Tar Heel Research Articles

Surgical Professionalism, the White Owl, and Tar Heel Basketball.

The University of North Carolina (UNC) has storied traditions beyond its champion Tar Heel basketball teams. One of its best-and least known off campus-is the white owl, today a lapel pin given to chief residents in surgery at Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill. Former residents in anesthesia and surgery at the San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH) remember it as a stuffed owl that anesthesia residents brought into the operating room whenever there was an appendectomy for appendicitis and the appendix was normal, an operation familiarly called a negative appendectomy. Standing at the table closing the incision their surgical counterpart endured the imagined smirks of the anesthesiologists behind their masks and the scrub techs and circulating nurses who also knew of the bird's significance. Alumni of the SFGH training programs also remember it as evidence of the good-natured repartee between anesthesia and surgery, teams that worked hard at all hours to serve the injured and disadvantaged populations of the city. In retrospect, the white owl signifies owning one's decisions and mistakes, an essential aspect of surgical professionalism.

Tar Heel Footprints in Health Care.

A periodic feature that recognizes individuals whose efforts-often unsung-enhance the health of North Carolinians.

Tar Heel Footprints in Health Care: A periodic feature that recognizes individuals whose efforts-often unsung-enhance the health of North Carolinians.

![Figure][1]</img> As Dr. Sarah Taylor Morrow reaches her 100th year, her impact on health care in North Carolina and across the United States continues to be celebrated by those who worked with her and those who were inspired by her example. As a young person, Dr. Morrow was determined to become

Tar Heel Footprints in Health Care: A periodic feature that recognizes individuals whose efforts-often unsung-enhance the health of North Carolinians.

Tar Heel Footprints in Health Care: A periodic feature that recognizes individuals whose efforts-often unsung-enhance the health of North Carolinians.

Assessing Recent Efforts and the Future of Water Loss Control in the Tar Heel State

Key TakeawaysPassage of the 2008 Drought Management Act provided momentum for North Carolina's water loss control efforts; AWWA Manual M36 and the AWWA water audit formed the foundation.Partnering groups tested a state pilot program to determine how small and medium‐sized utilities might benefit from using accepted best practices and tools for their own water loss control plans.It's all too easy to put the past behind us when a drought ends, so water utilities bear the responsibility of making water resource management a constant priority and educating the public.

Tar Heel Footprints in Health Care: Bill Hussey: Fighting for Our Most Vulnerable Youth.

When Bill Hussey has a vision and a stakeholder group, nothing will get in his way. With 38 years of service to those with mental health needs, Bill is fiercely dedicated to seamless mental health services in North Carolina. To realize this, he has brought together hundreds of stake-holders

Tar Heel Lightnin': How Secret Stills and Fast Cars Made North Carolina the Moonshine Capital of the World by Daniel S. Pierce

Reviewed by: Tar Heel Lightnin': How Secret Stills and Fast Cars Made North Carolina the Moonshine Capital of the World by Daniel S. Pierce Max Fraser Tar Heel Lightnin': How Secret Stills and Fast Cars Made North Carolina the Moonshine Capital of the World. By Daniel S. Pierce. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. [viii], 303. $30.00, ISBN 9781-4696-5355-6.) Like one of the Foxfire books, Daniel S. Pierce's Tar Heel Lightnin': How Secret Stills and Fast Cars Made North Carolina the Moonshine Capital of the World is exceptionally good with the small details. Did you know, for instance, that yellowroot or horsemint growing alongside a creekbank indicates the presence of "soft," mineral-free water—the best kind to use when making corn whiskey—while touch-me-nots are a sign of less-ideal, "hard" water (p. 9); that a "'hulled out'" 1940 flathead Ford V-8 can hold twenty-two six-gallon cases of whiskey where its innards used to be (p. 162); or that the early hillbilly singer Charlie Poole bought his first Orpheum No. 3 Special banjo with the proceeds from a moonshining operation he ran with Posey Rorer—later the fiddle player in Poole's pioneering string band, the North Carolina Ramblers? That many such morsels here are gleaned from already published sources—including the Foxfire books themselves, as well as earlier works of scholarship on moonshining and mountain culture in the rural South—may limit the number of entirely original insights offered up by Pierce's book. Nevertheless, Tar Heel Lightnin' does a fine job of being precisely what it sets out to be: a highly readable and always engaging account of the place of moonshining in the history of the Tar Heel State—or, as the book's subtitle would have it, "the Moonshine Capital of the World." And what a sizable place it is. "Indeed, one could argue," as Pierce does, "that illegal liquor production has been as important as tobacco, textiles, or furniture, an integral part of the warp and woof of the state's economic, social, and cultural fabric" (p. 7). A professor of history at the University of North Carolina–Asheville, Pierce knows this territory well (and lest you have any doubts by the end of the book, see the epilogue, which includes a photograph of the author visiting a disused [End Page 741] still site in Montreat). More to the point, he has combed through a century and a half of federal, state, and local records to demonstrate just how ubiquitous and consequential a practice moonshining has been, from the enactment of a federal excise tax on whiskey (at the time a nonissue for North Carolina's whiskeymakers, given that it was passed by Congress in 1862), to the bobo-renaissance in artisanal "so-called legal moonshine" that has become part of the contemporary scene in places like trendy and tourist-friendly Asheville (p. 3). Pierce's discussion of the complex political dynamics surrounding moonshining during Reconstruction and Redemption is particularly illuminating. Initially associated with local defiance of federal authority after the Civil War (illegal whiskey was first known in the state as "blockade liquor," in an appreciative allusion to Confederate blockade-runners [p. 25]), by the 1890s the "drunken Negro" had become a favored bugbear of North Carolina Democrats and temperance advocates alike, who began working hand in glove to push for prohibition and black disenfranchisement within the state (p. 76). Even the Charlotte Observer noted, in 1895, that it had "'not been a great while since the moonshiner was … made a sort of hero in North Carolina'"—yet, by that point, only "'the most densely ignorant or the debased'" could deny "'that the moonshiner lacks all qualities of a hero and is a public enemy'" (p. 44). Doggedly, if not always successfully, Pierce emphasizes the important and often overlooked roles that women, African Americans, and Native Americans have played in North Carolina's moonshining tradition. He attributes the relative underdevelopment of these discussions to a lack of available sources—but a more diligent scholar of race or gender might have done more with the diversity of experiences that Pierce documents...

Unionizing the World's Largest Slaughterhouse

Capitalism has many victims, but few fare as badly as slaughterhouse workers. Every day, meatpacking workers risk life and limb to provide cheap meat for consumers. Despite this, political scientist Timothy Pachirat once described slaughterhouse work as a form of labor "considered morally and physically repellent by the vast majority of society that is sequestered from view rather than eliminated or transformed." Yet, slaughterhouses are the sites of some of labor's greatest triumphs. Lynn Waltz documents one such triumph in her book Hog Wild, which describes how meatpacking workers successfully established a union at the Tar Heel slaughterhouse in North Carolina. While Waltz focuses on the particular fight at the Tar Heel plant, the unionization success of the workers there provides important lessons for future labor struggles.

Tar Heel Footprints in Health Care: Cedric Bright.

Tar Heel Footprints in Health Care: Cedric Bright.

Print News and Raise Hell: The Daily Tar Heel and the Evolution of a Modern University by Kenneth Joel Zogry

Reviewed by: Print News and Raise Hell: The Daily Tar Heel and the Evolution of a Modern University by Kenneth Joel Zogry Alex Macaulay Print News and Raise Hell: The Daily Tar Heel and the Evolution of a Modern University. By Kenneth Joel Zogry. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. [x], 350. $39.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-0829-7.) In Print News and Raise Hell: The Daily Tar Heel and the Evolution of a Modern University, Kenneth Joel Zogry examines more than a century of reporting by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Daily Tar Heel (DTH). What began in 1893 as an organ of the University Athletic Association evolved into a chronicler of much more than sports. Indeed, the DTH's vocal and far-ranging coverage embroiled the campus newspaper in debates over institutional, state, and national issues, from campus growth, to civil rights, to electoral and cultural politics, to the highs and lows of big-time college athletics. Zogry's thorough account reveals just how much the paper's regional, institutional, and professional environments shaped its image, content, and identity. Like that of most student-run publications, its tone and focus could and often did change from year to year, sometimes based on the individual preferences and personalities of its editors, a roll call of whom reads like a who's [End Page 478] who of American literary and journalistic giants. As students and journalists, DTH staff members consistently championed academic freedom and freedom of the press, rising up time and again against censorship and the stifling of intellectual debate. In 1925 they spoke out against legislative efforts to ban the teaching of evolution. A few years later, the paper interviewed presidential candidate Norman Thomas, describing him as "A Sociable Socialist" (p. 68). The paper issued full-throated denunciations of McCarthyism and the infamous North Carolina speaker ban. These actions drew the ire of North Carolina conservatives who cited the paper as proof that the university was home to "'crack-brained professors and baby radicals'" (p. 73). The paper garnered this radical reputation by expressing moderately liberal views on a conservative southern campus in a conservative southern state. The limits of said radicalism appeared in a variety of cases. In the late 1940s, the DTH defended a columnist who wrote an article declaring, "Christ Was a Communist," but released him soon thereafter when he penned an editorial calling for the banning of the Confederate battle flag at Tar Heel football games (p. 125). Decades later, the newspaper offered tepid, at times tortured, responses to debates surrounding the Vietnam War, the women's movement, and LGBTQ rights. After equivocating when it came to the initial racial integration of the university, the editorial staff eventually came around, skewering segregationist ideals and rhetoric, promoting boycotts of segregated establishments, and sending reporters throughout the South who filed front-page stories lauding the work of civil rights activists in Alabama, Mississippi, and elsewhere. The paper followed a similar pattern on issues closer to home, waffling a bit when it came to renaming or removing campus buildings and monuments, including the Confederate memorial known as "Silent Sam." In these cases, the energy and activism of small yet vocal student groups such as the Real Silent Sam Coalition outpaced that of the DTH. The latter began to catch up with the former, although it will be interesting to check back on the paper's recent coverage of events surrounding the still silent and currently absent Confederate memorial. The final pages of the book remind readers of the Daily Tar Heel's original and evolving role as both institutional booster and gadfly. Zogry reprints the front page of the July 26, 2012, edition, where, under the headline "Tracking a Scandal," the paper detailed the controversy over fraudulent classes involving student-athletes at the University of North Carolina (p. 302). Flipping the page, one finds another full-page image, this time showing a joyous Tar Heel men's basketball team celebrating its 2017 national championship under the headline "At Last, Redemption" (p. 304). Informative and accessible, Zogry's work confirms that a free, independent press remains crucial to the healthy...

Salinity Tolerance of Turf-type Tall Fescue as Affected by Nitrogen Sources

Tall fescue [Schedonorus arundinaceus (Schreb) Dumort] has potential in cool arid regions, where it is often subject to salinity stress. The objective of this 2-year field study was to investigate the effect of nitrogen sources on tall fescue turf quality under salinity stress in the northern Great Plains of North America. ‘Wolfpack’, ‘Wolfpack II’, ‘Tar Heel’, ‘Tar Heel II’, ‘Jaguar 3’, ‘Jaguar 4G’, and ‘Arid 3’ were treated with NaCl and CaCl2 in equal amounts. Six N sources were used for fertilization: nitrate-N, urea-N, ammonium-N, urea-N/ammonium-N/nitrate-N, urea-N with urase and nitrification inhibitor, and organic N. Salt treatment reduced turf quality of all cultivars. Turf quality was affected differently by N source. Regardless of salt treatments, urea stabilized with a urease inhibitor and a nitrification inhibitor consistently had the best turf quality. Equal amounts of nitrate, ammonium, and urea-N yielded the lowest turf quality. However, there was no interaction between N source and salt treatment. These results were also supported by green density (GD), dark-green color index (DGCI), shoot chlorophyll (Chl) content, and leaf relative water content (RWC). Tall fescue cultivars responded to salinity treatment differently, with ‘Wolfpack II’ being the cultivar ranked consistently at the top and maintained above the acceptable level of visual quality.

Tar Heel Footprints in Health Care: Jeff Spade.

Tar Heel Footprints in Health Care: Jeff Spade.

Tar Heel Footprints in Health Care: Dr. Bob Parr Takes the Lead in Tracking Pollution.

Tar Heel Footprints in Health Care: Dr. Bob Parr Takes the Lead in Tracking Pollution.

A large dromaeosaurid from North Carolina

During the Cretaceous period, North America was divided into two landmasses, the eastern Appalachia and western Laramidia. Recent research on several sites scattered across the eastern margin of North America has allowed for the analysis of vertebrate faunas from the once obscure terrestrial fossil record of Appalachia, revealing the landmass harbored a distinctive fauna composed of mostly relict forms. One geological unit that has produced a comparatively extensive record of terrestrial vertebrates, including non-avian dinosaurs, is the middle Campanian Tar Heel Formation of North Carolina. Here, the first definitive occurrence of a dromaeosaurid from the Tar Heel Formation is reported on the basis of a tooth from a fairly large member of that group. This tooth clusters with those of dromaeosaurine dromaeosaurids from the western United States and Canada in morphometric analysis, differing in morphology and size from other dromaeosaurid teeth from southeastern North America that have been assigned to saurornitholestines or considered indeterminate. The tooth described herein is intermediate in size between those of smaller dromaeosaurids like Saurornitholestes and gigantic forms like Dakotaraptor, filling the gap between larger- and smaller-bodied dromaeosaurids from the Late Cretaceous.

Tar Heel Footprints in Health Care: Sean McHugh.

Tar Heel Footprints in Health Care: Sean McHugh.

Tar Heel Footprints in Health Care: Catherine Joyner.

Tar Heel Footprints in Health Care: Catherine Joyner.

Latinx: ¡Estamos aquí!, or being “Latinx” at UNC-Chapel Hill

This essay theorizes the specific use of the term “Latinx” at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill during 2016–2017, which emanated in the context of the Tar Heel State’s election year politics and the transition from the Obama administration to the Trump one. “Latinx” gained currency at the University of North Carolina in the wake of House Bill 2: The Public Facilities, Privacy, and Security Act, or as it came to be commonly referenced, “HB2.” The bill enforces an oppressive binary sex-and-gender system as well as the potential exploitation of and discrimination against employees. HB2, signed into law, takes aim at transgender and transsexual people and bars employees from filing in state courts against their employers and limits them to bringing their grievance cases to a federal court, a far more expensive and cumbersome process. Latinx was adopted at the University of North Carolina especially but not exclusively by students to be gender-inclusive in the wake of HB2 and, furthermore, to be coalitional. A general consensus exists that discrimination runs along multiple vectors at once, not just gender but also ethno-racial and class vectors where “class” is understood to encompass a variety of factors, including citizenship status.

Tar Heel Footprints in Health Care

Tar Heel Footprints in Health Care

The Life and Lies of Paul Crouch: Communist, Opportunist, Cold War Snitch

Gregory S. Taylor, who previously authored a history of the Communist party in North Carolina, is perfectly suited to deliver this first biography of one of the most infamous Communists from the Tar Heel State. Paul Crouch's notoriety owes not merely to his years of work as a party organizer throughout the South and the West but to his break with the party during World War II, followed by his dramatic shift to anticommunism in the early Cold War years. Anticommunism became Crouch's profession. Taylor presents this paid informant as a “pathological liar” whose almost-routine perjury did damage both to victims on the left and to the anticommunist cause (p. 8). Taylor's central argument is that Crouch symbolized the dangers inherent when ideologues enter positions of political power. Taylor's evenhanded study charts Crouch's course from leftist radical to Cold War opportunist. Witnessing the injustice of the Red Scare during his formative years, Crouch gravitated to the Communist orbit while stationed in a military intelligence post in Hawaii during the 1920s. Court-martialed for revolutionary activities, Crouch served three years in prison, becoming a minor cause célèbre and propaganda symbol. Upon his release, Crouch toured the Soviet Union while Josef Stalin consolidated his dictatorship in the late 1920s. Crouch's zealous ideological faith enabled his willingness to ignore the clear oppression he witnessed. Taking his cue from Red Army chief Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Crouch returned home to plot the infiltration of the U.S. military. His career as a Communist was spent largely as an organizer, however. Fatigue seems to explain his break from the party, for Crouch tired not only of the ever-shifting party line but also of his itinerant existence. Crouch would ultimately become an anticommunist ideologue, but opportunism initially motivated his transition to Cold War snitch. Despite Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi) awareness of his fabrications, Crouch's lucrative career as paid informant made him vital in attacks on such notables as Harry Bridges, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and even Charlie Chaplin. His patrons included Senators Joseph McCarthy and James Eastland, but in the wake of the Army-McCarthy hearings, in which Crouch served as a key source for the junior senator from Wisconsin, the mainstream press grew more vigilant in questioning Crouch's reliability, and officials in the Justice Department and fbi had little interest in coming to his defense. Unlike his fellow professional informant Harvey Matusow, Crouch never admitted his lies. His lonely death from cancer came in 1955.

Tar Heel Footprints in Health Care: Marian Earls, MD, MTS, FAAP.

Tar Heel Footprints in Health Care: Marian Earls, MD, MTS, FAAP.