I think there's a suspicion in the South of people putting on airs. You see it in most successful Southern politicians, but you also see it in someone like Richard Petty, who may be a multimillionaire stock car driver, but he's also beloved because he has a nice self-deprecatory way about him.

He has lectured at over 300 colleges and universities in the United States and abroad and held visiting positions at over a dozen including Fulbright lectureships in Israel and India and the Pitt Professorship of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University. He taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1969 until his retirement in 2000 as William Rand Kenan Jr. from Columbia University in 1971.