Given President Obama's impending visit to UNC -- he'll be speaking here at Carmichael Gym on Tuesday -- I thought about trying to get a ticket. But when I saw the line yesterday, I figured, what the heck: I'll just go back to work. That lead me, however, to ask, what kind of presidential trivia I could use related to UNC.
I ruled out on based on James K. Polk, though I thought about asking what building he listened to graduation speeches in when he returned to campus in 1847. (The answer to this and much more is in my article on jurisprudence in UNC graduation addresses before the Civil War. Next up in that series, by the way, I think will be Wake Forest graduation addresses -- or maybe Davidson College. Some North Carolina school, anyway. Ok--product placement over.)
I settled on a more recent presidential trivia question. What is the building pictured here and which future president lived in it when he was a student at UNC? There is, so far as I can tell, no marker commemorating this on the building. And now I wonder about whether there are any markers outside the places Obama lived while he was at Columbia or Harvard? Or whether there are markers commemorating where sometime Durhamite Richard Nixon lived when he studied at Duke law?
It is the Carr Building (built 1900). Not sure of the other part . . . my best guess is George Herbert Walker Bush when he was attended Navy Pre-Flight Training School at UNC during WWII. Gerald Ford also attended Pre-Flight School at UNC, so he would be my second choice.
Posted by: Brian Clarke | April 23, 2012 at 12:00 PM
Boy, that didn't take long! You're exactly right on the Carr Building, which used to be a law dormitory. And it was Gerald Ford, who lived there in 1938. He was a summer student in the law school, as I understand the story.
Nice going, Brian!
Posted by: Alfred Brophy | April 23, 2012 at 12:02 PM