UNC and OWASA maintained a powerful hold over public utility matters
Holt again returns to the notion that Cane Creek residents were dismissed by more powerful political forces such as UNC and OWASA. Although UNC had relinquished control over public utilities, Holt argues that the university continued to play an active role in local utility matters.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Nancy Holt, October 27, 1985. Interview K-0010. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- FRANCES E. WEBB:
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Someone suggested, I think it was a student in the class, that it was a,
it was a political thing on the part of the University.
- NANCY HOLT:
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Yeah, it was. You see the University had been told to get out of the
utilities business. But they never got out of it. They never stopped
being a powerful force. And whatever the University wanted, they got.
And don't ever forget that for a minute because they are the
political force to be reckoned with and they as a col… - in
my mind, a collective group of very, very powerful political figures.
And whatever they want they jolly well get. And so they have a temporary
lake out here, the beginnings of a temporary lake. Probably one of the
things that irritated me the most, was people selling real estate out
here as lake front property. Seven years ago. It was ads in the Chapel
Hill papers, about beautiful lake front property in the Cane Creek
region. And I thought, there's no lake there, how dare you?
But we're - we just did not have the powerful backing. I
would suspect that had this community contained the Ralph Scotts, or the
William Fridays, Jim Martins, or the Rose family - some of the other
families that are very, very strong politically, they would never have
looked at this community. Never. But we had no real strong political
figures out here. We were just as mediocre, middle-of-the-road, middle
America as you can get. Not real, real pro-active in anything, except
generally taking care of the community and the
land. And I think raising fine people to populate this land. This is an
excellent community in so far as the kids grow up to be, maybe they
don't grow up to be presidents, but they don't
grow up to be Charles Manson either. It's a community of
middle America. And I firmly believe that had we had some very, very
political family as residents here, OWASA would never have considered
this or the University. And I, I often use OWASA and the University
interchangeably because nothing really changed, when they became a
separate department. Nothing really changed, except it wasn't
UNC Water Department anymore.