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Another star with ties to Rocky Mount
When I was a teenager in the 1970s, I first heard of Rocky Mount through the dribbling wizardry of Phil Ford at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Ford to this day is regarded as one of the great college point guards of all time.
Buck Williams made his mark at the University of Maryland not long after that, and Rocky Mount’s place in the universe was permanently fixed in my mind. That’s where they grow great basketball players.
It was only after moving here in 1993 that I began learning about this area’s long line of People Who Made It Big in other areas — Gov. Mike Easley, Attorney General Roy Cooper, financial giants Ken Thompson and William Harrison, jazz great Thelonious Monk, football coach Herman Boone, writers Kaye Gibbons and Alan Gurganus.
Now comes Holden Thorp, whose star rose in a hurry Thursday. Thorp is the new chancellor at UNC-Chapel Hill. His great-grandfather William Thorp was a judge and former Rocky Mount mayor. Holden Thorp’s dad, Herbert Thorp, got his start here before moving to Fayetteville, where Holden grew up.
That’s an impressive list of people of accomplishments for a city of any size, but even moreso in a town of fewer than 100,000 people.
We spend a lot of time talking about ways to improve this area through better jobs, more opportunities and improving education. But it helps to remember once in a while some of the folks who started in the Rocky Mount area, then went on to do quite well on a national and even international scale.
Not a bad list at all.
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