July 13, 1920:
William Clyde Friday is born to Mary Elizabeth 'Beth' Rowan and David Lathan 'Lath' Friday in Raphine, VA, home of the Rowan family. Shortly thereafter the first born for Beth and Lath is relocated back to his parent's home in rural Dallas, NC in Gaston County.

1929:During Gastonia's Loray strike, Communist-led National Textile Workers' Union unsuccessfully attempted to unionize Gastonia's largest mill. Both William and his father see the strike as a "pivotal event," hardening lines against unions, but the younger Friday would later take his impressions of this experience with him into University administration, publicly defending the striking workers

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1920s:
Boll weevil, land erosion and falling commodity prices devastate Carolinas cotton growers.

1926:
Congress creates 468,000-acre Great Smoky Mountains National Park from 100,000 acres of virgin forest and settled lands in North Carolina and Tennessee; park eventually grows to 520,000 acres.
Jazz innovator John Coltrane born in Hamlet.

1930:
Bill Friday spends his first summer with his grandparents in Raphine, VA, having an indelible impact on his life. While the summers provided the 10-year old boy with the values of hard work and sacrifice from his disciplinarian grandfather, Friday would later call the period, "the time of his life."

1935:
The rampant poverty that follows the Great Depression across the country affects the textile machine industry that had long supported the Friday family in North Carolina. As a result, the Friday's lose the land between Dallas and Gastonia where they had planned on one day constructing a larger home.

1933-1936:
Despite the fallout of the Great Depression, Friday begins to learn leadership skills through his participation in organized sports. Through his play as a standout catcher for the American Legion baseball team, Friday would find himself proficient enough to have pursued a professional career playing baseball.

1937:
Despite eventually becoming president of North Carolina's public university system, William Friday begins his college career at Wake Forest, a private university in Winston-Salem. Of the 13 members of his Depression-era high school graduating class, William Friday was the only one who was able to attend college when his minister helped to a $50 tuition scholarship.

1937:
Lath and Beth Friday separate from their marriage while William is away at college. As a result of this painful time, Friday would later say, "[their separation] led to all kinds of stress and tension, it made it very difficult. But, this is a lesson that in some ways prepared you to deal with other things."

1938:
With only one year at Wake Forest University behind William, Lath Friday encourages his son to transfer to North Carolina State University, then known as North Carolina State College of Agriculture and Engineering, to study a curriculum in textiles.

1932:
The N.C. Symphony performs for the first time, at Hill Hall on the UNC Chapel Hill campus. A decade later, it becomes the country's first state-supported symphony.

1933:
Black Mountain College, an unorthodox school primarily for artists and writers, is founded by a volatile S.C. classics scholar named John Rice. In its 23 years, it had as students or instructors people who became innovators in virtually every art.

1940:
William Friday meets future wife, Ida Howell, on a blind date arranged by William's friend Paul Lehman.

1941:
Already senior class president, Friday becomes the first student to be asked to speak at a State College commencement on June 9 before an audience that included Governor J. Melville Broughton, Frank Porter Graham, and both of his parents.

1942:
Despite lacking ROTC experience, Bill Friday, like many of his peers motivated by the Pearl Harbor attacks to serve their country, applies for and receives a commission for the navy in the spring. Later this year, Friday begins work at the Naval Ammunitions Depot at St. Julien's Creek in Norfolk, VA. Because of his engineering degree, he was promoted to plant operations manager, forcing him into the tense role of constantly supervising a dangerous environment for both himself and his men.

May 13, 1942:
Ida Howell and William Friday marry in the Haynesville Methodist Church in Raleigh.

1946:
A mere 7 days after being discharged from the Navy after WWII, William Friday moves to Chapel Hill with wife Ida to attend Law School at the University of North Carolina.

1948:
After graduating from law school in June, Friday begins to work for the dean of students at Carolina, Fred H. Weaver, thereby beginning what would become a lifelong career with the university. Friday later said that entering University administration during this period was the "last thought" in his mind.

1942:
World War II brings war industry to Charlotte with the opening of the U.S. Rubber plant, near today's Carowinds, which at its height employed 10,000.

1945:
Mocksville native Tom Ferebee, a 26-year-old bombardier aboard the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, pulls a cable on Aug. 6 that releases an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan -- helping end World War II. Life magazine named the bombing the 16th most important event of the millennium.

1950:
The bitter and controversial 1950 Senate race between Frank Porter Graham and Willis Smith, ends both Graham's senatorial career and indelibly impacts the way William Friday views political life. As a result, Friday would never run for political office.

1950-55:
Gordon Gray assumed the presidency after Graham left for Washington. Gray created a position of secretary to the president and appointed Friday to it, so his position became official and he would be named the acting president when Gray left.

1954:
William Friday, alongside Gordon Gray, is instrumental in the formation of the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), "representing an effort to establish an exclusive conference of schools of similar size that could enforce stricter controls over athletics."

1954:
Alongside Billy Carmichael and UNC President Gordon Gray, William Friday works diligently to make North Carolina public television a success. WUNC-TV began operations this year the initial broadcast of a UNC and Wake Forest basketball game, kicking off what is now the University of North Carolina's statewide public television network, UNC-TV.

May 8, 1957:
William C. Friday is officially inaugurated as UNC president in May at 36 years of age - a position he would hold for 30 years - facing the challenges of faculty morale, athletics issues, segregation and anticommunism.

1958:
Alongside other members of the Research Triangle Park Committee, William Friday is instrumental in establishing this "industrial complex that drew on the research of Duke, Carolina and NC State Universities. Today, RTP employs over 30,000 North Carolinians in scientific research, technology and a variety of other fields.

1950:
Clarendon County, S.C., parents sue over segregated schools in case that becomes part of Brown vs. Board of Education.
The first major stock car racing track in the South opens in Darlington, S.C.

1954:
Hurricane Hazel obliterates the ocean front from Pawley's Island, S.C., to Wilmington. October storm kills 95 people, including many in Canada.

1957:
N.C. Gov. Luther Hudges leads effort to establish the Research Triangle, a research and high-technology park centrally located between universities at Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill.

North Carolinians watch televised basketball for the first time, when Philadelphia TV producer C.D. Chesley hastily assembles a network of three N.C. stations and broadcasts the Final Four back home. That fans a passion for hoops in the Carolinas. The next season Chesley teams with Pilot Life Insurance Co. to televise 10 ACC games, and the passion soars.