The cover story for NC State magazine’s Winter 2010 issue captures a day in the life of the new Hillsborough Street. The eight-page piece is stocked with photos that reveal how a $9.9 million city of Raleigh street improvement project transformed the university’s main drag. Jeremy Lange took hundreds of more photos that we couldn’t squeeze into the pages, and you can view some of those photos in two slideshows. View the retail side of the street here, and the campus side here.
Though many businesses have come and gone throughout Hillsborough Street’s 218-year existence, one thing hasn’t changed: its route. Check out historical photos and trivia of Hillsborough Street in the slideshow below:
You can also read the memories alumni shared about Hillsborough Street here and here.
And that’s just the beginning of our online extras for content from our Winter 2010 issue. Here’s a list of the rest of our online extras (many of which have already been posted on our blog), which will give you a preview of what to look forward to reading this winter:
Descriptions of the nearly two-dozen programs that are tied together by NC State’s recently launched Springboard Innovation Partnership Portal and a Q&A with student entrepreneur Angela Hollen ’10.
Our winter issue of NC State magazine — which will hit mailboxes any day now and is a benefit of membership in the Alumni Association — includes a feature on the university’s newest member of the family: Tuffy, a 2-year-old wolflike dog. The Athletics Department worked with Student Government to introduce Tuffy as NC State’s new live mascot, and they plan to work him in slowly so he can eventually make appearances at events beyond football games. Our winter issue includes more information about Tuffy and an illustration by Greg Blackwell ’92. But as you wait for your issue, check out some of the university’s past mascots in the slideshow below.
One photo you won’t see, unfortunately, is of a robotic wolf that Ira Helms Jr. ’48 built when he was a mechanical engineering student at NC State. With size 16 shoes, it stood 7 feet tall and had a 120-inch chest. It debuted in 1946 with the cheerleaders during the football season opener against Wake Forest. Helms sat inside the contraption and controlled its movements, leading students to call his creation “Hell,” “The Wolf Monster,” “The Trojan Horse,” and “Helms’ Monster.” “With a body similar to Frankenstein’s monster and the ferocious head of a wolf,” Technician wrote on Oct. 18, 1946, “it is expected to create a sensation in the game and spur the team on to another victory.” Helms said he got too hot inside his creation, so the cheerleaders and band members operated it the rest of the season. It was considered a good luck charm as the team finished the regular season 8-2 and earned the school its first bowl bid (a 34-13 loss to Oklahoma in the Gator Bowl). Though the mechanical wolf was retired after the season, it helped solidify the Wolfpack name.
NC State magazine spoke to Helms about his creation in 2004. Read his first-person account of it after the jump.
Editor’s note: Last Friday NC State announced that Lonnie Poole ’59 and his wife, Carol, have donated $40 million to NC State, making it the largest-ever gift to the university. The College of Management will receive $37 million and be renamed the Lonnie C. Poole Jr. College of Management. As you can see in the video of the announcement and the renaming ceremony above, among the folks participating in the activities Friday was Chandler Thompson, a junior in economics who was selected NC State’s Leader of the Pack during Homecoming 2010. She’s also a member of the Alumni Association Student Ambassador Program and has been one of four students blogging for us throughout the semester. In her the entry below, she writes about what the Pooles’ historic gift means to NC State and to students like her.
One of the most important things for alumni to do after graduation is stay connected to the university. Being involved after graduation is something I value and look forward to. I know that my giving, no matter how little or how big, is important to NC State and the university’s endowment.
Mr. and Mrs. Poole’s generous gift is a testament to their dedication to NC State. They set a great example for supporting this university, and their support comes at a crucial time given the challenging economy. Students like me in the College of Management are lucky to now be students in the the Poole College of Management.
As I mentioned last week, this announcement makes me think of my younger brother. I used to call him my little brother, but someone pointed out I can’t say little anymore because he’s about a foot taller than me now. My brother received his acceptance letter to NC State last week, which means he is now joining me as a student in the Poole College of Management. That is very cool!
The Poole’s generous gift means a lot to my brother, me and all other students in the college. The value of all our degrees, as well as degrees of alumni of the college, will go up. All students in the Poole College of Management will see the benefits of this endowment. We will also see the business college put more focus on sustainability with the creation of a Center of Excellence in Sustainability within the Poole College of Management. I cannot even begin to imagine the other great things that will come from this gift.
On behalf of myself and all students at NC State, I want to extend another huge THANK YOU to the Pooles and all other alumni who donate to the university. The Pooles have done a great job of setting a terrific example to current students on how much it means to give back to NC State. They give me just another reason to love my school and be appreciative of the Wolfpack family. It makes me so excited, I just have to yell: GO PACK!
More than a month has passed since an essay written by Rob Dunn, an assistant professor of biology at NC State, was published on Smithsonian.com. But it’s still the most popular story on the site — in terms of being the most viewed and the most commented on. The topic: The Top Ten Daily Consequences of Having Evolved.
In the piece, Dunn writes, “Our own bodies are worse off than most simply because of the many differences between the wilderness in which we evolved and the modern world in which we live. We feel the consequences every day.” Those consequences range from hiccups and choking to obesity and being cold in the winter. Here’s the first item on the list:
1. Our cells are weird chimeras
Perhaps a billion years ago, a single-celled organism arose that would ultimately give rise to all of the plants and animals on Earth, including us. This ancestor was the result of a merging: one cell swallowed, imperfectly, another cell. The predator provided the outsides, the nucleus and most of the rest of the chimera. The prey became the mitochondrion, the cellular organ that produces energy. Most of the time, this ancient symbiosis proceeds amicably. But every so often, our mitochondria and their surrounding cells fight. The result is diseases, such as mitochondrial myopathies (a range of muscle diseases) or Leigh’s disease (which affects the central nervous system).
Read the full list and his explanation for each item here.
You may remember that Dunn, author of Every Little Thing: Man’s Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, From Nanobacteria to New Monkeys, wrote an essay for NC State magazine in 2009 about the thousands of tiny species at work around us that we often don’t notice. Read that essay below:
Carol and Lonnie Poole (Photo courtesy of University Communications)
Chancellor Randy Woodson announced today that Lonnie Poole ’59 and his wife, Carol, have donated $40 million to NC State, making it the largest-ever gift to the university. The College of Management will receive $37 million and be renamed the Lonnie C. Poole Jr. College of Management, becoming the first named college at NC State.
Another $500,000 will fund the Carol Johnson Poole Endowment in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and $2.5 million will be used to build a clubhouse at the Lonnie Poole Golf Course on Centennial Campus. In February 2007, Poole also donated $3 million toward construction of the golf course, which opened in summer 2009. From University Communications:
“With this transformational gift, it’s a new day for NC State,” Woodson said. “Today, we send a signal to the rest of the state and to the country that NC State University is prepared to compete on the highest national levels. Donors like Lonnie and Carol Poole understand that this university can and will use their gifts to make a broad impact that is felt well beyond our campus.”
Poole is founder and chair of Raleigh-based Waste Industries. In a 1992 NC State magazine profile, he talked about why he started the company:
Tune in tothe public radio programThe Storytoday to hear Saul Flores, a senior at NC State and a Caldwell Fellow, talk about his more than 4,500-mile hitchhike through 10 countries this summer. The Story — produced by American Public Media and broadcasted on many NPR-affiliated stations — airs at 1 p.m. and 8 p.m. on 91.5 FM in the Triangle area. Check out this website for a listing of broadcasts in your area. Or, go on and listen to the pre-taped show here.
As we’ve previously reported, Flores went to Ecuador in May for a weeklong service-learning trip as part of the Caldwell Fellows, a scholarship program founded by the Alumni Association. He spent the summer hitchhiking back to Charlotte, his hometown. His purpose: to raise money to support a school in Atencingo, Mexico, his mother’s hometown. He documented his journey at refiningthelines.com, where he’s selling photos he took during the trip. You can hear him reflect back on his trip in the following video produced by NC State’s communications team:
What’s a vocodor? A synthesizer that makes human voices sound robotic. It traces back to World War II, when it was used as a cryptography device, and has been used by various musicians, ranging from the likes of classic rock’s Peter Frampton to rapper T-Pain. Tompkins appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition last spring and talked about the vocodor’s history. Listen to the interview here (or read the transcript here), and be sure to check out photos of the vocodor.
And if you want to take a listen to the work produced by the vocodor, view the following video. It’s of Michael Jonzun’s 1983 hit “Pack Jam”– the theme song for that year’s national championship Wolfpack men’s basketball team.
So how did Tompkins get interested in the vocodor? Here’s an excerpt from a Q&A with him with The L.A. Times:
One of our feature stories in NC State magazine’s Winter 2010 issue — which will arrive in mailboxes around the holidays — focuses on the Entrepreneurship Initiative (EI), an NC State program founded in 2008 that teaches students how to start companies through the courses, training and networking opportunities it provides. Among those students making use of the EI is Angela Hollen ’10, a graduate student in the College of Textiles who plans to launch Spitter Spatter, a clothing line made from performance fabrics for infants and toddlers that she’s starting with Savannah Smith ’10 and UNC-Wilmington graduate Zach Schabot.
On most afternoons, you can find Hollen developing her clothing line in the Garage, a 2,000-square foot space inside Research Building IV on Centennial Campus. Funded by Red Hat and run by the EI, it opened this fall. Hollen gave us a tour of the Garage recently. Check out some photos of the Garage (and the students using it) in the above slideshow.
In the winter magazine story on the EI, we also talk about the Springboard Innovation Partnership Portal that NC State launched in September. Terri Lomax, NC State’s vice chancellor for research and innovation, describes the portal as a “network of networks” designed to unify various entrepreneurship and innovation activities on campus for faculty, staff, and students. One of those networks is the EI. Click here for a list and descriptions of all of Springboard’s networks.
Read our magazine story on campus entrepreneurship activities here, and read an extended Q&A with Hollen after the jump.
Here’s a second update on composer and arts studies professor Rodney Waschka, whom we first wrote about in NC State’s Winter 2006 issue. A few months ago we reported that Waschka won first place in the computer animation category in the 2010 Stella Artois St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase and first place in the experimental category at the Sunscreen Film Festival for his work on the short film Horizon, which you can view above. Waschka both co-produced and composed the music for the film. And now, he’s featured in an extensive Q&A in the latest Opera Today, and in this excerpt, he talks about his next project:
I have a lot of possible things in mind, but the thing about an opera composer is that since anything larger takes so many resources, what’s going to happen depends on which idea has some real possibilities of happening. Despite the fact that plenty of other people have done operas based on Gogol’s Government Inspector, I think I could do a good job. I would reset it in a banana republic, and the government inspector who is coming would be the American ambassador. Someone else shows up on the plane, and they mistake him for the ambassador, and you can see how things would go from there.
The cover story for NC State magazine’s Winter 2010 issue captures a day in the life of the new Hillsborough Street. The eight-page piece is stocked with photos that reveal how a $9.9 million city of Raleigh street improvement project transformed the university’s main drag. Jeremy Lange took hundreds of more photos that we couldn’t squeeze into the pages, and you can view some of those photos in two slideshows. View the retail side of the street here, and the campus side here.
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