By Lee Pace
Today on one perimeter edge of Eastgate Shopping Center in Chapel Hill there are separate restaurants serving burritos, gourmet salads and souvlakia, but up until a decade ago there was a full-service gas station there called Eastgate BP.
"Like the song says, 'They paved paradise and put up a parking lot," says Shawn Hocker, a former Tar Heel football player who toiled during the summers pumping gas, scraping windows and doing odd jobs around the business owned and operated by one James Israel Spurling.
Before the internet, social media and text messaging, news spread by chewing the fat.