WCU Chancellor John W. Bardo presided over the ceremony, which included the awarding of an honorary doctorate of humane letters to Sylva writer and storyteller Gary N. Carden.

A WCU alumnus, Carden has been an advocate, promoter and presenter of traditional Southern Appalachian culture for more than 40 years through his critically acclaimed written and spoken performances. His body of work includes “Mason Jars in the Flood and Other Stories,” which won the 2001 Appalachian Writers Association Book of the Year award.

Despite admonitions from a family member not to forget his mountain roots, Carden told the Ramsey Center audience that he “couldn’t get out of Appalachia quick enough” after his 1958 graduation from what was then known as Western Carolina Teachers College. “I wanted to be near theaters, book stores and nice restaurants. I wanted some culture,” he said.

For 15 years, Carden worked as a teacher in the metropolitan areas of Atlanta, Charlotte and Raleigh, but as the years passed he said he became less and less happy. “I was definitely homesick,” he said.

Eventually, Carden came back to Sylva for a visit and stopped at WCU’s Mountain Heritage Center to hear a presentation by Southern Appalachian poet Jim Wayne Miller. Through the poems in his collection, “The Mountains Have Come Closer,” Miller exhorts his readers to “come home.” Carden decided to move back to Sylva to live in his grandfather’s house.

“I took him literally, and I came home,” Carden said. “I moved in my grandfather’s house in Rhodes Cove, and for the past 40 years I’ve been trying – striving – to remember where I came from.”

The commencement audience heard stories about the strength of family ties from Will Peebles, a WCU professor of music who was honored as one of the University of North Carolina system’s best teachers earlier this year when he was named one of 17 recipients of the UNC Board of Governors Awards for Excellence in Teaching.

Peebles said his great-grandfather, who was born in 1873 and taught mathematics at an Illinois college, “knew how to care for a horse, and later, how to hold a Model T Ford together with baling wire.” Peebles said his great-grandfather liked to impress him and his identical-twin brother by calling out “whoa” to stop his red Corvair car just short of the garage wall. “We were 6; he was 90,” Peebles said. “We thought he was nothing at all like us.

“I know now that my great-grandfather and I are not really all that different,” Peebles said. “When I first met some shirt-tail cousins in Tennessee, 30 years after my great-grandfather had visited them, they surprised me by saying, ‘You have his laugh.’ We are more like our ancestors than we think.”

Peebles said the “most serious problem any of us face is really the same one our ancestors faced, and that is to see ourselves in others – our friends, our neighbors, and even our enemies – and to do unto them as we would have them do unto us.

“It’s an old and familiar rule, but let’s see what might happen if we were to treat it not as a rule, but as an opportunity,” he said.

In his charge to the graduating students, Bardo thanked them for what they contributed “to what this university is becoming.”

“As you leave Western, remember what you learned here,” he said. “Remember the lessons of what it means to be human, and remember the real value of being forever a Catamount.

“Those of us who will stay here in Cullowhee look forward to keeping in touch with you. Whatever it is you do, remember that you have a home in Cullowhee and we care a great deal about you and your future. Congratulations, graduates, and best wishes.”

WCU’s class of summer 2008 includes 31 Jamaican teachers who have earned graduate degrees in education through the university, and another 33 Jamaicans who are receiving their undergraduate degrees in education. More than 5,000 teachers from that Caribbean island nation have earned teaching degrees from WCU.

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Last modified: Monday, Aug. 4, 2008