NC State History Category
05.16.2012
It’s an age-old debate really, not limited to the culinary world. Some say tomato, accenting the long “a” sound. Others prefer the “tomotto” pronunciation of the word. And on NC State’s campus, a similar debate arose in the 1960s about Syme Residence Hall.
On this day in 1962, students learned that the correct pronunciation of the dormitory was actually “sim,” sounding like “dim.” In a survey by the university, more than half of the student body thought the pronunciation was “sime,” with a long “i.”
That thought is still around today, as the university’s facilities website lists the pronunciation as “sime.”
Syme Residence Hall in 1955. Photo courtesy of NCSU Libraries.
The residence hall was named for George Frederich Syme (prounounced “Sim,” like “him”), a civil engineering student who graduated in 1898 and garnered a reputation when he worked with C.L. Mann, an NC State professor of civil engineering, to survey the prospects of building a canal across Nicaragua after the turn of the century.
But as Hardy D. Berry writes in Place Names on the Campus of North Carolina State University, “It is said the heat, insects, and hostile surroundings discouraged their enthusiasm for the canal location.”
Syme, who was the first president of the Raleigh Engineers Club, came back to North Carolina as a highway and bridge specialist with his reputation, but apparently not his name, intact.
05.15.2012
The 1920s were a rocky decade for students’ extracurricular activities at NC State. A study by a graduate sociology student unearthed rampant cheating at the university as well as a lax attitude toward the offense. Administrators feared wild behavior in the dorms. And something seemingly innocuous as a cap set the campus into chaos.
On this day in 1930, Dean of Students Edward Cloyd took a stand against an existing dress code that many saw as an early form of hazing.
Former NC State Chancellor John T. Caldwell shows off a Freshman Cap. (Photo from the NC State Alumni Association Archives)
The controversy dates back to 1916, when freshmen first began wearing a red hat with an “F” on it to denote their underclassmen status. And, as Alice Reagan points out in North Carolina State University: A Narrative History, the rites of passage did not stop with the caps.
“Freshmen also were to learn all college songs, attend class meetings, and show a deference to upperclassmen,” Reagan writes. “For violations of the code, especially failure to wear the freshman cap, students were forced to run a gauntlet.”
Over the next nine years, freshmen got fed up with the initiation. Reagan writes that in 1929, NC State’s students voted to abolish the gauntlet as a means of punishment. A student body group known as the Court of Customs ordered a freshman football player to wear a dress as punishment for not wearing his cap that fall.
“A large portion of the freshman class attempted to burn the offending caps,” Reagan writes. The student body voted to keep the dress code, and the freshmen pleaded to the administration.
But Cloyd said he supported eliminating the tradition in his end-of-the-year address to students in 1930. The State College Board of Trustees voted to abolish the dress code that June.
But, as Reagan writes, “freshmen were still obligated to provide matches to upper classmen on request, and also run errands for them.”
05.14.2012
Former NC State head football coach Bill Fetzer wrote in the 1920 Agromeck that he believed college athletics had made a steady comeback since World War I. He drew parallels between being a good athlete and soldier. And he wrote about the values of Wolfpack athletics at the time.
“Clean living and clean thinking are of first importance to the person who expects to be an athlete,” he wrote. “All athletic directors lay stress on these facts. This is as it should be, especially the case in all intercollegiate athletics.”
The Monogram Club in the early 1920s. Photo courtesy of NCSU Libraries.
The Athletic Council apparently agreed with Fetzer and wanted some way to celebrate athletes who had accomplished great things in their respective sports.
So on this day in 1920, the Council made the decision to award sweaters to athletes who had received letters, or monograms, for their achievements. The sweaters, adorned with stars and an “N” and a “C” nestled inside of the block-S, soon made their way on campus.
Twenty-eight young men made up that first group of those who lettered in 1920. They are called “Monogram Men” in that Agromeck, and several of them lettered in the four sports listed: football, baseball, basketball and track. S.L. Homewood and R.N. Gurley lettered in three of the four. (Subsequent Agromecks dubbed them the “Monogram Club.”)
05.11.2012
Frank Thompson was everything athletics when he came to NC State in 1909 after a year at Davidson College. He captained the Wolfpack’s baseball team for two years before he was named its coach. He also captained the football team.
So it might seem odd that on this day in 1923, the basketball facility on campus was named Thompson Gymnasium in honor of him. But the honor saluted more than just Thompson’s athletic prowess.
The son of Judge John W. Thompson, Frank felt the patriotic call to serve his country. According to Hardy D. Berry’s Place Names on the Campus of North Carolina State University, Frank was too old to be drafted for service in World War I. But he enlisted anyway in the Fifth Division’s 15th machine gun battalion and soon became a first lieutenant serving in France.
Thompson was killed in action along the German lines when his division was attacked at Regnieville. “The news of his death reached his father in the Panama Canal Zone where he was serving as a judge by appointment of President Woodrow Wilson,” writes Berry.
Reynolds Coliseum opened in 1949, and Thompson Gym became Thompson Theatre in 1963 after renovations. In 2009, the building was renamed Frank Thompson Hall, which houses the Crafts Center and University Theatre, the home for the dramatic arts at NC State.
05.10.2012
Read the 1967 Agromeck sports section, and you’ll find a list of things the 1966-67 men’s basketball team didn’t have. It didn’t have many wins, losing more conference games than any other Wolfpack team and tying the record for consecutive losses. It didn’t have many returning veterans. And it didn’t have Press Maravich, who had left to go to Louisiana State University after coaching the Wolfpack for two seasons upon Everett Case’s departure.
But here’s what it did have: “The only coach in the country whose wife sang the National Anthem before games,” the Agromeck reads. “It had class.”
The purveyor of that class was none other than Norm Sloan. On this day in 1966, NC State hired “Stormin’ Norman” to become head coach of its men’s basketball program. Sloan would come to join Case, his former head coach, on a would-be Mt. Rushmore of NC State coaching greats after his team won the NCAA championship eight years later in 1974.
Sloan was one of Case’s original “Hoosier Hotshots,” a group from Indiana that Case brought to Raleigh to run his up-tempo style. He played for the Wolfpack from 1947-49, fighting for playing time behind guard Vic Bubas. After his playing days, Sloan took coaching gigs at Presbyterian and the Citadel before landing at the University of Florida in 1960. He would coach there for six years before NC State hired him away for a three-year, $12,000 annual contract. After compiling a 266-127 record at NC State in 13 years, he returned to Gainesville to coach the Gators from 1980-1989.
05.01.2012
NC State has long been heavy on science, mathematics and technology. But even scientists need a creative outlet, right?
On this day in 1964, the inaugural issue of Windhover was released to address such concerns. Windhover is NC State’s annual literary and visual magazine. The most recent issue was released last month.
The Windhover was not published from 1970-73, according to the journal’s website. A creative writing class at NC State published three issues of The Whole Thing, a similar literary journal, in 1974.
In 2001, NC State magazine wrote about Windhover and its success in collegiate press contests.
“There are always two ways to read something, and Windhover encourages the average reader to go beyond surface value,” said Emily Townley, who was then the editor of Windhover.
“A lot of times (at a science and technology university), we want to quantify everything, and we appreciate only the empirical data that come our way. But it’s really important for us to stretch our minds and work on pursuing other avenues of thought.”
04.30.2012
It was not that long ago that businesses in downtown Raleigh and along Hillsborough Street would refuse to serve blacks. But students, faculty and leaders at NC State battled to break down those barriers as the Civil Rights movement made its way throughout the South.
Chancellor John T. Caldwell and the Faculty Senate applauded a resolution by student government in 1960 calling for the integration of Raleigh’s public facilities. For three years, students and university officials talked with area business leaders and engaged in a letter-writing campaign calling for integration.
Those efforts finally paid off in 1963, when Baxley’s became the first restaurant on Hillsborough Street to serve blacks.
But the efforts didn’t stop there. In fact, they were intensified after Dr. Angie Brooks, a black United Nations delegate visiting from Liberia, was refused service at the S&W Cafeteria and the Sir Walter Raleigh Coffee Shop, according to Alice Elizabeth Reagan’s account in North Carolina State University: A Narrative History.
So on this day in 1963, students and faculty from NC State joined students from Shaw University and St. Augustine’s College to march downtown to protest racial segregation policies at the State Theatre in downtown Raleigh and at businesses in Cameron Village.
Within a few years, following the passage of federal civil rights legislation in 1964, most Raleigh businesses opened their doors to black customers.
04.27.2012
Visitors to NC State’s acclaimed College of Engineering these days will find themselves in new buildings on Centennial Campus.
But over 60 years ago, engineering students and professors were still settling into new space on NC State’s main campus. On this day in 1951, the newly-opened Riddick Laboratory was dedicated. More than 200 NC State officials, professors, staff and students gathered for the dedication.
Riddick Laboratory, which now houses the Physics Department and offices and classrooms for the Department of Animal Science, was named for Wallace Carl Riddick. In addition to being NC State’s first football coach (hence Riddick Stadium), Riddick was the university’s first dean of engineering and its fourth president.
The completion of Riddick Laboratory in 1949, at a cost of $1.3 million, came at a great time for the engineering program. The program received new accreditation for several of its disciplines, meaning that only Harvard and MIT had more accredited engineering programs, according to Alice Elizabeth Reagan’s North Carolina State University: A Narrative History.
04.26.2012
The Wolfpack men’s basketball team in 1946 consisted mostly of freshmen. They faced a 28-game schedule that included a new approach — taking a six-game Midwestern trip before Christmas. And they were adjusting to a new brand of ball, with offensive fastbreaks and defensive presses that had not been seen in the Southeast.
Those innovations came from Indiana with the man who would bring a tradition of excellence to Wolfpack basketball for the next 18 years. On this day in 1946, the university hired Everett Case as the head men’s basketball coach. He compiled a 377-134 record and won 10 conference championships during his tenure in Raleigh.
Case, who was nicknamed “the Old Gray Fox,” came here wanting to change the culture of basketball at NC State.
“He wanted them to dream bigger,” Bethany Bradsher said in an interview with NC State magazine last winter. Bradsher’s book, The Classic: How Everett Case and His Tournament Brought Big-Time Basketball to the South, chronicles how Case used the Dixie Classic to put NC State at the center of the college basketball world.
“He wanted NC State to see they could be a national powerhouse,” she said. “He made sure there was a basketball goal in every boy’s driveway in North Carolina.”
As Bradsher points out in her book, Case just didn’t change basketball with a new style and lots of victories. He found creative ways to promote basketball, even going so far as to have his players warm up before games wearing red capes.
“He also introduced the now-ubiquitous traditions like dimming the lights during pregame player introductions and cutting down nets after a big win,” she writes.
Case died in 1966, two years after he left NC State, from a battle with cancer. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., in 1982.
04.24.2012
It’s well known that World War II dramatically altered life at NC State, as students left school to join the military.
One of the biggest changes on campus was an influx of female students, whose numbers had been sparse up to that point. But on this day in 1942, there were urgent appeals made to young women to enroll at NC State.
“In an effort to obtain employment in traditionally male-dominated professions now facing labor shortages because of the war, women enrolled at State in ever-increasing numbers after 1942,” Alice Elizabeth Reagan wrote in North Carolina State University: A Narrative History.
Instructor Peele Johnson works with two students studying engineering in 1942 as Pratt-Whitney Fellows. (Photo courtesy of Historical State.)
Young women were particularly encouraged to study engineering, and NC State eventually became the only university in the south to offer Pratt-Whitney Fellowships to women to help them study engineering, according to Reagan’s book.
The 48-week course enabled the women to be hired as engineering aides at the company’s plant in Connecticut.
Once the war was over, though, the number of women at NC State dropped. It was not until the late 1950s that the number of female students at NC State began to rise again.
Subscribe