Much-delayed and almost forgotten: Post about the name of UNC’s stadium

That dust you might see floating your way might be the result of me blowing cobwebs from this post, which has been sitting around as a draft, unfinished, since November 2019. You read that right; this post started before the COVID-19 pandemic! 

And alas, it was forgotten ... until I went through my list of posts Monday afternoon and came across this among several other drafts. (I’m undecided about whether any of the others will see the light of day.)

Glancing at the the pictures in this post without reading any text, a visitor might think it was a sports-related subject. Well, it is about sports, but only tangentially. More importantly and significantly, it’s about the football stadium you see illustrated. But, again, only tangentially. For the record, these photos of Kenan Memorial Stadium are mine; I took them at the University of North Carolina on July 4, 2015. 

This post was a byproduct of my morning newspaper reading, which more than occasionally takes me down one or more “rabbit holes” as I try to learn more about things I come across in the paper.

 

It’s been so much easier doing newspaper-related rabbit-hole crawls since I bought my first smartphone in 2012, and even easier after I invested in an iPad six years later. When curiosity can’t wait, I just grab the phone or tablet and start hunting around for more information.

I did one of those rabbit-hole crawls just before noon on Nov. 8, 2019, when I still was reading the daily paper the “old-fashioned” way (in newsprint). In the main section of the Raleigh News and Observer that November morning, there was an inside story updating readers about how UNC was dealing with angry sentiments in Chapel Hill about the origin of the stadium’s name.

The Kenan family’s philanthropy toward UNC is prolific and quite well-known in these parts. Quite a few things on campus — including professorships and buildings (an arts center in addition to the stadium) — bear the Kenan surname. So if you were ever a UNC student and knew nothing else about the Kenan family, you certainly know the Kenan name.

As it turns out, most of those Kenan namings were to honor William Rand Kenan Jr., a 20th-century industrialist and philanthropist. The exception is the stadium. It was named for his father, William Sr., and that's where the story takes a dramatic — and disturbing — turn.

You see, William Sr. was a key member of a white supremacist group responsible for what today is referred to as the Wilmington Insurrection (or Massacre) of 1898 — the only successful coup d’etat in U.S. history. (I use the adjective “successful” still mindful today of the Trump-inspired 01/06/21 attack on the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.)

I put down the paper to start hunting around for more information on the Wilmington incident and came up this article (click on link). (In a somewhat related matter, UNC’s neighbor, Duke University, which is in nearby Durham, today is dealing with pleas from university faculty, alumni, students and other supporters not to succumb to attacks of “vile racism” — and very real threats of losing $108 million in National Institute of Health funding — by the current presidential administration.)

I took the pictures in this post on July 4, 2015, a full two years before I moved to Raleigh. I was in the Triangle to visit family, and I used some free time to find UNC and do one of my campus photographic profiles. Of course, back then ... I had no idea how handy the images would be to illustrate today’s post.

The UNC campus — which today is about 35 miles from my house — has been a hotbed of race-related controversy since moving here in 2017. The following year, there was the latest in a series of protests at UNC’s McCorkle Place against a monument known as “Silent Sam,” a statue of an unnamed Confederate solider gazing into the distance, rifle in his hands. I didn’t come across this statue in my 2015 visit; I would have liked to have, given what would happen at that August 2018 rally when protesters knocked over the statue.

For some time, Democrats in the North Carolina legislature had sought the removal of all statues in public places that saluted Confederate heroes or events. But Republicans have held significant majorities in both houses (the state’s radically gerrymandered congressional and state legislative districts have been the subject of lawsuits alleging that racial discrimination factored into the drawing of some districts. The lawsuits went before both the North Carolina and U.S. Supreme Courts, but that’s another story).

Silent Sam was removed by executive order in January 2019. 

What’s more interesting (at least to me) is that since that November 2018 article was published in the local daily newspaper, there has not been a swift effort to change the stadium’s name. 

Instead, UNC is taking its time preparing to solicit bids for (re)naming rights that would essentially take care of that problem, even though the Kenan name might still be used for something else on the stadium grounds or elsewhere on campus (although technically it’s already there by virtue of named tributes to Kenan Jr.)

The photos below are some of my other captures of the football stadium during my 2015 visit. 

UNC campus pretty, striking ... perplexing

When I visited North Carolina last year, I had an ambitious mental photography "wish list" -- to photograph the campuses of the University of North Carolina, Duke University and Wake Forest University. I was able to cross one of those off the list -- Wake Forest.

I thought that I might be able to knock off the two others this year because I'd be spending a lot of time in nearby Cary. I'm glad to say that I succeeded in getting to UNC, but Duke -- and perhaps even North Carolina State (in the nearby state capital, Raleigh) -- will waiting for another time.

I became particularly intrigued with UNC in the months after my 2014 visit to North Carolina because of an article at buzzfeed.com that I'd read early this year that listed it as the No. 1 "most beautiful" college or university campus in the United States. There were 21 schools included on the list; two other North Carolina schools also made the cut -- Duke, 15th, and North Carolina-Asheville, 19th. Two Indiana schools also made the list -- the University of Notre Dame (3rd) and Indiana University (5th).

I do think UNC's campus is pretty; there is an interesting array of architecture, a good amount of green malls and plazas, and some pretty striking features about it. But I'm not sure I'd assess it as highly as the buzzfeed.com article did. Some things I liked was the aforementioned architecture variety, and three spots on the north end of campus -- Coker Arboretum, the iconic Morehead-Patterson Bell Tower, and Old Chapel Hill Cemetery, a graveyard and national historic district.

One huge thing that perplexed me, however, was that the Dean E. Smith Center (see photo leading off this post) -- the main playing facility for the men and women's basketball teams -- seems isolated on the campus It's located on the extreme southeast end, and except for a few nearby resident halls, is far removed from academic buildings and the majority of athletic facilities, including its track and football stadiums. In fact, on the day I went to the Smith Center, there was so much construction going on around it, and several main accesses to it closed, that I could reach it only by foot. A minor mitigating feature is that the Carolina Basketball Museum is located in the Ernie Williamson Athletic Center next door to the Smith Center. It was just my bad luck that I was there on a Sunday, when both facilities were closed.

For a look at the full shoot at UNC, visit my gallery at SmugMug.

Above: One of the first pictures I took after getting out of my car on the north end of campus. A very shady thoroughfare, near a cluster of residence halls. 

Above and next five below: Inside Old Chapel Hill Cemetery, including a shot of the Rebecca Clark Memorial Gazebo.

Above and below: Fetzer Field/Belk Track, where at one end are situated the track athlete institutional art below.

An admissions gate (above) to Kenan Memorial Stadium (next three below). 

Above: An unusual feature near the north end of the stadium -- a wooded area and walkway.

The Morehead-Patterson bell tower (above) in a park across from Wilson library (below).   

Above: The front side of the library, fronting Polk Place mall. 

Above: The library seen from across the mall.  

Above: Another building in the mall. 

Above: Memorial Hall, one of the venues for Carolina Performing Arts. 

Above and below: Trees and green in McCorkle Place, another green mall. 

Above and below: At the south end of McCorkle Place, directly opposite the South Building (home of the Arts and Sciences), is the Old Well, which dates to 1897 and was modeled after the Temple of Love in the Gardens of Versailles. Many visitors stop here to have pictures taken. The view of the well below is a popular one; I haven't seen many of the perspective show above.

Above: Davie Hall, home of UNC's Pyschology Department. It is adjacent to Coke Arboretum. 

Above and next two below: Images from Coke Arboretum.

Above: View from a hill overlooking a cluster of residence halls near Dean E. Smith Center. 

Above: These stairs to Dean E. Smith Center seem intimidating.

Above: Another view of the Smith Center.

Above: Landscaping near the north side of the Smith Center.

Above and below: The Ernie Williamson Athletic Center and Carolina Basketball Museum.

 

Another Wrightsville Beach (NC) sunrise

Photography outings and opportunities have been few and far between in recent months, and for the time being, that's OK by me. I'm enjoying the hiatus, although so much is happening around me outside of photography that I'm not sure I'd have been able to squeeze picture-taking into the agenda even if I had wanted to.

I did indulge in quite a bit of camera work in early July when I returned to North Carolina for 12 days or so. Those of you who follow this blog will recall I made my first trip there in July 2014.

This year's trip included a couple days back at Wrightsville Beach, my first stop last year; a couple sessions (some candid, some portraiture) with Lee Ann's 8-month-old granddaughter, Elizabeth; a Cary, N.C. (where I spent the majority of my time); a visit to downtown Wilmington, N.C.; and a side trip to the campus of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

The trip to Wrightsville Beach included another sunrise photo shoot, and this post features pictures from that. Pictures taken along the intracoastal waterway in Wrightsville Beach as well as samples of the shoots in Cary, Wilmington and at UNC will appear here in the days ahead.

Gearwise, I traveled light for this trip. For all of my North Carolina shots except the portraitures of Elizabeth, I used my Canon 6D and Tamron 28-300mm f.3.5-6.3 Di VC PZD lens and bracketed my images for varying exposures of each composition so I could treat the images in high-dynamic range (HDR) software during post-processing.

The Tamron is such a handy, versatile tool for when I know I'm going to be on my feet for long periods of time and I don't want to carry around a lot of gear ... and/or when I want to bracket my exposures without lugging around a tripod. Tamron's PZD (piezoelectric drive) and its VC technology in the lens (both of which also are found in the 18-270mm that I use on my Canon 7D crop-sensor camera) does a very good job keeping things still when I do two or three exposures for a shot. And even on those occasions when there is too much shake or too slow of a shutter speed (the former will occur when the lens is zoomed to the 250+ range), the lastest version of Photomatix HDR software that I use now provides a deghosting tool that corrects motion blur almost perfectly. The great thing about that tool is that it allows you to select which frame of the multiple exposures you took for the software to pick when blending the exposures.

For the portraiture shots of Elizabeth, I used the same camera but turned to a Sigma 85mm f/2.8 lens, which I've had for a couple years but never really explored to the degree I did with the pictures of Elizabeth in July. I was very impressed with how the Sigma performed; I had some great bokeh, and the images were crisp and professional looking.

OK, back to this post ...

The sunrise and intracoastal waterway photos at Wrightsville Beach were taken July 7. Those of you who follow PP might remember that I also shot a sunrise, my first ever, at the same location almost a year ago. In that instance, I mistimed it; I didn't arrive to shoot until the sun had already crept above the horizon. Because of that, I was in a rush and started tripping the shutter quickly and instinctively -- before getting away from the hotel's seagull sonar wires.

This time, I was better prepared. I arrived early and managed to get an elevated position on the other side of the wires, closer to the shoreline atop a wooden deck which was above the natural berm. I got several shots of the colored sky before the sphere became visible.

The photo leading off the post was well into the shoot, but it probably best represents the sunrise collection. I decided to use the lifeguard station as my frame complement and viewer perspective, so you'll see it included in the first several pictures. The changing colors of the sky and clouds as the sphere made its slow ascent (see five photos immediately below) gave me a varied representation of the moment.

You can see images from the full sunrise shoot at my SmugMug travel gallery.

Above: In the moments before the sun inched above the water, the sky colors immediately above the horizon were drenched in rich oranges and purples.

Above: Several of the full-zoom shots of the sun just as it cleared the horizon reflected an overlay of what I have to presume is a low-lying cloud cluster (click on the image to enlarge and get a better view). At first, I thought the objects in the center resembled the silhouettes of a ship or two, but that wouldn't have explained the much larger object on the extreme right. And besides, I don't remember seeing any craft or vessel in the vicinity of this area in the moments before or after the sun slipped above the horizon.

Above and next two below: Two more images taken moments before the sunrise but using something other than the lifeguard station as the subject. The metal hunter in the two images above got into a lot of my shots, sometimes by choice, other times because I was momentarily boxed in for the composition and had to include him. The presunrise image immediately above also gives a sense of the haze hovering low to the ground/water on this morning. The haze will become more evident in pictures further down in the post. The athlete in the first image below was running away from the sunrise. The pier in the photo below that also was in the direction opposite the sunrise from my vantage point. This frame, too, gives a little sense of the haze.

Above and next six images: The sun had risen, so I started to compose to integrate the low-to-the-ground haze into my photos. Using a 28-300mm lens enabled me to exploit the zoom compression that explains the varying degree of sharpness and separation that you see in the photos, i.e., people up close are mostly clear and out of the haze, whereas those farther back are cloaked in various degrees of it.   

Above and below: I used this walker to compose several frames, and in the images above and below, I also demonstrate the subtleties between an image processed in HDR software (above) vs. one reflecting a single frame (below). The primary difference is that the HDR-treated image carries a slight full-body halo that gives it separation and better line distinction from the sand. I'm not saying this is necessarily better, because it certainly is less realistic. But artistically, you are more inclined at first to view the walker differently than you might in the image below. The walker in these images is headed in the general direction of the sunrise, but not directly so.

Above: Here is the same walker coming toward me. Because I'm not shooting into a direction where the sun is located, there is less silhouetting, and while there is haze, it's not as pronounced as it was above.  

Above: This image was taken shortly after the one of the walker above it. It is simply a bit to the right of it. With the subjects closer to the camera, the separation really illustrates the amount of haze.

Above and below: Two post-sunrise shots taken toward the ocean, but away from the sun.

Above and below: Two post-sunrise images, one pointed directly at the sun, the other a few minutes later when the sun slipped behind some clouds.