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Few people would ever think of flying all the way across the country to catch a
bus.
But Ken Moise did.
Then again, the bus he was catching was not just any bus, he said.
Moise, a new OB-GYN with UNC Hospitals, had a commitment to speak at a medical
convention in San Francisco the Saturday before the bus was to leave Chapel
Hill. As an organizer of the convention, he had planned to stay another day and
then catch a Sunday night flight scheduled to land at Raleigh Durham Airport
about the same time the Tar Heel Bus Tour was set to pull out of Chapel Hill.
The original plan was for his wife to meet him at the airport and drive him to
a Franklin County tobacco farm where the bus would be later that morning.
A delayed flight blew that possibility and left Moise spending an extra $300
for a ticket to New Bern where the tour would stop for the night.
The money, he said later, was well spent. "I was determined I was not going to
miss this."
Chapel Hill is not the South
People like Moise have been catching a ride on the Tar Heel Bus Tour for
four years now. The privately funded tour was initiated by the late Chancellor
Michael Hooker to introduce new faculty to the state and the role the
University plays serving it.
John Florin, a cultural and historical geographer who has been at Carolina
since 1969, joined the 2000 tour midway through its May 22-26 run to offer his
insights as the bus snaked its way from Charlotte into the mountains.
"We in Chapel Hill sometimes call Chapel Hill the southern part of heaven,"
Florin said, "but it would be a mistake for people to arrive here and think of
it as the South."
The bus tour, more than anything else, helps to correct that misperception. "We
are fortunate in North Carolina in that we are in a state that is filled with a
series of landscape and cultural differences that make it an exciting place. We
need to understand that. We need to see its differences.
"We sometimes sit in Chapel Hill -- and Chapel Hill is a very peculiar kind of
place -- and don't sense the diversity and the wealth of North Carolina. A trip
like this introduces people who might otherwise never get to see it to at least
snippets of that wealth."
Mike Smith, director of Carolina's Institute of Government and the tour guide,
said people come to Chapel Hill from all over the place and may carry
unfortunate negative stereotypes about the South.
"One of the things that this bus tour does is give them the opportunity to meet
lots of different kinds of people in lots of different parts of the state so
that they see the differences that are not about intelligence but are about
custom, that are about culture, that are about circumstance," Smith said.
A panorama of people
The bus covered more than 1,200 miles at a pace that made it seem as
much a relay race as field trip.
It was not about looking through a bus window at passing scenery. It was about
making stops that gave fleeting looks into people's lives.
In Franklin County, they met two farm families determined to keep their land --
one by hanging on to tobacco; the other by letting go.
"Used to be a man could take 20, 25 acres of tobacco and provide for his family
good," said Steve Mitchell, a third-generation tobacco farmer. He and his wife
now raise soybeans, small grains and beef cattle to supplement their income.
Still, tobacco accounts for 90 percent of their livelihood.
John and Betty Vollmer took over the family farm in 1972 but did not start
diversifying from tobacco to other crops until four years ago when their four
children had all finished college. "I can't put kids through school with
strawberries and pumpkins," Betty Vollmer explained.
Now one of those kids, son Russ, and his wife Mary have come back to the farm
with their fresh ideas on how to keep it going, such as opening the farm for
educational visits by school groups and families. Next fall, they plan to start
"agritainment" ventures that include hayrides and a field where people must
find their way through a maze cut through corn stalks.
The Franklin County stops proved particularly meaningful for Kurt Ribisl, an
assistant professor of health behavior. Ribisl grew up in Winston-Salem and his
research interests include evaluating tobacco control programs.
But until his visit with the Mitchells and Vollmers, he said, "I'd never
actually set foot on a tobacco farm."
These visits, he said, helped him understand the realities farmers face. They
also reinforced his belief that it's right for farmers get some of the state's
$4.6 billion share of a lawsuit settlement.
Before the farm stops, Ferrel Guillory gave the group a primer on tobacco in
North Carolina. He said the state's tobacco farmers feel under assault from
forces they can't control, such as anti-smoking sentiments and the erosion of
the federal tobacco support program.
"You will find the tobacco farmers full of angst," said Guillory, the director
of Carolina's Program on Southern Politics, Media and Public Life. He rode
along on the tour's first two days to serve as a guide.
Farther east in Grifton, the tour group met a town still digging out from the
effects of Hurricane Floyd.
After a barbecue lunch served in a relief-supply warehouse, the group saw some
of the hardest-hit areas, including a desolate road lined by abandoned homes
ruined when a nearby creek overflowed its banks. Household debris littered the
sandy soil, and a framed photographic portrait of a man leaned against the
trunk of a tree like some graveyard monument.
"There was still a sense of those people's lives there that they couldn't come
back to," said Kate McGraw, information services coordinator in the Health
Sciences Library.
In New Bern, the group discovered a historic town down east that served as
North Carolina's colonial capital and sits along the shore where the Neuse
River empties into the Pamlico Sound.
The group toured Tryon Palace, home of the Royal colonial governor, then
gathered inside a tent on the palace grounds to eat dinner with incoming
Carolina freshmen and their parents.
Entertainment was provided by Carolina's Bland Simpson, an assistant professor
of creative writing who plays with The Red Clay Ramblers. As dinner was served,
a thunderstorm boomed in from the sound. While the lights flickered, the power
stayed on and Simpson kept singing, the tent's fabric walls fluttering in the
wind.
At a Rotary Club lunch in Asheboro, the group met John McGlohon, a living
reminder of why there is a Memorial Day. McGlothon enlisted in the Army in June
of 1941 a week after his 18th birthday, wanting to become a parachute rigger.
Four years later, he found himself stuck in the glass belly of a B-29 bomber
with a camera -- and history -- in his hands as his plane flew over Hiroshima
behind another plane called the Enola Gay. His pictures, McGlothon knows, will
help future generations remember the event long after his generation is gone.
In Chatham County's Siler City, the bus tour stopped at a community center
where participants heard local officials talk about how an influx of Hispanic
immigrants has affected the racial dynamics of this rural place.
Rick Givens, chair of the Chatham County Board of Commissioners, said a UNC
system-sponsored trip to Mexico forced him to see immigrants in a different
light.
Instead of wanting to send Hispanics back to where they came from, he wants to
help them make a home here.
"Let's just deal with the people we have and make their lives better and our
lives better," he said.
In Burke County, inside Foothills Correctional Institute, the tour members met
Roy and Lacey, two young men who talked about their efforts to turn their lives
around behind bars.
They are different in many ways, strikingly the same in others.
Roy is a skinny white kid doing time for an armed robbery he committed after
quitting high school.
Lacey is a black kid with an easy smile who was convicted for attempted
murder.
Both had found religion in prison and the pathway to a four-year business
degree.
Roy became a born-again Christian, Lacey a Muslim.
"Who was your role model" growing up, asked Steven Shaban, a surgeon at UNC
Hospitals.
"Movie stars," Lacey said.
Roy, because he committed his crime while still a juvenile, will have the
chance to get out in a few years.
Lacey, because of Structured Sentencing laws, is not so lucky.
Not yet 25, Lacey will be more than 50 by the time he can get out of prison.
Hours later, the group sat in a Greensboro motel listening as Supreme Court
Justice Henry Frye told them what he thought about the value of Structured
Sentencing.
"On average, it's probably better to take broad discretionary power away," Frye
said. Before Structured Sentencing, two people could be convicted for the same
crime, and one could end up being sentenced for 20 years, the other for four
months.
The majesty of Madison
In the rugged mountains of Madison County, bus riders learned about
rug-hooking and clogging, and about doctoring families in a place where there
is no hospital.
It was here they met Mars Hill Mayor Raymond Rapp, who showed the group around
his town and the tiny college that shares its name.
"Around here we refer to you as the other hill," Rapp said.
Max Lennon, the college president, told how the school's clogging team, despite
its affiliation with the Baptist Church, has won the national championship nine
times. "Baptists may not believe in dancing, but they can appreciate great toe
tapping when they see it," Lennon said.
From Mars Hill, the bus stopped at a converted diner where Marianna Daly, the
county's only doctor, sees patients.
There are two kinds of doctors, Daly told the group. There are the "forehead
doctors," who lean their heads in to dispense information to their patients on
the way out the door. And there are the "belly doctors," who take the time to
learn as much about the outside lives of their patients as the inside of their
bodies.
Daly, who has a master's degree from Carolina's public health school, grew up
in Durham and went off to Princeton with the idea of becoming a forest ranger
until someone told her, "You want to work with people some place beautiful."
And it is the beauty of its mountains and its people that have kept her here
the past 12 years. "It fits what I wanted to do and where I wanted to be," she
said.
The bus parked for the night in front of Balsam Mountain Inn, with its sweeping
porches and breathtaking views and welcoming beds nearly as wide as the rooms.
And, for this one night, it had the music of the Trantham Family Singers, who'd
so impressed Michael Hooker on the 1997 bus tour that they were asked to
perform last year at his memorial service.
Father Doug had a banjo strapped around his neck, but it was clear from the
first lick that he played second fiddle to his three children. There was the
6-year-old, who told the sing-along story "We're Going on A Bear Hunt," his
11-year-old son, who really did play fiddle and dulcimer, and 14-year-old
Emily, who wore a straw hat over Raggedy Ann hair and sang with a voice spun of
gold.
Gene Nichol, the new dean of the law school, sat silently at one of the tables
closest to the stage, transfixed up to the Tranthams' last song. "Anybody got a
lighter?" he yelled as they finished, eager for an encore.
But even a girl with an angel's voice can have a stomach that growls. Emily
glared at her audience and said, "We haven't eaten, people."
The economic divide
Florin told the group that North Carolina is divided into three distinct
geological regions: the coastal plains to the east, the mountains to the west
and the Piedmont in the middle.
The more meaningful divide, in terms of shifting economic fortunes, separates
the Piedmont's urban crescent from every other place in the state.
Various stops on the tour put those differences in sharp relief and revealed
that the state has an economy as complex and changing as its people.
On a Wednesday morning in Charlotte, the group gazed out the window of the 59th
floor of the Bank of America building and looked out at all the various
improvement projects the bank had worked with the city's government leaders to
make happen.
That afternoon, on Main Street in Mars Hill, they stood inside a $6,000 gazebo
the city had built as part of its revitalization efforts. Evelyn Underwood, an
89-year-old member of the town council, contibuted to the project by planting
flowers.
Tour members read from their guide book that the "three T's" of the North
Carolina economy are tobacco, textiles and technology.
What they learned was that a fourth T -- tourism -- is continuing to emerge as
tobacco and textiles fade.
Tourism is blossoming from mountains to coast and also in the out-of-the-way
places such as Seagrove in Randolph County, where a cluster of clay potters
like Sid Luck sell their wares.
Luck, who runs his potter's wheel out of an old chicken coop, is a retired
school teacher and fifth-generation potter.
Terry Zug, the chair of the University's Curriculum in Folklore, views Luck's
shop and the 100 or so like it around Seagrove as one more magnet to draw
tourists to the state.
That may be, Luck said, but for him, there has always been a bigger return of
pleasure than profit. "People talk about having clay in their veins and there
is something to that," Luck said.
The mountains of western North Carolina are a wonderful place to live but a
hard place to make a living. Becky Anderson and the organization she runs,
HandMade of America, is working to change that.
The arrival of interstate highways spurred the development of the "invisible
industry" of tourism, Anderson said. Locals have always had a love-hate
relationship with the people who come in their cars to stare at their
mountains, Anderson said. To them, tourists have always meant traffic and
trash. More and more, they are beginning to realize that tourists also mean
cash in their pockets.
HandMade seeks to grow a regional economy by marketing the things made by hand
in the mountains -- from quilts to rocking chairs to blackberry jam -- that
cannot be replicated on an assembly line anywhere else.
"If you think we are going to be the Detroit of Dixie, think again," Anderson
said. "This is not gentle terrain, and the terrain is a terrific problem. It is
also a wonderful asset."
There are other vital pieces of the state's economy, large and small, old and
new, that the tour sought to highlight.
In Lenoir, the bus stopped at Bernhardt Furniture, a family-owned business
founded in 1889 that now operates with a blend of "high tech and high touch,"
said G. Alexander "Alex" Bernhardt, vice president and general manager.
"We are trying to do things that are interesting, different and hopefully
better than what the competition is doing," Bernhardt said.
Nearly a third of all the furniture produced in the United States is produced
in North Carolina.
In Yadkinville, the group visited Unifi Inc., a humming, modernistic plant
where polyester chips are poured into ovens, then made into a textured,
wool-like fiber used for anything from sportswear to the seats of sports
cars.
In Morrisville, the tour made its final stop at Hangers Cleaners, where Joseph
M. DeSimone, a Carolina chemistry professor with dozens of patents, showed how
he had developed a way to use carbon dioxide in place of toxic solvents to
clean clothes.
The process is safer for the environment and easier on employees because it
does not require heat, DeSimone said.
The new technology also gives DeSimone a toehold on an established $8 billion
industry that is bigger than the country's motion picture industry.
From bus to campus
And so from east to west, from tobacco to innovative cleaning solvents, the bus
tour went.
"On this tour, you see people who are regular, everyday folks working hard, and
you see people who are regular everyday folks in a different setting like Bank
of America working hard and you see North Carolina is not one or the other but
all of these things," Mike Smith said.
"As the University, if we want to help the state, we have to recognize that we
have to put ourselves in the place where those folks are and help them on their
own terms, not on our terms."
The lesson was not lost on Haibo Zhou.
"In Chapel Hill, you don't see the hardships of people's lives," said Zhou, an
assistant professor of biostatistics. "It's like it doesn't exist. You come out
here and you see it."
Zhou has been at Carolina for three years. He grew up in Qingdao, a town in
eastern China. While he has been to the North Carolina coast, Winston-Salem and
Charlotte, he had never spent time in the rural part of the state, so he was
thankful for the bus tour.
"I could drive through it but I wouldn't get an insider's knowledge of issues,"
he said. "Our teaching and research will be more productive, more of a service
to the state."
But the tour was not just for journey-takers to get to know the state but to
discover things about each other as well.
Conversations on the bus ranged from discussing what they had seen -- "That
impressed me, that those people were able to sit there and talk like that," a
woman said about Siler City -- to last night's ballgame -- "It was a blow-out
in the second half," another woman said of a Lakers/Blazers playoff game -- to
the ride itself -- "We need a massage stop," someone said on behalf of
everyone.
The tour also inspired Janet E. Porter, the associate dean of the School of
Public Health, to turn to poetry. The following stanzas seemed to capture the
spirit of the ride:
We had lots of laughter
Friendship and networks
Smith said the friendships formed on the tour could foster the kind of
cross-disciplinary collaboration needed to help the University respond to the
state's complex problems.
"Not one thread of any discipline can have the kind of impact that all the
threads coming together can have," he said. "I think our challenge after the
bus tour is to try to realize the potential -- to try to find ways our campus
can facilitate that coming together."
Memories and fun
But when this is over
When we're all done
Are what will remain.
A commitment to serve North Carolina
We will surely sustain.
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