Citizens of the Carolinas Award 2003

Remarks to the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce
By Bill Friday
December 2nd, 2003

Thank you; members of the Chamber and to all friends here gathered. 

I hope and trust that you will understand what this moment means to a fellow raised across the Catawba in Dallas, during the Great Depression, where the greatest of thrills was to ride the Piedmont and Northern on Saturday to visit the Queen City.  I am most grateful for your kindness to Ida, our daughters, and to me.  This is a humbling experience that takes its place in one’s memory.

We have just celebrated that uniquely American holiday: Thanksgiving.  We have much to be grateful for.  A land of free people, a land of brave sons and daughters, husbands and wives,  who fight on foreign soils, a region like the Carolinas where the family, the land, and the church still bind us together.  And I am grateful for this splendid city now a world center of banking and commerce, our first really global city.  And I thank you for giving life and strength to one of the strong urban public universities in the land, to the private universities so large a part of your heritage, to a community college of real stature, and a public school system that has pioneered in so many ways.  I say these things because here in Charlotte there is the will to lift the bondage of ignorance—the greatest gift a community can give its young people.

I remember being at the train station to see President Roosevelt, and playing American Legion baseball, and standing at Trade and Tryon to see my first Christmas parade.

And I am thankful for those leaders in this community who understand how critical it is to nourish the soul and spirit and creativeness of each of us by proposing the Cultural Facilities Master Plan.  What a wonderful example to set for others.  For truly, man cannot live by bread alone. 

And I am especially grateful for the commitment to public service of so many citizens of Charlotte—to giving back something of themselves, in whatever way it may be done, to improving our world and the suffering of those about us. 

I applaud my great and good friend, C.D. Spangler, Jr., who, along with his good wife Meredith, gave ten of the best years of their lives to lead our greatest asset, the University, as exemplary of this noble tradition.

We now enter the Christmas season, which like Thanksgiving, is a time of gratitude, and especially of hope and joy.  The best within us rises to govern thoughts and actions in the most noble of ways.  It is good that this is so because we need a time of redirection and renewed commitment to preserve the bounty and beauty of nature that so generously surrounds us, the civility with which we should live and work one with another day by day, and at Christmas it is worthy to remember these words of Bernard Shaw:

Life is no brief candle to me.  It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

And to be mindful, as William Penn that

I shall pass this way but once,
Any good that I can do
Or any kindness that I can show
Let me do it now;
Let me not defer or neglect it
For I shall not pass this way again.

So, with a grateful heart and with gratitude for your many kindnesses to Ida, our children, and to me, and for your wonderful care of the University and of this great city, I thank you – I thank you.

In the spirit of Christmas let me say with Tiny Tim: May God bless us, every one. 

Related Links

 

Charlotte Chamber of Commerce
330 S. Tryon St., PO Box 32785
Charlotte, NC 28232
(704) 378-1300