Answering the Call of Politics
Bob Jordan recalls getting to know Bill Friday, both as a student government representative and after graduation as Jordan began to get involved with state politics.
Interview on 2011-09-16 00:00:00 -0400
Transcript
00:00:00.000
1960, I guess it was,
00:00:04.660
I got a phone call one day from a person who was the house of representatives member for our county.
00:00:11.601
Each county used to have one person representing it, a hundred counties, a hundred people,
00:00:16.244
and later you got into one person, one vote
00:00:18.507
and it expanded to a hundred and twenty-five, but a little county like Montgomery
00:00:22.929
didn't get a whole representative. You had to work--
00:00:25.933
Anyway, this person at that time was the representative
00:00:29.407
and he was on the committee that had a hundred people on it-excuse me, had twenty-five people on it-each year,
00:00:35.614
and the board of trustees of the university system, which was then State, Women's College, and UNC-Chapel Hill,
00:00:42.634
they had just one board,
00:00:48.546
no single board, so every two years they put twenty-five people on that hundred-person board
00:00:53.415
and it was an eight-year term. So he called me one day and said, "I saw in the Montgomery Herald while you were at NC State
00:00:58.652
that you were involved in school affairs, student body,"
00:01:03.768
so he said, "I've got a chance to put somebody on that board.
00:01:06.631
This is my year and I get to put somebody on there to serve an eight-year term.
00:01:13.918
Would you like to do it?" It didn't take me long to decide that. So this was 1961.
00:01:22.222
When I walked in that first board meeting I was twenty-eight years old,
00:01:28.093
when I walked in there, the youngest one on the board, certainly then,
00:01:35.851
and the person sitting in front was Bill Friday.
00:01:39.139
Well when I was at State we had a consolidated student body group that met occasionally
00:01:46.862
and we had a meeting in Chapel Hill one time, and that was in the spring of '54, I think.
00:01:51.884
I went to the meeting and we sat down there, and at that time just the three universities sitting there, the leaders.
00:02:04.208
This person walked to the front of the room and he said, "I'm the assistant to Gordon Gray, the president of this university. My name's Bill Friday."
00:02:11.529
So that was my first time I met Bill.
00:02:15.634
Then when I went to the board of trustees of the system I walked in and he's president,
00:02:20.239
and he took me under his arm.
This video is an excerpt from a longer interview. Contact the Special Collections Research Center to request the transcript of the full interview.