When I worked in Los Angeles covering hard news, very often when something important would happen I'd be off in the woods covering something unimportant, which was more interesting to me.

TV critics, who traditionally hate television and make their living writing about it, often didn't like what I did on the air.

There is melancholy in the wind and sorrow in the grass

I much preferred the peaceful life on the road, where I didn't have to ask embarrassing questions and do all the things real reporters have to do.

I'm not knocking the wholesale grocery business or any other, but there is a kind of romance in journalism which some people, the lucky ones, feel inside them all their lives.

I suppose I was a little bit of what would be called today a nerd. I didn't have girlfriends, and really I wasn't a very social boy.

What is it that binds us to this place as to no other? It is not the well, or the bell, or the stone walls, or the crisp October nights or the memory of dogwoods blooming. Our loyalty is not only to William Richardson Davie though we are proud of what he did 200 years ago today. Nor even to Dean Smith, though we are proud of what he did last March. No, our love for this place is based on the fact that it is as it was meant to be, the University of the people.