M.C.S. Noble, dean of the school of education in the University, will be 70 years old next Sunday, March 15. He was born in Selma, N.C., just 1,910 years, to the day, after Julius Caesar was struck down in the Roman Forum.
“Beware the Ides of March!,” the warning which the soothsayers gave the great Roman in the winter of56-55 B.C., might have been said with equal prescience to the monster Illiteracy that was stalking back and forth through North Carolina in the last century; for ever since he learned the alphabet, or almost ever since, Mr. Noble is has been engaged in teaching readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic, and other more advanced subjects to the youth of the State.
Maybe the circumstance that he was born on the anniversary of one of the most famous events in Roman history had an influence upon the bent of his mind, for he was a Latin fan from infancy. Before he was out of the First Reader, cat and dog became, to him, felix and canis; and the chances are that today when he crosses a bridge between here and Durham he thinks of Horatio before he things of Frank Page and the tax on gasoline. When he graduated from the University 46 years ago he wrote his thesis in Latin. But this document has been lost.
He was commander of cadets at the Bingham School from 1879 to 1882, and from 1882 to 1898 was superintendent of schools in Wilmington. He came to the University faculty in 1898. He has two children, Miss Alice Noble, who lives with him in Chapel Hill, and M.C.S. Jr., who is now traveling abroad. Mark, by the way, was bound for Rome when he last wrote and perhaps will be prowling about the Forum on his father’s 70th birthday.
From the front page of the Chapel Hill Weekly, Thursday, March 12, 1925
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073229/1925-03-12/ed-1/seq-1/
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