Nicholas Graham – Page 3 – History on the Hill

UNC vs. UGA Football Goes Back More than a Century

As is befitting the two oldest state universities in the country, the football rivalry between UNC and the University of Georgia goes back more than a century, with the teams first meeting in Alanta, site of this year’s game, in 1895 (100 years after UNC began offering classes and 94 years after the University of Georgia opened). Carolina won the first game, held on October 26, 1895, 6-0, and followed that with another win over Georgia just five days later.

One of Carolina’s biggest wins against Georgia came in 1914. UNC won 41-6 in a dominating performance. The Tar Heel could not resist multiple references to William Sherman’s march through Georgia, which was a not-so-distant memory, having occurred only fifty years earlier:

About fifty years ago one General Sherman with an army of blue coated men marched through Georgia. Last Saturday a squad of men led by Head Coach Trenchard and Capt. Tayloe, both marched and ran through Georgia. In the sixties the march was attended by slaughter and devastation of human life; last Saturday the march was also accompanied by slaughter and devastation — this object being this time the destruction of Georgia’s hopes for a Southern conference championship in football.

Carolina and UGA did not meet again for 15 years. The two schools played fairly frequently from the 1930s through the 1960s, with the most notable matchup coming in the 1947 Sugar Bowl. The Sugar Bowl game, won by Georgia, 20-10, featured two legendary players: UNC’s Charlie Justice and Georgia’s Charlie Trippi.

From 1967 to 1977, the UNC and Georgia teams were coached by brothers: Bill Dooley, who led the Tar Heels, and his older brother Vince, who coached the Bulldogs. The last game between the schools was also the only one coached by the two brothers. UNC and Georgia met in the 1971 Gator Bowl, with Georgia winning 7-3. Following the close game, Vince Dooley said, “I think my brother Bill outcoached me,” leading to the ironic Daily Tar Heel headline: “Gator Bowl: Bill Wins, Heels Lose.”

UNC and Georgia have played 30 times, with the Bulldogs winning 16. The last UNC victory over Georgia came in Chapel Hill in 1963.

Art Weiner catches a pass in the 1947 UNC vs. Georgia game. Hugh Morton Collection, NCC

Cardboard Club Records, University Archives (40345).

Eben Alexander and the Revival of the Modern Olympic Games

1896_games_photograph_front — Crowds entering the Olympic stadium, Athens, Greece, April 8, 1896. Eben Alexander Papers, Southern Historical Collection.

A few days ago we published a blog post looking at the history of UNC athletes in the summer Olympics, beginning with Harry Williamson’s participation in the 1936 summer games. It turns out the Carolina connection to the Olympics goes back even further than that.

When the Olympic games were revived and the first modern Olympics were held in Athens, Greece, in 1896, UNC faculty member Eben Alexander was there. Alexander was a professor of Greek at Carolina and served as the United States ambassador to Greece and Serbia from 1893-1897.

When Pierre de Coubertin, a French educator who is credited with creating the modern Olympic movement, began to talk about reviving the Olympic games, he found an eager ally in Alexander, who was one of the first contributors to the committee assembled for the Olympics. Alexander spread news about the games back in the United States and helped to recruit a large contingent of athletes to come to the Athens for the games. The presence of American athletes and fans ensured that the games would not be dominated by Greece and other European countries and helped to build support for the Olympics as a truly international competition.

There is a small collection of Alexander’s papers in the Southern Historical Collection in Wilson Library. These include a few letters related to the first Olympics and the photo shown above.

Alexander’s influence in convincing American athletes to come to Greece is evident in a letter from Princeton University listing the athletes they were sending to the games (most of the first American Olympians were college track stars from Ivy League schools). Even more interesting is a transcript of a letter from Alexander’s wife, Marion Howard-Smith Alexander, describing the scene at the Olympic stadium during the games.

On April 14, 1896, Marion Howard-Smith Alexander wrote a letter to her sister, Eleanor Howard-Smith, describing the scene in Athens at the first modern Olympic games. She wrote:

I must begin by telling that the stadium with the thousands of people & the beautiful views about it was a sight to remember for life. Many people will regret bitterly that when they hear from their friends how entirely successful & interesting the games have been. Our boys who have nearly swept the fields of honor each day, are great favorites with the Greeks. One fellow in particular when he went out on the streets would be followed by an admiring crowd shouting “NIKE” which means victor.

In 1897, following the election of William McKinley, Alexander left Greece and returned to teaching at Chapel Hill. He remained on the faculty until his death in 1910. In many obituaries, Alexander’s role in helping to revive the Olympic games was held up as one of the most significant achievements of his career.

UNC’s Olympic Firsts

Harry Williamson. Daily Tar Heel, 7 March 1936.

Floyd “Chunk” Simmons. 1948 Yackety Yack.

Athletes and coaches from UNC have participated in most summer Olympic games since 1936. The list below is an effort to compile a handful of notable Olympic firsts from Tar Heel athletes. I used the list of UNC Olympians available on GoHeels.com and a similar list on Wikipedia. It’s possible that some of these may be incomplete — if we learn of any mistakes or omissions (and we’d like to hear from you if you can help!), we’ll post the updates as soon as possible.

First Olympian: UNC’s first Olympian was Harry Williamson, who ran the 800 meters at the 1936 summer Olympics in Berlin. A native of High Point, Williamson was a track star at Carolina, winning conference championships in the mile and half-mile. After winning both of his qualifying heats in Berlin, Williamson finished sixth in the 800 meter finals. See if you can pick him out on this YouTube video of the race.

First Medalist: The first medalist from UNC was the remarkable Floyd “Chunk” Simmons, from Charlotte, who played football and ran track at Carolina. A terrific all-around athlete, Simmons won the bronze medal in the decathlon in the 1948 and 1952 Olympics. He competed throughout his life, winning age group awards when he was in his 70s and 80s. As if that wasn’t enough, Simmons had an acting career, appearing in multiple movies including the hit 1958 musical South Pacific. Simmons looked back on his career in a 2007 interview with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Library, available on DigitalNC.org.

First Gold Medal: It should be no surprise that the first UNC alumnus to win a gold medal was a basketball player. In the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Larry Brown became the first Tar Heel to play on an Olympic basketball team and helped the U.S. men’s team win the gold, defeating the Soviet Union in the final. Carolina women first won gold in the 1996 Olympics with the women’s soccer team, which featured several players from UNC, including star Mia Hamm.

First Women: Several athletes competed in the Olympics before coming to UNC, including swimmers Ann Marshall (1972 Olympics), Janis Hape (1976 Olympics), and Wendy Weinberg (1976 Olympics).

As far as I was able to tell, the first woman from UNC to compete in the Olympics while still a student was Sharon Couch, a track star who finished sixth in the long jump in the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona.

First Individual Gold Medal: Former Tar Heel athletes excelled in team sports in the Olympics, participating in gold medal-winning teams in men’s basketball and women’s soccer. A former UNC star did not win an individual gold medal until the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, when Allen Johnson won the gold in the 110 meter hurdles. The first woman from UNC to win individual gold medals was Marion Jones, who won three golds in the 2000 Sydney Olympics. However, Jones later returned the medals after admitting to steroid use.

The Olympic Torch in Chapel Hill

Charles Shaffer, Jr., with the Olympic torch, 23 June 1996. Photo by Dan Sears for UNC News Services.

Twenty years ago this summer, the Olympic torch relay passed through Chapel Hill on its eventual way to Atlanta for the 1996 Summer Olympics.

UNC was placed on the torch relay route thanks to the work of alumnus Charles Shaffer, Jr., an Atlanta attorney who was one of the early members of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, the organization that successfully pitched what began as an unlikely proposal into a successful bid for the 1996 games.

In recognition of his work in bringing the Olympics to Atlanta, Shaffer was asked to participate in the torch relay and got to decide where he would like to run. As an alumnus with longtime family ties to Carolina, Shaffer chose Chapel Hill.

On June 23, 1996, the torch came to Carolina. Members of the local community, including UNC journalism professor Chuck Stone, carried the torch through Carrboro and Chapel Hill. Charles Shaffer took the torch onto campus and past the Old Well, where a large crowd was waiting. The photos on this page are from the UNC News Services collection in the University Archives.

Photo by Dan Sears for UNC News Services. — Photo by Dan Sears for UNC News Services, 1996.

Photo by Dan Sears for UNC News Services, 1996.

From Tokyo to Chapel Hill: UNC’s First International Student?

One of the earliest — and possibly the first — international student to attend UNC was Shinzaburo Mogi, from Tokyo, Japan, who was enrolled during the 1893-1894 school year. Mogi had an interesting personal history. His family in Japan was involved in the production of soy sauce, beginning the company that would later become Kikkoman Corporation. Mogi himself made several attempts to manufacture soy sauce in the United States.

Mogi has a brief entry in the earliest alumni directory, noting only that he was a student during the 1893-1894 year. He is listed among the freshman class members in the 1894 yearbook, but does not appear to have been mentioned in the student newspaper for those years. Nor could I find anything about him in the University President’s correspondence for 1893-1894. The Registrar’s record book for the 1890s show that Mogi was here for just one term, taking classes in Math, English, and Physics.

The only other references to Mogi that I could track down were from local newspapers, including one published a few decades after he left UNC.

Note: Some contemporary coverage of Mogi described him using terms that are now considered slurs and framing that modern readers will see as tokenizing. We are sharing these items in this post as part of the very limited historical record about Mogi’s time at the University

Mogi is first mentioned in the Durham Globe on February 2, 1894:

Durham Globe, 2 February 1894. Newspapers.com. — *Durham Globe*, 2 February 1894. Newspapers.com.

The so-called “conversion” mentioned by UNC President George Tayloe Winston is evidence that there was still a strong religious emphasis at the University at the time.

Mogi received a brief mention in the social column of the Raleigh Evening Visitor a month later when he visited Raleigh to attend the state museum.

Evening Visitor (Raleigh, N.C.), 10 March 1894. Newspapers.com. — *Evening Visitor* (Raleigh, N.C.), 10 March 1894. Newspapers.com.

Mogi didn’t appear in local newspapers again until an article about international students at UNC published in the Salisbury Evening Post in 1920.

Salisbury Evening Post, 30 January 1920. Newspapers.com. — *Salisbury Evening Post*, 30 January 1920. Newspapers.com.

We believe that the Shinzaburo Mogi who attended UNC is the same as the member of the Mogi family who came to the United States in the 1890s and opened the first soy sauce factory in America. In Ronald Yates’s 1998 book, The Kikkoman Chronicles, he says that Shinzaburo Mogi, then 20 years old, left Japan in 1892 with the intention of bringing the family business to the United States. Little is known about Mogi’s early years in the United States (the book does not mention his time in Chapel Hill), but he is known to have opened a soy sauce plant in Denver in 1907. The business was not successful, and Mogi moved to Toronto where he managed another soy sauce factory. This, too, was a short-lived effort and he eventually settled in Chicago where he worked as a trader, importing Japanese soy sauce and also continuing to invest in American soy sauce companies. Mogi returned to Japan in the 1930s and died in 1946.

New Post Looks at the Naming of McCorkle Place

In a new post on the blog of the Chancellor’s Task Force on UNC-Chapel Hill history, Rob Shapard looks at the naming of McCorkle Place at UNC, including why it took nearly 150 years to name something after one of UNC’s most prominent early supporters.

Summer Reading in 1962: Look Homeward, Angel

UNC’s popular (and sometimes controversial) Carolina Summer Reading Program began in 1999. However, UNC experimented with the idea of an assigned summer reading book for students as early as 1962.

Students entering Carolina in the fall of 1962 were required to read Look Homeward, Angel, UNC graduate Thomas Wolfe’s classic coming-of-age novel featuring a young man from western North Carolina who attended a familiar-sounding college in the town of “Pulpit Hill.” Orientation Chairman Bob Madry told the Daily Tar Heel that the book was “a difficult assignment,” but appropriate because “exposure to it plus the analysis and discussion in the seminars will give new students some idea of the type of work they can expect in the months to come.”

As part of the orientation program, students would attend a discussion session led by members of the Phi Eta Sigma scholastic honorary society. English professor Hugh Holman prepared a guide to the text. Unfortunately, the records in the archives don’t tell us how the discussions went, or how many incoming students made their way through the entire 626-page book.

Looking back on the required reading assignment, a committee charged with evaluating the orientation offerings wrote, “The seminars on a book (tried experimentally last year) should be repeated, but the book should be a shorter work such as Animal Farm.”

lha1962 — Records of the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs (40124), Box 33. University Archives.

Operation Match: Computer Dating at UNC in the 1960s

Long before Tinder and Match.com, students at UNC and other schools looked to a computer for help finding dates with a program called “Operation Match.”

Operation Match was founded by students at Harvard and Cornell in 1965. Students would send in a questionnaire with a $3.00 fee. Their answers were transferred to punch cards, processed on a five-ton mainframe computer in Massachusetts, and then the students were sent a list of names and phone numbers of potential matches.

The program came to UNC in time for the fall 1965 semester. A Daily Tar Heel editorial asked, “Are you willing to let a big machine with flashing lights and flying cards tell you how to run your personal social life?” Apparently many students were.

The program ran an interesting promotion on campus in October 1965. Patsy Puckett, who was then Miss Mississippi, filled out an Operation Match questionnaire and then went on a date with Carolina student she was matched with.

According to the DTH, several hundred students used the service in its first month. While Operation Match apparently led to several successful dates, there were some unusual matches, including that of a UNC sophomore who was matched with his sister, a student at Duke. This was notable not just for the fact that they were related, but, according one of the student’s friends, “They are as different as night and day.”

The program lasted at least through the next school year. In February 1966 Operation Match was advertising for a “North Carolina District Manager” to help with promotion and outreach. By the fall of 1966, the DTH declared “Electronic match-making is here to stay.”

In the University Archives, we’re interested in tracking down one of the questionnaires that the students were asked to fill out. We haven’t been able to find one in our records (yet). If any former students are reading this and have suggestions, please let us know [Edit 1/12/2017: Thank you to Emanuele Berry, a producer for the podcast Undone, who sent us an Operation Match survey from 1966! She turned up the survey while doing research for an episode on Operation Match.]

Operation Match ad from the Daily Tar Heel, 20 April 1966.

From the Archives: Anti-War Rally at UNC, 1936.

I ran across this photograph in the UNC-Chapel Hill Image Collection and was surprised to see an anti-war protest not from the mid 1960s, when college students across the country demonstrated against the Vietnam war, but from three decades earlier. … Continue reading →

Anti-war rally at Memorial Hall, ca. 1936. P004.

Memories of World War I were still fresh in the minds of many Americans when tensions were beginning to escalate in Europe in the 1930s, building toward the conflicts that would lead to World War II. Pearl Harbor was still several years away and some college students were wary of the idea of getting involved in another European war. At UNC, students formed local chapters of two national anti-war organizations: the American Student Union, a left-wing organization associated with the Communist and Socialist parties, and the Veterans of Future Wars, a satirical group asking for compensation for future military service.

The photo shown here is probably from a rally held on campus on April 22, 1936. It was described as a “strike,” with classes cancelled for about an hour. The rally started at South Building and continued to Memorial Hall for speeches. The description in the Daily Tar Heel said, “Placards and tableaux expressing antipathy to war will make their appearance at the anti-war strike.”

The featured speaker at the rally was Dick Whitten, president of Commonwealth College in Arkansas, who descried “capitalistic imperialism” as the driving force behind war. An estimated 700 students and local residents attended.

Barack Obama’s 1994 Visit to Chapel Hill

In 1994, the Sonja Hayes Stone Black Cultural Center sponsored a three-day program for leaders of African American student groups at UNC. The Black Student Leadership Summit included sessions on leadership and community outreach and gave students opportunities to discuss issues and ideas. The event kicked off on the evening of September 2, 1994, with an opening reception and dinner followed by a featured speaker from out of town: Barack Obama.

Program for the 1994 Black Student Leadership Summit. Stone Center Records (40341), University Archives.

The future president had received nationwide attention when he was elected as the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. He was working as a Civil Rights lawyer in Chicago at the time of his visit to Chapel Hill.

Obama, whose first name was misspelled as “Barak” in the conference program, was listed as a “motivational speaker.” Unfortunately, there is little record of his speech or his visit. The booking was arranged through an agency, so there is no correspondence with Obama. The file did not include any photographs and the conference was not covered in the Daily Tar Heel.

Excerpt from an invitation to the Black Student Leadership Summit. Stone Center Records (40341), University Archives.

The conference was held at the Aqueduct Conference Center south of Chapel Hill, so it’s likely Obama never even made it to campus. About all we can tell from the records is that the the visit was short: notes on travel arrangements showed that he arrived the afternoon of the 2nd, spent the night at the Omni Europa, and then flew back on the morning of the 3rd. Obama received a $1,500 honorarium for his talk. A handwritten note in the file said that he was travelling with his wife, so it appears that future First Lady Michelle Obama was here as well.

Excerpt from evaluations of the Black Student Leadership Summit. Stone Center Records (40341), University Archives.

While we don’t know what Obama said, we do know that his speech was well received. With approval ratings that President Obama (or any politician) would envy, 21 out of 22 people responding to a post-conference survey said that they enjoyed Obama’s talk. Attendees said that they “Liked his views and thoughts about values and picking our battles,” and “liked the fact that he was a very successful Black man fighting for the betterment of Black people.” One respondent called him “inspirational.” Another said, “He was a little long.”

The records of the 1994 Black Student Leadership Summit are in the records of the Sonja Hayes Stone Center for Black Culture and History in the University Archives.