Matt, tell us a little bit about how you got to, how did you come to be on this project? How did this all evolve?

Yeah, I mean, it's a really interesting story.

My father, who started his career at the Raleigh Times, which was kind of a partner, you know, news organization, afternoon paper for the News and Observer.

So he started in journalism.

As I said, we moved up to the Washington, D.C. area.

He became a speechwriter and kind of spent his career in Washington, kind of in agricultural issues and that domain.

But he always had a passion for writing.

Canopy.

So how did George Simpson help to make this make the park an actual reality?

Yeah, I mean, George Simpson, he was a sociologist or sociology professor at UNC, young guy, early 30s.

He was a protege of a guy named Howard Odom, who was just super well regarded.

Southern sociology, wrote a number of books about the South and the culture of the South.

And George Simpson was just very crucial.

And it's interesting because he came in, he gets hired in the end of October 1956, right before the election of 56.

So, yeah, just remember, you know, Hodges.

Can you talk a little bit about education and schooling, how that developed and the ways in which the community worked to really uh develop a a good public school system

Uh, so h- how, how did George Simpson, um, help to make this, uh, make the park an actual reality?

Yeah.

I mean, George Simpson, there, he, he was a sociologist, uh, or sociology professor at UNC, young guy, early 30s.

He, um, was a protege of a guy named Howard Odum, who was just super well-regarded, Southern Soci- Sociology, wrote a number of books about the South and the culture of the South.

And George Simpson was just s- very crucial.

A- a- and it's interesting because he came in, he gets hired in the end of October 1956, right before the election of '56.

So yeah, just remember, you know, um, Hodges ends up filling out the term for Umstead through '54 to '56, but he, because the, the governor was only allowed to serve one term, but because he was just filling part of the term, he was able to run and got elected in '56 for four years.

Um, could you talk a little bit about education and schooling, uh, that, uh, how that developed and, and the ways in which the community worked to really, uh, develop a, uh, a good public school system?

So how did George Simpson help to make this make the park an actual reality?

Yeah, I mean, George Simpson, he was a sociologist or sociology professor at UNC, young guy, early 30s.

He was a protege of a guy named Howard Odom, who was just super well regarded.

Southern sociology, read a number of books about the South and the culture of the South.

And George Simpson was just very crucial.

And it's interesting because he came in, he gets hired in the end of October 1956, right before the election of 56.

So, yeah, just remember, you know, Hodges.

Could you talk a little bit about education and schooling, how that developed and the ways in which the community worked to really develop a good public school system?

Uh, so how, how did George Simpson, um, help to make this, uh, make the park an actual reality?

Yeah.

I mean, George Simpson there, he, he was a sociologist, uh, or sociology professor at UNC, young guy, early 30s.

He, um, was a protege of a guy named Howard Odum, who was just super well-regarded Southern soci- sociology, wrote a number of books about the South and the culture of the South.

And George Simpson was just s- very crucial.

Eh, and it's interesting because he came in, he gets hired in the end of October 1956, right before the election of '56.

So yeah, just remember, you know, um, Hodges ends up filling out the term for Umstead through '54 to '56 but he, because the, the governor was only allowed to serve one term but because he was just filling part of the term he was able to run and got elected in '56 for four years.

Um, could you talk a little bit about education and schooling, uh, that, uh, how that developed and, and the ways in which the community worked to really, uh, develop a, a, a good public school system?

Uh, so h- how, how did George Simpson, um, help to make this, uh, make the park an actual reality?

Yeah.

I mean, George Simpson, there ...

He, he was a sociologist, uh, or sociology professor at UNC, young guy, early 30s.

He, um, was a protege of a guy named Howard Odum, who was just super well-regarded Southern soci- sociology, wrote a number of books about the South and the culture of the South.

And George Simpson was just s- very crucial.

A- and it's interesting because he came in, he gets hired in the end of October 1956, right before the election of '56.

Um, could you talk a little bit about education and schooling, uh, that, uh, how that developed and, and the ways in which the community worked to really, uh, develop a, a, a good public school system?

So how did George Simpson help to make the park an actual reality?

Yeah, I mean, George Simpson, he was a sociologist or sociology professor at UNC, young guy, early 30s.

He was a protege of a guy named Howard Odom, who was just super well regarded.

Southern sociology, read a number of books about the South and the culture of the South.

And George Simpson was just very crucial.

And it's interesting because he came in, he gets hired in the end of October 1956, right before the election of 56.

So, yeah, just remember, you know, Hodges.

Could you talk a little bit about education and schooling that how that developed and the ways in which the community worked to really develop a good public school system?

Who were those key players, and what did they do?

Again, you know, North Carolina had some unique elements to its culture at that time that encouraged some of these leaders to emerge and seize this project.

So there's a really interesting book that had a lot of notoriety called Southern Politics by a Harvard professor, V.O. Keys.

The point of the book was that the Southern states, and this, he wrote that in the late 1940s, and how different all of the Southern states were.

So a lot of the rest of the country looked at the South as a monolith, you know, as this sort of very backward part of the country, never really got over the Civil War.

North Carolina, you know, had this bit of irony because, as I said, it was really at the bottom of the economic [chuckles] ladder in the South, like the poorest part of the country, and yet it had, he called it the progressive plutocracy.

So some of the industries that did emerge here, like textiles, banking, furniture, tobacco, those folks knew each other.

There are a lot of places, not just in the US, but around the world that try to duplicate the success of somewhere like Silicon Valley and Stanford and SRI, you mentioned, and places like the Palo Alto Research Center, and it sounds like RTP was sort of early on, like, "Well, we could make a model like this work." Why do you think they were successful and some subsequent attempts have not been successful at doing that?

Who was he and how did he come up with this idea?

Yeah, I mean, Romeo Guest, it's interesting, you know, because he was so central to the creation of Research Triangle Park and not many people know him now.

He was kind of a tragic figure, given what he was able to accomplish.

He worked for his family company, Guest and Sons.

They did construction, usually for small industrial operations, a lot of textile mills, for example.

His family sent him away to Northern Boarding School at a young age, which was kind of unusual at that time.

Ends up going to MIT in the 1920s.

How did the politics around race and desegregation play a role in making Research Triangle Park an appealing corner of the South for companies to invest when they're looking at all these challenges and the strife in the South during this period of history?

And I think to make that, have that make sense for our listeners who don't know anything about this topic, I think you need to set up a little bit of the, at least just basically at the beginning here, who made this happen?

Yes.

I think a lot of people probably saw the film Oppenheimer a couple of years ago and heard the story about the development of the atomic bomb and how radically that shaped the world for good and bad.

And, you know, we don't think about the way the atomic bomb ended up playing out in places like North Carolina, but there is a connection.

The gentleman who oversaw the Manhattan Project, Vannevar Bush, was an engineering professor at MIT, and FDR tapped him to head up the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which oversaw basically the military's technological development in World War II.

And his real insight was the funds to develop these technologies should go through the universities rather than into private industry to develop and do the underlying research to develop these military applications.

And after the war, you know, obviously there's a lot of success, radio, the atomic bomb, a lot of things came out of World War II.

So I think, talk about that as being part of the Research Triangle Park success story.