If you don’t get enough of me here on the pages of the Ledger News, listen to me each Tuesday morning on Next Door Radio here in Oxford at 10 a.m. There I talk about what you might expect, local history. Now I realize this may be more of me than some of you can take. But join me there for some Oxford and Granville history talk.
I am writing about a man for Go Duke the magazine who quite frankly has had one of the most remarkable careers of anyone I know of. I’ll let you know when the full article is out, but here is a snippet. This man was chosen as the best offensive lineman in the ACC in his senior season at Duke in 1965. He was drafted for service into the Vietnam War and served as a fighter pilot with over 100 combat sorties. His awards and accolades while in Vietnam are numerous, including the Distinguished Flying Cross. But he didn’t stop there. He went into the energy and oil business after serving our country and rose to be CEO and Chairman of a company, Wilbros, that employed over 14,000 people worldwide. All this in a single lifetime and is still going strong today at 82. John McNabb is his name.
While on the subject of Duke, let me “look back” at a man from Oxford who made quite an impact over in Durham. Joseph Penn Breedlove was born in Oxford and educated at Horner’s School in Oxford. He then went to Trinity College, now Duke University, where he graduated in 1898. He was the second full-time librarian at Duke, and held that position from 1898 to 1939, and again from 1943 to 1946, From 1939 to 1943 he was librarian emeritus, so he basically was the Duke Librarian from 1898 to 1946, 48 years. His portrait today hangs in the Joseph Penn Breedlove Room in the Perkins Library of Duke University…