In a well-kept old house down a quiet two-lane outside of Smithfield, North Carolina, Jim Gibson ’50 travels through time.
“This is a picture of Coach Wallace Wade, who took us to the Rose Bowl,” he says. In the black-and-white photo, Gibson wears the number 51. Wade, in suit and fedora, sits with his back to the camera. “I was starting offensive center, and I called the plays. I was over with Coach Wade. He was telling me what he had observed about my performance.”
Gibson remembers the namesake of Wallace Wade Stadium as a man who didn’t believe in getting excited, in running up and down the sidelines during a game. Coach Wade, as Gibson calls him, sat down to coach rather than stand, even as football history unfolded around him. And he prioritized education.
“He said [to me], ‘If I get four years of football out of you and you don’t get a diploma, you’ve been shortchanged,’” Gibson recalls.
On June 15, Gibson celebrated his 100th birthday. Two days later, he welcomed me into the rural home he shares with Joyce, his wife of 70 years. After a lifetime together, the couple tell each other’s stories with warmth and pride. Jim tells of Joyce’s family, which owned this house and the ones nearby. In fact, Joyce was born in the house across the road 93 years ago. Joyce tells of Jim’s Duke accolades, both as student-athlete and alumnus. His 1996 Charles A. Dukes Award for Outstanding Volunteer Service sits on the warm wood of their dining table. True to his athletic background, Gibson was a charter member of the Iron Dukes.
Though he started life as a fan of “the other school,” as his son notes, Gibson’s loyalty turned deeper blue when Duke recruited him to play football – 80 years ago.
“I don’t know of any teammates of mine that are 100 [and] still living,” he says.
Gibson was born in Asheville, North Carolina, on June 15, 1926. His father was city treasurer until the Great Depression cost him that role. The family uprooted, moving to Detroit and then to Wilmington, Delaware. They landed back in North Carolina – briefly in Hickory and then finally Winston-Salem. Jim can’t remember when he first heard of Duke – then a young school – but he does remember listening to Duke play in the 1942 Rose Bowl game on his family’s Philco radio. Held weeks after Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entry into World War II, that year’s Rose Bowl was played at Duke rather than Pasadena, California, because of safety concerns.
As a teenager, Gibson was already a dedicated athlete. He was a standout football player for R.J. Reynolds High School in Winston-Salem. After graduation, he ended up in the military, like so many men of his generation. Football followed him, though, and his reputation on the gridiron coincidentally kept him from combat.
“Tom Chambers ’50, [Jim’s] high school buddy who also later went to Duke, was with him in the Navy,” Joyce says. “They had graduated from boot camp and were in the outgoing unit at Camp Peary [in Virginia].”
The two had gone to Williamsburg to see a movie. On the bus ride back to base, the Camp Peary football coach, who had previously coached at a rival school in Winston-Salem, recognized Jim and asked him to play football for the Camp Peary team. Jim spent the remainder of World War II playing football and riding a special model of Indian motorcycle as a member of base police.
“Had Jim and Tom not gone to the movie, they would have been on a ship to the South Seas or wherever,” says Joyce.
In 1946, with the help of the GI Bill and a football scholarship, Jim enrolled at Duke. The incoming students were a mix of World War II veterans and students fresh out of high school. Jim’s time at Duke was spent on what is now West Campus. What is now East Campus was still the women’s campus, where Jim remembers that there was a dorm for nursing students, all women at the time. He didn’t go into Durham much, spending most of his time on campus.
“Well, it had room and board,” Jim half-jokes.
Talton Gibson, one of the Gibsons’ four sons, sits at his parents’ dining table and flips through a scrapbook assembled by Bob Gibson ’50, Jim’s brother. In 1949, as a member of the glee club, Jim shared the stage with crooner Perry Como. Talton finds a 1950 photo of the glee club, then points out his father in it.
The scrapbook is filled with moments of Duke history Jim witnessed firsthand. One photo, for instance, is of the 1949 Duke-Carolina football game with a record-setting 57,500 in attendance. Gibson was on the field. The Victory Bell tradition, a longstanding element of the Duke-Carolina rivalry, began in 1948, when he was benched with an injury. His 1950 football information book lists Eddie Cameron, the namesake of Cameron Indoor Stadium, as director of athletics.
The book calls Gibson “Light but scrappy.” It says that his hobbies are food and football.
One of those hobbies could be the reason for his long life. Though Gibson’s football days are long behind him, he retains an athlete’s physicality. Up until the spring before his 100th birthday he was still mowing his two-acre lawn himself. He stopped only because he can’t risk tick-borne Lyme disease. He and Joyce still live independently.
“I know something has made it possible for me to be around,” Gibson says. “It’s got to be the fact that I was physically active.”
After we talk, Gibson gets to his feet easily. His handshake is firm and steady, his eyes clear.
I tell him I’ll see him at 101.