Bagging groceries at the Food Town on West Innes Street in the 1960s, Tom Smith paid for his business degree at Catawba College the hard way. And through the years, it paid him back.
With that degree, Smith would later lead the renamed Food Lion, with its nearly 90,000 employees and 1,200 stores. And he would return to Catawba as chairman of his alma mater’s board of trustees.
Today Smith sees the 150-year-old private college as an asset that the community should share.
“I think the people of Salisbury should visit Catawba,” he said during a walk last week around the college’s brown-brick buildings and towering trees. “This is a beautiful campus...It makes you feel good to walk around and see all the good things happening.”
A graduate of China Grove High School, Smith became the first in his family to earn a college degree.
When he graduated in 1964, Catawba was a different place. The basketball team played at Salisbury HighSchool — then Boyden High School. Now when they play each other, Salisbury and North Rowan draw crowds large enough to use Catawba’s Goodman Gym. Local high schools also hold the annual Sam Moir Christmas Classic tournament there.
Years ago, athletics mostly included football, basketball and baseball. Today nearly a third of the student body participates in one of 18 sports.
“There’s such a large number of sports and students participating in them now,” Smith said.
Founded by German pioneers who migrated to North Carolina’s Piedmont from eastern Pennsylvania, Catawba dates to Dec. 3, 1851, when some 20 students assembled in Newton to enlist in the school’s first classes. The campus there had streets of mud and no sidewalks or public utilities. It depended on a gas generator for lights.
This year the 276-acre campus on the north side of Salisbury has a new, $6-million Center for the Environment that overlooks the college’s 296-acre ecological preserve. Work on a new field house and stadium will be completed next year. Catawba has a record enrollment of more than 1,400 this fall. Its football team is ranked among the best in the nation in its division.
In just five years, the college’s Lifelong Learning program has grown to about 400 adults who take one course at a time at night and on Saturdays.
Despite these changes, Smith — now in his fourth year as Catawba’s financial leader — wants to keep the campus atmosphere pretty much the same. Even with so much happening, he doesn’t want a surge in new students.
Smith anticipates 200 more students in the next few years. The college will have to build another dormitory just to accommodate them. Like other small, private colleges, Catawba prides itself in keeping class sizes small, close relationships between students and their advisors and getting students to stay involved.
“It’s still small enough as a campus that people recognize each other,” said Smith, who donated half a million dollars toward the college’s $56.5-million capital campaign when he retired from Food Lion two years ago.
“The thing that I think has been preserved is the individual attention students receive and the responsibility we all have in developing these students,” he said.
Catawba also emphasizes the value of community service, said Smith, 60, who serves on 10 other boards and talks regularly with Catawba alumni around the country from Charlotte to Las Vegas.
One of his daughters, Leigh, a 1992 graduate, worked at Rowan Helping Ministries and in the Special Olympics while attending the school.
“Catawba’s here to give people an education,” he said, “but it’s also here to make good citizens.”
Contact Brad A. Hodges at 704-797-4266 or bhodges@salisburypost.com
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