A Place for Purpose

At 40, Chief Machinist's Mate Richard McKenna was the very model of a seagoing sailor; he had joined the Navy during the Depression, served 22 years on everything from a river gunboat in China to a destroyer off Korea. In 1953 McKenna suddenly deep-sixed the old salt image. Stumbling on Walden, he felt that his mind had been "in a deep freeze," decided to retire and become a writer. An old skipper charted his new course: go to the University of North Carolina, a good place for "a man with a purpose."

In 2 1/2 years at Chapel Hill, Sailor McKenna sped through 40 courses in science, literature and anthropology, made straight A's and Phi Beta Kappa. He stayed on after graduation in 1956, married a university librarian ("for my complete set of Wordsworth.'' she murmurs), and toiled at a first novel about the 1925 revolution in China. The book, called The Sand Pebbles, has just become the $10,000 Harper Prize novel of 1962, is a Book-of-the-Month choice for January, and has been bought by Hollywood for a minimum of $200.000.

Beauty & Freedom. In a sense, McKenna has only done what comes naturally at North Carolina, the first (1795) state university to open its doors. Chapel Hill boasts "something in the air" that inspires purpose. In part, the spur is natural beauty: a town built around a tree-shaded oasis of ivied Georgian buildings on 552 acres. Alumnus Thomas Wolfe ('20) fondly described "Pulpit Hill" in Look Homeward, Angel as "a provincial outpost of great Rome: the wilderness crept up to it like a beast."

The outpost has long subdued the beast with a Jeffersonian blend of what its citizens call "small town living and cosmopolitan thinking." Except for the five years that carpetbaggers closed it after the Civil War, the university has forged a freedom that makes it the conscience of North Carolina and the most enlightened state campus in the South.

Before World War I, the university launched the South's first great college extension service, which in turn inspired good highways, school libraries, medical schools, community drama and the North Carolina Symphony. The Institute for Research in Social Science dramatized Southern problems, helped spur TVA. The Institute of Government trains state and local officials at every level--judges, jailers, sheriffs, tax collectors. Spurning political interference, North Carolina desegregated its graduate schools in 1951 and admitted Negro undergraduates in 1954. Last year Julius L. Chambers, the Negro son of an auto mechanic, scored the law school's highest grades, was made editor of the North Carolina Law Review.

Whisky & Writers. Chapel Hill is the sort of town where last year the P.T.A. "came out for whisky"--that is, using state liquor stores to support public schools. It values variety of opinion. It tolerates white students who join Negro sit-in pickets, and it tolerates W. C. George, a retired medical professor who recently earned a $3,000 fee from Alabama with a study "proving"' the biological inferiority of Negroes. It is rightly proud of such alumni as President James K. Polk (1818), and wryly proud of such graduates as the late swindler Gaston B. Means ('22), described by Historian Archibald Henderson as "the most able, ingenious and imaginative criminal of the age."

Such tolerance, and a first-class library, have long made Chapel Hill a haven for writers. While alumni range from Tom Wolfe to Columnist Robert Ruark, other writers choose Chapel Hill as an inspiring place to live. The late novelist James Street (Tap Roots) wrote, farmed and battled there for civil rights. So now does Pulitzer Prizewinning Playwright Paul Green (In Abraham's Bosom). Fighting just as hard in another cause--to save Chapel Hill's trees from builders' buzz saws--is arboreal Novelist Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn).

Work to Do. Amid its blessings,. Chapel Hill recently got a reminder from Basil Jones, a Negro janitor at the university, that it still has work to do. Dismayed that some of his fellow janitors could not even sign their paychecks, Jones hit the faculty with the hard fact that North Carolina is the nation's sixth most illiterate state. Jones organized a remarkable adult education program, stressing the three R's, science, government, health and humanities. University scholars quickly donated films, books and lectures. It seemed to prove once again that Chapel Hill is the right place for "a man with a purpose."

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