Transferring to NC State
William Friday describes his transition from Wake Forest College to NC State College and the difficulties associated with attending college during the Great Depression.
Interview on 2011-09-13 00:00:00 -0400
Transcript
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I'm from Gaston County, a little place called Dallas.
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I wanted to go to college, those were the years of the Depression, 1936 and '37,
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and there was a Baptist minister there that said maybe we can get you a scholarship to Wake Forest.
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That happened, it was a fifty dollar scholarship,
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and that's the way I got started to college.
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My father was in the textile business
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and I knew that was inevitable.
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I was the oldest child of four brothers in the family.
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So in 1938 I moved over to Professor L.E. Hinkle's house
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on Park Drive-I couldn't get in the dormitory-
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and met up with three wonderful guys, Bob Furman,
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who later became the chief pilot for American Airlines, flying transcontinental flights,
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"Winks" Simpson, who bought the Nansemond Hotel in Virginia Beach and became a big operator,
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and Doug Allison, who is there in Raleigh, working in humanities and working for the state.
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So we had a wonderful time with the Hinkles; they were just delightful people.
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He taught German and I'd had one year of German so we practiced guttural sound.
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That's all the German I could remember. [Laughs]
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So that's my background.
This video is an excerpt from a longer interview. Contact the Special Collections Research Center to request the transcript of the full interview.
