“But perhaps the greatest discovery for me was the city of Raleigh itself.”

In 1962 I entered North Carolina State in engineering. I had attended Emory College at Oxford, Georgia, for one year, but since I did not have a high school diploma, State ranked me as a freshman. I was a farm boy from the Blue Ridge Mountains, and Raleigh was the first city I had lived in. I belonged to the generation that had been told to study engineering to “beat the Russians.” In the aftermath of the first sputnik the cold war seemed far from won.