Giduz, who grew up here and lived here his entire life aside from brief stints in the Army and at Columbia and Harvard, was Chapel Hill embodied. He held many positions -- journalist, photographer, politician, businessman, blogger, as well as his own preferred title, "notorious hometown ne'er-do-well" -- but none of them really conveyed the degree to which he and Chapel Hill were so thoroughly steeped in one another.

If you had a question about Chapel Hill's history, Roland was the first guy you called. He could tell you about the bells being raised into the Bell Tower on the UNC campus, because he watched it happen, when he was 6 years old. He could tell you what it was like when Hurricane Hazel struck in 1954, or about the long-forgotten bowling alley that used to be downtown.

He had sharp powers of observation, intelligence and a great sense of humor. He had something else, too -- the ability to reflect and evolve. As a town alderman in 1964, he voted against an ordinance that would have forced the segregated businesses in town to integrate.

His reasoning was jurisdictional -- the town, he felt, didn't have the authority to supercede state law. Still, last November, he said that vote was among his biggest regrets. "I tried to play it down the middle, but it wasn't good," he said. If he could do it over again, he would "absolutely" vote for the ordinance.

In losing Roland Giduz, we lose one of our own who was a vast repository of information about this place, and who loved it with all his heart.

Raspberries to the owner of Hillsborough's historic Colonial Inn, which has become a broken shell of what it once was.

Francis Henry bought the inn in 2002 and has let the once-grand building fall into abject disrepair, despite repeated pleas to renovate it -- or, at the very least, do basic repairs to it.

The inn was built in 1838 and has a long, notable history in Hillsborough. Now it's a ruin, with rotted wood, crumbling chimneys, missing windows and peeling paint.

The people of Hillsborough are dismayed by the Colonial Inn's deterioration and baffled about why it has been allowed to happen. The town held a meeting last Friday to discuss the building's condition and explore options for rescuing it.

"The whole situation seems like a terrible and inexplicable tragedy," said novelist Lee Smith. "A building of this importance with so much history shouldn't be allowed to fall into wreck and ruin."

She's right. It's shameful that a building with such a central place in Hillsborough's history has been so neglected.

Several people with the town's planning department say they believe Henry has good intentions and truly wants to restore the inn. They say he has been judged harshly by people who don't understand the details of a very complicated situation.

That may be; we don't know his side of the story, because he has declined to tell it. We're reluctant to pile on. But seven years is a long time, and it seems to us that Hillsborough has been very patient. We hope some progress can be made before there's nothing left of the Colonial Inn but an archeological site.