I don’t know if there was a particular time when I started to think about going to college. It wasn’t during my freshman year in high school that college first crossed my mind.
The question for me was where I was going to college not if I was going to college. I kept hearing my parents talk about college so subconsciously I decided that would be my story, college that is.
Besides, there were older children in my neighborhood who had gone to college. In fact, a couple of guys had athletic scholarships. One of the guys, James Arthur Price, had gone to North Carolina Central College (NCC) in Durham on a football scholarship. The name of the college is now North Carolina Central University.
Sam Jones of Boston Celtics fame graduated from N.C. Central. Price played tackle for NCC and he was about 6’4”, 260 lbs. At that size, the younger children like me couldn’t imagine calling him by his first name.
Many Thanksgiving Fridays ago, he invited a buddy of mine and me to attend one of his football games. The opponent was North Carolina A&T College, a bitter rival located in Greensboro. It is now called North Carolina A&T State University. A few weeks prior to the game, Price sent both of us a prep cap with his school colors of burgundy and gray. We wore our caps with great pride.
Even though I was in elementary school at the time, I observed that these college kids were having a great time at the game. My immediate thought was that college must be fun.
Weeks after the game, I was fortunate enough to visit some college classrooms. Of course, the atmosphere was much more serious. There were not people screaming about touchdowns and first downs. I still thought that college must be fun. My opinion about that has not changed much over the years.
