NEWS

Roughly 40 years ago, I was a Davidson College student majoring in Political Science and I liked learning outside of the classroom almost as much as I did in the classroom. As a result, I had several internships during my time at Davidson.

One of my favorite internships was with D.G. Martin, Davidson Class of 1962. Among many other things in his life, he had started a cable access show, for those of you old enough to remember that format. Essentially, as cable television came into being, many cable providers offered local content producers access to their facilities to create local programming. D.G. decided to do just that, as he was convinced that people would want to watch lively conversations with interesting local people or to hear about important local topics in a long format that local television stations were not producing.

Every week he brought a new guest to the set of "One on One with D.G. Martin" and primarily discussed issues of interest to the wider Charlotte community. While I never asked, my assumption is that it might have been D.G.'s experience with that show that ultimately led up to him hosting "North Carolina Bookwatch" on PBS.

Concurrently with the establishment of the cable access show, D.G. began writing his weekly column. He did that "without fail" for four decades. And several years ago, he gave News of Davidson permission to publish his weekly articles which quickly became a hit with our readers.

Now D.G.'s daughter, May Martin Bryan, is taking the reins of the weekly column. The short biographical sketch that will now be found at the end of the "One on One" column will read: "May Martin Bryan is a lifelong resident of North Carolina and holds degrees from Davidson College and the UNC Schools of Law and Social Work. She holds endless fascination in the books, politics, and history of our state."