JFK, NC and Me

The N&O had a letter today and a guest column last week about John Kennedy’s campaign visit to North Carolina 50 years ago – September 1960.
 
I had my own brush with history that day. Kennedy was campaigning with Terry Sanford, who was running for governor.  Sanford had broken with most of the North Carolina delegation – and most Southern delegates – to endorse Kennedy before the national convention.
 
On the way to Reynolds Coliseum that night, the Kennedy-Sanford motorcade made a brief stop in Raleigh’s GlenwoodVillage, at the corner of Glenwood Avenue
and Oberlin Road
.
 
My family lived about a mile away, and somehow my mother knew about the stop. So she hauled me and my two younger brothers (the youngest was still a babe in arms) down there. She managed to push her way to the candidates’ cars, and I got to shake JFK’s hand.
 
The N&O column, by ECU Professor John Tucker, recalled Kennedy’s visit that same trip to Greenville and the tobacco market. Tucker noted that JFK – Northeastern Catholic that he was – still carried PittCounty with 78 percent of the vote in those pre-Voting Rights Act days.
 
Kennedy carried North Carolina narrowly, by 58,000 votes. Organizing college campuses for him and Sanford that year was Jim Hunt, then a graduate student at N.C.State. It was the first campaign Hunt worked in.
 
Hunt likes to boast today that JFK later credited the College Democrats, especially in OrangeCounty, with carrying the state for him. Much of the Democratic establishment sat on its hands.
 
Hunt did his job so well he was hired a year or so later to organize college campuses across the country for the Democratic National Committee. He and his family lived in Washington that year, and his son Baxter was born there.
 
The 1960 campaign was where Hunt first caught the attention of Sanford and his campaign manager, Bert Bennett. Bennett later became Hunt’s political mentor and was instrumental in his first race for governor.
 
That’s the direct line – now 50 years past – between John Kennedy’s visit to North Carolina and Jim Hunt’s 16 years as governor. And me.
 
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Gary Pearce

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JFK, NC and Me

The N&O had a letter today and a guest column last week about John Kennedy’s campaign visit to North Carolina 50 years ago – September 1960.
 
I had my own brush with history that day. Kennedy was campaigning with Terry Sanford, who was running for governor.  Sanford had broken with most of the North Carolina delegation – and most Southern delegates – to endorse Kennedy before the national convention.
 
On the way to Reynolds Coliseum that night, the Kennedy-Sanford motorcade made a brief stop in Raleigh’s GlenwoodVillage, at the corner of Glenwood Avenue
and Oberlin Road
.
 
My family lived about a mile away, and somehow my mother knew about the stop. So she hauled me and my two younger brothers (the youngest was still a babe in arms) down there. She managed to push her way to the candidates’ cars, and I got to shake JFK’s hand.
 
The N&O column, by ECU Professor John Tucker, recalled Kennedy’s visit that same trip to Greenville and the tobacco market. Tucker noted that JFK – Northeastern Catholic that he was – still carried PittCounty with 78 percent of the vote in those pre-Voting Rights Act days.
 
Kennedy carried North Carolina narrowly, by 58,000 votes. Organizing college campuses for him and Sanford that year was Jim Hunt, then a graduate student at N.C.State. It was the first campaign Hunt worked in.
 
Hunt likes to boast today that JFK later credited the College Democrats, especially in OrangeCounty, with carrying the state for him. Much of the Democratic establishment sat on its hands.
 
Hunt did his job so well he was hired a year or so later to organize college campuses across the country for the Democratic National Committee. He and his family lived in Washington that year, and his son Baxter was born there.
 
The 1960 campaign was where Hunt first caught the attention of Sanford and his campaign manager, Bert Bennett. Bennett later became Hunt’s political mentor and was instrumental in his first race for governor.
 
That’s the direct line – now 50 years past – between John Kennedy’s visit to North Carolina and Jim Hunt’s 16 years as governor. And me.
 
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Gary Pearce

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