Sherwood Smith rose from what he calls a “simpler life” in Glen Lennox while attending UNC law school as a Morehead Scholar. He became one of the most prominent and powerful businessmen in North Carolina as president and CEO of Carolina Power & Light, which eventually was Progress Energy before merging with Duke Power in 2012.
Smith lived on Maxwell Road in Glen Lennox for three years that he calls a seminal period of his life. He and the former Eve Hargrave were married in the summer of 1957, welcomed the first of their three daughters and graduated from law school that led to a legal career and eventually into business.
“The basic framework,” Smith calls it.
He and Eve, a Duke graduate whom he met in undergraduate school, settled into a two-bedroom unit just behind the Sinclair filling station with a concrete basketball court outside and to the right of their front door. Basketball in Chapel Hill and North Carolina had begun its upward trajectory in March of 1957, when Coach Frank McGuire’s Tar Heels won all 32 games and brought the NCAA tournament title home from Kansas City. It was the first of six national championships UNC hoops teams have earned on the court.
Smith remembered paying “less than $90, maybe $85,” for rent at Glen Lennox and car-pooling with fellow law students who lived in the neighborhood to the old Manning Hall. Eve worked at Memorial Hospital and also car-pooled there with other wives. A simpler life.
“We had about 700 or 800 square feet in our apartment, which was less than ten years old,” Smith said. “It was small but adequate. We converted one of the bedrooms that I had used as a study at first into a nursery. They were not centrally air conditioned. And if you wanted it you would buy your own air conditioner or window unit.
“There were a good many married students, some with children, and a few baby-sitters. The typical event might be to go next door to your friend’s home and have two or three couples there; everybody would bring something different. One couple would bring the meat, one the potatoes and one might bring the salad and so forth. We didn’t go in those days to the two movies downtown, there was no local movie theater near us and wasn’t much on television. It was a more conversational time with friends.
“Unfortunately, some of them are no longer with us and passed away. There are others that I still know today. So that’s some 60 years.”
Sherwood and Eve tried to grow a small tomato garden, but the ground was too hard with red clay. While Eve took care of their baby girl, Marlin, he took the car and went back to the law school to study at night.
“That was the only mode of transportation, no city bus system or anything like that,” he said. “And there were no computers, so you had to rely on books to get the information you needed.
“The cost of living was very low compared with today. You would have to move the decimal point a long way from the left. There were no big grocery stores in the Glen Lennox area. That whole South side of Raleigh Road is built up now, but there was nothing there except the Pines restaurant and University Motel.
“From where we lived in Glen Lennox you had to go to West Franklin Street for the least-expensive grocery store; the more expensive one was Fowler’s and it was also on West Franklin. Then my wife reminded me, when I asked her, about a little grocery store in Carrboro, named Andrews Riggsbee. You could buy small filets, I guess they were an ounce and a half or two ounces, for 50 cents apiece.”
It has been more than six decades for Sherwood Smith, who still has vivid memories of Chapel Hill in the 1950s and stepping away from studying at the law school to watch baseball practice or games at the old baseball stadium just a mile or so from Glen Lennox, sitting on the front row with other students at Woolen Gym to watch the Tar Heels play or attending Duke-Carolina football games in a coat and tie with his wife and, in those days, rooting for different teams.
Having Hall of Fame coaches Mack Brown and Roy Williams at UNC is not lost on Smith, who says the money and media are much bigger today but no more exciting than with McGuire there and the football team coached by Big Jim Tatum, who died suddenly in the summer of 1959 from a form of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.
“Then Jim Hickey became head coach and the first year he beat Duke 50-0 and the game was televised. That was a huge upset because a year before Duke had beaten Carolina 7-6 when Carolina thought it might go to a bowl.”
Besides serving as vice chair of the Morehead Scholar selection committee, Smith spent from 1989-95 leading the UNC Bicentennial Campaign, which raised $442 million in private contributions and grants. In 1998, Smith was inducted into the North Carolina Business Hall of Fame.
And it all started at Glen Lennox.
“Glen Lennox Stories” is a series on Chapelboro sponsored by Grubb Properties
My wife and I moved into 166 Hamilton Rd in June of 1957 and bought a air conditioner before we occupied it as we came from DC where it was hot. When our first child arrived zinc Jan 1959 we moved to 32 Hayes Rd to have a bedroom for our first child. Those were happy days which I will never forget. As I live in CH I pass Glen zlennox frequently and love it.