ECU board elects officers for 1999/2000

Phillip R. Dixon, a Greenville attorney, was elected chairman of the East Carolina University Board of Trustees at the board’s meeting on July 16. Dixon, an ECU graduate, has been a member of the board since 1993 and served two one-year terms as vice chairman. He succeeds H.E. “Gene” Rayfield Jr., a Chapel Hill investor, who served two terms as chairman and remains on the board. Other officers elected at the meeting were Vice Chairman Charles R. Franklin Jr., director of the Albemarle Mental Health Center in Elizabeth City, and Secretary Willie C. Martin, an executive with the DuPont Co. in Wilmington, Del. Franklin, an ECU alumnus, has been a board member since 1995. He had served two terms as board secretary. Martin is a former head of the DuPont facility in Kinston. He was appointed to the ECU board in 1997. In addition to the new officers, three new board members were sworn in at the meeting: Thomas Andrews Bayliss III, mayor of New Bern; Michael Kelly, an Outer Banks restaurateur; and Stephen D. Showfety, president of a real estate development firm in Greensboro.