Yes, I considered myself a mentor and at the same time I have been
blessed to have had the opportunity to work for--my first teaching
experience was under a dynamic administrator, the late H.E. Brown.
Herbert Brown, who was principal of Whiteville Central High School and
later became principal of Ligon High School in Raleigh until his
retirement and I had the opportunity to go with him to Ligon in Raleigh
but I also had an opportunity to go home to teach, so I chose to go home
and he went to Raleigh. We left the same year. I have been able to
surround myself with some real top notch administrators and they sort of
guided me into the paths that I needed to be in and how to look for
people and how to do things. I can remember very vividly when I became a
principal. Mr. Brown took his job, came to Littleton arrived on campus
before the first bus arrived, observed the buses, observed me on my
first day all day long. At the end of the day, he sat down with me and
critiqued me on what he observed and how he would have done things had
he been principal. You just don't find that kind of mentoring going on
today. But that is what Mr. Brown did for me and the late J.E. Rastus
Best was the same kind of person. He would tell me, John, any problem
you have, tell me about it because I have already had it. And with those
two guys it was just hard to go wrong because I knew school
administrators. They were learned people and as far as I'm concerned
they were ahead of their time. And I feel very fortunate that I had the
opportunity to work with these people through the years and I learned
early in the game to try to surround yourself wih good people but I
guess I learned that from the book John F. Kennedy wrote named, Profiles of Courage. You know you
surround yourself with the best people that you can and they make you
look good. That is what I did by being able to become directly
associated with the University of North Carolina and some of the
education people there and the M.A.T. Program there I didn't have to
look for science, math, English or whatever. They sent me the best and
then on top of that they would come by and see how those people were
doing and I'm fortunate right now to say that we still have two there
now; one left me through a marriage and one was transferred to the other
high school to teach calculus at the other high school because he was
not teaching math for me and they needed a strong math teacher and so he
is teaching at William High School now and he is Phi Beta Kappa. But
again, just having good folks--my philosophy is you hire good folks then
give them the opportunity to teach. Consequently at Cummings High School
in the twenty years that I was there I know that we haven't had any
teacher on duty in that school in 19 of those years. I never assigned
any teacher any extra duty at all. No bus duty, no hall duty, no
cafeteria duty, no duty whatsoever.