Charlotte College
In 1949, with the support of Dr. Garinger and a cadre of community leaders, she sparked the Charlotte Center's conversion into Charlotte College, a two-year institution financed by city taxpayers and supervised by the Charlotte Board of Education. It was a pioneering move that later resulted in athletic teams at UNC Charlotte being named the '49ers.There was never enough money to assure Charlotte College's permanence, but every time a major crisis arose, Miss Cone would find a benefactor willing to rescue it. She had a knack for making small gifts seem large. Among the college's early supporters was Henry Fowler, Charlotte's Pepsi-Cola bottler whose granddaughter, Dale F. Halton, grew up to become a patron of UNC Charlotte.
Following the death of her father in the early 1950s, Miss Cone invited her mother to live with her in an apartment on what is now Sharon Road in Myers Park. The mother lived there until her death in 1959. Each morning, Miss Bonnie would get her mother started on a knitting project for the day, and then hurry off to her duties at the fledgling college. In 1954, when the outlook for Charlotte College seemed especially bleak, she led a campaign in which city voters approved a two-cent property tax to support the school. Four years later that tax was expanded to include property in all of Mecklenburg County. Miss Cone recruited part-time faculty with the same resourcefulness in which she raised money. She persuaded editor-author Harry Golden, publisher of The Carolina Israelite and numerous best-selling books on American life and manners, to teach courses on Shakespeare. She prevailed on C.A. "Pete" McKnight, editor of The Charlotte Observer, to teach Spanish. She convinced lawyer Robert Potter, later to become a judge of the U.S. District Court, to teach business law.
In 1958 the newly-created North Carolina Community College System accepted Charlotte College as a member, qualifying it for state support and requiring the appointment of its own board of trustees. At the time she predicted that within 10 years the college would be expanded into a university to serve Charlotte and the burgeoning metropolitan area around it. She made many Charlotte business leaders understand the importance of such a university, not only to the students it would serve but also to the local economy. Many of businessmen, including some of the city's most conservative, among them investment banker J. Murrey Atkins and engineer Oliver R. Rowe, rallied to her cause.
By 1959 her duties as president of Charlotte College forced her to give up teaching. Her busy schedule, including hastily arranged trips to Chapel Hill or Raleigh to intercede with state officials in behalf of Charlotte's needs, often caused her to miss classes. It was unfair to students, she said. Bonnie Cone also called on the Charlotte business community for financial support. Her goal was to free the college from its high school surroundings by acquiring a campus of its own. Her appeals to businessmen often included the phrase, "and there's this little piece of land that Charlotte College needs."
Read more about this topic: Bonnie Ethel Cone
Famous quotes containing the words charlotte and/or college:
“Last night, party at Lansdowne-House. Tonight, party at Lady Charlotte Greville’s—deplorable waste of time, and something of temper. Nothing imparted—nothing acquired—talking without ideas—if any thing like thought in my mind, it was not on the subjects on which we were gabbling. Heigho!—and in this way half London pass what is called life.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“I never went near the Wellesley College chapel in my four years there, but I am still amazed at the amount of Christian charity that school stuck us all with, a kind of glazed politeness in the face of boredom and stupidity. Tolerance, in the worst sense of the word.... How marvelous it would have been to go to a women’s college that encouraged impoliteness, that rewarded aggression, that encouraged argument.”
—Nora Ephron (b. 1941)