Wednesday, February 18, 2015
"This is going to be a good Wednesday!" Lent begins
Tromped out across the ice to the bus stop at 6:33 this morning. Usually the 6:42 bus is pretty full but there was only one other person on the bus. He smiled at me and mumbled something., Then he said "you got change for a dollar?" "No," I said, "but I do have a dollar." "That'll do," he repelled. I gave it to him. I tried to start a conversation but he kept on mumbling in his private world, Then smiled at me and said "God bless you. This is going to be a good Wednesday!" Indeed! As I walked from the bus station to Immaculate Conception for the 7:00 am Ash Wednesday service I found that stepping where other people had walked was a lot easier than trying to negotiate the slippery unbroken ice. Just like life....Father Bill led the few who made it (including Neil McManus from our Bible study group) in simple a capella singing in the little side chapel. The Gospel was from the Sermon on the Mount, about not giving alms for the purpose of making it known but to do it quietly, and not let people know you are fasting. Bill then talked about the community obligation to repent, renew and share that Lent represents, and how even the animals of Ninvehe repented when Jonah warned the city. The service was short and very simple. Bill signed us with the ashes and we sang one more hymn and filed out. It felt so right to begin Lent with a small group, and a very simple service with no frills. Outside a woman asked me to lend her a pen and it turned out we had clients in common and she can help me with my work--and she was a friend of Neil's. Her daughter who was there too is in a play at Manbites theater which sounds like great fun...We all had a pleasant chat before Neil brought me downtown. So much community, so many blessings from simple acts of charity, so little need to be original as long as you are walking in the Light. "This is going to be a good Wednesday!" Yes it is!
Sunday, February 8, 2015
Carolina Way lives on --Thank you Dennis Rogers
Saturday, February 7, 2015
To Dennis Rogers
Dennis,
Your columns in the N & O were a fixture of young adulthood here in central NC. I enjoyed your humor and insight and stories about motorcycle riding, the Army and home living. You are missed now that you are in retirement.
I had to write to you when I read your piece today about the Carolina way being alive and well. As we Quakers say, “The Friend speaks my mind.” You have eloquently put out in the public arena something I have been trying to articulate and saying to my friends a lot over the last several years, exactly what you said. Even with all the athletic scandals, Carolina is still a great place and I am still so proud and happy that my family has so many connections with it.
We moved to Chapel Hill in 1965 from Cornell in upstate New York (back when “Yankee” was still a dirty word), when my dad, Forrest Read, got a job teaching in the English Department at UNC. Maybe you took some of his classes when you we there. It took a while for Carolina fever to catch on (my folks originally planned to stay in this hick state for a few years and then move back up to the Ivy League), but by the time I left the Army in 1976 I knew there was only one place to finish college, UNC. My Mom had gotten her social work degree at UNC in 1972. When I applied to law school (while getting my Masters in German at UNC) there was only one place, UNC.
By the time my kids applied to college there was barely enough space on the application for all the family members who had been to UNC–my dad, my mom, brothers, sisters, in-laws. My daughter, Dino Mangano, like me, only wanted to go to and apply to UNC (we made her apply to UNC-Asheville, just in case–she did, very grudgingly). They both graduated (son Quentin in 2009 and Dino 2010). Their Mom, my wife, Maria Mangano, got a job at the UNC Law School (where she got her JD in 1982) and shared the experience even more than I could. The kids both got great educations (as did I) and are developing into great citizens of the world. I am so proud of them and the University.
After she got her Masters in Education at Wake Forest, Dino said that she was so glad she went to UNC as an undergraduate. Not only did she get a great academic education, but she felt she got such a great education in life from being around and sharing the UNC experience with so many different kinds of people, something she felt was missing at WFU.
As this athletic mess has unfolded I have tried to think in what ways if any the dishonesty really touched the lives of my own UNC students during the five years they were there. I have not been able to think of any way that it did. More than the athletes cheating and professors looking the other way my sadness and disappointment now comes from the obfuscations, scapegoating and expensive evasions of the University administration. The lack of success of the basketball team makes me sad, but that is transitory–the reality of life and education in Chapel Hill remains the same and I would go there again myself in a minute.
I recently had dinner at UNC with law students (Witt Professionalism dinner) and came away marveling again at the intelligence, integrity and purpose of so many of the young people who go to UNC. The Carolina way does live on. Thank you for putting it out there so eloquently.
Daniel Read, UNC 78, UNC MA German 1981, UNC JD 1983
http://www.newsobserver.com/2015/02/06/4536004/rogers-despite-uncs-troubles-the.html
Rogers: Despite UNC's troubles, ‘The Carolina Way’ is alive and well
BY DENNIS ROGERS
ColumnistFebruary 6, 2015 Updated 11 hours ago
The sight of protesting UNC-Chapel Hill students marching and chanting slogans because they don’t like the name emblazoned on a campus building warms my heart. Good for them.
The target of their ire is Saunders Hall, named for a former slave owner who was once the King Klucker of the Ku Klux Klan or something. The building bears his name, the university says, because he published the early colonial records of North Carolina, and that, to historians, is a certified big deal.
I don’t really care all that much what the place is called. What I do care about is a phrase that has been ridiculed and bandied about a lot in the past few years: “The Carolina Way.”
Full disclosure: Yep, I’m a Carolina graduate. I wear my Carolina garb with pride, although I’d be a little more proud if the basketball team would quit choking in the second half and maybe, just maybe, hit a clutch free throw occasionally. That said, I’m the guy in the fight song: “I’m a Tar Heel born and a Tar Heel bred and when I die I’m a Tar Heel dead …”
Those in the ABC (Anybody But Carolina) club have made great sport of the university’s signature slogan. “The Carolina Way,” they claim in their endless and often nonsensical tirades on the Internet, means phony classes, phony grades, taking down the championship banners in the Dean Dome, an athletics department doing anything to keep athletes eligible, administrators trying to cover up the whole sordid mess, blah, blah, blah.
No, that’s not The Carolina Way. The Carolina Way is the almost 30,000-member student body going to class every day to study medicine, history, journalism, art, chemistry, law, education, astronomy, music or a hundred other disciplines.
The Carolina Way is students who volunteer to work with needy people at home and abroad, building houses, tutoring and, yes, cheering like mad at sporting events.
The Carolina Way is about professors who encourage disheartened students, who do research and remember they are there to teach, inspire and motivate. And, yes, The Carolina Way is their underpaid and overworked graduate assistants who never get the praise or the money they deserve.
I lived it
So the naysayers are wasting their time telling me what they think The Carolina Way is.
I know what it is because I lived it.
My heart was in my throat the first day I walked on campus in the summer of 1970. Fresh out of the Army, I was 27 with a wife and two kids and had been admitted as a “high-risk” provisional student, meaning I was expected to fail and hit the road. The deal was, I had to take two classes in each session of summer school and pass all four with no grade less than a “B” or I was gone.
Two years and two semesters later, I graduated with honors and a degree in journalism.
How? Because of The Carolina Way.
The Carolina Way is married students working day and night to keep family and education going. My wife worked at the Institute of Government and as a waitress while I repaired books at Wilson Library and slung words at the Chapel Hill Weekly. And when we needed a car to get to these jobs, her boss, professor Jake Wicker, sold us one for $65 that had a new set of tires and a new battery.
The Carolina Way was Dean John Adams coming up with a thousand-dollar grant from the Journalism Foundation when, in spite of our four jobs and the GI Bill, we ran out of money for books and tuition and I was looking at having to re-enlist.
The Carolina Way was a grad student teaching French who took pity on me and my Southern accent that first summer and promised that if I tried real hard and came to class every day, I would pass with the “B” I needed to be admitted as a full-time student. I worked harder in her class, and learned more, than in any other class I took.
The Carolina Way? It is journalism professor Walter Spearman arranging a part-time job for me that paid $2 an hour. And it’s another journalism professor lending me his prized and expensive Hasselblad camera so I could take his photography class. And he gave me film for it.
Protests and vigils
The Carolina Way is students marching to support higher wages for cafeteria workers and bravely facing down armed state highway patrolmen. It is working to end the disastrous war in Vietnam. It is lighting candles in silent grief for the murdered Eve Carson. It is protesting the legislature’s attempt to decide who can or cannot speak on campus. It is standing up for your beliefs even when they are unpopular. Especially then.
The past few years have been difficult for those of us who love Carolina. We are disgusted with the whole stinking mess and look forward to the day when those in whose hands we have entrusted our beloved university will have the courage to do the right thing, openly and boldly. Remember what’s written on the university seal?
“Lux Libertas” (Light and Liberty).
That’s The Carolina Way too.
Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2015/02/06/4536004/rogers-despite-uncs-troubles-the.html#storylink=cpy
To Dennis Rogers
Dennis,
Your columns in the N & O were a fixture of young adulthood here in central NC. I enjoyed your humor and insight and stories about motorcycle riding, the Army and home living. You are missed now that you are in retirement.
I had to write to you when I read your piece today about the Carolina way being alive and well. As we Quakers say, “The Friend speaks my mind.” You have eloquently put out in the public arena something I have been trying to articulate and saying to my friends a lot over the last several years, exactly what you said. Even with all the athletic scandals, Carolina is still a great place and I am still so proud and happy that my family has so many connections with it.
We moved to Chapel Hill in 1965 from Cornell in upstate New York (back when “Yankee” was still a dirty word), when my dad, Forrest Read, got a job teaching in the English Department at UNC. Maybe you took some of his classes when you we there. It took a while for Carolina fever to catch on (my folks originally planned to stay in this hick state for a few years and then move back up to the Ivy League), but by the time I left the Army in 1976 I knew there was only one place to finish college, UNC. My Mom had gotten her social work degree at UNC in 1972. When I applied to law school (while getting my Masters in German at UNC) there was only one place, UNC.
By the time my kids applied to college there was barely enough space on the application for all the family members who had been to UNC–my dad, my mom, brothers, sisters, in-laws. My daughter, Dino Mangano, like me, only wanted to go to and apply to UNC (we made her apply to UNC-Asheville, just in case–she did, very grudgingly). They both graduated (son Quentin in 2009 and Dino 2010). Their Mom, my wife, Maria Mangano, got a job at the UNC Law School (where she got her JD in 1982) and shared the experience even more than I could. The kids both got great educations (as did I) and are developing into great citizens of the world. I am so proud of them and the University.
After she got her Masters in Education at Wake Forest, Dino said that she was so glad she went to UNC as an undergraduate. Not only did she get a great academic education, but she felt she got such a great education in life from being around and sharing the UNC experience with so many different kinds of people, something she felt was missing at WFU.
As this athletic mess has unfolded I have tried to think in what ways if any the dishonesty really touched the lives of my own UNC students during the five years they were there. I have not been able to think of any way that it did. More than the athletes cheating and professors looking the other way my sadness and disappointment now comes from the obfuscations, scapegoating and expensive evasions of the University administration. The lack of success of the basketball team makes me sad, but that is transitory–the reality of life and education in Chapel Hill remains the same and I would go there again myself in a minute.
I recently had dinner at UNC with law students (Witt Professionalism dinner) and came away marveling again at the intelligence, integrity and purpose of so many of the young people who go to UNC. The Carolina way does live on. Thank you for putting it out there so eloquently.
Daniel Read, UNC 78, UNC MA German 1981, UNC JD 1983
http://www.newsobserver.com/2015/02/06/4536004/rogers-despite-uncs-troubles-the.html
Rogers: Despite UNC's troubles, ‘The Carolina Way’ is alive and well
BY DENNIS ROGERS
ColumnistFebruary 6, 2015 Updated 11 hours ago
The sight of protesting UNC-Chapel Hill students marching and chanting slogans because they don’t like the name emblazoned on a campus building warms my heart. Good for them.
The target of their ire is Saunders Hall, named for a former slave owner who was once the King Klucker of the Ku Klux Klan or something. The building bears his name, the university says, because he published the early colonial records of North Carolina, and that, to historians, is a certified big deal.
I don’t really care all that much what the place is called. What I do care about is a phrase that has been ridiculed and bandied about a lot in the past few years: “The Carolina Way.”
Full disclosure: Yep, I’m a Carolina graduate. I wear my Carolina garb with pride, although I’d be a little more proud if the basketball team would quit choking in the second half and maybe, just maybe, hit a clutch free throw occasionally. That said, I’m the guy in the fight song: “I’m a Tar Heel born and a Tar Heel bred and when I die I’m a Tar Heel dead …”
Those in the ABC (Anybody But Carolina) club have made great sport of the university’s signature slogan. “The Carolina Way,” they claim in their endless and often nonsensical tirades on the Internet, means phony classes, phony grades, taking down the championship banners in the Dean Dome, an athletics department doing anything to keep athletes eligible, administrators trying to cover up the whole sordid mess, blah, blah, blah.
No, that’s not The Carolina Way. The Carolina Way is the almost 30,000-member student body going to class every day to study medicine, history, journalism, art, chemistry, law, education, astronomy, music or a hundred other disciplines.
The Carolina Way is students who volunteer to work with needy people at home and abroad, building houses, tutoring and, yes, cheering like mad at sporting events.
The Carolina Way is about professors who encourage disheartened students, who do research and remember they are there to teach, inspire and motivate. And, yes, The Carolina Way is their underpaid and overworked graduate assistants who never get the praise or the money they deserve.
I lived it
So the naysayers are wasting their time telling me what they think The Carolina Way is.
I know what it is because I lived it.
My heart was in my throat the first day I walked on campus in the summer of 1970. Fresh out of the Army, I was 27 with a wife and two kids and had been admitted as a “high-risk” provisional student, meaning I was expected to fail and hit the road. The deal was, I had to take two classes in each session of summer school and pass all four with no grade less than a “B” or I was gone.
Two years and two semesters later, I graduated with honors and a degree in journalism.
How? Because of The Carolina Way.
The Carolina Way is married students working day and night to keep family and education going. My wife worked at the Institute of Government and as a waitress while I repaired books at Wilson Library and slung words at the Chapel Hill Weekly. And when we needed a car to get to these jobs, her boss, professor Jake Wicker, sold us one for $65 that had a new set of tires and a new battery.
The Carolina Way was Dean John Adams coming up with a thousand-dollar grant from the Journalism Foundation when, in spite of our four jobs and the GI Bill, we ran out of money for books and tuition and I was looking at having to re-enlist.
The Carolina Way was a grad student teaching French who took pity on me and my Southern accent that first summer and promised that if I tried real hard and came to class every day, I would pass with the “B” I needed to be admitted as a full-time student. I worked harder in her class, and learned more, than in any other class I took.
The Carolina Way? It is journalism professor Walter Spearman arranging a part-time job for me that paid $2 an hour. And it’s another journalism professor lending me his prized and expensive Hasselblad camera so I could take his photography class. And he gave me film for it.
Protests and vigils
The Carolina Way is students marching to support higher wages for cafeteria workers and bravely facing down armed state highway patrolmen. It is working to end the disastrous war in Vietnam. It is lighting candles in silent grief for the murdered Eve Carson. It is protesting the legislature’s attempt to decide who can or cannot speak on campus. It is standing up for your beliefs even when they are unpopular. Especially then.
The past few years have been difficult for those of us who love Carolina. We are disgusted with the whole stinking mess and look forward to the day when those in whose hands we have entrusted our beloved university will have the courage to do the right thing, openly and boldly. Remember what’s written on the university seal?
“Lux Libertas” (Light and Liberty).
That’s The Carolina Way too.
Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2015/02/06/4536004/rogers-despite-uncs-troubles-the.html#storylink=cpy
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