By Bion H. Butler
Like many another man I have a boy.
I have more than one. But only one happens to fit into this story. Three years ago as he was coming out of high school, which seems to be an event of the young ones of this generation, he told me he thought he would go to State college. In my day at his age college propositions would have been started by the old folks. Curiously enough I belong to that generation which in its youth was governed by its ancestors and in its older days is governed by its offspring. As I look back it seems I never had a chance to boss much. So I merely mildly asked the young man if he didn’t think it wise to look around a little before he made up his mind. He said he had been investigating, but like most of the dutiful children, he was willing to scout around a little with me over the country to take a look at some of the other places. Carnegie Tech in Pittsburg had struck me as a pretty good school for boys inclined along the line he proposed to follow, but a few minutes there satisfied him and he said he wouldn’t stay in Pittsburg. I mentioned the University there but his argument there weas that it was in Pittsburg, too, and he was ready to leave Pittsburg. He talked with a Princeton man a day or two later and told me no Princeton. We ran by Washington and Lee and I proposed we look at the University of Charlottesville as we went that way, but he said no. After we had scouted around through Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland and New York, he informed me that he expected to go to school in North Carolina because he liked to live in North Carolina, liked North Carolina surroundings, like North Carolina school customs, and liked North Carolina people. He also said he expected North Carolina would in his day develop into one of the leading states in the union and he believed it to be a state worth tying to, both from a business point of view and because he liked the people.
Coming home we stayed over night at Ashland, Virginia, the home of Randolph-Macon College. At his suggestion we walked out by the campus. “I just wanted to see what it looked like,” he said. ”I am going to school at State.” He approved of Wake Forest and at Chapel Hill he spoke of the University as a creditable fellow of the craft as he had done of Trinity when we came through Durham. When he reached home he wrote to State that he would be up thee in the fall. In June he will finish his third year there. I fell in with his choice and his arguments from the beginning. Since he went to State I have become better acquainted with the instructions there than I was before and also with the practices and customs of the students and with the aim of the work. I have some acquaintance with the faculty and management of the higher institutions of the state and our Universities and colleges appeal to me perhaps even more than they did to my boy. One of the strong pints that Imake with regard to living in the Sandhills territory is this excellent opportunity of getting the younger members to school. I look on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as one of the great and progressive seats of learning in this country. Education to me is not exactly filling the student’s head with a certain number of things, but it is a creation of habit of study and the desire to look into things. The faculty at Chapel Hill is a group of progressive educators and research men. I know a number of them personally and I admire them immensely. Had my boy chosen to go there I would have been content. Wake Forest is a college that is doing remarkable work. The New Duke University, building on the foundation laid by Trinity, seems to me to be the beginning of one of the influential forces of the world. Money and intelligence, using every modern facility and with hardly a limit on what they may do, point to the creation of an institution that none of us can fully comprehend. I expect to see Duke assemble young men and women from everywhere and in large numbers.
In the other towns and cities around us are a variety of colleges with various aims, some for women, some denominational, all of them under wholesome influences, carried on at moderate cost and in communities where the social and human atmosphere is desirable. Any of these schools are reached by a two or three hour drive on good roads from the Pinehurst section, and to me they constitute one of the most powerful agencies for the selection of a home in this vicinity.
Although we are led to believe, and possibly it is a fact, that parental desire is still that when the boys and girls go away from home to school they find their surroundings such as will help to develop desirable character. I am not sure that all schools would satisfy me. Now while human nature is human nature, no matter whether in North Carolina or anywhere else I am of the impression that our state being more of a rural state we are a little more democratic and conservative than in some other places. I may be mistaken, but superficial contact with schools and colleges in a good many states in a good many years leads me to think that possibly our colleges are not as rantankerous as I have seen in some other sections. I may be prejudiced a little in favor of our own or perhaps a more intimate acquaintance with them gives me a truer insight into ours than in those of the other States. But it is my conviction that I would rather have a boy or girl in one of the North Carolina higher schools than in those of almost any other of the states. I like North Carolina ideals and North Carolina habit of thought and North Carolina moral measurements. Our colleges may lack some things some of the other colleges have, and many have some things the others lack, but I think they lack some things that other colleges have and in the lack are benefited.
If I had before me the choice of a place for a home and Pinehurst was one of the points considered, if my household included boys and girls who had reached the age where they considered going to college it would not be golf and the other attractions of Pinehurst half as much as the high character of the colleges and universities in this section that would lead me to make my home in this vicinity. To my notion that is the strongest point to be offered in recommending the Sandhills as a place to live. My boy at State runs home several times during the year without missing a class and I see him frequently in his school, which enables me to be in touch with him and his teachers at frequent intervals. I have an acquaintance with him and his work as he goes along. And this opportunity is available to anybody living in the Pinehurst neighborhood.
From page 4 of the Pinehurst Outlook, Saturday, April 17, 1926
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn91068725/1926-04-17/ed-1/seq-4/
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