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Duke University's most popular man is bright-faced, bright-eyed, cupid-smiling little Dr. Robert Lee ("Bobby") Flowers, secretary and treasurer of the University since 1910 and contact-man with the Duke Endowment. A graduate of the U. S. Naval Academy, he has taught mathematics at Trinity since 1892. When "Buck" Duke began to plan his great Endowment, Dr. Flowers hustled off with Dr. Few to Charlotte, N. C. to make sug- gestions. And he it was who, when Trinity decided to change its name and move its campus, roamed about the countryside looking for a suitable site, selected the wooded, hilly. 5,100 acres three miles from town and quietly bought them. Says he: "Mr. Duke loved trees. When we stood there he told me: 'This is the place!'"
The Founder. Many a rich U. S. un-versity owes its name to an individual now remote and legendary—Lord Jeffrey Amherst, Elihu Yale, Ezra Cornell, Nicholas Brown, John Harvard. It is less than six years since James Buchanan Duke passed to his rest. Famed as a "log-cabin milionaire, " hero of many a stirring success story, he was born and lived not far from the new Duke campus. Durham is full of Duke cousins and fresh memories of the State's great man. Many an oldster is left who knew the great man's father, Washington Duke. The rich story that is Duke is still well-preserved from its beginning.
Though "Old Man Wash" was almost illiterate, he was no "po' white," and the birthplace of his sons Brodie, Benjamin Newton ("Ben") and James Buchanan ("Buck") was no log cabin but a farmhouse surrounded by 300 acres of good North Carolina land. In 1865 the Civil War was over; Wash was 45 years old, had 500 in cash and a bag of tobacco that Federal soldiers had left on the farm. This he sifted, labeled Pro Bono Publico, sold in Durham. Then he built a log cabin on his farm, made more tobacco, a great deal more.
But he had a potent competitor: Bull Durham. Ever since North Carolina's famed "bright yellow" tobacco had been discovered, by chance, in 1852, the pipe and chewing tobacco trade had been booming, and John R. Green had made his trade-mark world-famed.* It was Buck Duke who urged that the family go into the cigaret business, then undeveloped. They employed the first successful cigaret-making machine, got one William T. O'Brien, a bright young mechanic, to perfect it for them. Swift thereafter was the rise of W. Duke Sons & Co. and the formation in 1890 of American Tobacco Co. with a capital of $25,000,000.† In a ruthless, buccaneering business era, Buck Duke assembled his great combine with all the gusto and smash of the northern tycoons who were putting together railroads, steel mills, oil wells, can factories. He fought historic battles in what was one of the most fiercely throat-cutting U. S. businesses. Then, in 1912, when he was ordered to unscramble his trust, he did so with superb aplomb.