forums based on the materials they gather. “We want to understand what went wrong so we can construct a different future,” Deena said. In the School of Nursing, associate professor Dr. Russell E. “Gene” Tranbarger is trying to capture the experience of another group of forgotten men: graduates of male nursing schools. At least four male nursing schools existed between 1888, when the first one opened, and the 1960s, when they all closed. Tranbarger himself graduated from the largest of these, the Alexian Brothers School of Nursing in Chicago, and he is annoyed that these schools have received little public acknowledgment. The premier book on nursing history includes only one paragraph on male nursing schools, he said, and a historical outline produced by the American Journal of Nursing makes no mention of male nurses, even though half of all nurses at the turn of the century were male. With no one else eager to write their history, Tranbarger, who teaches nursing administration, took on the task and began collecting oral histories of the graduates. It is a personal mission. He works on his own time, using his own money. So far, he has taped interviews with five graduates. One interview stretched over three days. In time, he plans to write about each school and its contributions to the profession. “Eventually, I think it can be a book,” he said. “I’m determined the literature will include something.” Among the varied oral historians are an equally varied assortment of philosophies — to transcribe or not to transcribe, to edit or not to edit; of end products — a tape and transcript, a public forum, a book; and of goals — to inform here, to heal wounds there. Almost universally, however, oral history becomes a transforming process for interviewee and interviewer. The Vietnam project began with a single veteran, Louis J. Raynor of Clinton — Sharon Raynor’s father. Although he was a decorated veteran, Sharon Raynor said, “I wouldn’t have known he was in Vietnam if I hadn’t found his diary.” His silence drove her to learn more. She said he and other veterans have been surprised and pleased when they realized someone was willing to listen to their experiences. “I’m just hoping this project will help more people understand Vietnam vets,” she said. “They feel betrayed.” Lu Ann Jones’ interviews may have begun on a less personal note, but they didn’t end that way. She has stayed in touch with several of the farmers, who take pride in introducing her to friends as “that woman from the Smithsonian who’s written about me.” It can be a humbling experience. “Doing oral history brings with it a lot of responsibility in terms of learning to respect other human beings and listen to their stories,” she said. “When people give you a story, it’s like giving you a gift. You should be very responsible with what you do with that gift.” • Sharon Raynor opens a “Breaking the Silence” public forum. • SPRING 2000 • 16 cooked up by a hundred or more groups competing for the barbecue blue ribbon — merits a two-week fast beforehand to make room for seconds and thirds. But why the elaborate decorations and costumes, the meticulous arrangement of the finished pig? “It seems to me that part of what’s happening is the presentation of food as art,” said Baldwin, who edits the North Carolina Folklore Journal and won the 1992 Brown- Hudson Folklore Award from N.C. Folklore Society. “But we’re also in an area and time when agriculture is in deep trouble, and hog farming in particular is presenting all kinds of problems to the region. Part of what’s going on is a way of talking about the importance of hogs and farming to the region by setting up this really eloquent contrast between the adulation of the pig as food and the kinds of hazards that intensive agriculture are presenting to the region. At least that’s my folklorist interpreta-tion.” Such interpretation and an emphasis on the aesthetic help set Baldwin’s discipline apart from its near relative, oral history. Consider it oral history with a twist. Researchers in both fields employ similar tools and methods. In the folklore archives next to Baldwin’s office, thick manila envelopes pack shelf after shelf. The contents would be familiar to any oral historian: cassette tapes of interviews, transcripts, photos, written reports. “Folklorists link up with oral historians at one end of the academic thought about how people render accounts of their history and verbal accounts of their culture,” she said. “(Like oral historians) folklorists are very much involved with listening to people talk about family tradition and community tradition, but folklorists may be more interested in the aesthetic dimensions of such narrative and how it carries over into traditional aspects of narrative, such as legend.” Legends like the recurring tales of mysterious lights. To Baldwin, it’s only natural that these legends grow up along deserted lumbering tracks. What are called ghost lights symbolically recall the lumbermen who once labored there and the towns that vanished as the timber dwindled. “Folklorists do a lot of interpretation,” she said. “We’re given license to pull together all sorts of interesting threads about what this could mean without having to prove it in a scientific lab. It comes out of the methodol-ogy. We’re used to looking at artistic metaphors (such as those found in) folk tales and ballads and applying them in different areas.” Artistic metaphors crop up, not only in festivals and legends, but in yards. Baldwin marveled at the creativity of a retired farmer who filled his yard and garden with windmills he crafted out of old bicycle wheels. He was a quiet but friendly man. The windmills, she said, were his way to greet the community as it passed by on the road in front of his home. Another man used an elaborate outdoor Christmas display to raise money for the local homeless shelter. “Sometimes words fail me to describe how articulate the connection is between the symbols these people are creating and what they do with them,” she said. • A s Karen Baldwin put the finishing touches on a book for the University of Mississippi Press, she half-heartedly chastised herself. The book was supposed to be an overview of coastal North Carolina folklife, but the chapter on community festivals had gotten out of hand. It called for another book. Certainly material isn’t lacking. For the past 20 years Dr. Baldwin, an award-winning folkorist and associate professor of English, has haunted festivals throughout eastern North Carolina. The Ayden Collard Festival. The Newport Pig Cooking. The Blessing of the Fleet in Hobucken. The Fourth of July celebration in Whortonsville. The Core Sound Decoy Festival on Harkers Island. The Herring Festival in Jamesville. The Mill Creek Oyster Festival. She has watched some spring to life and others transform. Seen through her eyes, these festivals represent more than the obvious good time. They are symbolic conversations about community values. “The idea of a festival is to create a ceremonial space that’s separate from daily happenings so things out of the ordinary can go on,” she said. Take the Newport Pig Cooking. Sure, it raises money for the volunteer fire department and the Girl Scouts. And sure, the food — Reflected values Dr. Karen Baldwin, associate professor of English The war to end all wars also brought an end to a way of life in the one section of the North Carolina Sandhills. Claiming the pressing needs of the war effort, the federal government in 1918 asserted its power of eminent domain, bought out scores of often unwilling families and established Camp Bragg, a U.S. Field Artillery training center. Over the next 60 years, more land was taken. Today Fort Bragg encompasses more than 200 square miles. But what of the families forced off the land? “There are still people who feel very sad about that loss,” said Dr. Lorraine Aragon, visiting associate professor of anthropology. “It was their ancestral home, and no money could replace that. Others, often those who had 17 • SPRING 2000 • moved out of the area, said it was a good thing. The land was very poor for farming. [Eviction] often got them to areas with better educational opportunities or where they could find other ways to earn a living.” Aragon recently completed a project detailing the recollections of people whose families once lived on land now occupied by the military base. Funded by the base and the Army Construc-tion Engineering Research Laboratories, the project was intended to help the base archaeologist pinpoint sites of historic or prehistoric value. The Army also plans to make a report of this pre-military history available to the public. As part of her research, Aragon conducted extensive taped interviews with 24 former residents or their descendants, ranging in age from 50 to 105, and talked with many others. She led her subjects through as much detail as they could remember from their own lives and family stories. “One African- American woman still remembers where the foundations of her house and the buildings were and where the fields were,” Aragon said. “Her family had owned hundreds of acres, paid for by profits from working turpentine. They had bought it from a white family that probably owned thousands and thousands of acres.” She found distinct differences in the way the region’s major ethnic groups looked back on their history. “For Highland Scots, the point of pride was how their ancestors came from foreign places and conquered this land that was so difficult,” she said. “Some of their genealogical records go back quite far. They know which ancestor came on the boat, which island in Scotland he came from and what he did here.” For African-Americans, stories as well as family records begin in 1865. The pride is in freed ancestors. “It was often not stated, but it was where they began,” Aragon said. “Great-grandfather was a freed slave who was able to buy a piece of property or enter a profession, or he was a preacher or a postman after the Civil War.” Native Americans focus on the present. Their ancestors had viewed the Sandhills — a territory disputed by North and South Carolina — as a good place to hide from an oppressive white government. “They were often dispersed, pushed about, hiding in forests,” she said. “You get a sense of tremendous disruption for a long period of time. Some didn’t even know which group they belonged to, Tuscarora or Lumbee. They often pushed aside the question and said just being Native American is what was important.” For the Army, the project is a commu-nity service venture and a reconnaissance mission. Before it can develop new tracts of land within the base, federal law requires that it document any sites of historical or cultural significance. Aragon’s report will help guide the search. Some of the richest archaeological evidence may be found where the stories of the ethnic groups cross. A ridge running east-west divides the base into two drainage basins. Buffalo trails once followed the ridge. Native Americans followed the buffalo trails to hunt and trade. Later, Europeans took the same paths and eventually turned some into plank roads. “So you have this layering and layering,” Aragon said. “In talking with the archaeologists, they say, coincidentally, they’re finding sites along the ridge.” • Sandhills memories Dr. Lorraine Aragon, visiting associate professor of anthropology • SPRING 2000 • 18 D estiny must have laughed when Louise Toppin met her first opera star. Edgar Toppin, a history professor at Virginia State University, had taken his young daughter backstage after a performance of Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors to meet his colleague. Willis Patterson was still in costume as one of the kings. “He said hello in this very deep voice and scary costume, and I went screaming in the other direction,” Dr. Louise Toppin recalled. Try as she might, Toppin couldn’t run away from opera. Today, this professor of voice is also a coloratura soprano — the highest of the highs — performing in such venues as New York City’s Lincoln Center and Barcelona’s Licieu Theatre. In August, after a performance at the N.C. Museum of Art in Raleigh, she flew to Sweden to sing the role of Bess in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. That was followed Coloratura soprano Louise Toppin, at top and right in the blue dress, performs the role of Mary in Highway One with the Longleaf Opera in Durham. Louise Toppin never meant to be a singer, but talent will out. Today the soprano’s performance schedule takes her around the globe. DT H E R Ei L Uv C T aA N T 19 • SPRING 2000 • C o n t i n u e d immediately by performances in the role of Mary in William Grant Still’s Highway One with the Longleaf Opera in Durham and the title role in Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha with the Roanoke Opera in Roanoke, Va. In April of 2000, she will sing the title character in the world premiere of Luyala, a role composer William Banfield created for her, and she’s booked for China in 2001. She has studied with the best — Phyllis Bryn-Julson, George Shirley, Joan Sutherland, Elly Ameling. “Louise’s talent ranks up there among the highest,” said tenor William Brown of Jacksonville, Fla., who performs with Toppin in a revue of popular music called A Gershwin Party. “The only reason she’s not Kathleen Battle is because she didn’t get to (conductor) James Levine first.” To sit and talk with Toppin on a rare day off, you’d have no idea of her international reputation. On-stage her first syllable fills the farthest reaches of the theater, yet in conversation she speaks softly, reluctantly. Instead of costumes and glitter, she dresses casually, leaning toward shorts and bare feet in warm weather. The suitcase-size black bag she carries everywhere — with Daytimer, cell phone and anything else needed to keep her organized and moving from place to place — threatens to create back problems. The last thing she wants is another injury. Two years ago, as she rushed down some stairs on the way to celebrate her birthday, she tripped. Friends found her in a daze and rushed her to the hospital. The injuries — sprains, cuts, bruises and loose teeth — forced her to cancel five months of performances. She missed only one week of school, but each day left her exhausted. She would teach and sleep, little else. Now, she’s back at full throttle. She performs on the road almost every weekend and arrives at each rehearsal in full command of the music. For Toppin, learning the music means not only memorizing her part, but researching past performances, the composer, the period of history and more. While performing one score, she learns the next. “She gobbles new music like a vortex,” said George Shirley, the longtime Metropolitan Opera star and Toppin’s former teacher. Her voice, he said, has a “pristine, pure, lyrical quality and is always highly enjoyable because of the purity.” Because performing is only part of her life, Toppin runs nonstop from dawn to well past dusk. When in Greenville, she doubles up on lessons with students. Into scattered moments, she squeezes time to record and produce CDs and concerts for Videmus, a nonprofit organization she heads; to organize events for the Pitt County Arts Council; and to direct subscription sales as president of the Pitt County Chapter of the North Carolina Symphony Society. Toppin considers this an easy schedule. Her track record explains why. She completed her college course work in three years, staying a fourth year only to give a senior recital; earned two master’s degrees over the next three years while teaching school to support herself; and in the following three, finished a doctorate that normally takes five years while also teaching at two universities. “A 13- to 14-hour day doesn’t faze me in the least,” she said. “That gives me 10 whole hours for myself, one hour for exercise, one hour for devotional....” Four days after returning from an extended road trip, she still had no food in the house. A year after moving into her first home, furnish-ings remained scant, not even a piano. She had no time for shopping, she said, and as for the piano, well, she has a Steinway grand in her office, and, with perfect pitch, she doesn’t need one to practice singing at home. For relaxation, she goes to movies or turns to her collection of Disney videos. Peter Pan is her favorite. Or she may kick back with a murder mystery or one of several biographies. Last fall, she was alternating among books about Christopher Darden (assistant prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson trial), Billy Graham, Patti LaBelle and Luciano Pavarotti, and she had just completed a biography of Louis XIV. Toppin’s schedule demands that she be organized, and she makes the same demand of her students. “My students know exactly what they’re to do,” she said. If they can’t work independently, if they aren’t willing to practice on their own and to research their music, if they can’t be prompt, she recommends they seek another teacher. Working with Toppin requires dedication and flexibility. For those who make the extra effort, Toppin gives as much or more in return. During a late-afternoon master class, she looked ready for the stage in a black dress and orange sweater and praised the students who had dressed for the parts they would perform for the class. Then she questioned, coaxed and demonstrated technique as the students honed their performance skills. “Can you believe she did that?” she asked the class after quizzing one student. “There are 25 different notes in this piece, and she’s psyched out over one note.” After class, a half-dozen students gathered round. “She’s my mama, my friend,” said Nicole Sonbert, who has studied with Toppin for three years. “She’s not just a teacher. You can go in her office and cry for an hour if you need to, and unless she absolutely has to be somewhere at a certain time, she’ll stay there with you as long as you need her to be.” Charles Oakley nodded. “I had one of those days today,” he said. “I just transferred here this year, and I was thinking I didn’t belong.” • SPRING 2000 • 20 And the music? “She goes out and looks for music others aren’t doing,” said Kenneth Tice. “She’s the repertoire queen,” Sonbert added. “And she works with you on every detail. She’s really concerned about making sure you can sing it correctly.” Toppin’s old teacher can only shake his head. Shirley called her one of the most impressive students he has ever had. “It has always amazed me that she is able to carry on a successful performance career and a successful academic career, to teach as many students as she does while carrying administrative responsibility and extracurricular work,” he said. “I admonish her to pull it back. She’ll do so for a short period, but then she speeds back up. It’s in her nature to need to be very busy.” Into a life of such rigor, a little weakness must fall. For Toppin, it comes with a peanut center, milk chocolate layer and candy coating. She eats peanut M&Ms by the pound. Colleagues tease her. Students begging leniency dangle them before her. Word has even reached audiences. After one standing-ovation performance in Atlanta, the entire front row presented her with bags and bags of M&Ms. She took her second bow munching on candy. Toppin never meant to be singer. She never meant to be any kind of musician, but talent will out. Her mother, Antionette, who taught English at Virginia State, could sing and play. Her father could do neither, but loved music. Recordings of Beethoven symphonies and Tchaikovsky concertos filled the Toppin home, and the parents took their three children to concerts by the Richmond Symphony, the Virginia Opera and jazz greats such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Sarah Vaughan. Piano lessons began as soon as the children were old enough. Louise, the youngest, learned to play as a 5-year-old by tagging along to her siblings’ lessons. By age 9, when her formal lessons began, she was playing Beethoven sonatas. At 10, she played hour-long recitals from memory. Still, she never sang, except around the house and in the church choir. Music was fun, not her future. In high school, she won prizes in calculus and physics. She wanted to be a cardiologist and entered the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with an eye toward medical school. That the university also had a strong music program meant she could continue her work on piano, just for fun. Her first real push came when she mentioned to her father how much she enjoyed the piano lessons. “He has never interfered with our choices, any of them,” she said. This time was different. “He said, ‘You’d make a wonderful doctor, but God has given you talent as a musician. You can help people with what you do with your music. I think you ought to seriously consider a career in music.’ ” Over the next few years, she turned toward singing one reluctant step at a time. After talking with her father, Toppin did change her major to music, but in piano, not voice. She sang in the Carolina choir only because it was required of all music majors and — encouraged by Donna Deese, who would later recruit Toppin to ECU — took her first voice lesson in her senior year. When Toppin headed off to the Peabody Conservatory, it was to earn a master’s degree in piano. Her goal: to become an accompanist. On the side, she joined the school’s prep opera, which gave non-voice majors an opportunity to perform. Phyllis Bryn-Julson, a voice teacher Toppin considered one of the best, heard her in the prep opera. If she could gain admission to the master’s program in voice, Bryn-Julson volunteered, she had a teacher. So Toppin taught herself an audition program — with selections in German, French, Italian, Russian and English — and was on the way to a second master’s. Her plan was to become an accompanist and opera coach. “I did the whole master’s degree never expecting to be a singer,” Toppin said. “I wanted to be the best vocal coach I could be.” To improve her on-stage acting, a teacher referred Toppin to Shirley, who was known as the acting tenor. It was Shirley who gave her the necessary push toward singing and a doctorate in voice. “I felt like I was hearing my father all over again,” Toppin said. Still uneasy with her prospects, she pushed herself through the doctoral work in three years. “I said to myself, if we’re not going to get a job anyway, let’s go ahead and find out we’re not going to get a job so there’s still time to go back and get a bachelor of science and go to medical school.” Toppin requires dedication and flexibility in her students, but gives as much or more in return. Toppin with her co-star in Highway One, Bill McMurray. While performing one role, she is learning the next. 21 • SPRING 2000 • BENCHMARKS OF LOUISE TOPPIN’S CAREER Validation came early, when she made it to the fifth round of the 1990 Munich International Competition. Years earlier, Jessye Norman had won the competition and begun her ascent to stardom. “When I got to the final round, I freaked,” Toppin said. “Up until then, my attitude was, I’m going home at any minute. At that point, I was a novice singer. I was competing with people who had 15 or 16 years of singing. I had only been studying four.” Talent paved Toppin’s way, but shyness erected a major roadblock. As a student, she was terrified of performing in public. Working with her teachers wasn’t much easier. She recalled her early lessons with Shirley: “He worked and worked, and finally he said, ‘You have to look in my direction at some point.’ That’s how bad it was.” Even now, at receptions after performances, she’s likely to find a quiet corner where she can observe instead of mingle. Although Toppin may have inherited musical talent from her mother, the family knows it is her father she most resembles, both in appearance and in habit. He has published 12 books of African- American history and is working on three more. “He’s very industri-ous,” his wife said. “He says he knows how to sleep fast.” Her brother drowned in an accident at 17. The rest of the family remains close. Toppin visits her sister, an accountant, and her family in California. Her parents often travel wherever she does. They came to Greenville when she interviewed for the ECU job in 1990. They flew to Prague when she sang there, to Colorado for the Aspen Music Festival, to Atlanta for Metropolitan Opera auditions. For a Videmus-sponsored concert in Canton, Ohio, Edgar Toppin joined his daughter on-stage, presenting the history behind the works she performed. For Toppin, Videmus is a mission more than an activity. Pianist Vivian Taylor founded the Boston-based group in 1986 to promote recordings and live performances of music by African-Americans, other minorities and women. When Taylor retired in October 1997, Toppin was named the new artistic director and president. Her goal is to broaden the audience for classical music by embracing all cultures. “All of the arts have been seen so long as elitist,” she said. “They really can be enjoyed by everybody. This is a way to open their eyes.” • Finalist, Munich International Competition, 1990. • Leading roles (Silverpeal and Goldentrill) in a Kennedy Center production of Mozart’s The Impresaria, 1992. • First prize district winner and regional finalist, Metropolitan Opera Auditions, 1994. • Christmas concert at Carnegie Hall, 1995. • Begins touring production A Gershwin Party with Leon Bates and William Brown, 1996. • Named artistic director and president, Videmus, 1997. • Release of first orchestral CD Paul Freeman Speaks Volume II with the Czech National Symphony (Albany Records), 1998. • First performance as Bess in a full production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in Sweden, 1999. • Release of Fare Ye Well, her first recording as a producer, 1999. • World premiere of William Banfield’s opera Luyala with Toppin in the title role, 2000. She knows firsthand the difference it can make to feel included. She pulled out a record album of Aida from her parents’ old collection. The cover shows Leontyne Price with her hair in an Afro. “I remember looking at the cover and being fascinated because this was something I had not seen (in person),” she said. “We would go to the Virginia Opera and the Richmond Symphony, and what I didn’t see were any black artists, and here was this woman on the cover. It let me know this was a possibility.” As a shy student appearing in her first operas, Toppin welcomed the costumes and role-playing. “I felt I could be someone else and people weren’t staring at me,” she said. Those who know her wouldn’t want Toppin to be anyone else. They describe a cheerful, smiling daughter. An industrious pupil. An honest and loyal friend. “She’s someone you’d want in a boat with you if you were out in the ocean,” singing partner William Brown said. Even those who have met her only in passing find her impossible to forget. When Toppin visited the University of Michigan to audition for admission to the doctoral program, the deep voice of her father’s former colleague rose from the faculty. “Toppin?” Willis Patterson said. “That’s a Toppin all right, but I don’t know which one. Are you the one that ran away from me?” • Toppin takes a day off work in September 1998 to visit Louis XIV’s home at Versailles while in Europe to present concerts and record a CD with the Czech National Symphony. B i c y c l e h e l m e t s g e t • SPRING 2000 • 22 If the Pitt County Safe Communities Coalition needed a poster child, a baby from Ayden would be a top contender. Last spring the coalition helped the Ayden Police Department conduct a “rodeo” to promote bicycling safety and handed out free bike helmets. One helmet went to an 11-month-old child who rides in a back seat while mom cycles. Within hours of the rodeo, mom had an accident. “The child’s head hit the railroad tracks,” said Officer Kelly Guard, Ayden’s community policing coordinator. “The helmet saved that child’s life.” Chalk up another victory for the Safe Communities Coalition, which has made bicycle safety its No. 1 issue, and for the coalition’s sponsor, the Eastern Carolina Injury Prevention Program. A joint effort of the ECU School of Medicine and Pitt County Memorial Hospital, the Injury Prevention Program seeks to stop the flow of accident victims into emergency departments throughout eastern North Carolina. At Pitt Memorial alone, 13,000 people a year — one-fourth of all ER patients — come in as a result of car wrecks, bicycle accidents, falls, hunting mishaps and all the other unintentional ways human beings hurt themselves. “In the spirit of real health and medicine, we need to keep those people from being injured,” said Dr. Herbert G. Garrison, professor of emergency medicine and director of the Injury Prevention Program. The program’s approach consists of research, demonstration and service. “We take what we know works, apply it and see if it makes a difference,” Garrison said. In the four years since it was organized, the program has received nearly $2 million in external funding to conduct its work. Its projects cover a range of behaviors: • Pitt County SAFEKIDS Coalition. This affiliate chapter of the National SAFEKIDS Campaign distributes national campaign materials and conducts child-safety-seat clinics and other interventions. • Project Replace. Working with the Governor’s Highway Safety Commission, the program gave away 2,400 child safety seats to replace those in automobiles destroyed in the 1999 flood. The seats were distributed at clinics where proper installation was taught. The project ran from Oct. 1 through the end of the year. • REACT. The Rural Enhancement of Access and Care for Trauma Project was funded by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to devise and test treatment standards and training to further reduce deaths of patients being treated by rescue squads and emergency departments in eastern North Carolina. Before and after measurements show a decrease in deaths, but Garrison declined to assign the project full credit. During the same period, he noted, the ECU School of Medicine graduated many emergency room physicians who stayed in the area to practice. • RID. The Reduction of Impaired Driving Project, funded by the Carolinas Medical Center, helped conduct a study of procedures to identify alcohol-impaired drivers seen as patients in emergency departments and to refer them for treatment of alcohol dependency. The results are being analyzed. • CAPTAIN. With a grant from the Duke Endowment, the program is running nurturing courses for families in Pitt, Greene and Martin counties. The program is called CAPTAIN, for Child Abuse Prevention Through Advocacy, Interven-tion and Nurturing. More than 230 families have participated and 150 volunteers have been trained to work with other families to prevent child abuse. • Teen Suicide Prevention. This new project is designed to encourage teenagers to ask for help when they feel depressed or stressed. The Safe Communities Coalition provides another case in point. In 1996, the National Highway Traffic Safety Adminis-tration sought local organizations to test the theory that the best way to reduce traffic injuries is to get broad partnerships of local people involved in analyzing the problems HARD a b i g p u s h i n a n e f f o r t HATS t o r e d u c e i n j u r i e s i n ONLY e a s t e r n N o r t h C a r o l i n a 23 • SPRING 2000 • and devising solutions. The Eastern Carolina Injury Prevention Program won one of four grants to set up a national demonstration under the acronym PISCES, for Pitt Initiative for Safe Communities Evolving Successfully. Garrison hired a project coordinator, Jennifer Smith, and pulled together a coalition of about 60 individuals represent-ing health care, rescue squads, law enforcement, human services, business, traffic engineering, the legal community, the insurance industry, parents and the community at large. Together, they pored over local accident data, examined existing injury prevention programs and targeted bicycle safety as their top priority. While it’s too soon to determine how much the coalition has affected injuries showing up in the emergency room, it can boast that: • Three Pitt County municipalities — Greenville, Grifton and Ayden — have passed laws requiring bicyclists age 15 and younger to wear helmets along public roads. No other county in North Carolina can say as much. • It has given away or sold at a reduced cost more than 600 helmets. • More than 1,000 children have participated in bicycle safety schools and events, such as the Ayden rodeo. • Surveys in Greenville showed that helmet use rose from 7 percent to 20 percent during the first year the helmet law was in effect. In a nearby community without a helmet law, helmet use went from zero to 7 percent during the same period. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that helmets reduce the risk of head injury 85 percent and of brain injury 88 percent. “Helmets won’t prevent accidents,” Garrison said, “but they will prevent the injuries that are most likely to kill.” Although focusing on bicycle safety, the coalition has not ignored other ways to reduce accidents. It lobbied successfully to establish a Safe Driving School, operated by Pitt Community College, as a sentencing alternative for drivers charged with speeding at least 15 miles an hour over the limit. Approxi-mately 250 people have gone through the school. A follow-up study will assess whether the graduates were any less likely to be charged with later traffic violations. The coalition also has applied for a state grant to install audible crosswalk signals for the visually impaired. Dr. Carolyn Crump and Robert Letourneau of the Injury Prevention Research Center at UNC-Chapel Hill, brought in to assess the project, were so impressed they nominated it for the Allstate Insurance Safety Leadership Award Program. And other groups — representing Craven and Wilson counties, the Marine Corps and Bowman Gray Medical Center — are calling Greenville to ask how they can follow suit. “In some communities you can’t even get everyone in the same room to have a conversa-tion,” said Sarah Minges, a consultant to non-profit organizations who serves on the coalition and on the Governor’s Highway Safety Commission. “But here we bring everyone in and respect everyone’s expertise. Dr. Garrison has a talent for bringing out the best in people.” Crump and Letourneau watched the coalition evolve over its two-year start-up and are detailing its record in a report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administra-tion. It was particularly telling, they said, that a survey of coalition members showed that three-quarters reported being “very” or “extremely” satisfied with their involvement and 97 percent said they felt the coalition had been “very” or “extremely” effective in getting things done. As the grant period ran out at the end of 1999, the coalition’s members vowed to continue the work and began drawing up papers to establish a non-profit organization. That’s the kind of result Barbara Sauers, who oversees the Safe Communities program for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, wants to hear. “Coalitions are challenging,” she said. “You have to find ways to keep them alive and vibrant. One of the pleasant aspects of the Greenville project is that they’ve been able to address and overcome turf problems.” • In the 16th century, Erasmus opened the eyes of the world to a new way of thinking. Today, an international team of scholars hopes to open the eyes of the world to Erasmus. Renaissance • SPRING 2000 • 24 Few people have had so profound an influence on modern thought while remaining virtually anonymous as the 16th century Dutch-born Erasmus. This theologian, educator, author and adviser to popes and kings left behind a legacy that continues to influence the Western world. He helped launch the Reformation, introduced a new approach to education and changed forever the way Christians read the New Testament. Yet of his writings, only the satirical work The Praise of Folly is likely to be found on library shelves, and for name recognition, he pales alongside such contemporaries as Martin Luther and Henry VIII. Soon, however, Erasmus may get his due — or at least some portion of it. About 100 scholars from around the world are in-volved in a project to translate 90 volumes of Erasmus’ literature and letters from Latin into English, complete with annotations ex-plaining historical and literary references. The University of Toronto Press project — called the Collected Works of Erasmus — is predicted by one reviewer to become “one of the century’s great scholarly achievements.” “At one time, Erasmus could be read because Latin was more widely known,” said classics pro-fessor Dr. Charles Fantazzi. “Until recently, at least those who taught the Renaissance and theol-ogy could read Latin, but now the language is not known by many people, so it’s very important to make these works available, not only for the knowledge of his period in his-tory, but of our own.” Fantazzi serves on the project’s execu-tive and editorial boards. He also has had a hand in translating and annotating four of the 40 volumes that have been released so far, including the Handbook of the Christian Soldier, with two volumes of correspon-dence in preparation. The work is rigorous, he said. The board demands accurate and elegant translations. “Erasmus wrote very good Latin so he must be rendered into equally good English,” he said. “We insist on a readable presentation for the ordinary reader.” edge talked with Fantazzi to learn more about Erasmus, who was both literally and figuratively a Renaissance man. EDGE: What was Erasmus’ greatest single achievement? FANTAZZI: Without question, his work on the New Testament, including an edition of the Greek text, his own Latin translation and annotations on the text, which took up almost as much space as the Latin and Greek texts put together. It was a huge success, going through five editions. Erasmus’ Greek text was the first ever published and became the basis of the received or standard text, which remained unchallenged for three centuries. It lies behind the King James Version of the Bible. His Latin version was also published separately and was widely disseminated. It was the basis of Luther’s German translation and other Protestant translations. EDGE: Still, his texts were not without controversy, were they? FANTAZZI: Erasmus was fiercely at-tacked for daring to tamper with the sacro-sanct Latin version of the Bible known as the Vulgate, or common version, which was at-tributed to St. Jerome. But, as Erasmus pointed out, Jerome himself had corrected previous Latin versions of the New Testament by comparing them with the original Greek manuscripts, just as he did. He contended that the text of the Vulgate then current was not all by Jerome and contained many scribal errors. As for the divine inspiration of this version, he quoted Jerome’s own words in a letter to a certain Desiderius: “It is one thing to be a prophet, another to be a translator.” The theo-logians of Paris and Louvain were particularly irritated by all this because their explanations of doctrinal matters were based on the form of the Vulgate then in use. Erasmus was thus undermining their authority. EDGE: The encyclopedia calls Erasmus a Christian humanist. What does that mean? FANTAZZI: Humanism was a scholarly movement of the Renaissance period that redis-covered classical Latin and Greek literature. Erasmus thought — just as earlier church fa-thers like Jerome and Augustine did — that there was a true link between pagan and Chris-tian wisdom. One could read Plato and Cicero, for example, and take what was good in them and harmonize it with Christianity. So Christian humanism is just that, using pagan classics to help us understand our Christian beliefs and live a Christian life. Erasmus believed that just reading these works could make you a better Christian. He once said that reading good books is more beneficial to the soul than food is to the body. EDGE: Erasmus lived at the time the Reformation was ripping apart the Catholic Church. Where did he stand in this struggle? FANTAZZI: He was right in the middle of it because he was trying to convince the pope, the cardinals and other high officials of the church to be more understanding instead of punitive toward some of the reformers, espe-cially Luther. He wanted reconciliation, to keep the church together. At the same time, he knew the church needed reform. Although he dis-agreed with Luther on some points, particularly on free will, he admired him as pious and well-meaning, but in the end Luther’s intransigence became intolerable to him. Erasmus is con-stantly saying that he realizes how bad things are getting and isn’t sure where it’s going to end up, but he often comments, “I think I see the hand of God in all this.” The church, of course, didn’t listen to Erasmus. Many of the prominent theologians in Paris and Rome thought of Erasmus as a heretic and a sympathizer with Luther. Erasmus thought they were using this as an excuse to put down his ideas about humanism by connecting the study of the classics, what he called “bonae litterae,” or “good letters,” with religious rebel-lion. He was right in this, but they were never able to condemn him for anything heretical. 25 • SPRING 2000 • Man C o n t i n u e d Erasmus of Denmark, Musée du Louvre, Cliche des Musées Nationaux • SPRING 2000 • 26 EDGE: Where did he see the need for reform? FANTAZZI: Erasmus attacked the church as an institution with its empty ceremo-nies and manmade laws like those on fasting, clerical celebacy, divorce and the granting of indulgences. His philosophy of Christ stressed a personal and direct relationship with God, rather than mediation by sacraments. In his new interpretations of scriptural passages, he undermined church teachings. He explained, for example, that when John the Baptist ex-horts his followers to repentance, the Greek word used, “metanoeite,” means a “change of heart” and has nothing to do with penances handed out in sacramental confession. Erasmus had no use for the superstitious wor-ship of relics, saying that there were enough relics of the true cross in circulation to fill a cargo ship. His trenchant wit and biting satire won him many enemies. EDGE: In terms of his theology, did Erasmus have a continuing influence? FANTAZZI: Most Catholics saw him as subversive, but his approach to the reading of the Bible had a profound influence on the Prot-estants. He applied the scientific study of phi-lology — the study of language itself — to the Bible, which previously had been something sacrosanct, not subject to philological interpre-tation. He sought to unite learning and piety. He said it was not sufficient to be pious. You have to cultivate the mind, to study in order to understand the message of the Gospel. He also wanted to get away from the minute dis-cussion of the fine points of dogma and make Christianity more genuine, a lived Christian-ity. He said you should not only learn the Bible, but put it into practice. EDGE: Were all of his books religious in nature? FANTAZZI: He published both reli-gious and secular books. After the New Testa-ment, he wrote paraphrases of all the Gospels and Epistles that made those books more un-derstandable to the common person. These were later translated from Latin into the ver-nacular languages so that everyone could have access to them. In the Church of England, the English version of his paraphrases of the Gos-pel and Epistle for the day had to be posted outside the door every Sunday. His Handbook of the Christian Soldier, a guide to true piety, was also important. It was translated immedi-ately into the vernacular languages and had great influence, especially in Spain. He also wrote fine poetry — in Latin, of course. Everything he wrote was in Latin. Even his letters may be regarded as models of good Latin style. And he published a couple of reference books that became very popular. One was De Copia, or The Foundations of the Abundant Style, which was a textbook on how to write good Latin. Shakespeare was brought up on it. And he published a book of about 4,000 adages that he collected over many years. Probably no other work of Erasmus had such a profound impact on European culture. Most of the sayings still in use today come from this compilation, such as “a flash in the pan,” “to have one foot in the grave,” “to break the ice,” “to blow your own horn.” Erasmus gives the origins of all these sayings in Greek and in Latin and adds his own com-mentary, which sometimes becomes a full-fledged essay. EDGE: Erasmus was an educator, too. Was this an important aspect of his work? FANTAZZI: Erasmus is regarded as one of the greatest figures in the history of educa-tion. He was the chief spokesman of the new learning in the north of Europe, where he estab-lished the educational principles of the Italian humanists. He did this through a series of manuals that touched on every aspect, theoreti-cal and practical, of education — curriculum, methods of study, pedagogy and the training of the teacher. These had a great diffusion throughout Europe during his lifetime and after his death. He reformed the teaching of Greek in his brief career at Oxford and Cambridge. He was instrumental in the foundation of the Col-lege of the Three Languages in Louvain, which added Hebrew to Greek and Latin as the lan-guages to be taught in the study of the Scripture. It is often said of Erasmus that he laid the egg of the Reformation and Luther hatched it. But he also laid the egg of a whole new type of educa-tion, and it was hatched by his many disciples. EDGE: A large portion of the Collected Works of Erasmus will consist of the transla-tions and annotations of his letters. Why are they so important? FANTAZZI: It’s often said that his letters are, without comparison, the best documenta-tion we have of the intellectual history of the first half of the 16th century. He traveled throughout Europe and had contacts with all the leading princes and prelates of his time. He lived at various times in England, the Low Countries, Germany, France, Italy. He corre-sponded with such potentates as Pope Leo X, England’s Henry VIII and King Sigismund I of Poland. All of them wanted Erasmus to take up residence in their country. He also wrote to fellow scholars all over Europe so that one can now follow in his correspondence the historical and political events of the time. Erasmus often said that his writings would give a more accu-rate picture of him than any artistic likeness. The letters are the most intimate portrait. • “Erasmus wrote in very good Latin so he must be rendered in equally good English,” says Charles Fantazzi. The abundance of colors (top) indicates excessive electrical activity in a stutterer’s brain. With frequency altered feedback, the activity drops to near normal levels (bottom). their brain, compared with a fluent person. Specifically, they display Beta band hyperreactivity, and it is most pronounced in the posterior-temporal- parietal electrode sites. The researchers also looked at what happens to those signals under experimental conditions. They found significant changes. When stutterers heard their electronically altered voices, not only did their speech improve, but their brains’ electrical signals looked more like those of fluent people. They showed less activity on the right side of the brain and more on the left. Altogether, this boils down to a new theory of the cause of stuttering. Perhaps it’s not a motor control problem after all. Instead, Rastatter suggested, the signals from the right side of the brain are overloading the neurological pathways and thus interfering with the left side’s ability to send out clear messages. With their technology proven, the researchers’ next challenge is to make it practical for everyday use, which means shrinking it to the size of a hearing aid. For this, they’ve teamed up with the College of Engineering at North Carolina State University. They anticipate a first-generation prototype by August 2000. The team has applied for a grant to field test the device with hundreds of adults and children in Pitt County who stutter. The therapy also may prove useful for other communication disorders. Rastatter, chair of the department, said trials with dyslexic children have produced dramatic improvements in reading and comprehension. For Kalinowski, whose experiments with digital signal process-ing launched the team’s current line of research, the success has brought personal as well as professional satisfaction. He knows firsthand the frustration of stuttering, even after 190 hours of speech therapy. Recalling one therapist, he shook his head. “She thought I didn’t know how to speak,” he said. “I know how. It’s just that the system breaks down.” • 27 • SPRING 2000 • The 17-year-old boy was too stunned to smile. “How did I do that?” he asked. What he had done was simply to read aloud, clearly and fluently. Behind a glass wall, his parents wept. They had never before heard their son speak without a severe, agonizing stutter. For most of his life, a 55-year-old Raleigh man had avoided speech as much as possible. But when he donned headphones in a laboratory at the School of Allied Health Sciences, his stutter disappeared. He could speak without embarrassment. For these individuals and millions like them who stutter, researchers at ECU now offer the hope of fluency. Drs. Michael Rastatter, Joseph Kalinowski and Andrew Stuart of the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders have demonstrated that slight alterations in hearing can bring dramatic improvements in a stuttering person’s ability to speak clearly. They recently received a patent on a device that may one day extend this laboratory-borne fluency to the outside world. Stuttering afflicts an estimated 2 to 3 percent of the world’s population. The cause is unknown. Numerous therapies have been tried through the centuries, but none has shown significant, long-term effectiveness. Currently the dominant therapy involves slowing the stutterer’s speech, on the theory that the underlying problem is one of speech motor control. The ECU experiments, on the other hand, enable stutterers to speak clearly at both a normal and a fast pace. Success also has been measured in telephone conversations, one of a stutterer’s most difficult challenges. The scientists use a digital signal processor — similar to the sound board and headphones musicians use in a recording studio — to alter the speed or pitch at which a stutterer hears his own voice. It’s called altered auditory feedback. With as little as a fraction of a second’s delay or a half-octave change up or down, the stutter lessens and often disappears completely. They have tested their methodology with more than 300 stutterers. Fluency improved between 50 and 100 percent in nearly all cases. “And it happens just like that,” Rastatter said with a snap of his fingers. This speed, combined with the degree of fluency, told Rastatter and his colleagues that something other than speech motor control accounted for the improvements. To learn more, the researchers looked inside the brain itself. Using quantitative electroencephalograms, they have studied the brain’s neurological signaling during speech in fluent persons and in stutterers. The left side of the brain controls language functions. Stutterers, however, show excess electrical activity on the right side of Hope for F l u e n c y Patented device may eliminate stuttering. • SPRING 2000 • 28 The noise never stopped. For three weeks, the pounding, squealing, grinding of the truck-mounted drill accompanied Dr. Catherine Ann Rigsby day and night. The walls of her tent afforded little protection from the roar or from temperatures that dropped below zero every night. Fortunately, the souvenirs made the whole trip worthwhile. The souvenirs were eight 50-meter cores from the Altiplano, or High Plain, of the Bolivian Andes. The cores will help Rigsby, associate professor of geology, interpret more than 40,000 years of climatic history. This history in turn may help us better understand how the buildup of greenhouse gases is likely to affect future global climate. The need to improve climate models drives the project. Human activity has resulted in significant increases in the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases being released into the atmosphere, and there are short-term indications of resulting global warming. If this continues, sea level could rise as the polar ice caps melt, and severe drought could overtake the U.S. grain belt, just for starters. On the other hand, higher temperatures and resulting evaporation could set off a cascading effect that shuts down such warm water currents as the Gulf Stream and sends northern latitudes into another ice age. “Even the best models we have for predicting climate change are not very accurate,” Rigsby said. “Some say the Clockwise from top: In the Bolivian Andes, a glacier once filled the curving valley still discernible in the hills behind the drilling rig. Drilling cores reveal layers of sediment that will help unravel 40,000 years of climate history. “A lot of sand tells you this was a shoreline,” Catherine Rigsby says about her coring samples. Through hindcasting, cores from the Bolivian Andes may yield clues to future global climate. The treasure of the A l t i p l a n o Photo by Catherine Ann Rigsby 29 • SPRING 2000 • temperature will be higher, and some say lower. So what the scientific community wants to do is something called hindcasting. We find out all we can about major episodes of climate change in the past, and then we use the known information to test the models and in that way figure out which are most accurate.” So far, most of the evidence has been gathered from ice cores taken from the poles. Rigsby and others now seek to correlate the ice core data with information from equatorial regions. It will be a vital component of any climate change model. The tropics collect most of the Earth’s heat from the sun and, through a combination of heat and water vapor, power the planet’s atmospheric circulation. In the Western Hemisphere, this search leads to South America. Because erosion has washed evidence of the ancient past from the Amazon River basin, Rigsby is concentrating her research on an area about 12,000 feet up in the Andes Mountains of Bolivia. Here, a stable geologic history has left a thick and continuous record of sedimentation and vegetation. Rigsby hopes to chart how lakes and rivers on the Altiplano grew and shrank through the ages — telltale evidence of fluctuating precipitation. Four years of preliminary studies paid off in late spring 1999, when the National Science Foundation awarded her a three-year, $300,000 grant for a large-scale research effort. The timing gave her only three weeks to assemble a team and equipment for field work during ECU’s summer break, which coincides with Bolivia’s winter. Despite a limited knowl-edge of Spanish, a remote location and extreme cold, she pulled together the monthlong expedition, which included three weeks of camping and round-the-clock drilling in the now-dry valley floor. By September, she was back in Greenville analyzing the first set of cores. In her lab last fall, she pointed to the different colors of sediment. ��These cores show the transition between lake and river,” she said. “A lot of sand tells you this was a shoreline. Where there’s an abrupt shift from sand to clay, we know the environment has gotten wetter. The clays were deposited in ancient lakes.” Colleagues will help her tease out other vital pieces of climate history. Radiocarbon-dating will attach dates to the different layers of sediment. Salt content will tell the rate of evaporation. Plant and animal remains will reveal the temperature range. All together, these cores should contain a 40,000-year record of the climate in a key area of the planet. Rigsby plans a second drilling expedition for summer 2000. “I know it sounds exotic, but this field work has global implications,” she said. “It’s important for understanding climate change, and for people in places like coastal North Carolina, climate change could have a big impact in terms of rising sea level.” • • SPRING 2000 • 30 Into the often rancor-ous debate over fisheries regu-lations, ECU scientists have inserted more harmonious sounds: the burping, purring and drumming of amorous fish. These sounds — or, more precisely, the information they provide on spawning — are guiding efforts to preserve several valuable but dwindling coastal species. For more than a decade, fisheries managers on the East Coast have noted dramatic declines in the harvest of weakfish, spotted sea trout and red drum, important species for both commercial and recreational fishing. The 1998 commercial catch in North Carolina, for example, was only half that of 1989. The declining catch and other indicators tell state and federal fisheries managers that they need better regulations to protect these species from overfishing and to allow their populations to recover. A necessary element in any recovery plan is protection for the fish during spawning season. To design these regulations, the managers need to be able to identify more precisely when and where the fish spawn. That’s where the ECU scientists enter the picture. Led by Drs. Joseph J. Luczkovich, Hal J. Daniel III and Mark W. Sprague, they have used the mating calls of male fish to create a timetable and habitat chart for spawning activities in a large section of the Pamlico Sound. “We’re not the first to record fish sounds, but we are the first to apply them to management issues,” said Luczkovich, associate professor of biology and associate scientist with the Institute for Coastal and Marine Studies. In doing so, they’ve shown managers a way to identify spawning habitat that is simpler, less time-consuming and more accurate than any previously used. Before, managers would collect eggs and estimate the time and place they were laid. Or they would catch fish and estimate their readiness for spawning based on the weight of their reproductive organs. State and federal agencies have taken note and are citing the team’s work as they draw up plans for red drum restoration and for coastal habitat protection, according to Dr. Louis Daniel, executive assistant for federal councils with the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries. The ECU method builds on existing knowledge of fish behavior and the laws of physics. Male fish “vocalize” during mating by contracting the muscle along their swim bladder, an organ that also allows them to ad-just their depth in the water. Different fish make different sounds. While the red drum attracts his lady love with a knocking sound, the spotted sea trout creates burps, and the weakfish purrs like the rotors on a helicopter. These sounds, unlike light, travel through the murky waters of the Pamlico Sound. “If something makes a sound, you can learn a lot about that object by measuring the sound,” said Sprague, assistant professor of physics. “Loudness can give you information about distance and the number of fish.” According to Daniel, professor of biology, you also can learn something about the size of the fish from the frequency, or pitch, of its sound production. Big fish produce sounds with a lower pitch, and small fish produce higher-pitched sounds. But eavesdropping on fish in such a large body of water presented a real challenge. How could they do it economically? Answer: with a little ingenuity and some off-the-shelf equipment. Armed with Radio Shack talking alarm clocks and microcassette recorders, they built sonar buoys that they program to turn on and off at certain times. They could set the buoys out, then come back the next day to collect them for analysis. Early experiments confirmed that fish spawn only at night and showed the scientists they could get maximum information on a one-hour tape by recording for two minutes every half hour for 12 hours. Back in the lab, a student would log the fish sounds, aided by the alarm clock’s announcement of the time of each recording. Eventually, such tedious work will be turned over to a computer. The team also collected fish eggs from the buoy sites and took those eggs back to the lab for positive identification. (The eggs of these species are practically identical to the naked eye.) Mitochondrial DNA analysis verified that the species the scientists heard were the ones spawning. Another important finding was confirmation that red drum spawn in the estuaries. Previous models had located their spawning habitat only in the open ocean. The egg collections revealed something else, too. The louder the fish sounds on the tape, the more eggs were laid. “The physics predicts the biological measurements almost perfectly,” Sprague said. Some incidental discoveries proved almost as interesting. On many recordings, the scientists picked up the mating sounds of yet another species, the silver perch. “Sometimes the sound would be quite loud, and all of a sudden it would go quiet,” Luczkovich said. “Then we’d hear a dolphin’s whistle.” The dolphin, which possesses the best sonar in the natural world, has a distinct taste for silver perch. An experiment in the marine lab at Beaufort confirmed the scientists’ suspicions. The fishes’ mating sounds were giving their location away to predators. “We think we’re the first to record the sounds of sex and death in the sea,” Luczkovich said. • Love songs of spawning fish point the way to better management plans. Sounds f i s h y A sample of the sounds Joe Luczkovich and his team collected with their homemade sonar buoys may be heard at http://croaker.physics.ecu.edu. Photo by Johnathan Bascom 31 • SPRING 2000 • As soon as the war ended, they would return home and life would be better. Through three decades of exile, that thought sustained Eritrean refugees eking out an existence in the hot, dry lands of eastern Sudan. Their opportunity came in 1993, when the civil war in Ethiopia ended and Eritrea gained its independence, yet the anticipated floods of repatriation never materialized. Today, 300,000 Eritreans remain hunkered down in the dusty poverty of a land n |
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