Emily Jack

When the Thomas Wolfe Society meets later this month, they’ll honor Thomas Wolfe the writer. We’d like to take a moment to salute Thomas Wolfe the actor.

In 1919, Wolfe was an eighteen-year-old college student in a playwriting class at UNC, which was taught by Carolina Playmakers founder Frederick “Proff” Koch. The student playwrights’ first plays produced on stage included Wolfe’s The Return of Buck Gavin. In the absence of a willing volunteer to play the title character, Koch convinced a reluctant Wolfe to take on the role.

When Thomas Wolfe made his stage debut as the mountain outlaw Buck Gavin, he wore a button-down shirt, pants tucked into tall boots, and this belt, which is one of our May Artifacts of the Month.

Wolfe appeared alongside Leila Nance Moffatt, who played Mary Gavin. Mary wore a dress, apron, and a pair of brown shoes.

All of these items can be seen through June 10 in the North Carolina Collection Gallery’s exhibit Making a People’s Theater: Proff Koch and the Carolina Playmakers.

Maybe the suddenly spring-like weather has a hold on me, but I can’t shake the thought that our April Artifact of the Month is smiling.

This puffer fish is part of a large collection of artifacts and specimens that were transferred to the North Carolina Collection Gallery in 2005. The objects came from UNC’s Wilson Hall, which housed the University’s Zoology Department and its library.

The Gallery accepted the transfer of these objects when Wilson Hall undertook a massive renovation. The collection, which includes hundreds of animal specimens and fossils, accentuates the Gallery’s goal of preserving items relating to natural history and the history of science at the University.

As part of the Gallery’s own renovation, we’ve recently upgraded our natural history exhibit, which features biographical panels on important naturalists, specimens from Wilson Hall, and original prints by John James Audubon.

Currently, the puffer fish can be seen in the exhibit Rooms of Wonder: From Wunderkammer to Museum, 1565-1865, in the Saltarelli Exhibit Room in Wilson Library, until April 17.

When freezing temperatures dig in, as they did last week and undoubtedly will again before this winter is through, it’s helpful to remember that we’re not the first generation of North Carolinians to know what ice looks like.

Our January Artifact of the Month is a pair of ice skates that belonged to Pittsboro native Henry Armand London, UNC Class of 1865, when he was a student.

The skates have fastening rings for attaching leather straps, which the wearer used to tie the skates to his feet. The straps are missing and the iron skates are rusted, but the bent toe guard hints at at least a few days skating. A look at London’s student diary (catalog record here) confirms this assumption.

(If anyone knows what London means by having a snap, please chime in in the comments!)

After graduating, London went on to become a prominent merchant in Pittsboro, as well as a lawyer, journalist, historian, state senator, and trustee of UNC.

You can view other artifacts that belonged to UNC students in our digital collection Carolina Keepsakes.

Last month we did what so many do this time of year: We devoted our attention to college basketball.

This month we turn our focus to another group of athletic students who are equally agile but far too often unsung: cheerleaders. This month we bring you not just one but three artifacts, all of them from a UNC cheerleader who graduated in 1968.

This sweater, a bit darker than the Carolina blue we see these days, features a very realistic-looking Rameses (the UNC mascot).

In this framed program from a UNC-Duke football game, two cheerleaders accompany the real live Rameses into the stadium. The cheerleader on the left is Jack Betts, the donor of these artifacts and the sweater’s former owner. Betts followed in the footsteps of his uncle Henry Betts, who had been a cheerleader at UNC in the early 1930s.

Our third artifact is this megaphone, which is about two-and-a-half feet long and, as the photo shows, in less-than-great shape. Betts explains that members of the squad would beat on their megaphones to generate noise during games — the reason for the wear and tear.

Jack Betts attended UNC from the fall of 1964 to the spring of 1968. He fondly recalls being a cheerleader during the time when the basketball team moved from the much-smaller Woollen Gymnasium to Carmichael Arena, which seated just over 8,000 people. The thrill of being right on the court, of watching the games from such a short distance, he says, was dizzying.

The staff of the NCC Gallery will never know the excitement of standing on the court during a nail-biting game. But as far as we’re concerned, the thrill of adding these great artifacts to our collection is excitement enough.