Finding a Home
Posted on July 14, 1999My earliest childhood memories are of my family and our many moves. My mother has shared with me that I lived in several apartments in Seattle until we moved into a house shortly before Dad went off to Korea. When Dad returned and decided to make the military a career, his decision had a profound effect upon my development and inadvertently shaped my Carolina experience.
Corporate children may be subjected to many moves as a parent — usually but not always a father — climbs the career ladder. The children of law enforcement officials, fire and safety officials, and others know that on any day their parent could be placed in a dangerous and sometimes life-threatening situation.
Military children, or “brats” as we often are known, experience both the certainty of frequent moves and the possibility that their parent is only a phone call from danger.
Growing up I learned to enjoy travel, and I recall with great fondness in particular the 2 1/2 years we lived in Germany. I became accustomed to meeting new people, learning new cultures and adjusting to change. Attending four junior high schools in four communities in a three-year span did not seem unusual; after all, by the seventh grade, I already had attended four elementary schools on or near three military bases.
This vagabond existence imprinted on me not only how locations may be transient but also how relationships can be as well. Somehow I knew that my playmates and I would likely know each other for only a relatively brief time — soon one of us would certainly move. So, while we benefited from the excitement of change and travel, we also lacked a sense of belonging anywhere. We really had no place to call “home” beyond where we lived at a particular time. It would be impossible to develop lifelong friends.
In recalling my Carolina experiences more than 30 years later, I realize that as a freshman, I was about to spend more time in one place than I had at any point in my life. I was among many students, most of whom grew up in modest-sized North Carolina communities. Many of my fellow UNC freshmen (we were not then called “first-year students”) came to Chapel Hill with friends they had known for their entire lives.
By chance, some time ago I learned that my counterpart at Princeton also is a military brat, and we have an advancement colleague at the Harvard Law School who also grew up in a military family. The Harvard colleague believes that among the reasons we have found careers on college campuses so appealing is that our experiences in college gave us a sense of community that we lacked as children. Further, we are comfortable relating to a diverse set of alumni as well as students who usually are with us for only four years. (OK, so some stay for five years.)
It was my good fortune, when Dad was killed in Vietnam, that the country’s oldest public university and one of the world’s most distinguished institutions of higher education was only 1 1/2 hours from our Fayetteville home. Beyond the magnetic charm of what was still the “village” of Chapel Hill, the Carolina campus was a community unlike any that I had experienced. While tens of thousands of former students once attended The University of North Carolina, those of us attending in the late ’60s somehow knew we were attending at exactly the best time ever. (Of course, every class to ever attend knows that they attended at the absolute best time!)
Carolina students come to Chapel Hill, are educated in and outside of the classroom, develop special relationships with classmates, faculty and administrators, but when we graduate we seldom really “leave,” even if our first job takes us hundreds or thousands of miles away. Carolina becomes our first adult home and, as such, holds us like no other we will ever have. We take lasting memories that inspire us to return to the place and people that so once captured us.
At my younger brother Charlie’s funeral in 1980, we closed the services by playing a recording of Chapel Hill native James Taylor’s Carolina in My Mind. As are all but one of his four brothers, Charlie was a Carolina graduate. He was a rabid fan of Carolina athletics, but he had an even deeper feeling for Chapel Hill and particularly for the Carolina campus and some very special classmates and members of the faculty. The place and people provided Charlie, as they have so many before and since, a “home” and a sense of belonging that was just as important as the education he received.
Although Michael Hooker’s family didn’t wander, he moved around quite a lot through a distinguished career after he finished at Carolina, one year ahead of me. Four years ago he seemed to have come home, and we felt more at home with him as his vision for the University’s future unfolded.
His death is a tragic loss for our University, for all North Carolinians and especially for our Carolina alumni. Over the course of nearly four years, Chancellor Hooker gave sustaining, passionate and visionary leadership to our University. He was never satisfied with his alma mater being among our nation’s elite public universities. He insisted that we become the best.
Michael Hooker’s unfinished work now becomes all of ours to complete. That is the legacy that he would have wanted and the legacy he so justly deserves. Debbie joins me in expressing our deepest sympathies to Carmen and Alex.
Yours at Carolina,
Douglas S. Dibbert ’70
