 You lied to me. I'm not going to say a few words. I'm going to say way too many words. Those headlines are a bit misleading. Physically, this place was a dump. The buildings were used to largely abandon. Duke was sharing some of the not-get-named Bryan facility with our small administrative staff until 1979. It began to move on to its first floor. It was slowly beginning to encroach onto the second. Bell, Reynolds, and Watts were off limits. They should have been. Paint was hanging off their walls in festoons. Water was standing everywhere. White, now royal, had been condemned even while the nursing school was still using it. It became the boys' residence hall as we hooked a haste in its demise. Hill became the girls' residence hall. In its basement house, the history and English faculty, where the language lab is now a wallpaper-taught biology, right out of the backyard of the back door were the woods that covered the back half of this block. That was her land. The athletic facility was an outdoor swimming pool just outside the built classroom, which made teaching in those classrooms in the fall and in the spring impossible. Late that Friday night before students were to arrive on Sunday, the painters finished their work in the doors. The faculty, the residential staff, and the administration spent a hot Saturday cleaning up those dorms, putting mattress covers on the mattresses. Neil Clark, my colleague in English and I, alternating between the swing blades and the mower, cut the grass around the dorms, which was a foot and a foot and a half tall. John Arminage, who lived in Durham and was a member of that first class, practically put screens in the windows of the unerror-conditioned dorm rooms. Students arrived on Sunday, everyone having left a better equipped, finer physical plan than they were moving into. Nonetheless, they stayed. They graduated. They went to college. And they had remained remarkable supporters for their alma mater. And the dump began to become pretty snazzy. In the second years I was helping Ross move some of the equipment to the brand new biology lab in Bryan. I remarked that she must be very pleased and excited. To which she replied, you can teach a lot of biology. It's a notion which reminds us that a grade school is not made up of just the stuff. It's the folk. It's their willingness to take advantage of what they've got. Given the different definitions between vacation and work, there are still some small pleasures in coming back to school. Returners catch up with old friends. New folk begin to find colleagues who will unravel the mysteries. And there is a certain comfort of settling into ways experience was made familiar. But on that first day, there were only vaguely familiar faces. There was no one to ask because no one knew any more than the asker. There were no comfortable syllabi to organize the future. We had not really even been able to prepare during the summer because we didn't know what to prepare. There was to be a program, but nobody knew what the program was to be. And we had each spent our summers building air passes in the sky. But we were all sure, even in the midst of our dawn, that we had been entrusted with something special. By some incredible fluke, we were given the charge of this great educational journey. It had not been everybody's dream. The NCAA was polled. The Lieutenant Governor had had to cast a tie-breaking vote in the legislature to establish the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics and giving the school dumbfounded freedom to shape its own program, its own destiny. Other than the name, the goal of excellence, of budget, and an admissions plan based on congressional districts, those of us who arrived on that first day were free to create the school, the education that we thought best. We were explicitly outside of and free from the expectations of the Department of Public Instruction. We had no connection to the university, and everything seemed. We first gathered all of us, almost 25 of us, including the faculty, the residential staff, and four administrators in a conference room that was just about where Katie Wagstaff's office is now. We were seated around the table that couldn't quite fit all of us, leaving a few to sit in the corners around the room. One of the first questions we addressed was how much student time each day would each of us require to provide excellent education in our areas? When we towed it up, and I've lost my place. This was it. This was our chance to get exactly what we wanted, what we needed, what we had dreamed of. But when we towed it that dream up, we discovered that we were requiring about a 38-hour working. Which maybe not everything was possible. Out of assessing, we talked on and on, and we're still talking on. We talked on and on, slowly realizing that my dream had to be part of your dream, had to become a part of our dream. And by the time the students had arrived, all that serious talk, and NASA sending a man to the moon had never talked so high-mindedly or so seriously. All that talk had created a serious, sharply focused academic plan to speed 16-year-olds well on their way to graduate school. It was pretty much the focus of the classroom. Unfortunately, the students themselves arrived. Within the first week, some of those young people, not party to our serious talk, not aware of our graduate school plan, approached Branson Brown, Brown Field out back by the year. He was our athletic coordinator. And they said to him, why not a cross-country team? He made a few phone calls, bought a few t-shirts, took them to Joe Liles, the art teacher, who stenciled NCSS in Wyoming, and by the end of the first week, we had the beginnings of a varsity athletic program. By the end of the year, we also were in the student government business. We were also in the prom business. Adam probably misplaced opposition to cheerleaders lingered for several more years. But inevitably, but inevitability is inevitable, and soon we had the cheerleader squad. Clearly, the graduate school was beginning to learn how to coexist with the high school. The experience, these experiences, and so many subsequent ones, have taught us and continue to teach us that our dreams and ideas need to start big, and all constituencies, and all the folk need to sit at the table, believing that all things are possible. In the process, we need to constantly remind ourselves that we are pretty free. We still aren't part of or subject to the Department of Public Instruction, while we are now part of the university, they really haven't entered our world too forcefully. We were not for years, even in the accreditation box, because we thought the process would be too limiting and too shaking of our program. We didn't efficiently compute grade point averages for two decades, and even without GPAs and accreditation, our students still got into college, good colleges, and one scholarships, big scholarships, just as we did then, we need now to remind ourselves that dreams have a lot of room here to grow, and they can grow. We can almost write our own book. We also have to remind ourselves that choosing a possibility sometimes eliminates other desirable possibilities. Thus we tried then, just as we continued to try to make the boxes large enough and inclusive enough to fit, and to be ready immediately to renovate them, or to begin again from the lack of a team makes me limited. Barstay Athletics and Homesick has also reminded us that it is inevitable proper for 16-year-olds to remain 16. This of course led to a much larger conduct than we had had. Steve Davis, the first chairman of our mathematics department, often said that we don't teach subject material, but we teach young people. If we teach them, the subject matter will follow. A very practical application of this, people primacy principle came in this suggestion at our first comment writing session that we just needed to have something both real and nice to say. Then we needed to define a problem if there was more and suggest a solution if there was more. And then we needed to end with something nice. Twice a year I think of this, however difficult try to follow its restrictions. The academic business is the people business, but this teacher sometimes needs to be reminded of it. My fellow grass cutter Neil Clark often memorably reminded us in our early discussions of curriculum of personnel policies and contracts with what faculty should be called with how often tutorials should be held and when. That we needed to be careful of the grand thing, grand name distinction. We are at our best when we focus on the grand thing that the grand man. If we do as the legislator legislature legislator we are excellent. The name will come. And it came early. In the first several years we were everywhere on the news and in the newspapers. One could hardly walk across campus without bumping into the New York Times reporter, one from LA, one from Washington, one from Louisville. We were featured on the covers of major news magazines. Nobel Prize winners were on our board. The grand name idea for the award was briefed for a while. This was an idea where Nobel laureates would come. There would be cottages built out there and they would pad around the paths and their slippers would interact with juniors and seniors in high school. Representatives from other states came and questioned and returned home to start schools much like ours but consciously very different from ours. I was once asked by a new faculty member if this was some kind of special school. Well, we were then and we are now a very special school. A model school. And still they come. Last year a Virginia delegation hoping to turn what they learned here into their own school. But the Oklahoma School was here to find new ways for this school so it began this year again much has changed. We have new stuff, more stuff, better stuff but the real NCSS was just the close of its beginning. This room is full of people with dreams and notions of excellence that we need to share. By weeks end we will have young people always the same on the first day. They are entering test scores just about what they always were when we adjusted the recenting of the test. They are bright, eager, proud, terrified. They are ready to learn but they will be different because they are coming to school with different boxes large and small in a different time. But they will be equally good just as proud of their time here as was that first class. I know that Ginger Wilson John Williams and Cook and Greg and I are proud of what succeeding generations of what you have made of this school that we came to.