The Grangers were the Courtyards at Southpoint’s first residents, moving to their new home in October of 2020, and living here during the construction of most of our homes. Although they expressed no complaints about that experience, Noelle did recall that it was “really dark out here at night.”

After living in Chapel Hill for over 35 years, they discovered that their four acres of property and empty nest of a house were becoming hard to maintain. Before Chapel Hill, they also lived in Cleveland, Ohio; Newport Beach and Costa Mesa, Calif., and Evanston, Ill.

Noelle was born in Connecticut and grew up in Plymouth, Mass., in a 100-year-old home facing the ocean. Her summers were spent sailing and swimming competitively, and her vacations involved sailing up and down the New England coast. She’s always loved animals and had a long line of them as a child. In her spare time, she had her nose in a book.

Gene was born in Waverly, N.Y. and grew up in Horseheads, N.Y., a small village his mother’s family had lived in since before the Civil War. He was raised as an only child, but at age 70 discovered a brother he had not known.

Noelle and Gene met in graduate school at Case Western Reserve University, where they were lab partners. “I do remember seeing Gene walk across the front of my first biochemistry class in grad school and thinking that’s one guy I will NEVER date,” Noelle confessed.

Gene’s recollection of meeting Noelle, however, is a bit different and more detailed. “She was good looking and had a great sense of humor,” he recalled. “We became good friends and dated after about two years. One evening . . . I asked her what she would say if I asked her to marry me and she said ‘Yes.’ My response was what the hell do I do?” That was over 56 years ago.

The Grangers have two adopted children. Their son Patrick lives in Utah with his Italian wife Lidia and their 17-month-old daughter Alexandra, described by Gene as “precocious,” and by Noelle as “a pistol, much like her dad was at that age.”

Their daughter Cameron was six months old when she became part of the Granger family, arriving from Seoul, Korea. Cameron lives in Durham with her husband Nathan and their three-and-a-half-year-old son Eli, “who brings laughter every time we see him, which is often,” Noelle stated.

“Our children taught us so much about life and how great it is to have children around you,” added Gene. “We shared our love of travel by taking them anywhere we went in the world – Europe, Galapagos, Africa.”

When she was young, Noelle admits she had no idea what she wanted to be when she grew up, but an aptitude test she took in middle school determined she would either be a forest ranger or a gas station attendant. Fast forward to college when she decided to major in zoology, but also considered learning Spanish well enough to work as a translator at the UN. She found science much more interesting and proceeded to get her post-graduate degree in anatomy. She then went on a sabbatical with Gene, where she was introduced to invertebrate endocrinology, which became her research basis for the rest of her career, including time on the UNC faculty.

After graduating from high school, Gene went to Johns Hopkins University, where he majored in biology. He then went to Case Western Reserve and ultimately finished his doctorate in California. In 1972, Gene received a grant from the National Academy of Sciences to go work in Prague with a friend and colleague at the Entomological Institute. After nearly eight months of living at their “second home” in Prague, with Gene trying to decide “what I wanted to be when I grew up,” he applied to medical school, took his MCATS in Geneva, Switzerland and was later accepted at Case Western Reserve. He recalled that “Noelle refused to go back to the ‘mistake on the Lake,’ i.e., Cleveland.” What “clearly saved a marriage” was an invitation to the University of California Irvine, where after four years of medical school they were off to Chicago to begin his residency at Prentice Women’s Hospital at Northwestern, where Noelle was pursuing a post-doctoral appointment.

When Noelle accepted a position at the University of North Carolina, Gene thought “that as long as there was sex in North Carolina, I could make a living and have fun.” He joined the Durham Women’s Clinic founded by Eleanor Easley.

Following retirement, Noelle is pursuing her interest in writing and is currently working on a book about her life titled Growing Up Pilgrim, a collection of stories about growing up in Plymouth.

In addition to reading, writing books, sailing and swimming, Noelle’s hobbies include knitting, travelling and baking.  An ideal day would involve some combination of writing, baking, swimming, getting together with friends and, of course, spending time with her grandson and granddaughter.

And she’s no wimp when it comes to her top three bucket list items. One is skydiving, which she had already done. She said she’d also like to swim with great white sharks off the coast of California (“in a cage of course”) and sail one of the America’s Cup boats in San Diego Harbor.

“My ultimate goal in life was to be rich and do good works,” Gene said. “The first never happened and delivering babies was my good works.” He is currently working to catalog a lifetime of pictures and write the history of both sides of his family. He and Noelle are planning a trip to Scotland and numerous trips to Utah to see their son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter. They also love spending time in Maine, where Noelle gets ideas for, and Gene takes pictures for, her mystery books.

Gene is not certain he has a bucket list, but has “always dreamed of seeing the Himalayas, but of course not climbing.” He would have liked to spend time in Africa with midwives in the villages, but now that time has passed, he looks forward to seeing his grandchildren graduate from high school.

In Gene’s opinion, the best feature of this community is the people, whose backgrounds and interests are myriad. “The Courtyards has given me the opportunity to work with nearly everyone while on the Architectural Review Committee.”

What does Noelle really like about our community? “Hands down, the people,” she stated. She wants the folks at her end of Cherob to know she’s the Community Watch person and the Care Committee person for that area and “I’m here to help.” And, she added, “I love to laugh!”