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I think often of my time as a freshman we went to the Final Four
I missed the better part of three weeks of school traveling first to Bloomington
then to Lexington and to the Final Four in Atlanta
and before each week I'd call my mom and say mom can we
will you help me figure it out can we afford it and she says you have to go
you may never get this chance again and thirty five years later she is she's
been right
when I came to UNC Charlotte I didn't know what I wanted to major in and I
did know what I wanted to do when I graduated from college and that was getting into
the real estate business
so at the time majoring economics made most sense to me
there were a lot of professors there with the names of Connaughton and Madson
and Zuber
and Schwartz and Amato and Wellman I learned a lot from those
men in that department I guess the mentor of all mentors here for me
was Miss Bonnie Cone
she was there for me in three very defining moments in my life
I had the opportunity to meet her when I was a senior in high school
and she said Dennis you come here you give it a chance
got here met a bunch of folks had a great time and never looked back
after that 7 or 8 years later I was working at going back to school
and I asked her if she would write a letter of recommendation it was accepted
and I went on down that path
I'm firmly convinced that if her recommendation letter would have been the only
one in the package
I would have been admitted to that program of that school and the third one was a
really big one
yeah I met
the
lady that I knew I was gonna marry
and for those of you who know Bonnie know that she was a prolific rose grower
so I called her up to tell her that I had met the one
and could I come by and cut a dozen roses to have dinner with her and she said sure
went there the next day we walked through the
garden picked 12 perfect roses
and delivered those to Kathy and so the rest is history on that
marriage front
Kathy gives me the opportunity to let my passion grow with this university
and it feels wonderful to know that you are in a position to help
a younger person that might not be otherwise be able to
afford to be here to come get an education Kathy and I decided a long time
ago that education of young
folks was very important to us so that's just where we spend
our very limited resources and
I appreciate being involved
where I think that I'm making a difference.