James Hunt, Sr.'s Memories of NC State

Governor James Baxter Hunt, Jr. discusses his father's time as a student at NC State during the Great Depression.

Interview on 2012-05-29 00:00:00 -0400

Transcript

00:00:00.000 My father went to NC State during the Great Depression.

00:00:05.644 I find that a lot of young people today don't know much about the Depression,

00:00:11.556 have no idea of its depth, what happened to people, what happened to families.

00:00:16.594 Just it's kind of, had a bad time, you know, a lot of people lost their jobs,

00:00:21.860 but they don't know how deep it was, how it really affected people.

00:00:25.731 My daddy had to work as a student to earn his room and board.

00:00:36.616 I guess the family had about seven children;

00:00:40.783 they'd all gone to college except one.

00:00:43.941 So I guess he got up the money for the tuition, which was very low at the time,

00:00:52.933 but he had to have a place to live and food to eat.

00:00:56.650 And so he worked in a boarding house,

00:01:00.477 right across Hillsborough Street.

00:01:03.907 Dean Cloyd, C-l-o-y-d, was the dean of students.

00:01:08.346 He was even there when I went in 1955. My daddy graduated about '32 or '33.

00:01:14.714 Dean Cloyd had a rooming house that students stayed in and paid for room

00:01:22.391 and my daddy would get up at 3:00 AM and peel potatoes

00:01:28.628 for whatever they were going to eat that day. It included potatoes. It was always potatoes. [Laughs]

00:01:34.184 So he worked a couple hours peeling potatoes,

00:01:36.968 probably then helped serve the breakfast because people at the boarding house had their meals there too.

00:01:42.568 So that's one of the things I really remember about him, working his way through college.