University Gazette, May 22, 2002

A peek behind the graduation stage

Commencement ceremonies, for all the people who come to this campus to experience them, have a way of compressing time into a few emotion-packed moments.

It takes most students the better part of four years to earn their diplomas, but just a moment to turn their tassels.

Dignitaries, as obligated, remind students to thank their parents and teachers and all the other people who helped push and prod them into seeing how far they could go and how high they could reach.

One group of people that rarely gets acknowledged is the one that literally sets up the stage.

Or the chairs that parents and grandparents and brothers and sisters and friends sit on at ceremonies across campus.

Or the tents.

Or the tables.

Or everything else, from the flowers to food to transportation.

And maybe that anonymity is how it should be. If employees have done their jobs right, things will go as they are supposed to go, look as they are supposed to look, be as they are supposed to be.

Going unnoticed, in this respect, serves as proof of a job well done.

That said, now that the weekend is past, it's a good time to take a look at some of the people who have spent countless days making sure that this one day comes as close to perfection as good planning, luck and weather permitting.

In a different sort of way than for students, it is their moment to sparkle and shine and to show off before thousands of invited guests just what they can accomplish when they set their minds to it.

Setting the scene

In telling such a behind-the-scenes story, it is almost impossible to figure out where to start, or with whom. Work is spread across campus in a way that connects all sorts of people from almost every department.

Grounds Director Kirk Pelland, for instance, said too many people make the mistake of thinking of graduation as a single two-hour event held within Kenan Stadium on Sunday morning.

Undergraduates no longer receive their diplomas in Kenan Stadium, which means commencement ceremonies were going on all over campus.

Altogether, there were 25 different ceremonies and events, with one on Friday afternoon, three on Saturday and the rest spread over Sunday. To make it all come together, grounds crews of three to five members were deployed to 13 different work zones.

Evidence of the scope and scale of activities can be found atop the desk of Jill Hartman, Pelland's administrative assistant. It's her job to make sure there is enough of everything from chairs to podiums to water tables.

Hartman started preparing for graduation in December, two months into her new job at Carolina after moving here from Erie, Pa.

"That's when departments start contacting me to let me know what they need for their own particular ceremonies and receptions," she said.

A tall stack of folders is piled on Hartman's desk, with the contents of each serving as a script of sorts for each work crew, detailing what each must set up, where and by when.

One way to get a sense of the scale of that task is to consider just the number of folding chairs that Hartman ordered. Of the 4,300 folding chairs set up on campus, only 1,800 went to Kenan Stadium.

Along with the chairs, there are tables and linens, podiums, water pitchers and glasses to put in place.

"This is my first one so it's been quite a learning experience," she said.

Straightening up the house

Kenan Stadium director Mike Bunting, who is no relation to the football coach who bears the same name and shares the same workspace, remembers describing for his wife what it was like preparing his house for commencement.

"It's like getting ready for a dinner party of 30,000 to 35,000 of your closest friends," he said. "It really is on that kind of scale."

Bunting graduated in Kenan Stadium in 1990 and decided he never wanted to leave.

He worked as the football team's assistant equipment manager before he became stadium director four years ago.

And considering the lengths Bunting had gone to make his house look good for commencement, you would think he had been preparing for an army of mothers to show up at his front door, each armed with a pair of white gloves stuck deep in her purse.

"It breaks my heart if somebody comes and has a negative experience because of my facility," Bunting said. "And it is the negative comments that motivate you more than the positive comments. I want to get rid of those."

Before graduation day, all entrance gates that are chipped or rusted get touched up with paint.

Every shrub is clipped.

Every seat in the 60,000-seat house is wiped down and inspected for needed repairs.

All the toilets are cleaned and flushed and any that don't flush are fixed.

Workers from HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) check interior air-conditioning systems to make sure they're working properly and set on the right temperature.

Housekeepers wipe, scrub and vacuum every inch of interior space in the stadium as well, from walls to windows to floors.

If the stadium were Bunting's dining room table, the stage would be the centerpiece.

Thursday morning before the big weekend, a work crew supervised by Louis Buarotti was on hand to give the stage some final touches. Buarotti started working at Carolina seven years ago and for five years was part of the work crew he now manages.

At this hour, Ronnie Hill from the paint shop was putting a fresh coat of white around the lattice skirt of the stage. The circular banisters and the Roman columns already glistened white against the backdrop of the Carolina blue carpet laid atop the stage floor.

Jimmy Wood from the carpentry shop did most of the work to join the various parts of the stage.

"It looks incredible from up above looking down on it," Buarotti said. "We have to cover it every night because they have these water cannons that water the field."

The field is so green because of the winter rye that Bunting's crew has kept alive for this one event, Buarotti said. After Sunday, the grass will be killed so that nothing but Bermuda will be left by the start of football season.

That same morning, Steven Hill was breaking apart another bale of pine straw to spread along one of the stadium paths. The laying down of straw, in Hill's mind, is a way of rolling out the red carpet for campus visitors. Hill has been on the job for only two months, but he takes that idea seriously.

"My goal is when outsiders come to UNC, I want them to see the way a college is supposed to look. I mean, you got to take pride," he said.

"Anybody could put straw down. But do you want quality or quantity? I want quality so that when people walk up here they say, `Hey, this looks nice.' That's when I know I did my part representing UNC."

Pelland's grounds crews, in the days leading up to graduation weekend, were all over campus, buffing and polishing, cutting and pruning.

Said Pelland, "The way we approach all of the maintenance of the campus is that it is a part of the mission of the University. We just look at graduation as show day."

Yet all it will take is a last-minute threat of severe weather, and no one will see Kenan Stadium at its finest because commencement will be moved to the Dean E. Smith Center.

Directing the show

There are so many hands, so many tasks, so many story lines. Most of them lead, in one way or another, to the main commencement exercise inside Kenan Stadium on Sunday morning.

In some ways, it is as elaborate and complex as staging a huge Broadway play -- without a rehearsal and with only one chance to get it right.

Enter Fred Stipe and James Kessler, who arrived at 6 a.m. to get things rolling three-and-a-half hours before the official start.

Together, they served as directors. Armed with their two-way radios, they remained in contact with each other and dozens of others as the morning unfolded and everyone was placed into their assigned spots.

Kessler is the director of disability services in Student Affairs, and one of his assignments was to drive disabled people from the Rams Head parking lot to their chairs on the stadium field.

Stipe works in Wilson Library's photographic services, but it is his expertise as owner of Show Pros Events Service of Chapel Hill that was called upon here. He got his start in crowd control working for a company that ran Rolling Stones and Grateful Dead concerts at Carter Finley Stadium in the 1980s.

Although crowds at rock concerts are twice as big and rowdy as those who come to graduation, a commencement requires precise choreography, and the crowd in many ways is part of the show. Each group has to hit its mark at exactly the right time for it all to come together as it should, Stipe said.

Kessler said 42 marshals would meet Saturday morning to go over the order of the processional.

"We've got this training down to a science, we like to think," he said. "They are leading a pattern of movement for 4,000 people who have not been trained."

Kessler said it works like passing a collection plate in church -- by people watching what the person next to them does.

By 9:30 a.m., once the seats were filled and the ceremony began, everything went on autopilot.

"There's an unbelievable amount of work that goes into it at the front end, but when it's over, and you've pulled it off without any problems, you really do get a wonderful sense of satisfaction that all the hours put into it were worth it," Stipe said. "When I overhear one of the grandmothers or grandfathers say what a wonderful time they've had, I don't need to hear anything else."
University Gazette

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill