Friends of the College Cultural Events
Clyda Lutz describes her responsibilities as the president of the College Union and recalls the cultural programs the Friends of the College brought to NC State.
Interview on 2012-09-26 00:00:00 -0400
Transcript
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So as president of the union we were responsible for basically all social activities on campus,
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excluding the fraternities, I mean they were a separate entity, but just about anything that happened on campus the College Union was involved in.
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But we really tried to provide a variety of activities, and one of the things that their [student activity fee covered was] membership in Friends of the College.
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I don't think they have that anymore, but it was just an unbelievable cultural thing for Raleigh, for the state of North Carolina at the time.
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I mean people bought memberships in Friends of the College and came from all over the state because they would have well known cultural events.
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One of the people that comes to my mind, Leonard Bernstein, who was the director of, what, the Philharmonic, I think it was. Anyway, he was probably one of the most well known conductors in this country,
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and to bring that orchestra to Raleigh was just unbelievable.
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Well my being president of the union also put me as the student representative on the board of directors for the Friends of the College, which was quite interesting too.
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so I can't tell you a whole lot about the workings of it other than they had these wonderful cultural programs brought here
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and the students at NC State, who then were strictly agriculture or engineering students, not the ones that sought out culture-type-what you stereotypically didn't think of
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-were exposed to this and given the opportunity to go for free,
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to attend those kind of concerts and what have you. So it was a novel idea, and then it was open also-.
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The public could buy memberships in the Friends, so that's kind of how it was financed, I think, was their membership, but it provided cultural events for the students, which was really big.
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