As a young university graduate, he moved to Tabor City near the South Carolina line and started a small community newspaper. Before long, he had built a solid business, made a happy life for himself and his family, and won the Pulitzer Prize for by standing up to the Ku Klux Klan.

One of Carter's last gifts to North Carolina was funding a new history of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UNC

"Making News: One Hundred Years of Journalism and Mass Communication at Carolina" by retired professor and former interim dean Tom Bowers, begins with one small journalism class taught by Professor Edward Kidder Graham in 1909. Bowers follows the school as it changes and grows to a 2005 faculty of 45 and student body of 876.

Bowers' book is a story of conflict and tension about the school's mission, a study in leadership, and, indirectly, a history of the changes in the way the mass media communicates with the public.

One of the highlights of Bowers' story is his careful portraiture of the school's deans. Two of them served terms of more than 25 years.

Oscar Jackson "Skipper" Coffin was department chair from 1926 to 1950, and then dean until 1953. He was an old-school newspaperman who had been editor of the Raleigh Times. He had a disdain for academic niceties and for the value of obtaining accreditation for the school. He saw little relationship between these things and what the school did to prepare its graduates to get and keep good newspaper jobs.

But when the school failed to gain accreditation, pressure built for new leadership.

Coffin's successors took a different approach and were part of what Bowers calls "a new generation of journalism educators who valued a more scholarly approach to the field . . . and showed a greater appreciation for research."

One of these successors was Richard Cole, dean from 1979 until 2005. Although Cole had practical newspaper experience, he was grounded in academia and had a drive to build the school's research and graduate programs. According to Bowers, Cole "transformed the school" and raised the funds to respond to technological and cultural changes that took place during his tenure.

When Cole began, more than 60 percent of journalism undergraduates concentrated on "news-editorial" course offerings. By 2005 only about 20 percent did; almost 30 percent focused on public relations, and about 20 percent in advertising.

Louis Graves, who led the journalism program in the 1920s, looked for the day when the "traditional vagabond journalist, the drinker and wastrel" would disappear.

Graves would be proud of today's J-School, full of students with crisp fresh faces, computers under arm, not a wastrel-to-be among them, just as proud as Horace Carter was.