I was very sad to learn yesterday that UNCC lost a great professor in 2020. I had hoped to connect with him this year for my thesis but sadly I will be limited to his published research.

I first met Tink in 1994, fresh from home with my accent still so prominent that I was often misunderstood. I was enrolled in his undergraduate world geography class which was a large lecture hall style class. Tink was great at engaging such a large group of students and quickly learned faces and names regularly calling on individuals to answer, respond and engage with him.

He pointed at me sometime around the third week of class and turned to write on the board as I responded. I saw his hand stop moving, his elbow dropping as he tilted his head to listen. When I finished he spun completely around on the hill of his cowboy boot, pointed directly at me with his chalky finger and said, "See me after class!" I spent the rest of the class wondering if I had made some sort of misstep or blunder.

Instead, the first words out of his mouth were, "Where are you from?" I can still see his crooked grin and twinkling eyes. Turns out he was from KY and grew up in the same area that my grandmother did. He regularly spoke with me about my family and our story and was very interested in the fact that I was the first student from Graham county to attend UNCC - it was the last county represented. Toward the end of the semester he invited me to take one of his 4000 level classes focused specifically on Appalachia.

The first day of class he passed out a blank US map and simply said draw Appalachia. He knew exactly what he was doing and I think got a big kick out of what happened next. I took my pencil and drew a small circle around the western tip of NC and north GA crossing the border into TN and just barely nicking the bottom of KY and put my pencil down. Everyone was still working and I realized that these were Geography students and they were meticulously drawing the entire Appalachian mountain range.

Without a word Tink collected the pages and pinned them all up to the cork band above the board. Mine was front and center. He couldn't hide his smile though when he asked, "What just happened?" It was the beginning of a great class. Another entire portion of the class was focused on migration patterns (this was decades before Hillbilly Elegy) and I realized my family's story was a perfect example of alternating generational migration patterns.

I was young and not yet used to the kind of academic reading required in upper level classes. I wish I had a better recollection of some of the other things we read and discussed - or a copy of his syllabus to work from - but he left a nice collection of articles for me to read.

It's not the same though - I was really hoping to hear that laugh again.