in WWII, rose to the rank of lieutenant and received
the Purple Heart. At UNC, he played on the football
team for four seasons and was on the team that
included Charlie “Choo Choo” Justice and played
Georgia in the Sugar Bowl. Jesse Nalle (’ 43, ’ 47
AB), 86 of Philadelphia; Aug. 8, 2008. Nalle was a
retired urban and regional planner. He was assistant
director of the Pennsylvania State Planning Board in
Harrisburg, director of planning and development in
Annapolis, Md., and executive director of the Greater
Bridgeport Planning Agency in Bridgeport, Conn. He
served with the Army combat engineers in WWII. At
UNC, he was a member of the Gorgon’s Head Lodge
and St. Anthony Hall. Wyatt Connor O’Brien (’ 47),
85, of Chase City, Va.; Jan. 22, 2008. Roberta
Enloe Parker (’ 40 MSSW), 91, of Franklin; Feb. 23,
2008. Parker taught history in the Macon County
school system. She also worked in the Forsyth
County welfare department and was a social worker
with the Family Service Agency in Charlotte. Carl F.
Phillips (’ 40), 88, of Asheboro; Aug. 18, 2008.
Phillips was an accounting professional who spent
38 years with accounting companies and 19 years
as an individual practitioner. In WWII, he served in
the Army and received the Bronze Star, the Croix de
Guerre avec Etoile de Bronze from France and the
Croix de Guerre 1940 avec Palme from Belgium.
Willie Hugh Ragan Jr. (’ 47), 82, of Winston-Salem;
July 4, 2008. Ragan worked at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for 38 years. He was in the Naval Cadet
program in WWII and served in the Navy. Nancy
Correll Roberts-Brown (’ 47 AB), 84, of Charlotte; July
1, 2008. Roberts-Brown was an author and storyteller who wrote 25 books, including Ghosts From
the Coast, America’s Most Haunted Places and
Ghosts of North Carolina, that together sold more
than 1 million copies. Early ghost stories that she
wrote for The Charlotte Observer drew praise from
Carl Sandburg. Story, page 66. Claude Leeman
Robertson Jr. (’ 48 BSCOM), 83, of Knightdale; July
23, 2008. Robertson left UNC to join the Navy in
WWII and fought in the Pacific. He was a retail merchant and served two terms on the Knightdale Town
Council, both as mayor pro-tem. He was a founding
member of the Knightdale Volunteer Fire
Department. At UNC, he was a member of Delta
Sigma Pi. Peter Chase Robinson (’ 45 AB), 84, of
Durham; July 7, 2008. Robinson left the General
Theological Seminary in New York to pursue a career
in journalism. He was managing editor of the Enfield
Press but returned to the seminary and was ordained
an Episcopal priest in 1952. He served at Episcopal
40s
churches in Sanford, Goldsboro and Greensboro,
where he was founding rector of St. Francis Episcopal
Church and remained there for 20 years. In retirement,
he served on the pastoral staffs of St. Philip’s Church
in Durham and Church of the Holy Family in Chapel
Hill. At UNC, he was in the Marching Band. Simons
Lucas Roof (’ 41 AB), 87, of Harvard, Mass.; May 23,
2008. Roof was president and owner of a writer consulting service. He wrote several books, including
Journeys on the Razor-Edged Path, and his poetry
appeared in The Saturday Review of Literature and
Poetry magazine. He was the commanding officer of
a mine sweeper in the South Pacific in WWII. Dr.
Ludwig Gaston Scott (’ 49 AB, ’ 54 DDS), 81, of
Burlington; July 26, 2008. Scott was in private practice in Burlington for 43 years and taught part time
at UNC’s dental school in the 1950s, ’70s and ’80s.
A Navy veteran of WWII, he was in the first graduating class of UNC’s dental school. At UNC, he was a
member of Delta Sigma Delta. William Lawrence
Seawell Jr. (’ 40 BSCOM), 87, of Greensboro; July 25,
2008. Seawell retired as senior marketing officer
after 46 years with Jefferson Standard Life Insurance
Co. He joined the company in 1940 but left to serve
with the Marines in WWII. He fought at Guadalcanal
and Okinawa. He returned to Jefferson Standard in
HAYDEN CARRUTH ’ 43 1921–2008
His Poetry Reflected an ‘Imaginative Heart’
“Raymond and Hayden were really good
poker players,” said Robbins, who now lives in
Carrboro. “They were smart, patient, analytical.
And more importantly, they didn’t get drunk
while playing, like Brooks and I did.”
Robbins also remembers Carruth, who died
Sept. 29 at age 87, as a groundbreaking poet.
Carruth received the National Book Award for
Poetry in 1996 for Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey:
Anthony Robbins ’ 76 remembers his
weekly poker nights with Hayden
Carruth ’ 43, short-story writer Raymond
Carver and poet Brooks Haxton.
The four would meet every Friday at
Carruth’s house on Maryland Avenue in
Syracuse, N. Y., just down the street from
Syracuse University, where Carruth taught in
the graduate creative writing program from
1979 to 1991 and Robbins and Haxton were
graduate students.
DAVID B. CARRUTH/GAA FILES
Poems, 1991-1995. His more than 30 books of Hayden Carruth ’ 43 won the National Book Award in 1996
for Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey: Poems, 1991-1995.
poetry included almost every known form of
the genre, and he wrote jazz criticism, essays,
philosophy and fiction. His first collection of
poems, The Crow and the Heart, was published
in 1959.
He battled depression and anxiety throughout
his life. After being editor of Poetry magazine and
working for the University of Chicago Press, in
his 30s he suffered what he later described as a
“good, old-fashioned nervous breakdown” and
fled to the backwoods of northern Vermont,
where he began to write poetry.
in
memoriam
Many of Carruth’s best-known poems are
about the people and places of northern
Vermont, where he lived on a farm in the
1960s and ’70s, as well as rural poverty and
hardship.
“Hayden came across as up-country
Vermont, but he was terrifyingly brilliant,”
Robbins said. “As a teacher, he knew so much
that he was around you, over you. Wherever
you wanted to go, he could go there. And he
was a very generous teacher.”
Carruth wrote about deep
emotional concerns and showed empathy for
strangers, especially the victims of social injustice and historical mayhem, including warfare
and the depredations of the powerful at the
expense of the poor. Robbins said Carruth’s
poetry was as complicated technically as anything produced in the 20th century.
“Hayden saw writing as a way of shaping
communication with the reader,” said Haxton,
who teaches creative writing at Syracuse. “He
had the ability to absorb a poem and penetrate
to the imaginative spark of the poet. He played
jazz clarinet all his life, and he loved jazz and
saw poetry, like jazz, as improvisation. He
taught that the imaginative heart of a composition was a moment of improvisational freedom.”
Carruth was born in Waterbury, Conn., and
grew up in a family of newspapermen — his
father edited the Waterbury Republican and his
grandfather started a weekly newspaper in the
Dakota territories in the late 19th century. He
studied journalism at UNC, where he was a
reporter and columnist for The Daily Tar Heel.
He served in the Army Air Forces in Italy in
World War II.
Carruth was introduced to modern poetry
while he was a graduate student at the
University of Chicago after the war. There he
discovered a love for the works of Ezra Pound
and T.S. Eliot, the literary life and jazz.
