Four Receive Davie Award for Extraordinary Service
Posted on Nov. 15, 2007Four friends of the University have been presented with the prestigious William Richardson Davie Award by UNC’s Board of Trustees.
This year’s honorees are Joe Hackney ’67 of Chapel Hill; Mike Overlock ’68 of Greenwich, Conn.; Ken Thompson ’73 of Charlotte; and Patricia Timmons-Goodson ’76 of Fayetteville.
Established by UNC’s Board of Trustees in 1984, the Davie Award is the board’s highest honor and is named for the Revolutionary War hero who is considered the father of the University. It recognizes extraordinary service to the University or society.
A Chatham County native, Hackney is serving his 14th term in the N.C. House of Representatives. He has served as speaker pro tem, House majority leader and House Democratic leader and was elected speaker of the House in January 2007. He is consistently rated by his peers as one of the 10 most effective legislators, according to the N.C. Center for Public Policy Research. He is president-elect of the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Hackney attended N.C. State University before transferring to UNC to earn a degree in political science, graduating with honors. He then earned his law degree at UNC in 1970. He served as an assistant district attorney in Orange and Chatham counties, and later he and his UNC ’67 and UNC School of Law ’70 classmate Robert Epting founded Epting & Hackney in Chapel Hill. He has practiced law there for 33 years.
Mike Overlock earned his bachelor’s degree in economics at UNC. After serving as a lieutenant in the Army in Vietnam, he earned a master’s degree in business administration at Columbia University in 1973. That year, he joined Goldman, Sachs and Co., where he spent his entire career. He headed the firm’s mergers and acquisitions department from 1985 to 1996, and he served on the management committee and was co-chairman of the investment banking division from 1990 to 1996. He became a limited partner in 1996 and a senior director in 1999.
Overlock has brought that wealth and breadth of experience to serve his alma mater as co-chairman of the Carolina First Campaign, UNC’s fundraising drive set to end Dec. 31. The campaign has received $2.27 billion in commitments, including $333.3 million to support students, $394.8 million to support faculty, $572.2 million for research, $598.5 million for strategic initiatives and $179.6 million for building needs.
Thompson is chairman, president and CEO of Wachovia Corp., the fourth-largest bank in the U.S. He grew up in Rocky Mount, was a Morehead Scholar at UNC and later received a master’s degree in business administration from Wake Forest University. He has held his current position with Wachovia since 2000.
Thompson has served UNC in many roles. He was on the class of 1973’s 20-year reunion committee, the UNC Board of Visitors and the Arts and Sciences Foundation board of directors. Currently, he is a trustee of the Morehead-Cain Foundation and is a member of Carolina First’s Morehead Alumni Campaign Committee and Regional Steering Committee.
Timmons-Goodson is the first African-American woman to serve as an associate justice on the N.C. Supreme Court. In 1984, she became the first African-American woman to serve as a judge in Cumberland County. In 1998, she was the first African-American woman elected to any state appellate court. In 2002, she served on the first three-judge panel of the N.C. Court of Appeals to be made up of all African-American women.
Born in Florence, S.C., Timmons-Goodson majored in speech at Carolina and also earned her law degree at UNC in 1979. She began her legal career as a prosecutor and then was a legal aid lawyer at Lumbee Legal Services. In 1984, she was appointed to the District Court bench in Cumberland County, where she spent more than 12 years. In 1997, Timmons-Goodson was appointed to the N.C. Court of Appeals and was elected to the seat the next year. She resigned in fall 2005, with the plan of entering private practice, but Gov. Mike Easley ’72 called a few months later to say she was his choice for a vacant seat on the N.C. Supreme Court. In 2006, she was elected to the same seat. She also is a past member of the GAA’s Board of Directors.
