Erwin Library – Wayne Community College | Goldsboro, NC

If your chimney needs sweeping, now is the time to begin to prepare for Santa and his reindeer swooping down through the air!  We’ll help lift your spirits with some early holiday cheer during Children’s Storytime in the Erwin Library on Wednesday, December 12^th from 9:00-10:00 a.m.  The more, the merrier!

As we still contemplate the loss of civilian lives during the terrorist attacks centered on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001, look forward to being with our own families in safety this Thanksgiving, and express our gratitude to military veterans on Veterans Day for their willingness to defend our freedoms, let us not forget the dark side of freedom, when it leads to inexplicable tragedy.  November 18,  2018 marks the 40th anniversary of what is now referred to as the Jonestown Massacre, where 918 Americans either willingly or by force, died by ingesting poison as part of a religious cult, which had fled to the jungles of Guyana, South America in search of what their leader Jim Jones called freedom.

The most hardened observers will never forget the sight of hundreds of men, women and children’s corpses left as they fell in death.  It wasn’t until the events of 9/11/2001 that a U.S. civilian death toll in a single non-natural event was greater than that of Jonestown.  The Jonestown tragedy was not caused by a terrorist from outside our fifty states, however, but resulted from an evil that grew within the United States.  Let us always celebrate our freedoms, yet never stop evaluating our choices for the directions in which we will take those freedoms.  They are never easy.  Books on display for you to check out about this compelling tragedy are now available in the Erwin Circulation Desk exhibit area.  Enrich your present with knowledge of the past!

With our country’s first visit to the moon soon to be half a century in the past, and our eyes turning towards an even more ambitious jaunt to Mars, the planet that has puzzled us with its fiery color and ghostly scars that could be the remnants of ancient canals, one filled with water like our own rivers, let us turn our minds to a night eighty years ago, October 30, 1938 to be precise (not even Halloween, but the night before!) when one of the more infamous “fake news” myths was perpetrated.

That night Orson Welles and his ensemble cast of radio actors performed a Mercury Theatre production of the play “War of the Worlds” based on H.G. Wells” novel of the same name.  The myth is that the entire United States panicked believing that the Martians had actually launched an invasion of earth, landing in New Jersey.  Probably only a small percentage of citizens went overboard believing the fake news angle, but it was, nevertheless a memorable broadcast.  The actors thought the story was so silly, no one would really take it seriously, but, hey, the actors might have just been too good!  Learn more about Orson Welles, the broadcast, the book, the era, from books now available to check out in the Erwin Library Reference exhibit area.

With the North Carolina State Fair opening just down the road from us today in Raleigh, our thoughts turn to fair food and fair rides.  In 1893 the city of Chicago was even more agog with the opening of the spectacularly named and executed World’s Columbian Exposition, “organized to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s landfall in the New World”  With the recent 1889 Paris Universal Exposition (actually the “Exposition Universelle of 1889“) to top, which featured the magnificently engineered Eiffel Tower, Chicago’s fair planners opened a contest for a design to rival the Eiffel, which would highlight the Exposition.  The designed winner was “George Washington Ferris Jr. was a civil engineer specializing in bridges and other structural-steel designs,” and, yes, the Ferris Wheel was first created for and operated to fair-goers fear and delight at the 1983 Chicago World’s Fair (as it was also called.).

As with many of the famous, George Ferris’ later life was no less flamboyant than his creation, though maybe not as well financed. “Ferris’ remains and his wheel eventually were caught up in litigation. After Ferris’ death, a Pittsburgh funeral director put a lien on his ashes pending payment for the funeral services. Chicago friends offered to “Free Ferris’ ashes” as one Tribune headline put it. After 15 years, the ashes were released to Ferris’ brother; their final disposition is reportedly unknown.”  Only a bit of the original fair site remains today, but it has not entirely disappeared.

Books on display in the Erwin Library Reference area will take you into the world of the Gilded Age, that post-Civil War period of American history in the 1890s when the country was frenetically doing bigger and bigger business, dreaming of money to be made, creating fortunes to use in magnificent architecture, celebration and large doses of frivolity.

What did WCC students do in 1972? How about those hairdos .. and that’s the faculty! You’ll see it was a slightly different world, but still Goldsboro and still our school as you flip through thirteen newly digitized WCC Yearbooks (Yearbooks link) published between 1964 and 1985, now part of the WCC Historical Archives. You’ll also find the WCC Campus Voice newspaper (See: Newspapers) published between 1968 and 2008, and the WCC Renaissance literary magazine (See: Campus Publications) for 1985 through the present.