A Look Back At The Start | Eastern NC Now

    Publisher's note: This article appeared on John Hood's daily column in the Carolina Journal, which, because of Author / Publisher Hood, is linked to the John Locke Foundation.

    RALEIGH  -  Tonight, the think tank that publishes Carolina Journal, the John Locke Foundation, will be celebrating its 24th anniversary with a banquet in Raleigh featuring "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace.

    As it happens, I was working for Fred Barnes, a friend and Fox News colleague of Wallace, back in 1989 when the idea of creating a free-market think tank in North Carolina first began to take root. After working as a newspaper reporter in eastern North Carolina and graduating from the UNC-Chapel Hill journalism school, I had headed up to Washington for a year to serve as a reporter-researcher at The New Republic.

    My assignment was to assist two senior editors, Fred Barnes and Morton Kondracke, with reporting and researching articles for the magazine and with prepping for their weekly television show "The McLaughlin Group." I enjoyed my time at TNR immensely and learned a lot from it. But I never wanted to settle anywhere but my home state. In late 1989, I was presented with an opportunity I couldn't pass up.

    While at UNC-Chapel Hill, I had founded a student magazine called The Carolina Critic. We published news, analysis, and commentary each month about campus, local, and national issues. Our staff was a mixture of conservatives, libertarians, centrists  -  and a left-liberal columnist to keep us all on our toes.

    To pay the printing bill, we solicited donors from among Chapel Hill alumni, North Carolina business owners, and some national conservative groups. One of those donors was John Pope, a successful retailer and member of the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees who had just created a foundation to direct his family's philanthropic pursuits.

    Mr. Pope's son Art, an attorney and former aide to then-Gov. Jim Martin, was tasked with the responsibility to develop a long-range plan for the John William Pope Foundation. From the start, one focus of foundation giving was to support free-market organizations around the country  -  and right here in North Carolina, if such organizations could be located or founded.

    I returned to North Carolina to help Art during the start-up phase of what would become the John Locke Foundation. We recruited a half-dozen other seed donors, including the Broyhill Family Foundation and the late Edwin Morris, CEO of Blue Bell/Wrangler Jeans in Greensboro (what is now VF Corporation). These seed donors included Republicans, Democrats, and independents.

    To serve as the organization's first president, Art recruited Marc Rotterman, a political and public-affairs consultant with experience both in North Carolina and in the Reagan administration. I went on the staff as director of research and publications. Our third permanent hire, Marilyn Avila, managed the office and stayed with JLF in various capacities for many years. (She is now a member of the North Carolina House of Representatives.)

    One of my goals was to create an opinion magazine similar to The New Republic or National Review but focused on North Carolina. Carolina Journal debuted in 1991 as a magazine. Some years later, we converted it to a newspaper format and added more original news reporting. To fill the masthead, I naturally turned to many of the same writers who had worked for me at The Carolina Critic back in the 1980s. Two of them, Rick Henderson and Michael Lowrey, are employed at CJ as I write these words.

    If you are reading these words, you probably find at least the online edition of CJ to be interesting, informative, or perhaps even infuriating in a guilty-pleasure sort of way. I'm glad you do. If you don't receive the print edition each month, you are missing out on lots of additional content. Just visit here to obtain your free subscription. And if you don't listen to "Carolina Journal Radio" each weekend on your local station or online, you are missing out on even more content. You can check the affiliate list or download weekly shows by visiting here.

    I'm proud of what JLF has accomplished during our first 24 years. During the coming year, just in time for our silver anniversary, we'll be launching some major new projects. Want to help? Please do.