Well it's amazing that I ever went to college. I never really wanted to go, I wanted to be a farmer like my dad, and my dad insisted that I go and my brothers and sisters,
one of whom was a lawyer, all insisted that I go. So finally I agreed to enroll at NC State-College back then, now University-and I applied and was accepted at State
and I received a Smith-Douglass one thousand dollar scholarship from Smith-Douglass Fertilizer. I was sort of a lay veterinarian,
I used to doctor on people's animals and horses and cows when I was young, and I really wanted to be a pre-vet student. My daddy died,
he had a heart attack the day before I was supposed to start in 1955 and he died in his sleep that night, so the next morning I dropped out.
I decided that my mama needed me worse than State did. She didn't drive. I had to teach her to drive. We had to sell the cows, gather up the cotton,
and do some things there in the first year and then I went to State the following year. So I think that delay probably helped me more than you could imagine
because it awakened me to a lot of responsibility. It was pretty scary for me. Number one I had not taken many college preparatory courses.
I was in the advanced classes at North Mecklenburg High School but I really wasn't the best student in the world. I got there and was thinking
I'd be taking a lot of chemistry and things of that nature to get me into pre-vet, and I ran into a Korean veteran named Doc Ray and he said,
"I'm going to run for president of the freshman class. Why don't you run for vice president?" and I said, hmm, why should I do vice president?
But anyway, I was scared to death and decided I'd do that. I won and he lost. There's a moral in that story I guess: Be humble and take whatever's given to you.
From that I progressed to run for president of the sophomore class, vice president of the student body, and then president of the student body.
I took a number of courses in preparation for pre-vet, animal husbandry, everything that you take, but somewhere along the way I decided I didn't want to be a small animal doctor.
When I had helped people on the farm it was usually with large animals. So I told my brother the lawyer that I didn't want to graduate in agriculture
but I was stuck because I was there and I was in two years of a lot of agriculture courses, so we decided I'd go to law school.
I began to look around and there were all kind of good college preparatory courses, public speaking, English, history,
and I took all kind of public speaking courses, speed reading so I could really speed read, and when I got to law school it really helped me a lot.