[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

JAY JENKINS:

This is an interview Jay Jenkins is conducting with Dallas Herring in his home in Rose Hill, North Carolina on February 14 for the Oral History Program.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

1987, you might add.

JAY JENKINS:

1987, thank you. Well, Dallas, if you would, let's begin with a brief biographical sketch.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Well, this is an appropriate place to begin, Jay. I was born in this room, seventy-one years ago, March 5, 1916. And the first light I saw at 2:00 that Sunday morning was in that coal grate fireplace. I thought of it as the center of the universe. I realize it is to me, and maybe my twin sister, but nobody else. I, first of all, am greatly pleased to see you again after so many years. I remember the trip that you and Pete McKnight 1 and Epps Ready 2 made to Hartford, Connecticut. 1 Editor of the Charlotte Observer, a Davidson classmate. 2 Dr. Epps Ready, director of the Curriculum Study, State Board of Education 1958. Pete had the idea that they could tell us something about improving the schools. I enjoyed the trip.

JAY JENKINS:

As I recall, you told them more than they told you.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

It was mutually helpful, I think. But I never have forgotten that trip. The great regret I have in my isolation here is that I have so little contact anymore with people like you with whom I was very active for so long a time. They're real memories for me, and I'm grateful for them. I graduated at Davidson in 1938, and in 1939 I was elected mayor of

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this village and spent twelve years in that role. We got the streets paved, the water and sewer system installed, and a new town hall, and fire department building. I thought my public career was over.

I had the personal disappointment of being rejected a number of times by the young lady on whom I had fixed my affections. [laughter] I sort of had the idea that I would withdraw into my Trappist monastery and have very little to do with the world, but the good Lord or somebody had a different view of it.

In 1951 Robert Carr was elected to the legislature which created a vacancy on the Duplin County Board of Education. January 1st, I reluctantly agreed to serve out the rest of his term. I was approached three times. The first two times I gave them a negative answer. I didn't have any children, and I thought it was a job that parents should do. But on the third occasion I remembered the good Lord called Samuel, and he finally listened. Maybe he was trying to tell me something.

I went over there [to Kenansville] to the meeting. The superintendent had everything lined up. All we had to do was open the meeting. As Hiden Ramsey 3 said many times about the trustees of the Negro colleges, they didn't have any authority. 3 Hiden Ramsey, retired editor of the Asheville Citizen Times, former member of the State Board of Education and first chairman of the Board of Higher Education. This was before '54. They opened the meeting with prayer and closed it with profanity and went home [laughter] after their annual meeting. They couldn't hire the teachers. They couldn't hire the president. All they did was take responsibility for

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whatever went wrong. With all due respect to my colleagues and the superintendent, that's the way the Duplin Board of Education was going about its business. And I remember having a discussion with O. P. Johnson, the superintentent. I said, "If I'm going to spend my time at this job as your draftee, you're going to hear from me. I want to see some results."

I'm a graduate of Rose Hill High School, and I went to Davidson College to compete with boys from Woodberry Forest, McCalleys, and Darlington, and Central High School in Charlotte, I might add. They had already gone through most of the first year curriculum, and it was foreign to me. I felt at a great disadvantage.

I resolved sometime to do something about it. And here I am in the place of responsibility, and we're going to do something about the quality of education. The superintendent welcomed that. Coincidentally, he told us that Guy Phillips had a grant from the Kellogg Foundation. He was dean of the University School of Education, Chapel Hill. I said, "Well, this is great. The experts will come down and tell us what's wrong and that will straighten it out, and I can go on back to my monastery." Well, Allan Hurlburt was new to the faculty there, and Guy put him in charge of it. He had been at East Carolina and later went to Duke after a brief stay in the State Department of Public Instruction.

Summarizing very quickly what happened there: they didn't give us any expert advice. I thought we threw our twelve hundred dollars away. I think that's what we contributed. There were

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seven counties, Harnett—I forget now, Concord, Cabbarus, Stanley, I believe. The process that they used was rather socratic. It tried to elicit from us an understanding of what constituted a good public school education, and, second, how you're going to get such a program. We decided—we only had fifteen high schools. We visited all fifteen of them. Had a committee of citizens from each of the districts, black and white. This was in 1951 before the court decreed that we should integrate. Blacks and whites in Duplin County were sitting down eating together and talking about mutual problems. I could see a rather quick transition in the thinking of the citizens, sixty odd people, from intensive interest in their own district school to an interest in the whole county. We were all surprised to see that others had better or worse schools than we had—no real equality. The more we met the more citizens wanted to meet with us. I recall the county commissioners were concerned about citizens meeting in different places, all about the county. They were not involved and asked to be permitted to attend the meetings, and the legislator also. Pretty soon we had a countywide citizens movement going without realizing what we were doing.

JAY JENKINS:

Well, I'll declare.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

We began seriously to debate the issue: What kind of schools do we have actually? Are they big enough? Are they too big? Are they too little? What constitutes a good size? And you determine the dimensions of the curriculum to some extent by the size of the school. For example, if you have a three-

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teacher high school at Magnolia and a three-teacher high school at Rose Hill, you've got to teach the basic required subjects in each of those locations. But if you put them together you've got six teachers, and you might squeeze in another subject or two. We really had not faced that before. It's something that we didn't want to think about.

In 1953 the state board of education decreed that the Magnolia School would be closed. Hiden Ramsey led the State Board of Education at the time. Old man Hunter was sent down here, not to ask us whether we would agree to that, but to tell us that we were going to close that school. They sent it to Rose Hill, of all places. It stirred up the people of Magnolia. They resented it. I remember going before the Board of Education in Raleigh and asking them to give us some time to work it out our way, but they were very unyielding. Umstead was governor then. There were fifteen schools across the state that they had decreed were too small and not cost effective and should be closed. It undoubtedly was true. The problem was the way they went about solving the problem.

JAY JENKINS:

By decree.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

It created quite a stir in the '53 session of the legislature. If you read the journal, you'll see that Umstead went before the legislature and asked that they remove the authority of the State Board of Education to consolidate schools and put it back in the hands of the local boards of education. Then he said, and this was very perceptive on his part, "I warn you that you'll have more consolidation of schools under that

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arrangement than you have now." It turned out to be very prophetic. I agreed with him thoroughly that you need to put the responsibility—no, the authority where the responsibility is locally.

JAY JENKINS:

Was that adopted?

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

It was adopted. It was a heated issue. If you will read the newspaper file from 1953, Magnolia School was reopend as a result of public pressure. But then our Kellogg project reached a climax about the same time. The citizens themselves began to debate the issue. Wallace needed a new high school. Rose Hill needed a new high school. They began talking among themselves—it's seven miles apart. The village of Teachey is between them. To make a long story short, the citizens decided they wanted to consolidate the schools. Calypso and Faison were the first. For years they couldn't make up their minds which side of Goshen Swamp they wanted to put their schools on. They were not opposed to consolidating. They came before the board and said, "Build us a new school, and we'll let you put it wherever you want to." The mayor of the town, each mayor, the board of commissioners—a unanimous decision.

The only trouble was we didn't have the money to do anything with. But there were the county commisioners involved, you see. We turned to them at the same meeting and said we have got to have the money to do this and right now. I don't think it took but about $200,000. This was 1953, I think it was. We built them a new school, North Duplin High School, and from that beginning we had the consolidation of all the schools.

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Then, of course, at the time of the Supreme Court decision in 1954 we were in the process of building a new Union School for blacks. We were just ready to let the contract. It's now the E. E. Smith School at Kenansville, named for the Duplin native, E. E. Smith, who was president of Fayetteville State. We had a meeting—called a special meeting of the black leaders of the Kellogg project. "What do you want us to do? We've got new instructions from higher up about this. We're fixing to build the blacks a school." They understood. They really didn't seem to me to be thinking about integration and were not concerned about it. But one of them in the back got up and said, "Go ahead and build it. We'll use it together." [laughter] And that's what we did.

JAY JENKINS:

Well, I'll declare, integrated from the beginning.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Well, it took some time, you know, for that idea to be absorded but we went ahead and built the school realizing that it probably would be an integrated school eventually. It was located very well—in the center of the county. It's now a junior high school. And Warsaw, Kenansville, and Magnolia came together [to form a new high school, James Kenan].

Well, I dragged that out a little further than I should have, but it taught me a lesson that I had previously learned here in Rose Hill when we paved the streets, even before Kerr Scott's program and the Powell Bill Fund Program started for building streets. We paid for it ourselves without any help from anybody. But it was because the people got together and said the streets were so bad that they were just ready to do it. If you

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put the problem in the laps of the people and put them in a situation where they have got to make a decision themselves, they are apt to make the right decision if you give them time to study it and if they know all the facts.

Well, I got involved in that process with the State School Board Association, which was Guy Phillips' private organization. He gave his life to it. He had me making speeches in Smyrna down here at the jumping off place in Carteret County, and Cullowhee, Boone, and Wadesboro. I don't know where all I did go.

JAY JENKINS:

To encourage consolidation.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Telling them the Duplin story. What we were doing and how we asked these three questions and gave the citizens a chance to answer them themselves and did not hand them out the answers. We didn't go there saying we ought to consolidate this school. We asked them what they wanted to do about it, and the thing spread over to Sampson County. Chevis Kerr was chairman of the board of the city unit, Clinton. We became great friends and our two families, the Herrings and the Kerrs, were neighbors down on Black River for generations. I saw Chevis' niece last summer, I mean his daughter rather. That's just a little about them, he was a great man. But he helped in the same way to bring this about in Sampson County, consolidation of the schools. We went up into Wayne, over into Lenoir. Harnett County wouldn't go along. They were in the group of the Kellogg study, but they still had problems. Well, after this, this movement began

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gaining momentum, not only in Duplin but in a number of counties about the state.

The fifties were a time of ferment anyway. The National Citizens Council for Better Schools, Dr. Conant's 4 group, was plugging "better schools make better communities." 4 Dr. James Conant, late president of Harvard University, founder of citizens study groups, author of The American High School, etc. I became a member of that, the board of trustees of the national group. In fact, I was in San Francisco, May 17, 1954, at a meeting of that group when the court ruled on the segregation cases. I was the only person from the south. They had me out there to lead a panel discussion.

JAY JENKINS:

What outfit was that?

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Dr. James B. Conant's organization was called the National Citizens Commission for the Public Schools and was changed to Council for Better Schools. Roy Larson was the chairman of it, the president of Time, Inc. We had such people as John Hersey, the author of The Wall and other novels, Harry Sherman, president of the Book-of-the-Month-Club, even Beardsley Ruml, the author of the withholding tax thing. People of that caliber, in my class, you might say [laughter] . I don't know what the devil they had me out there for, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm not just name dropping. It really happened. I had looked forward to hearing Walter Lippman's speech. You know television hadn't come in, and I just had read a great deal of his columns. They used to appear in the Charlotte Observer when

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I was a student at Davidson. I admired his mental capacities and insight.

Larson was a very interesting person to me too. He had been interested in Walter Hines Page, as I had myself. I remember when [1933] my parents took me to Davidson, we stopped at Red Springs and put off three sisters at Flora McDonald and went on by Alberdeen and stopped at old Bethesda church and looked at Walter Hines Page's grave and then went on to Davidson. I, all my life, had been interested in his attitude, his philosophy, and so on. Larson, by coincidence, was bitten by the same bug. He asked me to sit beside him at breakfast at the hotel the next morning.

A group of people, who were leading the panels and taking part on the program, including Lipman, were there. And somebody came in with the San Francisco Examiner, and the headline read "School Desegregation Decreed." Larson turned to me and said, "What do you think the South will do." I said, "Well, I can't speak for the South. I don't know what the South will do. I think North Carolina will do the responsible thing. It will take some time." Then I said, "What do you think New York is going to do?" [laughter] He didn't seem to think New York had any problem. And they don't to this day, apparently. You know, South Boston, Rochester, Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, why have they lost interest in civil rights in those places, I wonder? They're not segregated as a result of law, but de facto segregation is rampant in our national capital. And they're not doing anything about it. Contrast that with what we had up here

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at Magnolia the other day when Bone Crusher Smith 5 came. 5 A Magnolia native, black boxer. There were the blacks and the whites eating together and celebrated a local boy who has become a national hero.

JAY JENKINS:

The World Boxing Association Heavyweight Champion.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Yeah. I don't follow this thing. I didn't know who Bone Crusher Smith was 'til The Wallace Enterprise had his picture and told us about it.

Well, after that Larson and I kept in touch, and he sent me a number of little books (or a number of copies of a little book that he had printed) of some of the speeches of Page. I had read the biography of Page but I had not seen all these speeches before. They were a very handy thing. I corresponded with Page's son. Hiden Ramsey put me in touch with him before his death. I really thought, I still think, that Page had a message for our generation. And our generation is not paying attention, because North Carolina does not read history. It does not pay any attention at all, except for a handful of people, to what has gone on before. And you people in the newspaper business are the worst offenders of that. I don't mean you personally. I know where you came from, Richmond County, Scotland County. And I know about your past, John Charles McNeal, your relative. I have a volume that the University Press printed of his poems. I get it down every now and then so I won't forget that old dialect—beautiful. But you take the News and Observer that goes to New York and to Atlanta to get Claude Sitton in there. And he goes to New Orleans to pick up, what's the boy's name?

JAY JENKINS:

Ferrell Guillory?

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Guillory. He's very capable. I knew him before I left Raleigh. Well, I just wish in the process they would get at least one that—somebody like Tom Ingram that they ran off, who had his feet on the ground and embedded in the history of this state—could understand that, but it seems to be unimportant to them. It's none of my business, but I hate to see a newspaper that was so much a part of the history of the state that is not informed about it anymore. I read in this new biography of Page a letter that Aycock wrote to Page while he was practicing law in Goldsboro, before he ever ran for governor, to commend him. He proposed that Page come and join Josephus Daniels and make the News and Observer a going enterprise, and it'd be a tremendous thing. That was after Page had written his "Mummy" speech. That "mummies" were running North Carolina, you remember that. Well, I'm rambling too much. Well, I wanted to give you the background.

Umstead called me and asked me to serve on the Pearsall Commission to advise the state about this desegregation plan. I remember Judge Varser from Lumberton or Laurinburg (I forget which city), James Manning, Dr. Carroll, Gordon Gray. Gordon said something in those meetings that astounded me. He said the state had to face the inevitable fact that we could not afford to educate everybody, and we needed to introduce the European system and give a screening test at the beginning of high school. We couldn't afford to give the kind of education that was needed to everybody in high school. We were dropping out 75 out of a 100

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at that time. I was so astounded. I felt that I had misunderstood him. I asked Carroll and Ready if I had understood him correctly. They said that's what he said. He was president of the University. A good man but he didn't know his history either. What a contrast with what Page had hoped for the state: to educate everybody. I don't mean to be personal in criticism but it's part of my history.

JAY JENKINS:

It's part of the history.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

He didn't know me, though I'd had many letters from him when I was chairman of the Young Democrats of Duplin County. He was active, you know. I had met him before but he met so many people, I didn't expect him to remember. Well, I served on that commission. I took that assignment very seriously. I learned how they used to do things. They would appoint the big committee. Then an executive committee would get behind the scenes and decide what was going to happen. And Dr. Beverly Lake was not on the committee, but Tom Pearsall and Colonel Joyner 6 and the others were on it—running the thing, were deciding what to do. 6 A Raleigh lawyer, son of Dr. J.Y. Joyner, state superintendent during Aycock's term as governor. They came out with a report I wouldn't support.

I refused to sign it, because it provided for the closing of schools. This has been documented in a dissertation by a student at UNC-Greensboro and is available as John Bachelor's thesis for his Master's. I thought he did an excellent job with it. By that time Hodges had become governor, and he was very much put out with me for refusing to sign this report. I said, "Governor,

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what difference does it make whether I sign it or not? You can come on out. I'm not going to make a minority report. I just don't agree that you should allow for closing any school anyway." He said, "I don't agree with it either." I said, "Well, what have you got to have it in there for?" Well, he thought it was a safety valve, and eventually he persuaded me to agree to it on a promise, a commitment, that he would never allow one to be closed. Came close to it one time after—that's another story—when he sent me to the Halawar Indian uprising.

JAY JENKINS:

Halifax County.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Yeah. Bob Giles was sent down there. Bob had made them all mad. They were not going to do anything for anybody.

JAY JENKINS:

Giles was Hodges' counsel.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Legal counsel. Bob's a Georgia boy like Ed Rankin and Claude Silton [laughter] . They thought they were supposed to tell us what to do and Claude Silton said, "I've got a thing with these Georgia people coming up here running things." Anyhow, I wonder sometimes why we can't give them a course in North Carolina history [laughter] . And let them at least be aware of such people as Edward Kidder Graham and the other Graham, the celebrated senator, and Page especially. They don't know who he is. Well, I did agree conditionally. Not two weeks after that, a vacancy occurred on the State Board of Education in our district. Archie Graham from Clinton—attorney there, a kinsmen of Frank Graham, by the way—died. Luther Hodges called me and asked me to serve on the board.

JAY JENKINS:

That was 1955.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Yeah. I didn't think he would ever appoint me to anything. I was a astounded. I didn't ask him about it. He gave me a day or two to think about it, and I talked to my brother. So I accepted it. I went to Raleigh, and the board was composed of old men—old Dr. Dougherty, very good men. Sanford Martin was the Winston-Salem editor, and then Sol Brower (from Duke), J.A. Pritchett. All fine people. But I felt as though I'd been to a meeting of the real estate board—talking about the swamp land down here, you know, marshlands and what to do about that. Mr. C.D. Douglas was the controllor. They'd argue about little details of how a note was to be worded, and you know, just a lawyers' recess. I was wasting my time. I was just in the wrong place.

I went over to see Hodges. I said, "Governor, I left Duplin County at your behest to come up here." I told him what we'd been doing. I reviewed the Kellogg project. I said, "I want to go back, to get back involved as a citizen—I won't have to have an office—bringing some more progress in the schools back home. I can't do anything up here. They won't listen to me." So Hodges said, "I know exactly what you mean. I served as chairman while I was Lieutenant Governor, and I don't think they have a grasp of what the job is either." He said, "Go on back over there." Well, at first he said—we got to talking about new industry. This is important from the point of view of the community colleges. I told him that it seemed to me that he was asking the impossible to bring in all these new industries to the

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state and expect the people to walk off the tobacco farms and go to work in electronics plants without any instruction in what its all about. I said, "They'll get their tobacco planted. They automatically go to the river and go fishing for the next three or four weeks. They won't punch a clock." [laughter] Without preparation at all for this, the old generation would never change. I know because I grew up among them.

He was not very complimentary in his comments about us eastern North Carolina people. I used to think sometimes—(I had great respect for Governor Hodges) but I thought he thought highway 301 was the boundary between the real North Carolina and Bermuda. What was in between was swamp land [laughter] . He wouldn't build any highways down here. He was impatient with our slow ways, though he and I got along fine—witness his willingness to appoint me to that board after I disagreed with him. Well, he got interested then. In fact he got a little bit miffed about the status of vocational education in the public schools, very critical of it.

He said, "Go on back over there, and I'll get you some help on the board and come up with a proposal for the education of adults for the new industries we're getting." I thought that was a pretty important assignment. I took it in earnest, and he put Charlie McCrary from Asheboro, head of McCrary Hosiery Mills, on the board; and Barton Hayes, textile manufacturer from Hudson and Lenoir; Charlie Rose, an attorney from Fayetteville, father of Charlie Rose, the Congressman; and Charlie Jordan [Duke vicepresident]. They had to have somebody from Duke. All these good

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Methodists wanted to look after that. Didn't want Chapel Hill to get ahead of them. And I got him to put Guy Phillips on there. He was a little reluctant about that. He didn't think professional educators should be on there. I said, "Yes, but this one is the exception. If you're going to have Jordan from Duke, who's chairman of the Durham County Board of Education, you ought to have Guy." And so it just happened that there were some vacancies. Dr. Doughtery was senile by that time and retired, and Sanford Martin, a very fine person—I was glad to get to know him. He was just worn out. He didn't live long.

JAY JENKINS:

And you became chairman in '57.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Yeah, a couple of years later, right. Is it time to change that?

JAY JENKINS:

No, we can stop for a minute. [Interruption]

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

You know in the process of that public school thing though—Hal Tribble, you remember Hal Tribble—was at the Charlotte Observer, later the Citizen. He invited me up to Charlotte for a series of meetings to tell that story to people of Mecklenburg.

JAY JENKINS:

The Duplin story?

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Yeah. Hal wrote a piece about it. I've still got the clipping somewhere. It's what attracted Pete McKnight's interest. He and I were classmates at Davidson, but when he read the article about what we were doing there, he became interested, and later on the curriculum study committee and so on and the Carlyle Commission.

JAY JENKINS:

Don't let me interrupt you, but didn't you in effect consolidate a lot of public schools?

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Yeah.

JAY JENKINS:

Early on.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

We got fifteen consolidated in Duplin before I left.

JAY JENKINS:

I mean on the state level, when you got on the state board.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Fifty-five in one year, and that was the peak year. I don't know how many in all. I lost track. I may have the record.

JAY JENKINS:

Put it on the local people.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

That's right.

JAY JENKINS:

Let them originate it and so forth.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Put the monkey on their back. I told Hiden Ramsey, and he chewed me out for fair you well. I've got some real doozy of a letters from him. He would write me a five or six page letter telling me what a scoundrel I was for doing so and so. The next mail I'd get one apologizing. [laughter] He was a great guy. I thoroughly enjoyed him.

JAY JENKINS:

I interrupted you when you were saying what Hodges said about the vocational education for adults.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

You ready to start again?

JAY JENKINS:

We've already, we've been on.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

I didn't know that. Well, with all this new help on the board of education, these people were big industrialists, compared to me. I only had a small plant, a family business. I

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never knew anybody with sixteen hundred employees before. Charlie McCrary had, and he took me through his plants up there—beautiful arrangement. He's a very fine person. It was a coincidence that both he and Barton Hayes were Davidson graduates, Democrats. I don't know why everybody that's from Davidson is a Republican now, Holhouser and Martin. [laughter] But we had come up during the Depression years. I still keep in touch with Barton, but Charlie died about a year ago. He was a good fellow.

We just put his business man's principles to work there. We came up with a proposal for area vocational technical schools. To give credit where credit is due, George Geohagen of Raleigh, head of the study committee of State College—I think College Foundation—proposed a big boost in the production of engineers at N.C. State and the creation of three technical institutes and a system of area vocational schools. This happened at the same time that Hodges and I were talking about the same problem and opportunity to fit in with this industrial development program. So Ramsey suggested to me that I take this area vocational school proposal to the State Board of Education. I said, "I'll certainly do it, but I've already in effect done it." We were planning to have something in our budget.

He would not let me attend the meeting of the Board of Higher Education (I was a member of that too) when they were doing the budgets. He would schedule a meeting when the state board met so that I wouldn't get in on the budget proposals for the Board of Higher Education. [laughter] I don't know why,

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unless he thought I was competitive with it. I remember going down there 7 at noon one day when we took a break upstairs. 7 Both boards met in the Education Building. They were in secret session planning the budget. I just walked on in there. I was a member of the board, and they stopped talking. Well, the way it is today, you can't do that in private anymore.

Well, Dr. Carroll thought that the proposal of $500,000 was not enough. We wanted a million I believe it was. He said it should be three million. None of us had any idea. I'm sure if Hodges had known that it would be a multi-million program by now, he probably wouldn't have agreed to it. But we put it in the pot, and it went on over to the budget commission and legislature.

JAY JENKINS:

This was technical institutes?

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Well, we didn't call them that. We called them industrial education centers.

JAY JENKINS:

Industrial Education Centers.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

It's predecessor, "technical institute", frightened them and sounded too prestigious, and we really didn't have any money. They were less institutionalized than we have it today—something more fluid. We called them "extension" courses instead of "curriculum" courses.

JAY JENKINS:

What year did the legislature approve those?

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

1957. I got a call from Hodges toward the end of that session that said the appropriations subcommittee had voted down the proposal, and "it will not come out unless you can get up here and help change it." He wanted me to come up and see

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Watts Hill, Jr. and Dick Long from Person County—who were on the committee and had voted for it. I didn't know the two. I knew about them. The C&D department was on the second floor of the education building at that time, and I found them there. We went on down to the Sir Walter and had dinner together, and I left there at ten o'clock after reaching an agreement that we would negiotate for a $500,000 conditional appropriation to the budget commission which they would turn over to us if and when we presented a proposal they would approve. That was instead of 3 million, and that was put in the budget for the '57 session. We studied it all that fall. Had a committee from industry. Wade Martin was the staff member and took the lead in it. We went before the advisory budget commission in April, 1958 with a proposal for spending $500,000 for equipment for the area schools and industrial education centers and…

JAY JENKINS:

Let me switch this thing, Dallas

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

From that day in April—I've forgotten what day of the month it was—1958, in less than a year, the Burlington city board of education had a new building for the Burlington IEC, it was called, Industrial Education Center. Faculty was forty part-time people and over a thousand students—fully operational. We approved seven of them in the state on that occasion. The one in Wake County took two or three years for them to get what is now Wake Tech but…

JAY JENKINS:

These were jointly financed; counties participated?

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Yes, the counties. It was part of the public school system. They put up the buildings, and we furnished them. We got the teachers' salaries out of the George-Barden and Smith-Hughes Act funds, and the real carrot was the equipment. I remember Charlie McCrary, Wade Martin, and I went to Washington to the Pentagon to request them to grant some of the equipment that they had stockpiled in the salt mines against atomic attack. This was all new equipment. It was simply scattered about the country in case of attack—machine tools most of them. We made the point to them that we needed to stockpile some machinists to run the equipment. If people got killed who knew how to run them, what good would the machines be? And we were not getting to first base until we got hold of Hodges. He called the powers that be—I don't know who they were, but influence in the Pentagon higher up—and we got over a million dollars worth of equipment that went to Winston-Salem-Forsyth IEC. It's still up

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there by the way. From that day on the idea just took root and spread like wildfire.

It was a popular thing because it spoke to a need that the state had never met before. Hundreds of thousands of people across the state were shut out of the process of higher education. Shut out at the high school level because the high schools are too small to give them a diversified program that they really needed to keep their interest and teach them the skills that they needed in order to make a living. At the same session, the 1957 session, the Board of Higher Education was under the leadership of Harris Purks, who was the director, a physics professor and former provost at the University at Chapel Hill; Bill Womble, a young lawyer from Winston-Salem, who was a representative from Forsyth; Bob Lassiter from Charlotte, also a member of the Board of Higher Education and of the legislature; and Charlie Reynolds, from, I believe, Spindale. Oh, we had some fine people.

They proposed a different kind of community college system. Two of them had been out to California with Harris Purks to look at this, and they concluded that it was all wrong and didn't want to get involved with that. What they were interested in was the liberal arts and sciences programs only, no vocational at all.

Bonnie Cone had a comprehensive institution going in Charlotte at local expense, called Central Community College. It was operated by the Charlotte city schools, and public school vocational funds that came through the Department of Public Instruction were used. But when the new Community College Act

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of '57 was adopted, it severed the ties with the public schools. You couldn't spend the money on that. The state adopted a policy of reimbursing the local institutions. I think the figure was $3.50 per credit hour of instruction actually delivered. You would pay this over at the end of the quarter. You had to operate on local funds. You got a reimbursement at the end of the quarter if you did actually produce so many credit hours. Well, that spelled the end of vocational education for Charlotte Central Community College. Wilmington also had one. The university started extension programs down there in cooperation with the public schools. Asheville had a slightly different experience with what was later known as Asheville-Biltmore Junior College. We could not continue it. So we put the IEC's in there to take up the vocational programs. Asheville-Buncombe Tech it is now, Cape Fear Tech, and Central Piedmont Community College was at first Central Piedmont IEC, in the same place in the old central high school building.

Bonnie was very much grieved at that—this arbitrary separation, and I shared it with her. I voted against it on the Board of Higher Education, a minority of one again, and I don't want there to be any misunderstanding about it. I voted against it because it was a departure from the comprehensive community college idea, and it was totally inadequate in its funding. They only appropriated $25,000 for each of three schools. And they sold their soul for a mess of pottage. Hiden Ramsey blessed me out about that. Bill Womble got offended over it.

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I just quietly went about my business of building the IEC's. I knew Hodges would not agree for any liberal arts instruction to go into them, no libraries. He wanted us to train these millhands and do it right now and not have any pussyfooting about it. We were doing it. But I told him, "These people can't read. A lot of them can't read, and those that can, can only read at an elementary school level. How do you expect them to perform in a complex industry in tomorrow's technical fields?" Starting the Research Triangle out here and expecting workers like this to perform in it. I remember later on when he got to be Secretary of Commerce (Watts Hill had been on the Board of Higher Education in the Moore administration).

JAY JENKINS:

Watts, Jr., I believe.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Yeah. Watts got the idea that we were competing and about to turn the IEC's into community colleges. Hodges didn't like it. So I scheduled a session with him in Ready's 8 office. 8 Dr. I. E. Ready had become director of the Department of Community Colleges in 1963. I'm getting a little ahead of the story but I'll tell you now while I'm thinking of it. Ed Rankin was with him. They were dressed in their boots and were going hunting. There was snow on the ground. They went bird hunting. I defended what we did, but I don't think I ever convinced either one of them, Ed or Hodges, that the comprahensive idea was what was right for the state. We'll get back to that in a minute. We didn't fall out about it but we just didn't agree. Another thing that Hodges did, and I think it's often lost in the telling. He began the

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State Citizens Committee for Better Schools. Holt McPherson 9 of High Point was chairman of it. 9 Editor, High Point Enterprise. [Interruption]

I was telling about the result of the 1957 Community College Act which really was not a community college act. It was an act to inhibit the development of community colleges and to redirect the local movement to liberal arts and sciences alone rather than a comprehensive curriculum involving the technical and vocational as well as the avocational and the liberal arts and sciences. My colleagues on the Board of Higher Education simply were not convinced that the state needed any such thing as that. They had not read Walter Hines Page, by the way. If they did, they didn't agree with it. So we began in earnest to promote the development of the industrial education centers.

When Hodges' administration ended, there was a vacuum there where we could run things, and we filled them full of literary instruction. We bought books in anticipation of Terry Sanford's administration. There is a whole lot I could tell you about those days that I would like to record some time. I remember the curriculum study that I mentioned that began in 1957-58 with money from the Richardson foundation that Hodges got for us—took the cue that we had in Duplin. What kind of schools do we have? What kind do we need? How do we get the kind we agree we need? Let's put it in plain, Duplin County, North Carolina English rather than having a status report, an exploration of the possibilites, then the proposals 1 through 5B that have to be debated—plain English.

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The truth of the matter was, Jay, the people understood what they were involved in. We had 38,000 people involved in local citizens' committees, lay and professional people, working as local teams debating these very issues. They are the ones that decided we have too many high schools, and most of them are in the wrong place. So we began. We had this 1953 bond money that had not been spent, all of it. $50 million dollars, I think it was. We began in earnest building the schools for the new curriculum, the larger schools.

Terry Sanford began to think about running for governor. He was aware of all this activity. You know he was in the 1953 session of the legislature but he was not especially active about education. I guess his career was unfolding at the time, and he was looking around to see where his philosophy would—really I don't mean he was opportunistic about it—but I think he was maturing in his judgments about it. I don't know that I ever met him during that session though I appeared before the legislature and presented their budget request in '53. Of course, we've been talking about '57 since then. I'm sorry not to be chronological.

JAY JENKINS:

That's all right.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

I remember, we asked for $70 million dollars increase in the public school budget in '53. There was a Senator Owens from Beaufort County, Little Washington, who got up and said he was not sure he understood me perfectly. "Did I say $70 million or $7 million?" I said, "Seventy—seven, zero million [laughter] ." And he made some remark about how ridiculous it was to think about that. Yet, at the end of this first effort with

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the curriculum committee study and this grassroots involvement in consolidating schools and studying the needs of the schools—nobody at the top saying we need to do this; we need to have that; we need to quit doing the other; they were deciding it themselves—we proposed a $106 million dollar increase in the '61 session.

I remember after the primary—second primary in which Sanford defeated Dr. Lake—Guy Phillips and I went to Fayetteville to see him at his home there to get his approval of this. We didn't want to spring it on him in the newspapers, you know. Back then we could meet in secret and decide what we were going to ask for and not surprise people ahead of time. It took the edge off of it. When we could go before the budget commission, they'd already read about it in the newspapers. We got used to that later. You know, Sanford was very tired. That was a hard campaign that he fought. How many was it, six or seven candidates in the first primary. John Larkins, I don't remember who all…

JAY JENKINS:

Malcolm Seawell.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Yeah, Malcolm Seawell. Wasn't Main Allbright in that one too?

JAY JENKINS:

No, he was not in that one. I think that was Scott in '48. Before you get any further that $106 thousand…

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

$106 million.

JAY JENKINS:

$106 million was to establish the community colleges.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

No, no. It was the public school budget and included some for the IEC's. See, this was in '60, 1960 for the 1961 session.

JAY JENKINS:

I understand now.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

We had a little budget brief and handed it to Terry. He just went through it and said, "I'm too tired to consider this now. Let me tell you I'm going to support whatever you all come up with." I said, "Well, this is what we've come up with. It's a $106 million dollars." He said, "Let's go for it." I just could hardly believe my ears. I'd been used to getting negative reports. First thing that came to my mind was old man Owens belittling me for asking for $70 million a few years before. We went back there, and the NCEA, at that time, had asked for, I forget the figure—was substantially less than what we'd asked for. That really put Dawson and that crowd on the spot. [laughter] I think we timed it that way to happen. It contained a 30% increase for superintendents and principals. And they've cussed since then for not getting them enough, but they never gave me any credit for help getting that. [laughter]

JAY JENKINS:

What was the increase for teachers?

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

I've forgotten. You know, when Hodges put me on the board, I think the beginning salary was $1,450, something like that. The average salary when Sanford came in was $3,600.

JAY JENKINS:

Over 20%, I believe.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

It's hard to remember what the figures were when we haven't got them down.

JAY JENKINS:

That's all right. It's part of the record anyway.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Yeah. Well, to make a long story short, we had a rally in Chapel Hill. Dr. Conant was there. We'd had one in '58 or '9 when Adlai Stevenson came down. Wilbur Edwards, a Charlotte boy who was president of the student body at Davidson when I was there, was employed by the Encyclopedia Brittanica films and he called me one day and said, "I can get Adlai Stevenson to come for one of these school rallies you're having in Chapel Hill." Dr. Conant's National Citizens Council had put me in charge of the whole southeast to create citizen interest in the schools. So I said, "Well, get him. We've got Hodges' support." It was at the time of the Little Rock riots. Eisenhower was in there. Faubus was governor of Arkansas. Wilbur had told Governor Stevenson about me. He invited me to write him a letter about the situation here so he wouldn't walk right into an explosive situation. We had three thousand people coming. I wrote him about a six page letter. It wound up that he quoted my letter a lot in his speech, which flattered me very much. [laughter] He was a great man. I thoroughly enjoyed that brief acquaintance with him. He had a tremendous ability with the language which always impressed people like Edwin Gill 10 and me, and you too, I'm sure. 10 State treasurer. He was a wordsmith. Well, that's a flashback. I should have remembered to tell you that before. One of these same kinds of meetings—one of this type of meeting, we held in November after the Sanford election in the fall.

JAY JENKINS:

November '60, November 1960?

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Yeah. Who was it, Gavin ran against Sanford?

JAY JENKINS:

Yeah.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

It was a serious contest in itself for the first time in this century. I know Gavin had some family connections down here. He was from Sanford, but they came out of Duplin County and Sampson. Well, it was a happy occasion for us. We had been through two primaries, and the fall campaign, and Sanford's victory was really a new day. I invited him to come to that school rally. We had people from eight southern states. The auditorium in Chapel Hill was full of people. He asked me to introduce him. [laughter] I said, "Who is the happy warrior, who is he that every man in arms should wish to be?" And I told what kind of guy this fellow is, you know. That went across tremendously. Hathaway Cross was in the back, and in the campaign he was on the other side. He threw up his hand. He said, "I'm for the program, I'm for the program." [laughter] But Sanford announced then (I'd never discussed with him whether my term was out or what he would do about reappointing me, it was up to him) he announced in response to my introduction that the state couldn't afford to do without me, and he was going to reappoint me. Of course, it got a big hand. But he had a written speech that showed he had done a lot of thinking—a deep, really profound interest in the neglected people, young and old, who were either kept out or pushed out of the system because the system was too inflexible to meet the needs of people.

We tend to believe that a curriculum of quality is a rigid, fixed, and final kind of thing that everybody must meet. It fails to realize when people have very different kinds of ability

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as well as degrees [of ability]. You see it in the everyday world all the time. An illiterate mechanic who is just a wizard with the things that he knows about and can communicate very well in his own language about these things. What he needs is to be able to communicate with others about other things. You come from a different base. Page said it beautifully in his little speeches that he made. He told about the school at Northfield, I believe it's called. That little book up here beside me is really an inspiration. Sanford was aware of this. I think I had given him one of Roy Larson's books of Page's speeches. Later in his inauguration speech he challenged the people of North Carolina to join him in "the audacious adventure of making the state all it can and ought to be"—a very good way to put it, and it was an audacious adventure that we embarked on.

Early in the '61 session the newspapers headlined from Wilmington, a story that they were going to seek independent senior college status at Wilmington College. The Board of Higher Educaton was in session that same day. Major McLendon 11 had succeeded as chairman. 11 A Greensboro lawyer of the old school, son-in-law of Governor Aycock. Major was very perturbed about that. He didn't know what to do about it. I remember he kept us in session through lunch hour. You know how lawyers are. Time means absolutely nothing to them. It's one of their major tools they use. And I'm just a country boy, I like to eat at dinner time. [laughter] I got really peeved about it about three o'clock. He didn't want anybody to leave. I said, "Major, I know how to solve this problem if you'll let us do it, and we'll

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go get some lunch." He was ready by that time to listen to somebody that he was not accustomed to listening to. I said, "All you have to do is go with me over there to see Governor Sanford and propose to him that he make a public announcement that he plans to appoint a commission to study the whole area of education beyond the high school." Eisenhower had one for the nation. "It's time North Carolina took a look at education beyond the high school and addressed the issue of whether we should have a branch of the university at Charlotte and one at Asheville, and what to do about the two systems of post high school education, the IEC's and the so-called community colleges." Much to my surprise, the Major said, "That is the thing to do," and put it off until after the session. So we went over there, he and I, alone, and sat down with Sanford. I had no idea whether Sanford had thought about it himself or not. But he readily agreed to it and that deferred any activity in the General Assembly. They just put it on hold until they adjourned.

Remember at the end of the '61 session, they adopted our 106 million dollar budget. There was money in that for the IEC's. I don't remember how much. But right at the end of the session, Sanford went to Hawaii to the national governor's conference. I thought it was the worst thing in the world for him to do, because it could all go haywire. You know how it is. But it didn't. He told Bill Friday and me—Bill and I went to see him shortly after McLendon and I went. I kept Bill posted about it. I said now is the chance for the university to do what Edward Kidder Graham said it should do, make the boundary of the state

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determine the boundary of the campus. That's not his words but that's what he meant.

JAY JENKINS:

Co-terminus.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Co-terminus with the boundary of the state. Bill and I have had perfect relationships, as far as I'm concerned. I know I have his respect, and he became president about the same time I became chairman of the board of education. And Guy Phillips brought us together—having done our best to help each other all we could. By golly, he got pushed out about the same way I did too, I think. If the truth is known, he's too much of a gentleman to tell about it but I know enough about it to know that there was some political action there that is much to the discredit of that board for doing it. Bill Friday has been a statesman all the way through and deserves nothing but the eternal gratitude of the people of this state. He does not deserve to be mistreated in any degree. But it was a sad thing, I know, he's told me enough about it to know that. But that's a parenthetical statement I probably shouldn't have made; but its history also. Bill and I were asked by Sanford to name the commission. He had two or three names that he wanted on there, and he put them on. We conferred about who should head the commission. We agreed to Irwin Carlyle, this great liberal leader of the state, whose influence was highly respected, but somewhat distrusted because of his liberalism on the race question. His speech before the Democratic Convention probably cost him an appointment to the Senate—Umstead, or was it Jordan, I guess.

JAY JENKINS:

No, Ervin.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Yeah, Sam Ervin.

JAY JENKINS:

So he picked Carlyle as…

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

He was chairman of this commission—perfect chairman, intelligent, attentive, interested, but had the great good sense to let us run the commission. [laughter] I think he had confidence in Friday and me. He didn't know me before that but he seemed to learn what I was after, which was extending the opportunity of education to all the people, and so was Friday. I have always felt that Carlyle was a populist in that sense. I mean he was a thorough going Democrat but in the Populist movement, as was Adlai Stevenson.

JAY JENKINS:

Now this commission was appointed, I believe, in 1961 to report back to the 1963 legislature. Is that correct?

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

We spent the fall of '61 and all of '62 studying the future of higher education in the state. It was not easy. By that time, the press had access to everything. The interest in Charlotte, Wilmington, Asheville, was tremendous. I know Pete used to attend those—well, let's see, yeah, he was not on that commission—he was on the curriculum study, but he used to attend the meetings.

JAY JENKINS:

Pete McKnight, editor of the Charlotte Observer.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Yeah, right. You know I go to Charlotte. I have a sister living up there. I went to school up in Mecklenburg County and some of my classmates from Davidson—influential citizens and leaders of the city of Charlotte today, I could name some names. The only time I ever hear from them is when they

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want me to give some money to Davidson College. I went through all that experience, appeared in Charlotte numerous times, spoke to the Rotary Club, the school board association. I had to go to Charlotte to meet with the city board of education five times before I talked them into accepting an industrial education center.

JAY JENKINS:

That's the industrial center of the state.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Well, Bonnie Cone knows the extent that I went to to see to it that Charlotte got a branch of the university. They could not do it alone. Greensboro and Raleigh were not going to let them have it. It took a coalition which Bill Friday and I put together, actually Wilmington and Charlotte, to get institutions in those three places. The political truth was—this is the package, you take it, or you won't get any of it. Sometimes you have to be that rough about it to get the desirable end. Charlotte was quite willing to accept it without Wilmington and Asheville, but they did not have the political strength. Charlotte has never been skillful politically. Mecklenburg, well, they send Republicans down here to influence state government and think they've won the ballgame. I don't pay any attention to them.

JAY JENKINS:

Now this commission, that's when the blueprint for the community college system was…

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Well, it was like a pyramid. The base was the public schools. Sanford and the curriculum study commission and the other activities, the Citizen's Committee for Better Schools, had seen to it that our new budget—that we had a firm base.

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The next stratum in the pyramid was the community college system. We confronted the issue of the 1957 Junior College Act and the IEC movement. By that time I think we had twenty-odd IEC's and five community colleges and technical institutes. The commission confronted that issue, and we created a sub-committee. Leo Jenkins was made chairman of it. Put him on the spot. He was opposed to the idea to start with, I think, or somewhat opposed. He convinced himself in the process that it was the right thing to do. He realized that it was the way for East Carolina to become what it is now today. It tried to be a community college and teachers' training school and could not be a university. So it came together.

The only thing the commission disagreed about was the governance of higher education. I remember Emily Preyor, Rich Preyor's wife, sided with us on the issue. Major McLendon from Greensboro was opposed to us. Sanford supported the majority of it. He decided not to touch the question of governance and have a debate about it and risk the whole package. It remained for Bob Scott's administration to bring about the Board of Governance and the complete consolidation of the university system that we now have. Probably the time was well spent in maturing the ideas. You have to wait for public opinion to catch up with you sometime. And I think that Bob Scott is due a lot of credit. So is Bill Friday, for sticking with it.

Of course, we got the proposal for a comprehensive community college system under the State Board of Education in the report of the Carlyle Commission. The commission adjourned in the

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summer of '52 about September. Sanford asked me to head a committee to write the Community College Act, which I did. Had Alan Markham from the Institute of Government to get the staff committee together. You'll be interested in this because you'll remember Roger Kaiser from Scotland County. In 1953 Alan Hurlburt had written a proposal for Dr. Erwin, the state superintendent, for a comprehensive community college act. It was introduced by Roy Taylor who was later congressman from the western district. Roger defeated that thing in the house on the second reading. He was an old time school master, you know. Very able person but he was from another century, living in the nineteenth century. He just thought that it would ruin existing institutions. He was the defender of the existing structure of higher education. Ten years later in 1963, he was still there, and he voted against it, but it was just a handful of people that voted against it. The history that occurred in that decade had a great deal to do with it—the activities of that I've summarized.

The real victory was won by the personality of Terry Sanford and without his superb leadership it couldn't have happened. Robert Lee Humber, Ralph Scott, all the leaders in the assembly were— Cliff Blue, for example, speaker at that time—they all began thinking, well, wouldn't it be nice to have one of these community colleges back home. Cliff especially thought about that. Robert Lee Humber fell in love with the idea. It was a great project for him and the crowning event of his long and illustrious career. He made a tremendous contribution locally and statewide in that respect. So it was easy sailing. The

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payoff for me came when eventually Roger got appointed trustee of—let's see, it must have been Robeson Tech or one of the institutions, I think it was Robeson—and he came over to Jane Sprunt to see the school. We had dinner together. He eased up to me, and he said, "You know I was wrong about that. This is one of the best things that ever happened to the state." I thought it took a real man to say that.

JAY JENKINS:

I don't think Roger did that very often.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

No, he didn't. He chewed me out one time. You know when the Capitol—this was back when Governor Hodges and Dr. Carroll had a little run in about the staff people over there not doing what they were told to do. Carroll was protective of them, and a bill was put in to give the board the right to approve his appointments. The newspapers played it up as a fuss between Carroll and me. We never had any fuss about it. I was standing at the foot of the stairs on the west side, and the house adjourned, and Roger cornered me there and wouldn't let me go. As long as nobody was coming down the stairs he was very friendly, talking to me, but when some member of the House got close by, he just chewed me out [laughter] . I thought about that. Here he was over here at the Country Squire (restaurant in Duplin). I started to ask him if he remembered that. He was a great old guy. I thought a lot of him. He did a lot of good for the cause of education.

JAY JENKINS:

As you say he belonged to another age.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Yeah, he just…

JAY JENKINS:

Couldn't quite adapt.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

He thought that education was something that you had to go after and learn and get for yourself. Nobody could give it to you. He didn't remember that first somebody has got to open the door for you, or you can't get it.

[TAPE 2, SIDE A]

JAY JENKINS:

Well, Dallas, of course you were one of the fathers of the community college system. Now that it's been in existence for nearly twenty-five years, how do you evaluate the system that we have today?

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Well, first let me disclaim the paternity. I was the midwife, not the poppa. I always feel it was not my idea alone.

JAY JENKINS:

No single individual did more to bring it into existence. I can testify from first hand experience.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Well, I appreciate that but I want to share the honor with, or the blame as the case may be, with a lot of other people. There were a lot of people that did make it possible, Hodges and Sanford, all my colleagues on the board and in the system, Bill Friday, John Sanders, Irving Carlyle, Gerald James, many of them. The system enjoyed a protracted honeymoon in the '60's. The first negative response came as a cautionary note in the first budget message that Governor Moore gave to the '65 session of the legislature. It disturbed me a great deal. He said that the system was growing too fast and needad an independent study to see what could be done, implying that it needed to be curtailed. I didn't vote for Governor Moore. I voted for Richardson Pryor who was his opponent. Governor Moore knew that. I had respect for him and tried to be responsible in my relationship to him, and I'm sure he did too. He never seemed to blame me for that political sin but he, therefore, never seemed to have any particular compulsion to do what I asked him

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to do [laughter] . I did feel that during his administration we grew closer together. I found cut that Edwin Gill wrote the paragraph about the community colleges.

JAY JENKINS:

In the Governor's message?

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

Yeah, he admitted to me that he did. I went to see him about it because I knew he had influence with Moore. The explanation that Gill gave me was—I think he was really responding to Sanford—he was weary of being put on the shelf and this was an occasion when he could assert his independence. 12 12 Both Gill and Sanford were from Laurinburg, but Gill was conservative and did not support Sanford. They were estranged to some extent while Sanford was governor. Gill and I had a perfect relationship. He seemed to respect me, and I know I respected him. But he was far more conservative than I was about some things. He reminded me of Hodges who was in favor of progress in education as long as it didn't cost anything [laughter] . You know how that was. That's too rough a criticism, but he didn't want it to cost much. Gill was willing to give some, but not nearly as much as Sanford forced him to. I said we had to get some experience with it. It's true that it's grown like a patch of weeds in the barnyard. It's just growing because it's meeting a need that has never been met before, and the people are lopping it up. They want it.

JAY JENKINS:

Pent up demand.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

That's exactly right. I told him an example of a black man down in Pamlico County, at Oriental, that I'd had a letter from. He had eight children. He didn't have enough money to buy him a boat to go out and fish with, but he had a flat

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bottom rivar boat and could go around the edge and catch crabs and take them to the fish market and try to support the family. But he was doing that in all kinds of weather, and year round it's sort of an uphill proposition. Somebody said to him, "Why don't you go over here to Pamlico Tech [or IEC or whatever it was at that time] and take a course in welding, and you can go across the river hare to Cherry Point and get you a job at the air base and make big money." I have to stop to keep from being sentimental about this. He said, "You mean they'll let me in there?" The fellow assured him that he could get in there. To make a long story short he went, he learned. It's forty miles from Oriental around by New Bern back (so Ned Delamore tells me, it seems strange but it must be) to Cherry Point. It's only three or four miles across the sound over there, if you've got anybody with a boat that can get across. That was before the ferry was put in. Anyway, he got over there. Got him a job. I think his check was $250.00. The most money he had never had in his life. This is in the '60's. It sounds small now. He was one of those rare individuals who remembered to thank people. He went to see Paul Johnson, president of the institution, and thanked him profusely for making this economic opportunity possible in his life. And Paul said, "Well, don't thank me"—that he didn't start it and he just hired the teachers, etc. Well, whom should he thank, and he told him to write me a letter. It's a very valued treasure in my files. I don't know where I'd find it, but it's somewhere in those boxes.

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It just impressed me, as a tremendous example, of what the educational planners would have left out. It never would have occurred to the Board of Higher Education that here was a need that was worthy of their consideration, with all due respect to them. They thought in terms of institutions, power, prestige, quality, accreditations—all of these worthy things—but forgot the human being who was so far cut of it that he wasn't even aware that he deserved a chance. And of course what he studied was not a worthy thing either—welding. We're talking about the toe dancing school [laughter] —I worked with John Ehle on that thing, and I'm totally in favor of it. I think it's wonderful, and I think we chose the right place to put it, where the powers that be in the noble city of Winston-Salem will fund it when we run out of state money [laughter] .

Well, let me ask you this question. If it's right to recognize the creative urge in the human spirit that finds expression in ballet and music and drama and the arts that are recognized with some standing, is it wrong to recognize the art of how to decorate a cake in some black woman's life in the remote province of Pamlico, or Cherokee for that matter? My plea is, has been, these are not—it's hard enough to get them to recognize the economic need and the economic potential of the forgotten people that Page talked about. It is even more difficult for them to understand that these are human beings with immanse capacity for creative contribution to the progress of civilization.

JAY JENKINS:

Great statement.

WILLIAM DALLAS HERRING:

And I can't help being frustrated and sentimental. I want to break down and cry when I think about it. When I see what so many professional educators turn these institations into—self-serving mills conforming to traditional requirements. We like to lock it up at 3:30 and go play golf instead of staying there until the last student leaves late at 11:00 at night because he was interested in what he was doing and had to work during the day at his job so he could go to school at night to get out of this ghetto that we have and we don't recognize. It wouldn't do for me to get on the warpath about that now. They'd put me in my place in a hurry, but every opportunity I get I bring it out.

I went before the board—they gave me a little medal up there—board of community colleges. They didn't say that they were going to ask me to speak. They seldom do that anymore, but there were a number of others that were honored at the same time. After they got through, they asked me to speak. That's when they gave us these pictures that they made of us to hang in the board room—very prestigous kind of thing—felt like it was in a courtroom. But I got up there, and I told them the story I just told you about Pamlico. I said, "I read in the paper the other day that somebody had told you to close Pamlico Tech down. It wasn't big anough. I think it was the gentleman from Mecklenburg, but I'm not sure. I wouldn't blame him for it. I think that's who it was, or aither somebody had told the governor to do it, or the governor said that they ought to do it. It's a long way from Mecklenburg to Pamlico. And I want you to know

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that it's a long way from that skyscraper the bank owns up there to the house in Oriental. Think about that for a minute. Charlotte can lead us in the way to desegregation and pat itself repeatedly on the back, ad infinitum. When is Charlotte going to get up with its great humanitarian heart and say: ‘These are our people too, and we want their needs to be met whether or not you do justice by Mecklenburg’?" When are we going to get a society in North Carolina that's willing to do that?

Think about this, Jay. We get the political situation where we can appropriate three million dollars for a horse barn for the society horse set. (I used to keep saddle horses—until the town got so civilized that they wouldn't let me keep them on the lot anymore, and I tore the barn down—in my younger days, and I thoroughly enjoyed riding. I used to dress up in my jodhpurs and go out with my gentlemen friends and ride horseback.) But if the state has the kind of money to build a riding stable for this highly selected set of society in Raleigh and then, to keep the pot from boiling over, to duplicate that in Asheville, it has the money to educate the people at Triangle. You know where Triangle is, in Cherokee County? There are a few people from Georgia that slip over the line to go to school at Tri-County Community College. I told them, "Let them in. They're human beings." More likely they're going to marry somebody in Murphy and settle down up there anyway. I should tell you this about that.

We started bootlegging the liberal arts and sciences into these IEC's and Technical Institutes during the Moore administration. It just happened, coincidentally, that Holland

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McSwain, who was president of Tri-County Tech in Murphy, used to be superintendent of schools in Caswell County, and Ed Wilson 13 knew him very well, and I had known him over the years. 13 Ed Wilson, Sr. of the Department of Community Colleges, former legislation from Caswell. He went up there as the superintendent of schools in Murphy, and then he became president of this institute. He said these mountain people are so far away from Western Carolina [University], it's almost like going to the beach. I forget how many miles. It's almost a hundred miles across some of the most rugged territory in the state. They won't go to Western Carolina. Well, the thing for us to do is to take Western Carolina to them. All that's lacking is a little bit of money. It didn't take much money to pay the mileage of the professors over there to come over here to Tri-County Tech and teach them whatever it is they need to know, if it's college level stuff. They're graduates of the high school, and they want to study some college math, by golly, get somebody to come over here. We'll pay for it.

Somebody went and told Governor Moore what I had gone and authorized. And somebody in his administration didn't like that idea at all. I don't remember who it was, the budget people. Dan Stewart 14 was awfully busy—he was the C&D man—heading off things we were doing in community colleges. 14 Former management person with Carolina Power & Light Company, Raleigh, then head of the Department of C & D. He was afraid we were going to convert them to community colleges and leave out the vocational, technical training. I went to see the Governor and told him what we wanted