North Carolina State University Athletics
Who is William Neal Reynolds?
12/2/2010 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
Dec. 2, 2010
Editor's note: Excerpt taken from NC STATE BASKETBALL: 100 YEARS OF INNOVATION by Tim Peeler and Roger Winstead. Copyright © 2010 NC State University. Distributed by the University of North Carolina Press. www.uncpress.unc.edu. The authors will be at the NCSU Bookstores Friday, Dec. 4, from 5-8 p.m. to sign books during the store's annual holiday sale. They will be at Quail Ridge Books, adjacent to the GoPack Store, in the Ridgewood Shopping Center on Wade Avenue Thursday, Dec. 9, for a one-hour discussion with Adam Lucas, author of NORTH CAROLINA BASKETBALL: 100 YEARS OF EXCELLENCE. And they will be signing books prior to the NC State heritage game on Saturday Dec. 11, at Reynolds Coliseum.
The name William Neal Reynolds is etched in the memory of every old-time NC State basketball fan and alumni. But relatively few know that much about the famous industrialist, philanthropist and sportsman whose name adorns “The House That Case Built.”
Reynolds never attended the school, nor was he a big basketball fan. But his name is on the South’s largest on-campus basketball facility because he raised the four children of his late brother, R.J. Reynolds, founder of the world’s largest tobacco company.
R.J. Reynolds died in 1918, leaving four young heirs under the age of 13 and his much-younger wife, the former Mary Katherine Smith. When she died in 1923, the four under-age children went to live with “Uncle Will” and his wife Kate, who had no children.
The oldest of the children, Richard J. “Dick” Reynolds Jr. enrolled at NC State shortly after his mother’s death and graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1927. He became one of the state’s most prominent early aviators. His international airship pilot’s license was signed by Orville Wright.
In 1941, while he was serving on a carrier escort in the Pacific Theater of World War II, the school began to seek funds to finance the grand new arena being built south of the railroad tracks. So they went to his younger sister, Mary Katherine Reynolds Babcock of Greenwich, Conn., who at the time was one of the wealthiest women in the world, thanks to her $30 million inheritance from the family estate.
She and husband Charles agreed to provide $100,000, or one-third of the projected construction cost, to build the arena, as long as her beloved uncle approved of the expenditure. His reply, in a letter to her on May 5, 1941, was “I know of no more worthy cause in the state.”
The Babcocks also provided an additional $52,000 following World War II, to purchase the ice-making equipment needed to make Reynolds Coliseum the South’s first ice rink.
“It is appropriate…that the Coliseum be named for William Neal Reynolds,” wrote William D. Carmichael on the day the arena was dedicated. “No man in North Carolina is more deserving of recognition by the University – and, because of the wide variety of the significant activities that have characterized Mr. Reynolds’ worthwhile life, it is a ‘natural’ that the Coliseum, with its varied usages, spiritual, cultural, scientific, agricultural, industrial and recreational, should be known forever as the William Neal Reynolds Coliseum.”
After Reynolds opened in December 1949, William Neal Reynolds became a major benefactor to NC State’s School of Agriculture. Since 1951, the top agricultural professor at the university has received the William Neal Reynolds Professorship.
Reynolds, a graduate of Trinity College (now Duke University), was an early benefactor to his alma mater. Later, his Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, named in honor of a murdered nephew, provided the funds and lands needed to move Wake Forest College from its original location 10 miles north of Raleigh to Reynolds’ adopted hometown of Winston-Salem.
Reynolds was not much into basketball – his lifelong interest in sports was much more aristocratic. He was a successful harness racing horse breeder and trainer, and a personal friend of golf course designer Donald Ross. Reynolds was instrumental in hiring Ross to design the golf courses at the Forsyth Country Club and Roaring Gap Country Club.
When he died in 1951, he also left the grounds of his Tanglewood Farm to the city of Winston-Salem, which turned it into one of the country’s largest municipal parks.
