When Mac Jordan stepped onto Duke’s campus in 1979, he was one of the few freshmen to come with red dirt flowing through his veins. Growing up in Saxapahaw, a mill village on the Haw River in North Carolina’s Alamance County, he and his siblings spent their days climbing trees in the shady woods and catching salamanders by the creeks that feed the Haw. “The river, the forests, the fields, the farms, the creeks, that’s where I was,” recalls Jordan ’83.