PHOTOS COURTESY OF BILL POPE
Clockwise from far
left: A young Mary
Pope Osborne; the
family in 1963, with
Natalie standing and
Mary between Bill,
left, and Michael
and Barney, the
dog; Osborne while
a student at
Carolina; and in a
UNC production of
Dracula.
Osborne spent her first two years at
Carolina in the drama department, where
she became a well-known actress on campus. But it was a different sort of drama
that ultimately hooked her. When she saw
a friend crying one day from his experience in a psychology of religion class, she
abandoned the stage and switched her
major to religious studies.
“He was so affected by the class,” she
said. “I was hungry for that kind of
knowledge.”
After college, Osborne and her room-
mate, Susan Reynolds Sultan ’ 74, back-
‘Woe betide
any bully that
came into the
room or into
the playground
when my sister
Michael Pope ’ 73
packed through Europe. In Matala, a town
on the southern coast of Crete, they lived
in a cave on a cliff for six weeks, with a
tiny path and a long drop-off as their front
porch. As dark, confined spaces go, Sultan
said, it wasn’t so bad. They made their
beds from branches, had two rooms and
even a couple of shelves.
“We would walk into town and get
these sandwiches and stay on the beach
and think we were in heaven,” Sultan said.
And then came Miguel.
“Oh, Miguel,” groaned Sultan, wearily.
“He was a handful.”
The Spaniard charmed Osborne into
going east with him. In Magic Tree House
character terms, Osborne says she’s a solid
Jack — if she’s going to do anything
courageous, she needs an Annie to push
her. Like Sultan, for example. But Miguel
was a special kind of fearless “that bordered
on psychotic,” Osborne said.
They had no money, didn’t speak one
another’s language and barely knew each
other — and still, Osborne thought, why
not? So Sultan returned home, and Osborne
followed Miguel through Turkey, Lebanon,
Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India
and Nepal on a rickety bus, enduring an
earthquake in northern Afghanistan and a
riot in Kabul, feeling terrified but all the
while sending cheerful little notes home to
her parents about how she was with a group
of students and having a wonderful time.
Then the notes stopped. Osborne’s parents discovered that their daughter was in a
hospital in Katmandu with blood poisoning, deathly ill. She spent two weeks there
recovering and reading The Lord of the
Rings as the Himalayas stood guard outside
her window.
Her parents’ congressman helped ship
her home.
The apple of the Popes’ eye had developed a hippie core, and that was a difficult
reality for the colonel, who was by then
the president of Oak Ridge Military Academy near Greensboro.
“He was a leader of men,” Osborne
said, “but at home, he was very vulnerable.
He was a sentimental person. The ’70s kind
of swallowed us all up, me and my broth-
ers. He couldn’t relate to us, and he was
kind of heartbroken. And he kind of
blamed Carolina a little bit, said, ‘Oh, those
professors are terrible.’ We were against the
war, and he was in the military.”
CAROLINA ALUMNI REVIEW
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