1. “And I always remember that whatever I have done in the past or may do in the future Duke University is responsible in one way or another.” — Who spoke these words at a Greensboro campaign rally in 1960?
2. What crucial contribution to the tobacco industry was made by a slave in Caswell County?
3. True or false: Actor Robert De Niro once appeared as a beauty pageant emcee in a Duke Power television commercial.
4. What is the largest city in North Carolina not named for a person?
5. True or false: No football player at an N.C. college has ever won the Heisman Trophy.
Answers below
1. Duke law grad Richard Nixon.
2. Stephen Slade fell asleep while tending a fire in a tobacco barn, accidentally inventing the process that produces bright-leaf tobacco.
3. True. De Niro was discovered for the role while performing at the Matthews Dinner Theater in 1967. His big break in movies didn’t come until six years later in “Bang the Drum Slowly.”
4. High Point, the state’s eighth largest city.
5. True. North Carolina’s Charlie “Choo Choo” Justice was runner-up in both 1948 and 1949.
Lew, I always enjoy your “So You Think You Know North Carolina” quizzes, especially when I know one of the answers…like today.
It was December, 1942…Charlie Justice and his future wife Sarah Alice Hunter were on their way to a holiday celebration when on the car radio they heard the news that the University of Georgia’s Frankie Sinkwich had won the Heisman Memorial Trophy for the 1942 football season. Charlie turned to Sarah and said, “I want to win that trophy some day.” Well, Charlie never won the coveted award, but he came in 2nd in 1948 to SMU’s Doak Walker and again in 1949, when Notre Dame’s Leon Hart won the award. There were sports writers who said that Carolina’s schedule was not strong enough in ’48, and some of the same writers said that if Charlie had been able to play in the 1949 Notre Dame game in New York’s Yankee Stadium in front of the “Big Apple” media and had just an average Charlie Justice-day, the voting in ’49 might have been different. We’ll never know, but here’s something we do know:
“The Heisman Memorial Trophy annually recognizes the outstanding college football player whose performance best exhibits the pursuit of excellence with integrity.” Let me emphatically say those last two words again… “WITH INTEGRITY.”
I believe it’s safe to say that over the years, every Heisman recipient was an excellent football player, but that “integrity” thing has failed a few winners. In fact one was forced to give his trophy back and another one just recently got out of jail. And there is the one who seems to turn up in the news often these days for all the wrong reasons. And just last week, another former recipient again made headlines in a negative way.
I remember Charlie Justice saying in an April, 1989 interview:
“Once you become a public figure, you owe it to the public to conduct yourself in a way that sets a good example.”
That 1989 interview was conducted during the groundbreaking ceremony for “The Charlie Choo Choo Justice Center,” a facility for youth and young adults with chemical dependency treatment needs.
Justice continued, “This honor makes up for the Heisman Trophy I never won…because it is better than the Heisman.”
Again, Lew, thank you for all your good work on “North Carolina Miscellany.”
Jack, thank you — he made his “missing” Heisman seem small indeed….