The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Board of Trustees presented five alumni with the William Richardson Davie Award, the board’s highest honor on Nov. 19. All of the winners have ties to the College of Arts and Sciences.
Chancellor Holden Thorp and the trustees honored the following recipients at a Carolina Inn dinner: Vaughn and Nancy Bryson of Vero Beach, Fla.; Peter Thacher Grauer of Greenwich, Conn.; C. Knox Massey Jr. of Atlanta; and James (Jim) Horner Winston of Jacksonville, Fla.
Established by UNC’s Board of Trustees in 1984, the Davie Award is named for the Revolutionary War hero who is considered the father of the University. It recognizes extraordinary service to the University or society.
Peter Grauer, who earned his degree in English in 1968, has spent his career in the financial industry. He worked at the investment banks Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette and Credit Suisse First Boston. Then he cofounded DLJ Merchant Banking Partners and DLJ Investment Partners. In 2002, he took over leadership of Bloomberg LP, the worldwide information-services and media company. He had been on the company’s board of directors since 1996 and its chairman since 2001, succeeding company founder Michael R. Bloomberg. Grauer is also lead director of healthcare services company DaVita.
Grauer has served on the boards of more than 25 public and private companies. At Carolina, he has stewarded the Honors Program in the College of Arts and Sciences, whose external advisory board he has led since 1997 and where an endowed professorship is named in his honor. In addition to contributing his time and leadership, Grauer and his wife Laurie have made generous monetary gifts to Carolina. They support the Carolina Excellence Fund, the European Study Center at Winston House and the James M. Johnston Center for Undergraduate Excellence (both in the College), and the men’s lacrosse team, among other areas.
Beginning with Patrick Henry Winston in 1844, six generations of James “Jim” Winston’s family have been Carolina students and leaders. Among them were George Tayloe Winston, who served as president of the University from 1891 to 1896, and Winston’s uncle, also named James, who was the first Carolina student to win a Rhodes Scholarship.
Though many Winstons graduated from Carolina, the connection to his family was made ever stronger in 2007 when Winston provided the leadership gift to name the European Study Center in London. The UNC European Study Center in Winston House serves faculty, students and alumni from across the University. Alumni are welcomed at the center for enrichment activities and meetings. Faculty and graduate students hold academic conferences there with European colleagues; state-of-the-art instructional technology links classes in Chapel Hill, London and other locations across the European continent.
Winston earned his degree in business administration from Carolina in 1955. He is chairman of LPMC Inc., a real estate investment firm in Jacksonville, Fla., and also president of White Oak Land and Development Co., the developer of Summer Beach, a project of more than 1,000 residential units and the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Amelia Island, Fla. He is also president of Omega Insurance Co., a property and casualty insurance company that does business in Florida and five southeastern states.
Both natives of North Carolina, the Brysons entered UNC the same year, studied pharmacy and graduated in 1960. Vaughn Bryson worked at Eli Lilly & Co. for 32 years, serving as its president and CEO from 1991 to 93. Nancy has served on the Arts and Sciences Foundation Board, the Friends of the Library Board and the Board of Visitors at UNC. Vaughn has been on the pharmacy school Dean’s Advisory Board and is now on the board of the UNC General Alumni Association. They both served on the Carolina First Campaign Steering Committee and have received the General Alumni Association’s Distinguished Service Medal.
The Brysons have given generously to Carolina, in several different areas. They made the first major gift toward the new music library building, spurred the funding of a pharmacy professorship endowment in honor of George Cocolas, one of their favorite professors, and created excellence endowments for the deans of the pharmacy and public health schools. They funded a baseball scholarship and created an endowment for baseball, the first for a sport at UNC. Vaughn has also been the visionary behind the renovation of the baseball stadium. Once work is completed, Tar Heel baseball teams will play home games on Bryson Field at Boshamer Stadium.
C. Knox Massey Jr. is an active force for the University. He earned a degree in business administration in 1959 and, after graduation, he went to work for C. Knox Massey & Associates, the Durham advertising firm founded in 1930 by his father. Massey moved to Atlanta in 1964 to merge the firm with Atlanta-based agency Tucker Wayne & Co. As that firm grew to be the largest in the Southeast, Massey eventually served as president, chairman and CEO before retiring in 2000.
At Carolina, he has served on numerous boards, including the Carolina First Campaign Steering Committee, the Board of Directors of the General Alumni Association, the UNC Board of Visitors, the Arts and Sciences Foundation Board and the Institute for the Arts and Humanities External Advisory Board. His wife Mary Ann also graduated from the University in 1959.
Massey and Mary Ann have given generously to their alma mater. In 1983, they joined with Van and Kay Weatherspoon (Massey’s sister) to honor Knox Massey Sr. with one of the early professorships at Kenan-Flagler Business School. They, along with the Weatherspoons and Knox Massey Sr., created the Massey-Weatherspoon Fund. This fund supports the C. Knox Massey Distinguished Service Awards, recognizing “unusual, meritorious or superior contributions” by University employees, and the Carolina Seminars, which bring together faculty members from Carolina and other area universities and institutes to discuss a variety of issues.
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