Front Porch

As you might have already guessed from Doug Marlette's cartoon, a wonderfully playful jab at one of our two coeditors, this issue of Southern Cultures is a little different.

John Shelton Reed retired this summer after thirty-one years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Fortunately for us, John is not leaving Southern Cultures, but his decision to shift gears has put the rest of us in an awkward position, for this is no ordinary retirement. During his years at Carolina, John rose through the ranks from instructor to Kenan Professor of Sociology. He has also been the beloved teacher of thousands of undergraduates, director of the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science, founder of the UNC Center for the Study of the American South, president of the Southern Sociological Society, board member of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and holder of more fellowships, guest lectureships, and visiting professorships around the world than we have space to name. Everywhere, as Larry Griffin puts it, John Reed has been recognized as "beyond doubt the most accomplished and influential living sociologist of the U.S. South."

We at Southern Cultures remember our raising and we know it's not polite to brag. Ordinarily we would wait until the honoree had really left the masthead before delivering the proper tribute. In this case, however, John plans to keep working with Southern Cultures and to think and write and speak about the South as much as ever, but without the hassle of showing up for class on a regular basis. Under the circumstances, we realized that it might be decades before John Reed really retired, and we didn't want to wait that long to brag on his many gifts to us and other southerners.

So we have made this issue of Southern Cultures a special tribute to John Shelton Reed and his work. Offices being what they are, we couldn't exactly do it without his knowledge, but we certainly did it without his consent or active participation. After all, John is even more conscious of good manners than the rest of us.

But as Dizzy Dean used to say, "It ain't bragging if you can prove it," and proof abounds of John Reed's outstanding contributions to the study of the South. He is also funny, generous, kind, wonderful to work with, and personally respectful of people he disagrees with. As a lifelong Republican, he meets with quite a few of these in the groves of academe, yet his colleagues will not dispute the breadth and importance of his wisdom. Southern Cultures was his idea to start with, and we could not watch him change hats without using the journal to share his work with all our readers.

Reed's scholarship is rooted in quantitative social science, so the place to begin is with basic statistics. Ironically, John Reed was born in 1942 in New York City, where his father was attending medical school. The family soon returned to their Appalachian roots and Reed grew up in Kingsport, Tennessee. He married Dale Volberg, his high school sweetheart and now his coauthor, in 1964. That same year he received his bachelor's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and seven years later he obtained his Ph. D. in sociology from Columbia University. He began his career as an instructor at the University of North Carolina in 1969 and has remained with us steadily until now.

Contact with the North put Reed in touch with the sense of being southern, and he carried this interest into his first book, The Enduring South: Subcultural Persistence in Mass Society. Other publications followed regularly, and as they did, Reed became ever more noted as an academic who could actually write well--an outstanding scholar who also communicated with intelligent readers everywhere. (We list his books at the end of this Front Porch.) Of all his accomplishments, it is John Reed's legacy as a writer that Southern Cultures tries hardest to imitate and pass along.

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