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| S C T E CHN I CA L CO L L E G E S Y S T EM ’ S
F I R S T 5 0 Y EAR S
Spartanburg TEC
Hollings, the main speaker, arrived early to inspect things.
“Proudly,” said Walters, “I explained the agenda and shared how
we planned to unveil the light and LAMP OF KNOWLEDGE
at the end of his comments.” Walters raised the green cloth so
Hollings could take a peek.
“The governor said, ‘I don’t think you will want to unveil this
sign!’”
“Why not?”
“Knowledge is misspelled.”
“They had left the ‘D’ out of the word KNOWLEDGE,” said
Walters. “We unveiled the lamp but not the sign. I can imagine
how much fun the press would have had with that.”
Typos, parking issues, whatever problems surfaced wouldn’t
last; that’s for sure. Tom “Black Cat” Barton, a man who believed
in making a new friend a day, would fix it.
“Black Cat” Barton is legendary in technical college annals.
Freshman footballer Tom Barton was quick, nimble, and sported
a crop of black hair. Clemson’s Coach Frank Howard gave Barton
his nickname during a 1950 practice. “Black Cat” stuck. “It prob-
ably will be on my tombstone,” Barton once said.
When he retired from Greenville Tech in 2008 at 79, “Black
Cat” Barton was the longest serving college president in Ameri-
ca. Years earlier, Barton and other young men—barely older than
their students—would inspire the term “boy president.” A “boy
president,” he would serve as president of Greenville Tech for 42
years. He was there when it had but one building. “We had a heck
of a time reclaiming the land for buildings,” Barton remembers.
“You can’t put foundations on garbage. That whole area had been
a garbage dump after the turn of the century. We were getting
newspapers out of there from before World War I.”
That one building had to suffice for years. Dr. James Hudgins
worked at Greenville Tech. “I started there in 1967. It had one
The 1960s
M O B I L I Z I N G A G R E A T R E S O U R C E
