Which, if you listen to him, is just the point.

Dollar had contacted us when we failed to mention the Preservation Society of Chapel Hill in our recent article on the 75th anniversary of Spam. Hormel Foods was celebrating with cans and T-shirts featuring one-time model Georgia Kyser of Chapel Hill. The society had been distributing the shirts, and Dollar was ticked we'd blown a marketing opportunity for him.

So all the time I'm e-mailing him I'm thinking he's some middle-aged guy like, well, me. When he wrote that he was trying to make preservation work less stuffy, I set up the meeting to see how we might work together.

It's true, Dollar says. Most people into historic preservation have a little history on them. But if young people don't have an affinity for history it's mostly because of how it's taught.

"All these names and dates, and they sort of take a plunger and cram it down your throat," he says.

Dollar, 37, married with two small kids, wants to change that.

The new director of the preservation society wants to increase membership, revamp his Web site (first suggestion: lose the home page doily) and get young people to care about local history.

"History is like storytelling," Dollar says. "It's such a story of man, to be profoundly sad about it -- where we've been and how far we've come."

Profoundly sad?

He takes another bite. These are tough times to be a preservationist in Chapel Hill. The town is growing up. Older homes are falling to a market that can return three, four times the investment by tearing down and building new. Even modernist homes built in the 1950s and '60s are being leveled, years before history can take full stock of their architectural worth.

"The biggest threat to Chapel Hill is Chapel Hill," he says.

Dollar thinks he can get more people caring about historic preservation if he can get more of them caring about history. And that shouldn't be hard, he says, because history is filled with kooks.

Horace Williams, the namesake of the preservation society's home base, was "a superfreak," he says.

"If people [only] knew how kooky he was, how he would eat the same meal every day for a year, how he would do these strange yoga-type exercises on his porch in his underwear just to piss off Chapel Hill."

(Here I tell Dollar he is the first preservationist I know who's used the phrase "piss off" in an interview.)

It doesn't take long to get Dollar's point. Knowing the history of Horace Williams makes you that much more interested in seeing -- and saving -- the porch where he stood in his long johns.

You can learn more about Horace Williams when Mike Troy, the poet laureate of Hillsborough, gives a talk on him Aug. 24 at the Horace Williams House, at 610 E. Rosemary St.

To learn more about Dollar, you can join the society at http://chapelhillpreservation.com or watch these pages and our Web site. One thing we can guarantee: We won't be asking you to memorize any dates.