I see from your profile that you left NC for college in New England, yet Durham as my collegiate geographic destination was my escape from the midwest. Since this thread is for casual entertainment purposes, because hardly anyone posts on it, and because I created it, I feel free to move off topic at will--I'll be the judge and I'll be the jury.
So continuing in the off topic vein, I have a couple questions for you about the Durham area back when you were still an inhabitant. I understand that Durham High School, which has since been converted into some sort of arts theme magnet school, was once a well-funded, academically powerful high school drawing the children of Duke's faculty and Durham's socioeconomic elite, in much the same way Chapel Hill High functions in Chapel Hill. The children who used to attend Durham High now go to suburban schools, like Northern High, or the regions premier private school Durham Academy. I know that famed political pundit and aspiring wise man David Gergen (whose father headed Duke's Math Department for twenty years) attended Durham High in the late sixties, during which time he began his career as a political correspondent by writing political commentary for the Durham Morning Herald. Its past glory and current state fill me with wonder and I wonder if you have memories of Durham High in its full glory.
The other question I have for you regards a certain rock quarry, known as just "the quarry", several miles from Duke's E. Campus in forest on private property that is mostly undeveloped and accessible by trail from a nearby road. I didn't actually learn about it or visit it until years after my graduation from Duke on a return trip to Durham to visit some friends who have stayed in the area. Since the quarry ceased being actively mined and subsequently filled up with water, I've been told that generations of triangle high school and college students frequented it every day during the summers and that it was a great local hangout. I wonder if you knew of this vernal retreat and may have once tread its waters. By the time I first visited it, about six years ago, the owner was guarding it with a gun and didn't want anyone to come and swim in it anymore. I heard a rumor that this security was in response to an incident that occured several years prior in which a drunken fraternity member, presumably from Duke, went swimming with his partying fraternity mates and wound up drowning.
You must remember when Jesse Helms was just a television talk show personality! |
