[upbeat music] [gentle piano music] - [Narrator 1] Sending pictures through the air from the moment 13-year old James Fletcher Goodman witnessed the first WRAL broadcast signal in 1956.

The notion has filled him with wonder, but passion for communication is something that runs through Mr. Goodman's family tree with roots firmly set by his grandfather, A.J.

Fletcher who founded the Capital Broadcasting Company in 1937.

Four decades later, his grandson and successor James Fletcher Goodman turned the company into one of the nation's most visionary corporations.

First to market on new technologies, Mr. Goodman has also delved into the business of sports franchises and urban development.

Revitalizing Durham and the entire triangle region.

In the meantime, the AJFletcher Foundation with Barbara Goodman at the helm, has endowed North Carolina with an abundance of arts and education programs, institutes and opportunities.

With two sons continuing the family traditions of innovation and generosity, the Goodman family propels and inspires their home state.

Tonight in his own words, serving his country and covering tragedy in Memphis, finding love and marriage with Barbara Lyons Goodman.

AJFletcher Foundation beginnings and climbing the corporate ladder at the Capitol Broadcasting Company from operations manager, to president and CEO.

- [Narrator 2] Funding for this series of "Biographical Conversations" was made possible by support provided by Frank Daniels, Jr. And by contributions from UNC TV viewers, like you who invite you to join them in supporting UNC-TV.

[upbeat music] - Hello, and welcome to the second part of our series of Biographical Conversations with James Goodman.

I'm Shannon Vickery.

Thanks for joining us.

Mr. Goodman, let's pick up where we left off last time.

During your years in the Navy, you were assigned to an air station in Memphis where you met a nurse named Barbara Lyons.

Tell us about Barbara.

- Well, let's see, it's called NAS Memphis Naval Air Station.

It's actually at Millington, Tennessee and there was a person in my unit that was dating a girl, had a girlfriend downtown and who had an apartment and had a roommate.

And he asked me to go with him one night and the rest is history [laughs].

- And what was it about her that caught your attention?

- [laughs] Don't ask me that.

I mean, I mean, you know, it just happens.

Barbara had finished nursing school and she was working at the Charity Hospital in Memphis on the pediatric floor.

So she was working with kids, had a real connection with kids and how they're doing.

- Did she share with you her experiences working with pediatric trauma in the burn unit?

- Yes, really horrible things would happen to kids.

The hospital, so, you know, they would come in, really awful things would happen.

I'm not going to even talk about it, but she would see badly burned kids, kids who'd had been in the middle of roads and that, so it was just really horrible.

So I think out of that came, so it's hard to think about that, you know.

Why would somebody let that happen?

What are the circumstances in which people live that that kind of stuff happened?

So I think that early on, she had this idea that, there's something not right here.

I mean, we've got some we need to work on.

So it wasn't, we actually, I don't think we talked about, we didn't talk about politics or anything.

We just talked about what we think is important.

- While you were working in the Navy, you also worked a night shift as a studio engineer at a television station.

- Yes.

- What did that work entail?

- Well, I was the night engineer, which meant I had to keep everything working and I was also responsible for recording anything needed to be recorded, syndicated programming.

We delayed "The ABC Late Show" and just be the night engineer.

- On April 4th, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis.

- Yes.

- Tell us about that night and where you were.

- Well, it was early evening, so I was at the station.

We'd finished Early News.

Everybody had gone to supper.

Then we had booth announcers.

Everything was alive.

The booth announcer breaks everything, lab booth announcer.

I got a call from the News Room that one of their highway patrol radios wasn't working.

We had Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas.

And while I was down trying to figure out what was going on, I heard, I believe I know it wasn't Tennessee.

I believe it was the Mississippi Highway Patrol Radio that Dr. King had been shot.

So I ran across the street to get, let's see, his name was Charlie B Watson, the Booth Announcer, and got him over.

He started making some calls.

He confirmed the story.

And then he did, we did a bulletin, voiceover bulletin.

- What were your personal feelings at this time about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.?

- I was keeping up with him.

I had started keeping up with the movement through the New York Times, and had some knowledge of it, and understood the stakes, understood the issue, and understood the stakes, and understood that we needed to get on with it.

- In 1969, you married Barbara Lyons.

- I did.

We were married in Memphis at a downtown church.

We had, our honeymoon was up in North Carolina Mountains at Hound Ears.

And then we rolled on back here in the Raleigh and I went back to work.

Barbara was a nurse.

And when we were first married, she went to work for the state for the council on developmental disabilities and has always been interested in mental health services.

- What were her responsibilities there?

- Well, the whole idea was to coordinate services, mental health services and the different groups under the mental health, the different disabilities.

And so she drove all over Eastern North Carolina and visited hospitals and different organizations that were interested in providing mental health services.

Had our state car, and would drive all around, yeah.

- And during this time you were also growing your family.

- We could not get pregnant.

So we adopted our daughter Elizabeth from Catholic Social Services.

Actually Elizabeth... North Carolina used to be one diocese in North Carolina, the diocese of North Carolina.

They split into two, now there's a Raleigh Diocese.

We adopted the first child from the Catholic Diocese of Raleigh.

And as often happens, we then had Jimmy and Michael.

- What did it mean to you to become a father?

- [laughs] Well, I, well, you know, come on, it was great.

[mumbles] I became a dad.

You know what that means [laughs].

Well, I loved it.

What do you mean?

That was great.

- Mrs. Goodman decided to leave her job to focus full-time on the family.

- Yes.

- Was that a difficult decision for her to make?

- No, no, no.

If you ask Barbara what she is, she would say, I'm a mom.

Now she might say, you know, I worked here, everybody wants to say that kind of stuff, but deep down, I'm a mom.

- Mrs. Goodman at this time was also actively involved with The Salvation Army.

Tell us about- - Yeah that's her- - Her community service work and what that meant- - Right, that's really important.

- To your children.

- Barbara was the first female President of the Salvation Army, I believe, but you know when Barbara gets in it, she's in it, watch out.

And she also is very good at getting other folks to join the parade, and was very instrumental in building the base of support, and some of the big annual events, annual projects of The Salvation Army.

Jimmy followed that with The Salvation Army and is on the National Board of The Salvation Army.

So the family's pretty, family's dug in there.

- According to our research, you joined Capitol Broadcasting Company in 1968 as the Operations Manager.

Let's talk about some of the technology and the changes happening there during this time period.

It was announced that half of all of the primetime television programs that fall would be broadcast in color.

- Well, yeah.

- Tell us about the change from black and white to color at WRAL-TV.

- Well, so we'd been talking about it, you know RCA was RCA, the RCA labs, Robert Sarnoff, the first color cameras were RCA cameras and that we were with NBC and they sent down for us a color remote unit, and did color from the fair.

And then we were not necessarily ahead of anybody, but we eventually got color cameras and color film, and color or everything else and got the color, and it was a great improvement.

- At this time, Fred Fletcher was President and General Manager and your grandfather was chairman and CEO, is that correct?

- Right, and Jesse Helms was Executive Vice-President.

Fred had sales and marketing promotion, and Senator Helms had programming and news.

- And did you report to Jesse Helms at this time?

- I did.

- What was that relationship like?

- Yeah, he was the boss, he did a five minute editorial every day and you know how hard it is to write a five minute piece every day?

So he would come in and in the mornings, he would write his editorial.

So I didn't really talk to him until that was finished.

And he recorded the editorial and I talked to him in the afternoon.

He was first of all, a really nice person, cordial person, fun to talk to, and sort of, well, this is how we're going to do it kind of person.

Right, it's pretty hard to change directions with him.

- Let's talk a little bit more about those five minute editorials.

At this time, how groundbreaking was that to have editorials as part of your programming strategy?

- I don't believe there were any television stations in the country doing editorials.

I'm not 100% sure of that, but I know that when WRAL started editorials, there were complaints about it, and what is this?

And how can you do, you know?

Can stations editorialize?

So the FCC got to work on that, and developed the editorializing rules.

And what they expected stations to do when they editorialized.

So from that point of view, it was groundbreaking.

- And at that time, did his editorials represent the viewpoint of WRAL-TV or was it the viewpoint of Jesse Helms?

- Well, okay, yes.

Well, an editorial by definition is the viewpoint of the company.

And the viewpoint of the company was determined by my grandfather.

So I would say, well, there weren't any editorials that went on the air that my grandfather didn't approve.

So yeah, the company.

- But as we come to more recent times, those editorials wouldn't necessarily reflect the company today.

- No, but I mean, we did it.

That's what my grandfather wanted to do.

There they are.

And you know, the rest is history.

- In 1972, Jesse Helms entered the race for the U.S. Senate.

He had, of course by this time switched parties and was a Republican.

How, if at all, did your family participate in that campaign?

- I don't think anybody in the family was in the campaign or worked in the campaign.

We were certainly interested in it, but I don't remember any campaigning.

Some people at the station left the station and joined his campaign.

I think their office was at the college inn across the street there on Avent Ferry Road, I'd run into him some, but there was, it wasn't any connection with the campaign.

- And at this point was Senator Helms still broadcasting editorials, or had he left the station.

- No, he did.

He went off the air when he announced.

- The year 1972 was a significant one for North Carolina.

Not only did Jesse Helms become the first Republican U.S.

Senator in more than 100 years from North Carolina, but James Holshouser won the governor's race.

At that time, your uncle Fred noted that WRAL had an influence on the results that year by quote, "Strongly advocating a two party system and stressing conservative philosophy rather than party politics."

Do you agree with that assessment.

- Fred said that?

Well, okay.

- According to our research.

- Yeah, I don't disagree with it, but I don't... Well, WRAL, well, yes had a conservative editorial policy.

If you ask me, what did you, could you see that in the news?

Was that part of the news?

I didn't think it was a conservative newscast, but the editorials were certainly conservative.

And if that's what Fred feels that way about it, good.

- In 1973, you became Executive Vice President of Capitol Broadcasting.

What were your responsibilities at this time?

- Well, I was just picking up more parts of the operation.

You know, I had started in operations and then picked up programming news, and ended up with promotion.

And I've just sort of growing into position.

Still not, still didn't have sales.

I like to tell the story that nobody's ever asked me to go on a sales call [laughs] and that's probably good.

So I didn't have sales and I eventually got sales.

- During this time, as you were climbing the corporate ladder Capitol Broadcasting, did you still have an avid interest in engineering?

- No, well, I've always, I still do.

I mean, in technology, and that is how do you use, what's the latest technology that will allow us to improve specifically our local news gathering?

You know, or maybe improve the viewer experience or increase our signal, get us more viewers.

It's always what this will do to our product kind of.

Not necessarily how it works, but what does it do?

- In 1975, your uncle Fred retired, and you became president of Capitol Broadcasting.

What was that transition like for you?

- Well, I was, there are two parts to that.

You know, there's nothing I'd rather be than president of Capitol Broadcasting.

So there was going on for some time, the notion of who's going to run the company when my grandfather is not there?

And he, my grandfather believed that he needed to get that done.

And so he made it clear that I was going to do that.

And when he made that clear, that was of course a disappointment to some members of the family.

And there were some pretty rough times and there were some that was worked out in other ways.

And Fred retired.

And I certainly did miss him.

Boy, he was fun to work with.

I didn't like that.

So I didn't like all that.

I mean, I like being, I told you it's two things.

And it really hurt Fred, It caused trouble in the family.

And there you go.

Not much, there's not, it was Pop's decision.

And I was ready to go.

And there you are.

I mean, that's kind of a tough thing to talk about.

I mean, but that's right.

There was family issues with all that.

- How excited were you to be taking over the helm of the company- - Oh come on, are you kidding?

- And what was your vision?

- Oh, are you kidding?

Oh my God, here we go.

Yeah, I had the notion that we, without being critical of what had already been accomplished, because I had an understanding of how hard it was and what the circumstances were and where it started, from nothing and very proud of what they had done and everything, I had the notion that we had to change the way we sort of think about what we're doing.

And set about doing that.

By the way, it was hard.

I mean, changing a lot of people and changing the organization.

I did.

What's the best thing you ever did, Jim?

One of the best things I ever did was hire Fred Barber.

I wanted to get outside managers.

I felt like we needed new people was to hire Fred Barber.

Let's see, Fred had been in High Point, and Washington at JLA.

So, what's the best thing you ever did?

Was hire Fred Barber.

And what's the best thing Fred Barber ever did?

Was to hire John Green.

So I had to kindred spirits in terms of our notion about what we could, what are the possibilities with WRAL-TV?

So that was, it took some time, but we got her going.

- And what did you see as the possibilities for the company at that time?

- Well, it is that, well, look at this resource.

Well, think of all the things we can do for the local community and well in this fund.

Yeah, noticeably absent from my well list at that time was well, lets make lot of money.

I hadn't really been responsible for that, but that came to me, that my responsibility as the president for the financial performance of the company and that if we wanted to do all these things, that we wanted to do, then we needed to make money to do that.

So there was the early WRAL was not focused on that.

That was not...

So that was another change and sort of, this is, yes we're going to do all these things, but by the way, we're a business and we're going to hit that.

We're going to really go after that.

- How unique do you think it was that the company while being a business, wasn't solely focused on the financial end?

Because when a lot of people think about television, they automatically think about the money?

- Yes, well, remember they started with no revenue.

When you start with zero, you can be pretty happy with where you got to.

But if you're not aware of how it all works and what else is going on in the market, then you don't, you're not aware of the possibilities.

I'm not saying they didn't care, I'm just saying that they were growing at, they had a 250 worth of radio station.

So that was not the, I'm not suggesting they didn't care.

I'm suggesting that their sites weren't as high as it should have been.

- In 1979, you took over as CEO of Capitol Broadcasting.

Did this transition come naturally to you from all of the cooperation- - Yeah, I know, you know all the business.

You know the business from executive vice president, the president and the CEO, I didn't change.

I mean, I was doing the same stuff.

Had another title, kept on going.

Might have changed some signature lines on some of the corporate documents but basically after executive vice-president, certainly after president, nothing changed but titles.

- Your uncle, Fred was head of the Parks and Recreation Association for Raleigh for 35 years.

- Yes.

- Was he a role model for you?

- You know, yeah, absolutely.

His interest in other people and interest in the community doing well and parks and recreation, and his spirit had a great effect on me.

I had Fred and his community spirit and nature.

I had my grandfather a little more businesslike or severe, although he had his opera and theater and stuff, I had a personality like Jesse Helms, straightforward kind of, I had a...

I worked for some different, very different, really terrific people.

If there was a lasting anything, it was certainly Fred and his just attitude about everything.

He was quite fair, I told you he was the East, Raleigh had an Easter egg hunt at Pullen Park.

He was the Easter bunny.

I mean, who else?

I mean, nobody was surprised, here comes the Easter bunny.

They did a fairy tale and is a morning show, when he did the morning radio show.

Yes, influence yes.

- Your grandfather had a great love for opera.

- He did.

- How did he showcase this love?

And was he an opera performer himself?

- Yeah, you know, so he says that he saw opera when he was in the fifth grade.

Now that would have been up in Ashe County and Jefferson, I don't know the specifics of that, but that's when he fell in love with opera.

And so he became a singer and then eventually formed an opera company that he called the Grassroots Opera Company.

And his goal with that was to perform opera in the fifth grades of schools in North Carolina, to give opera singers a chance to do lots of performances.

You know, they do one to two performances a day all week, and then introduce opera in English.

So he actually had people do translations of the of the big operas, and the company went to schools and perform the opera.

- Did you inherit any of your grandfather's love for the opera?

- Well, yeah, only in that, I think it's a wonderful art for him because it includes everything.

I'm fascinated with the large, bigger than life performances.

But I wouldn't say that I'm an opera buff.

However, I was, I remain, I am committed to the Fletcher Foundation, supporting opera for ever.

- In 1952, The New York Times published an article your grandfather had written, entitled "Grassroots Opera".

It's pains and pleasures.

And in the article, he stressed that not only did he have a love for opera, but he also had a commitment to exposing school children to it.

Tell us about this commitment and why your grandfather wanted to bring- - Well, after I tied back to - the opera to the kids.

- I saw opera in the fifth grade up in Ashe County, and I wanna make sure everybody else as many young people as possible have that opportunity and he then did it.

We're well over a million North Carolina school kids seeing an opera.

- Also in that New York Times article, your grandfather wrote quote, There is no quicker or sure way of achieving losses than opera, end quote.

We're assuming he's talking about the financial - Absolutely, yeah.

- ends of opera at that point.

But it still seems like your grandfather thought that this was a worthy investment.

- Yes, it was a worthy investment.

This is a fun story to talk about.

So here I am, running the television station and not many people go to opera.

They just don't.

I mean, it's not that it's the grass roots opera, it's just, you know, there's not.

So I decided I'm gonna change that.

And so we had a [chuckles].

We were doing a couple of performances at Meredith.

I think McDonald's bought the most, gross rating points a week on our station.

I ran almost twice as many gross rating points for that opera performance as we did for McDonald's.

I said, I'm gonna get people to this opera.

That attendance went down.

I mean [chuckles] so it's not a mass market.

That's when I sought to learn my, yes you have to subsidize opera, but you have to have sponsors and you have to have contributions and you have to get help from everybody.

It's not a right.

He called them lawsuits okay.

- In 1961, your grandfather created the A. J. Fletcher Foundation.

Why did he make this commitment and what was his early vision for the foundation?

- Well, I think he wanted, he was working on sort of the legal structure for where are we gonna put the opera company, and he wanted to set up an organization so that he could leave part of his estate to that foundation to support long-term support his interest in opera.

- In 1979, your grandfather died at the age of 92, after a brief illness.

His list of accomplishments were long.

Where do you think the Fletcher Foundation fit onto this list of accomplishments in his mind?

- The foundation at that time was a small foundation.

It was put there just to operate the opera company.

The foundation didn't really have any financial significance.

Didn't have any horsepower until after his death.

He left his Southern Life Insurance Company stock to the foundation and he left a large block of non-voting stock and Capitol Broadcasting Company to the foundation.

I have wondered as the company has grown and become more valuable, if he had any idea, what he had created.

Right, the television business wasn't really established.

Now the insurance company was the [mumbles] I don't.

I sometimes wonder I say, Bob, you know what you did here?

I don't think he did.

I mean, I think he had the right idea.

He knew he was gonna do something, but I don't think he knew how large it was gonna be or what he had done.

Now, here's one thing, another interesting thing about the way we're set up.

So the foundation owns a good bit of non-voting stock in the company.

So they're one of my shareholders.

I'm working for the foundation, but this all of, and that's something I've always, what we do at Capitol Broadcasting affects the foundation.

So, see what I mean?

That's always been important to me that I'm very interested in what Capitol Broadcasting does as it relates to our our shareholder, the AJFletcher Foundation.

- In 1985, Frank Fletcher returns to Raleigh to work as a grants coordinator for the Fletcher foundation.

- That was great.

That was great.

Frank had had some health problems, but he was doing fine.

Moved to Raleigh, was very interested in the foundation, got us organized.

Frank was perfect for meeting people, getting to know people, helping with what should the foundation be supporting.

He was perfect, and I hope, I think, that he really enjoyed it.

- In 1988, the Fletcher Foundation hired for the first time an executive director.

Tell us about Tom McGuire.

- Tom McGuire is, gosh, what a good hire was a musician, masters in business, very accomplished Arkansas Symphony, Alabama Symphony maybe, the North Carolina Symphony, and was perfect because he could be responsible for running the foundation, and take on the responsibility of the opera company, which under Tom really became a school, school of the performing arts.

- We understand that Mr. McGuire had an extensive musical background serving as director of the North Carolina Symphony and the Arkansas Symphony.

We're assuming that during this time, the arts were a major priority of the Fletcher Foundation.

- Yeah, the major priority of the Fletcher Foundation was the opera company.

Right, now, we wanted to grow and do other things, but supporting the arts, the opera company, we had scholarships.

You know, we had voice scholarships at really most the universities in North Carolina.

We'd support young people that wanted to take voice lessons.

Even if you're a math major or an engineer, the idea was to encourage and to encourage the arts.

So, at the top, it was an organization that could run the Fletcher School of Performing Arts.

And Tom was perfect for that.

- What do you see as the role of the arts in society?

- Arts, now this is something we've really worked on in several different areas.

The arts are so important to like the fabric of the community of who we are.

What's going on here?

What do we support it?

And I've considered our emphasis in the arts here in the triangle, as to be a big part of our success, as it relates to quality of life and our economic development.

And one other story, there was the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, AICPA.

400 people in New Jersey.

We're looking all over the Southeast to relocate.

It was long story, but anyhow, we had an opportunity to pitch them on the triangle.

And it was a last minute thing.

I didn't really know what to do.

I mean, I'd said everything I thought I could say about the triangle.

I call Larry Wheeler at the art museum and said, Larry I have a group of accountants for use, not the most lively group you've ever been with, but these are good folks.

And they're going to have lunch with you.

I'm bringing them to the art museum and they're going to have lunch with you, Larry.

And you're going to convince them to move their national headquarters to the triangle.

And he did it.

They're out on 40.

And they were interested that we wanted to, when you start talking about what's great about this place, when you talk about arts, they were interested that we would say arts are really important to us, and they decided to locate here.

You can't overemphasize arts, parks, community infrastructure.

You can't overemphasize that.

- In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Fletcher Foundation began conducting annual meetings with other nonprofit organizations in order to share best practices.

Was this one of Mr. McGuire's initiatives?

- Yes, I developed a real interest in convincing nonprofits that they need to be much more aggressive.

They need to make much more noise about their clients and the people that they're working for.

And they need to emphasize to their clients and to the people they work with the importance of voting.

So I really wanted nonprofits to emphasize to the people to support their nonprofit.

That they should vote not who they should vote for, but they should vote.

And they should certainly think about supporting people that have the same value system they have.

Or that are interested in the same values that they're interested in.

And until nonprofits do that, they will not be effective.

- What do you see as the role of nonprofits?

- Well, they have an interest in a particular area, a particular group of people.

There's some mission going on here and lots of cases, they're providing services.

And by the way, they are very good at that.

I'm not fussing it, everything.

They're very good at providing services.

They are not very good at having their voices heard and pushing on elected officials and their clients, and everybody else, the importance of speaking up.

- In 1989, the Fletcher Foundation awarded a three-year grant, totaling $120,000 to the Durham Public Education Network.

What can you tell us about this project?

- Frank, we had gotten interested in this concept of one thing.

So a big part of our interest has been helping organizations get started.

Grants to -- so here's this organization wants to get started.

So we'll make a grant for them to hire a consultant to evaluate their fundraising opportunities, what does this look like?

and then we'll provide the funds for them to hire a development director to do their initial fundraising.

So these grants, early grants have been very important that we've done a lot of them.

And one area did that is in this County Educational Groups.

We did the Wake Education Foundation.

We did Durham.

We've done several of the local education foundations, if I can, and I'm really proud of this list.

We did the Public TV Foundation Grant, [mumbles] Grant, the Museum of Natural Sciences, the North Carolina Aquarium, the Symphony, our ideal there was to encourage these groups to form membership groups.

Friends of the Museum, Friends of the Symphony, Friends of Public Television.

And we invested a lot of time and effort into getting those organizations going.

That's been a successful idea.

- It sounds like by the end of the 1980s, the foundation was expanding beyond supporting the opera and the arts.

- Yes.

- What did this transition mean for the foundation?

- Well, we looked at our resources and our ability to make grants, and believed it was our notion that we're doing the job we need to do in opera, we're doing the job we need to do in the arts, we had the other significant interest was the A.J Fletcher scholars at the Wake Forest Law School.

We invested in that, that was important to us.

And we also invested in a professorship at Wake, the Frank Fletcher Chair of Administrative Law.

So Frank was working with the FCC, and was in government administration.

So we invested in that.

And so, okay so we had done what we thought we should do there, and we're very proud of that.

So we got into, okay, what other things can we do?

So we got into the startup business, we got into the notion that wait a minute, non-profits are five or 6% of the economy.

Taken together, this is a significant business.

And we ought to start talking about good business practices for foundations, better boards, better planning, better, all that sort of stuff.

And I'm not, I want to, I might be a little off on the years but we did the Philanthropy Journal, which Todd Cohen ran force, and the idea there was to bring, they have a news vehicle for the nonprofit community.

And we thought that the way to do that, it's on the internet.

So we moved the Philanthropy Journal to the internet and the Fletcher Foundation ran that for a while.

But all of this is to get... You know, impact is really important.

I mean, you can say you have a thousand non-profits, but what is the impact of the fact that you have a thousand nonprofits?

And the answer is zero, if they don't work together.

So that's all, that's been the whole working on that segment.

That's really been fun.

Then I'll keep going if you want me to, Tom leaves the foundation, the opera companies' gone to the school of the arts, and [laughs] we did a big search nationwide search and hired Barbara Goodman.

That's one of the smartest things we ever did.

And I will take credit for that.

And that was really terrific for the foundation.

A whole new energy and emphasis and fun.

And we moved into a community issue.

So not socially, I don't know, more community-focused social issues.

I guess the best thing to call them.

- Great.

- Barbara was very interested in housing.

You know, I'd gotten interested in SmartStart.

Are there any number of organizations that we supported?

And a part of this again, was, let's make a little noise.

Let's make sure everybody knows the facts, and that we stay in everybody's face about this.

- Let's talk about a project that Barbara Goodman spent a lot of time working on called, Healing Transitions.

- Yeah, good, Barbara was chairman of human services in Wake County.

Maria Spaulding was the director of human services, and that relationship grew.

They became interested in the homeless substance abusers.

Homeless addicts.

They had developed in Downtown, Raleigh a significant homeless population.

Many of them were addicts.

You could go to Wake Med on Saturday night, Friday night, Saturday night, the emergency room is full of that population.

And so, okay, what can we do about this?

And they ran into a project in Kentucky called The Healing Place and Barbara, and Maria and Fred Barber.

Remember I mentioned him, he was general manager of the TV station, got together and held numerous meetings, called on everybody, got great support from the County, the ABC Board, lots of organizations, the foundations, the Fletcher Foundation, and built the Healing Place.

Now the name has changed to Healing Transitions.

But it's been very successful.

That's a long-term program for that's, it's really the Healing Place is for when you, not any other place to go.

You've kind of hit the bottom, and you got to start over again.

They have a very successful program, and it's something that the community is very proud of.

- And we'll leave it there for now, Mr. Goodman.

Thank you so much for sharing your time with us.

- Well, thank you, Shannon.

- And we'll pick back up where we left off in the next of our biographical conversations with Jim Goodman.

For more information on this series, and the "Biographical Conversations" project, you can go to our website.

Thanks for joining us.

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