Homecoming

After the war, before my disability took over, I did practice for a while, a large wonderful practice with many wonderful patients. I considered my patients as friends. Visiting me was an experience, not a treatment. A professional gets into trouble when he treats a patient or client subjectively rather than objectively. You always keep what is best for the patient in mind. Early, a retired school teacher came to me wanting contact lenses. In the early history of contact lenses, unlike today's, the adjustment was difficult. Of course, young teenage girls wearing real thick minus lenses (a lens correction for near sightedness) would have worn thumb tacks in their eyes to get rid of those awful glasses. This teacher, around age 60, an articulate, attractive woman said, “I'm going to my college reunion. The first time I have ever been to a class reunion. I don't want to look like those old classmates with bifocals and old ladies frames. I want my classmates to remember me as pretty as I was when I was in school.”

I only went to one class reunion, long after graduation, after my military service. I had some eyesight, enough to see that the young men I was in school with were now fat, wrinkled, graying old men. I thought to myself, I'm the only one still young and good looking.

I entered the university of Chapel Hill in the fall of 1948. I was probably the greenest student to ever enter the university. I do not believe Hinton James, the first student of UNC-CH, who walked from my city on the coast all the way there, was any more inappropriate for university matriculation than was I.

Even though my great grandmother was reared at Chapel Hill, I had never been to the town or campus. My father drove me up in the family Chevrolet...he had never been to Chapel Hill either. Of course I had read everything about the campus, knew the dorm to which I had been assigned. My clothes, books, etc, where in an old trunk of my mother's. My father was the only member of his family who had not attended college and I believe he always resented that.

My mother had only a 6^th grade education. Although we had the genes, colonial families (founders of Morristown, NJ – Lucas – Pittman) my folks were just hard working, God fearing, tax paying, poor farm people. If I had been taking my son to college for the first time, I would have been talking about college activities, both I and his mother with doctorates.

Poverty is the one social disease from which you never recover. Until the day you die, you always recognize the difference in the haves and the have nots and, believe me, the haves never let you forget that they are the elitest.

Here I was, on the premiere men's elitest campus in the state. The oldest state supported university. “Incubator” for all the state's elite families, future legislators, doctors, lawyers, bankers and judges. Only a few female graduate students attended Chapel Hill at that time. It was a bastion of male superiority and eliteness. Young men from the state's wealthiest families, largest high schools, most prestigious prep schools. They talked above me and down to me. I was not one of them.

With an abiding faith, desire for success and ability to study, I endured and graduated...working my way through entirely. There were no government grants, no largess from philanthropists. It was a matter of accomplishment or go home.

The most sickening matter, and it still irritates me to this day, the university accommodated students from the state's power brokers (sons of legislators, judiciary, moneyed families). There were those assigned by administration to make sure the sons of the powerful had no problems at the university. The campus was a bullwork of liberality even then. These liberal professors did not believe enough in their liberality to resent this treatment of the powerful compared to the poor students. The liberal professors were not bothered by the fact that the state's bright, smart black students could not even put their foot in a university classroom. To this day, I am appalled that white, liberal Democrats who have by hook and crook controlled politics and life in eastern North Carolina did not allow minorities to put their foot in the ocean at white beaches. The Jewish people, by money and attendance supporting the university, voting almost 99% Democrat, giving out the empathy of love for minorities, maintained beautiful beach houses on these lily white beaches.

I will never forget the fact, and it is a fact, that working my way through the university, attempting to keep up with the better prepared, I lived on $1 a day, .25 for breakfast, .25 for lunch and .50 for supper. Sitting on a stone fence, back of Wilson Library, I had the epiphany of my life, which to this day I remember as vividly as then. I had said to God, as did Job...”even if You kill me I will trust You.” God revealed to me that in the library where I worked (medical school) change had fallen from pockets into the stuffed chairs. I retrieved enough change to eat for a while until I got my next paycheck.

Now, I get invitations to homecomings, there and at the other university, where I also had a hard time and worked my way through. By any barometer or measure of success, in spite of military blindness, I have enjoyed enough success to give much money as a philanthropist. I have traveled the world. A testimony to Christianity. I am convinced that at one of these homecomings, I would still be treated just as I was as a student by the elitest classmates who, because of their connections, went on to greatness in other areas. God has assured me and the others of you who have endured the shame of the independent life, that He is the scorekeeper. We take joy in that homecoming.