IN AN OLD FARMVILLE GAS STATION, RAW MATERIALS PLUS FIRE EQUALS ART

The golden hour arrives in Farmville, where the sun slowly slips beneath acres of tobacco and cotton fields surrounding this eastern North Carolina town, revealing hues of blue, orange, yellow, pink and, of course, purple.

The drive is less than 30 minutes from East Carolina University’s campus in Greenville, and students make the trip four evenings a week, catching a glimpse of nature’s majesty on their way to class at the GlasStation.

ECU opened the studio five years ago in collaboration with the town. Each semester, undergraduate and graduate students sign up for glass blowing at ECU, the only university that offers it in the University of North Carolina System.

Student success

Charity Ray, who is majoring in art with a concentration in graphic design, needed another class to finish the art studio requirements for her major. “Out of all the classes I could’ve taken, glass blowing was something that I wanted to know more about,” she says. “I automatically assumed it was going to be hard because of how clumsy I was, but no matter how many times I messed up, I wasn’t afraid to try again.”

Glass blowing has a steep learning curve, a choreographed process of heat, movement and pressure, which becomes intuitive with practice, says Michael Tracy, teaching assistant professor in the School of Art and Design.

“Surprisingly, after being in the class for a little bit over a month, I have gotten the basics of controlling the glass and not being afraid of getting close to the heat,” says Ray of Severn, Maryland. “I did not know how every detail that goes into making a glass piece is up to the artist. In the end, if you break it, just shake it off and start again.”

On a Monday night this spring, Ray carefully and methodically moved a long-handled metal blow piece from the furnace to a work bench, where she rolled and shaped the glass before returning it to the fire. The steps were repeated over and over, turning and transforming what started as a gooey blob into a clear glass cup.

“This class is definitely more hands-on than my other classes this semester,” Ray says. “Even with my previous studio classes, only my hands were needed to make my art but, in this class, you will be needing your whole body.”

First-semester students learn heat control and ways of manipulating glass physically. They spend eight weeks making cups before graduating to vases. “The vessel forms just give a recognizable, defined end goal,” Tracy says.

Students also complete technical projects in the “cold room,” where they learn grinding, polishing, carving and sandblasting techniques that can change the shape or texture of glass without heat. “Glass blowing is the flashy part, so that’s what everyone wants to see or hear about, but it’s actually only half the process,” Tracy says.

Nick Bisbee, a first-year graduate student in ceramics, has enjoyed creating designs for molds for his hand-blown glass. He caught the “glass bug” in his first class and now is a teaching assistant with Tracy. Bisbee hopes to eventually teach ceramics at a university.

“My favorite thing about glass is definitely the aesthetics of it, the fact that you can make something that refracts light in a way that no other material really can and the way that light can move through it in ways that it doesn’t really with other materials,” he says.

Bisbee’s other medium is clay, “which weirdly translates extremely well into glass. Instead of throwing on a wheel, you’re throwing fully sideways, and you can’t touch it with anything other than tools, even though you really want to.”

Students are shaping glass at temperatures between 1,600 and 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, although it’s closer to 2,100 degrees when first pulled from the furnace. The material can crack if it drops below 1,000 degrees and isn’t cooled slowly.

Building community

The GlasStation is helping fulfill a vision to use the arts to revitalize downtown Farmville. Almost a decade ago, members of the Farmville Group, a volunteer economic development association, and the Tabitha M. DeVisconti Trust, which owns the building, approached ECU about the possibility of opening a studio or art space in Farmville.

At that time, more than half the town’s storefronts were empty or abandoned. In response, ECU proposed a glass art facility that would not only serve as a classroom for students but would become a destination for anyone interested in glass blowing.

“It’s a vital place now,” says Todd Edwards, a local builder, developer and Farmville Group member involved in the effort. “Just the energy that the GlasStation brings, that big risk that ECU took, and that Michael took to come here. The attention it draws, it’s amazing when they have demonstrations. Often it’s standing room only.”

Below, the GlasStation’s name is a nod to the building’s former life as a Gulf service station. At right, glass is turned at temperatures between 1,600 and 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit in the furnace. Below right, finished glass pieces are lined up on a shelf.

ECU’s glass studio has been joined by other artists and new businesses the past few years. Catty-cornered across West Wilson Street, the North Carolina Furniture School’s Stuart Kent ’05 ’08 teaches furniture making, woodturning and woodworking classes. His friend Matt Wright ’94 visited and decided to open Lanoca Coffee Company, a small-batch, artisanal coffee roaster, on South Main Street. The arts council has rebranded and revamped programming, and two art galleries have opened.

“We have been able to leverage that with retailers coming to Farmville,” Edwards says. “Our downtown’s filled up now. Adaptive uses, people living downtown, this was the forerunner to it. This kind of led the charge.”

ECU’s presence has rejuvenated interest from residents and beyond. “Mike’s done a great job of promoting glass art,” Edwards says. “It’s really performance art meets art world because there’s a physical, tangible product in the end. To watch glass being made is absolutely fascinating.”

The GlasStation name honors the building’s former life as a gas station and its repurposed mission. Built in 1946, the building features exposed brick, large windows and industrial lighting with about 2,400 square feet of studio space.

ECU supplements academic classes with community outreach including continuing education workshops and monthly demonstrations that are open to the public. Tracy also teaches students from Pitt Community College, another town partner. “This studio was created with community outreach in mind as a secondary goal right behind the course offerings it adds in the School of Art and Design,” Tracy says.

‘Creative roots’

Glass blowing involves heating a glass tube, called a blowpipe, and manipulating it to shape the molten glass as it cools.

ECU’s glass blowing classes are capped at eight students, a purposely small group to accommodate available workspace and equipment. Over the past five years, Tracy has taught about 150 ECU students the art of glass blowing.

The medium has not changed much, Tracy says, since humans began making glassware.

“I love the fact that I feel like I have a connection with the Mediterranean and Roman glass blowers 2,000 years ago. That kind of feels a little special,” he says. “New technologies are great, but I also feel a lot of them are transient, whereas with glass blowing, the only change has been our fuel source. It probably won’t change drastically any time soon.”

The forms were all influenced by pottery and translated to glass, Tracy says. “Form follows function, so if you’re trying to make a vase, only certain shapes are going to work really well for a vase,” he says.

In 2019, ECU’s College of Fine Arts and Communication received a $20,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant to research the cultural and economic impact of the glass blowing studio in Farmville. ECU was one of 19 organizations in North Carolina to receive the competitive funding.

ECU and the college’s role in regional transformation — part of the university’s core mission — comes to life here in the form of the orange glow of hot glass on its way to becoming a piece of art.

“We know that the arts have the ability to transform us in many ways,” says Linda Kean, dean of the College of Fine Arts and Communication. “In the case of the GlasStation, giving people the opportunity to participate in the creation of a piece of work that is uniquely their own can be powerful.

“We hope that the GlasStation provides those that visit an opportunity to experience all of what art can do for us as individuals and as a community. We continue to look to the future to find ways to collaborate with Farmville and other communities to come together to create art in its various forms.”

The GlasStation’s impact continues to unfold today. “And it just keeps going. We have lots of tenacles to what’s going on and the creative roots that this place has put into town,” Edwards says.

“The ECU connections run deep, and we’ve had a lot of ECU alumni come through here. It’s brought people to town in many, many ways,” he says. “Everyone is proud of ECU, and we’re so proud to have an ECU satellite to the campus here in town. For us, it’s a really big deal.”

Charles Darwin considered fire and language the two most important discoveries of humankind. Of those,fire has been a symbol of destruction and creation. We admire its beauty, fear its destructiveness and harness its power. East interviewed two groups of people whose careers revolve around fire: firefighters and artists. They describe how they found their calling to work with and around fire and the passions that drive them to continue their work.

Fire illuminates Ben Owen III’s face as he adds wood to the kiln. Firings take multiple days. A kiln firing is a collaborative effort in patience.

The front lines of firefighting

When the alarm rings, they spring into action. With sirens blaring and lights flashing, they rush toward danger while others flee from it. They face smoke, flames and the unknown with courage and selflessness. They are firefighters, the people who put their lives on the line to protect our communities.

Beyond the iconic image of firefighters battling infernos, there is a story of sacrifice, camaraderie and resilience. Kevin Fontana ’94 ’03, Lauren Griffin ’13 ’14 and Derrick Ingram ’00 have more than 60 years of firefighting experience among them.

You might recognize Ingram’s name. He’s in the ECU Athletics Hall of Fame for his track accomplishments in the 1990s. “I was looking for a career job in the Greenville area that would help me provide for my family,” he says. “I met a former Greenville Fire/Rescue employee who told all the great things GFR had to offer. I applied the next day.”

Now a captain with the department, Ingram says the rewards come from knowing he’s “helping people in their time of need. I enjoy helping and providing education to the citizens of this city.”

Griffin started firefighting when she was in high school in northern Virginia. Her curriculum required volunteer hours, so she became a junior firefighter.

“I was an overachiever, so I got like 10,000 hours,” she says. Even though music was her focus as a youth, she eventually received degrees in education and counseling at ECU. She taught with Pitt County Schools for seven years as an English teacher and counselor, but she missed firefighting.

During a vacation to Belize, a nearby restaurant caught fire. Griffin got in the bucket brigade ferrying water from the ocean to douse the flames. Inside her head, a voice kept talking. After returning home, she saw an ad for a career fair at GFR.

“That little voice says you need to do fire and rescue,” she says. “I haven’t looked back. I just had a calling. Every year I was without fire and rescue in my life, there was something missing.” She’s also a paramedic.

For Fontana, it was seeing volunteer firefighters work to save a neighbor’s burning house — community members who had also helped his family during difficult times. He was 20 at the time and talked with one of the firefighters afterward.

“I thought volunteering would be a way to repay the community for supporting my family,” says Fontana, who’s an instructor in the College of Business.

Keeping your cool when things get hot

In 2022, GFR responded to 74 building fires and 55 cooking fires confined to a container, according to Jessica Blackwell ’17, public information officer and fire educator. For all types of fires, from vegetation to vehicles, firefighters responded to 148 fires in 2022 and 174 in 2021. According to the National Fire Protection Association, every 23 seconds, a fire department in the United States responds to a fire somewhere in the nation.

For firefighters, staying calm at a fire scene is a matter of training and experience. Griffin says yoga also helps. “Some people get really excited, overenergized, but I find a calming in putting on my gear, breathing,” she says. “I’ll constantly monitor my breathing, bring my heart rate down, conserve my air. But it’s also an adrenaline rush. Within five to 10 minutes, the main job is done, but it’s so physically strenuous.”

How strenuous? She says not as much as moving into Legacy Hall as an 18-year-old. “Walking up all the stairs — I still remember the day my parents helped me move into that dorm. Lugging all that equipment is nothing compared to moving into my dorm,” she says with a laugh.

“I try to lean back on my fire training to manage my emotions at incident scenes,” Ingram says. “I don’t think I have ever been scared due to training.”

Looking ahead

Firefighting jobs are expected to grow at about a 4% rate through 2031, most with local departments, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. That means about 28,000 openings each year to replace workers who retire, move to other jobs or leave the workforce.

Helping keep the ranks up at GFR is a second-generation Ingram.

“It was an honor to have my son Jordan follow my career path and become a firefighter,” Derrick Ingram says. “It was challenging at first because I wanted him to do so well, and as a parent you want to do it for them. Jordan has developed into a good employee and is making a name for himself. He has embraced the job and is taking classes for career development.”

Griffin’s 7-year-old son, Asher, wants to follow in his mom’s footsteps. “He wants to be a firefighter,” she says.

Fontana is coming out of a recent volunteer hiatus due to family illness and preparing for his daughter’s wedding. He plans to pick up his volunteer work this summer. Why? He goes back to that day 30 years ago when he saw local men and women risk their lives.

“It’s all about public service and the importance of volunteering to help your community,” he says. “Volunteer firefighter numbers are down across the state. If I can help sound the alarm — pardon the pun — I will do so when possible.”

Install and regularly test smoke alarms on every level of your home, inside bedrooms and outside sleeping areas. Talk with all family members about a fire escape plan and practice the plan twice a year.

If a fire occurs, get out, stay out and call for help. Don’t go back inside.

Have a fire extinguisher and learn how to use it.

Sources: American Red Cross, FireRescue1

Pottery tells Owen’s multigenerational story

Committing pottery to the fire is one chapter in a unique story of each piece. Flame, heat and time change the clay and glaze, creating vessels with color, character and texture. It’s a story Ben Owen III’s family has told for generations in Seagrove.

Owen ’93 says his work is at the mercy of the fire when placed in a wood-fired kiln, where flame surrounds the vessels. Smoke and ash can also affect the glazes and can change the state of the materials in the glaze. Owen finds the interaction and the outcome exciting. He’s spent years studying to enrich his craft.

“I learned my craft the traditional way, passed down from my family and other potters in the area, not relying on modern technology,” Owen says. “I wanted to understand why all these things worked the way they did and how our family manipulated these materials, transforming a lump of clay into a vessel of purpose.”

Owen brought his family knowledge to ECU to study under professors and artists, including Art Haney and Chuck Chamberlain. As a student, he was indulged with access to labs, freedom to do research and the opportunity to learn how different materials work. Owen focused on ceramics but took on a wellrounded curriculum that allowed him to look at what he did with clay in interaction with other elements, such as woodworking, painting and blacksmithing. For Owen, it added depth to his knowledge of pottery.

“ECU had such a great foundation of materials and equipment to use, plus we had the opportunity to build a wood kiln while learning the fundamentals of how to control the fire successfully,” Owen says.

ECU’s influence on Owen’s craft also happened beyond the classroom. Chamberlain took Owen to visit and learn from local potters, including Irene Glover. She was creating ash glazes from trees cut and burned on her farm. She gave Owen the choice of an ash from her collection. He selected a hickory wood ash. Owen described the gift as a golden bar of chocolate. It was special and rare, and it created a celadon glaze unlike anything he had seen. He used the ash sparingly for as long as he could to benefit from the unique color.

The visit allowed him to grow as a potter and learn about the intricacies of the materials. He paid those experiences forward, bringing students from ECU to Seagrove to participate in a kiln firing. He serves as the artist-in-residence at High Point University and involves students in learning opportunities at his studio.

Owen describes a wood kiln firing as a performance. Each performance inspires Owen’s journey of creating pieces that will be in the next story. A couple of months of work go into wood firing. He typically prepares four or five wood firings a year — dictated by what he makes and commission work as needed. Each firing can include 300-400 pieces. A larger kiln has the capacity for up to 1,500 pieces.

There are two wood-fired kilns at Ben Owen Pottery. One is a single-chamber kiln that has the shape of a candle flame where vessels are stacked in front of the fire box. In this kiln, Owen produces work with more ash effects for all the pieces. A multichambered kiln allows for a variety of interactions among clay, glaze, flame, ash and heat — based on each pot’s placement in the kiln.

Kiln firings take multiple days. A firing is a collaborative effort in patience. The performance may include fellow potters and a few tried-and-true helpers who support loading, firing and around-the-clock monitoring. As compared to a painter, the outcome isn’t known until days later when they unload the kiln.

“You set out a goal and a road map for what you want for the pieces and how you think it will turn out. Just when you are sure how the results may be, the firing, materials, weather or plan provides the unexpected,” Owen says. “Every firing is different, and each piece has a unique mark from the firing. I still get nervous but excited every time we reveal the results from the process.”

Forging art with fire and steel

The flames, heat and artistry of an iron pour sparked the imaginations of Aaron Earley ’10, James Dudley ’11 and Ella Snow ’17 and eventually fused them together as partners and staff at Cricket Forge in Durham.

The attraction to sculpture and fire began for them as students at ECU’s School of Art and Design. Iron pours are a team effort, “a sort of dance to create art,” Dudley says. Iron is melted to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, collected and poured into wood and sand molds for iron casting. The wood burns, and sand and wood fuse with the cooling iron, creating the cast sculpture.

“It was a thing we practiced at ECU and hardly anywhere else at the time,” Earley says.

“It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen,” Dudley says. “All I knew was I needed to do this. Whatever this is, this is my future.”

At Cricket Forge, the trio and their co-workers are still drawn to the flames and heat. They specialize in metal art furnishings, steel indoor and outdoor furniture, garden benches, custom metal work and sculpture. Earley and Dudley became owners of the business with partner Jonathan Paschall. Snow joined in 2021.

Each day is a mixture of small-business management, maintenance, marketing, customer service, fabrication and creation. In the creation of their production and custom work, fire is the creator, manipulator and finisher of their art. They work with plasma energy, heat treatments and traditional blacksmith forging in the facility.

“Almost every product sees the touch of fire, either as cut steel, a forged element, heat treatment, a finishing method,” Earley says. “Where many materials are consumed or ruined by fire, the only way steel can take on a new form is with fire.”

Whether it’s a sheet of steel being cut by a 30,000-degree Fahrenheit plasma arc or a length of square bar heated to 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit in a gas forge, fire is the starting point, Earley says.

At Cricket Forge, Snow has found a job that aligns with her creative goals and allows her space and opportunity to continue practicing as an artist.

“It just feels right that I am here,” she says. “I’ve learned a wide range of skills and maintenance. Also, the people I work with are lovely, so that’s always a benefit.”

Snow works with a zinc flame sprayer in her responsibilities of sandblasting, zinc coating and then painting the products at Cricket Forge. The unique steps she works on add longevity to the steel structures they create.

“It’s essentially a handheld flame thrower with a metal wire thrown in,” Snow says. Propane and oxygen feed into the sprayer to create the fire. Zinc wire meets the flame, melts and sprays onto the metal work. “It looks like it should be a prop in a space movie with constant flame coming out of the front as you coat the surface of the product.”

The previous Cricket Forge owners allowed employees to use the facility to make art, and that tradition continues with the current employees. All three have projects they are working on in the facility. Cricket Forge allows them to be an incubator for learning new skills, and they find themselves inspired and influenced by the work happening on the floor.

“We’re wearing multiple hats; it’s a big team effort,” Earley says. “We hire cool people, a few of whom are ECU alums.”

As a co-owner and fabricator, Dudley is working with metal as he always knew he was meant to. His work often includes creating tools used at Cricket Forge. He also works with clients to design custom work and maintains the shop equipment and infrastructure.

“You can’t help but be inspired by what you see in the shop,” Dudley says. “We create a lot of scrap metal whose shapes have influenced countless artists outside of Cricket Forge in creating their own art.”

One of those artists is Jonathan Bowling ’99, whose well-known horse and animal sculptures dot the Greenville landscape. Dudley, who worked for Bowling after ECU, and Earley say that at least for a time every sculpture created by Bowling had a piece of metal from Cricket Forge. For Earley, there’s a good balance of stress and pleasure in running Cricket Forge. He has the opportunity to teach, collaborate and focus on creative problem-solving. He is proud of the legacy of their products and enjoys the inspiration of the new creations that happen in the shop.

“The diverse knowledge of sculpture materials and methods I developed at ECU is something I use every day,” Earley says. “The wide variety of projects we were assigned often serves as a citation or reference when I encounter new tasks, or a client. Sometimes I even use them as a point of reference for teaching or training an employee.”

Over 24 years, the butterflies and creations of Cricket Forge have found homes across the country, including the entirety of the Duke University campus. Earley also has seen one of their sculptures installed at an overlook on the side of a mountain.

Their favorite locations of their artwork include Dollywood and a sculpture at Lebron James’ I Promise School in Akron, Ohio.

ECU LAB TRACES FIRE’S FINGERPRINTS THROUGH HISTORY

History — human history, the history of Earth, even the history of the universe — is made up of stories.

In East Carolina University’s Department of Geological Sciences, Siddhartha Mitra and his students are using black carbon — the soot, char and other chemical residues left behind by fire — to investigate and tell those stories. From meteorite impacts thousands of years ago to modern oil spills and other pollution, they use organic molecules to piece together and understand the events and processes that have shaped the world in which we live.

“Fires leave a very distinctive fingerprint of their presence in the form of organic molecules,” Mitra says.

In the lab are a variety of reference materials, created from known ingredients in laboratorycontrolled combustion processes, such as charcoal created from burning grass, char from burning a specific type of wood or soot from automobile exhaust. For these reference materials there are extensive databases of information about their chemical composition, what they look like under a microscope, the conditions when they were created and more.

“Then we go out and get a sample,” Mitra says. By studying the sample under a microscope or using extraction processes to isolate certain components, the researchers can compare the sample to known reference materials and begin to fill in pieces of the puzzle. A puzzle piece might be something such as the presence of levoglucosan, a chemical formed from the burning of wood, which survives only up to 475 degrees Celsius.

“So if I find that molecule in my sample of fire residue, I suspect that the fire was less than 475 degrees,” Mitra says.

The presence of other molecules can show what kind of material was burned — grasses versus hardwood trees, for example. “We put all these little pieces together of these different organic molecules, and eventually we may start seeing a shape, possibly a reconstruction of whatever caused that fire,” he says.

The Chicxulub crater on the Yucatan Peninsula is widely believed to be the impact site of an asteroid that caused the extinction of non-bird dinosaurs along with many other species. Sid Mitra and other researchers are investigating how and why the impact and associated burning affected the planet.

Ancient explosions, and a local creek burns

“We have a study funded by the National Science Foundation right now where we’re looking at the Chicxulub site … where a giant meteor hit the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago. That event is thought to have wiped out 75% of the species of organisms on earth,” Mitra says (see more at adobe. ly/40ecpTt). He and other researchers are working to narrow down the type of burning that occurred afterward and how far it spread using samples from around the world.

Sid Mitra’s analysis of soot samples from Tall el-Hammam supports the research team’s hypothesis that the city was destroyed by a high-temperature fire the civilization at the time could not generate. Above, a rendering shows what the site and the blast would have looked like. At right, this map illustrates the reach of a blast similar to the 1908 explosion over Tunguska, Russia, overlaid on the Jordan site. Bottom right, master’s candidate Daniel Reed looks at burned oak through a microscope. Reed is investigating the pollution of Town Creek near downtown Greenville.

In another project, Mitra joined an interdisciplinary team of researchers who presented multiple lines of evidence that the Middle Bronze Age city of Tall el-Hammam was destroyed by a cosmic airburst — a meteorite impact or the explosion of a meteor in the atmosphere. Mitra’s analysis of soot from the site showed the city burned at a temperature higher than any technology humans possessed at the time, indicating a huge external source of energy such as an airburst.

“One of the nice things about what I do is I usually collaborate with lots of people — anthropologists, biologists, chemists, modelers — because you really need a big team to tease out something that happened 50 million years ago, or even 100,000 years ago,” Mitra says.

Mitra’s lab also provides opportunities for student research. Doctoral student Rachel Wheatley is working on the Chicxulub project, while master’s candidate Daniel Reed is investigating a more contemporary question — that of pollution in Town Creek near downtown Greenville.

“Town Creek had all this hydrocarbon seeping into it from all the fuel tanks throughout Greenville, and it eventually caught fire,” Mitra says.

A great deal of work has gone into cleaning up the creek, and Reed is working to determine whether and how much of that oil seepage is still present and potentially flowing into the Tar River. Oil is simply an uncombusted fuel source, Mitra points out, so many of the same techniques are used to analyze what it is and where it came from.

Studying sediment in Africa

For master’s student Michael Zigah, working in Mitra’s lab was a matter of fate once he heard about a project analyzing sediment samples from Lake Bosumtwi in northern Africa.

“I grew up in Ghana, right near there,” Zigah says. “And the lake was just a huge feature there, like people take their kids on vacation and school trips.”

Mitra says he was blown away to find a student familiar with a particular lake 5,000 miles from Greenville. “I said, ‘Well, this project is obviously meant for you to work on.’”

Zigah is using the samples to trace the history of fires in northern Africa, tying them to cycles of climate and vegetation in the region, which hasn’t always been desert. Understanding the changes in the region over thousands of years could be useful in understanding and predicting the climate changes taking place today, he says.

Mitra says he loves seeing the progress his students make in the lab and the classroom.

“When they start off, sometimes you can see they’re struggling,” he says. “But then by the end of the process as they’re defending their thesis, it’s just like a transition has happened — they’ve become this incredible scientist. And I love to see that.”

Mitra, who serves as director of the integrated coastal sciences doctoral program, also encourages his students to publish their work and present at conferences.

“A data set inside of the lab isn’t doing anyone any good,” he says. “So go out and give a seminar. Publish these results in a scientific paper. … Some of our students have been in the press for their research, and the more they get that exposure, the more training they get as a science communicator. That’s a really critical part of science that I think is often overlooked.”

As an organic geochemist, Mitra says his lab involves more chemistry than most geology labs, so it can be a steep learning curve for his students, but the exposure has been beneficial for many.

“They have told some really great stories,” he says. “And that’s part of the joy of being a professor in academia — to be able to tell these stories with students and other scientists.”

Brian Bailey remembers the first time he heard of Jeff Charles.

It was 1988. Bailey, sports director at WNCT Channel 9, had interviewed for the play-by-play announcer job at East Carolina University.

“A friend of mine in the athletic department said, ‘You did great, but you’re not going to get the job because this guy Jeff Charles is really good,’” Bailey said with a laugh.

Charles, known as “the Voice of the Pirates,” died suddenly Feb. 10 while in New Orleans to broadcast the ECU-Tulane basketball game. He was 70.

A Piqua, Ohio, native, Charles, whose full name was Jeff Charles Purtee, was a graduate of the Career Academy of Broadcasting School of Columbus, Ohio. He also received a degree in speech communications from Goshen (Indiana) College in 1975.

Before coming to ECU, he worked in the same capacity at Virginia Tech, Illinois and Furman. Charles earned North Carolina Sportscaster-of-the-Year honors from the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association in 2000 and 2014. ECU recognized him as an honorary alumnus in 2015.

Charles also worked as sports director at WSB in Atlanta where he was the nighttime host of a sports talk show heard throughout 38 states and Canada on the 50,000-watt clear channel station.

“He was like a machine that he knew stats and knew players,” said Bailey. “He was everything I would want to be as an announcer.”

For many years, Charles hosted the “Ride With the Voice” motorcycle fundraiser to benefit the Heather A. Purtee Nursing Scholarship in memory of his daughter, who died in a car crash in 1992. She was a nursing student at the time. He also hosted a weekly radio show, Bike Talk, on WGHB 1250-AM for several years.

In late 2012, he underwent surgery for colon cancer. He returned to the sidelines Feb. 13, 2013, to broadcast a 74-61 Pirate basketball victory over the University of AlabamaBirmingham.

About a month before he died, Charles talked with WNCT about having called 1,000 games at ECU. “The relationships are really the neat part,” he said. “That’s what I’ll remember more than the wins and the losses. It’s the relationships you build with people.”

A couple of weeks after Charles died, on Feb. 26, former athletic director Terry Holland died after a yearslong battle with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 80.

A native of Clinton, Holland played basketball at Davidson College. He served as the head men’s basketball coach there from 1969 to 1974 and at the University of Virginia from 1974 to 1990, compiling a career record of 418-216. At age 48, he retired from coaching and moved into athletic administration, first at Davidson from 1990 to 1994, then at Virginia from 1994 to 2001. In 2004, ECU Chancellor Steve Ballard asked him to lead the athletics department at ECU, which he did until retiring in 2013.

Bailey grew up in eastern Virginia and said he used to imagine he was playing for Holland as he did layups before his youth basketball games. “Having him around was really a neat deal,” Bailey said, “just to work with him and pick his brain. It was really cool to have a Hall of Famer like that as a friend.”

Holland advocated for the university’s Olympic sports, and in 2014, ECU dedicated the Terry Holland Olympic Sports Complex. It’s home to the 1,000-seat Max R. Joyner Family Stadium (softball), the 1,000-seat Johnson Stadium (soccer), the eight-lane Bate Foundation Track & Field Facility and the 20,000-square-foot Williams-Harvey Team Sports Building.

During Holland’s administration, East Carolina earned regular season and tournament championships or qualified for NCAA postseason appearances in football, baseball, women’s basketball, men’s and women’s golf, women’s soccer, softball, women’s swimming, and men’s and women’s track.

In the classroom, 973 Pirate student-athletes were selected to the Conference USA Commissioner’s Honor Roll, and 213 received the league’s top academic medal between 2008 and

2014. During the 2009-2010 year, nine ECU sports netted a perfect Academic Progress Rate score of 1,000.

Holland led efforts that resulted in a 7,000-seat expansion of Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium, completed in 2010. Pirate Club membership soared past 17,000, and fundraising scholarship coffers climbed above $6.4 million for the first time. Plans for the $17 million Smith-Williams Center, a basketball practice facility, began under Holland’s guidance.

In 2012, Holland steered the Pirates into a football-only membership invitation to the Big East Conference. Four months later, ECU accepted an all-sports offer in the league, which was renamed the American Athletic Conference.

Women’s sports at ECU achieved “fully funded” status during Holland’s leadership, meaning the 10 women’s teams were able to offer the maximum number of scholarships allowed by the NCAA.

Before Holland left coaching, his Cavalier teams won the ACC Tournament in 1976 and the NIT in 1980 and reached two Final Fours.

“He wasn’t impressed with himself at all,” former Virginia women’s basketball coach Debbie Ryan told NPR after his death. She described him as a Southern gentleman who was focused on his players. “He was just there to make sure these boys became men, and they became good men.”