A lot of people have told me they wish their grandparents, many of whom had been denied the right to vote, were around to witness what happened Tuesday in voting booths across North Carolina.

I wish the same thing, although I doubt my grandma and granddaddy would've believed it even if they'd seen it.

Mr. Mask would have believed it, though.

A.G. Mask Sr. of Hamlet spent nearly five decades educating children in Richmond County and registering them to vote when they got old enough, so you just know he would've been tickled pink to see how well Barack Obama did in our primary election.

Mask died a couple of weeks before the election at age 93, so he didn't get to play a celebratory jazz tune on his piano after Obama's victory. Heck, I don't even know whether he was an Obama supporter.

Doesn't matter. A man who spent 50 years driving around Hamlet and Rockingham with voter and NAACP registration signs and a card table in his car to place them on, encouraging people to vote for somebody, anybody -- why, I suspect he would've been glad just to see so many people vote. For anybody.

CNN reported turnout among the state's black voters at about 33 percent, nothing to jump up and down with glee about, but a far sight better than the anemic, "y'all need-to-be-whipped" showings in the teens of some recent elections.

Some people delight in pointing out that 60 percent of white voters didn't pull the lever for Obama; I prefer to say that nearly 40 percent of them and 91 percent of blacks did.

You know that old saying "We ain't what we ought to be, and we ain't what we're gonna be, but thank God we ain't what we used to be"?

That's goes for states, too, and a big reason North Carolina is not what it used to be -- a place to split from as soon as you got your high school diploma -- is because of the tireless struggles of people like Mask, irrepressible people whose contributions often go unacknowledged.

The main thing you should know about Mr. Mask was that he was a one-man get-out-the-vote campaign for more than 40 years. He was a community activist who led the battle in Hamlet to get that Imperial Chicken plant razed after 25 people died in a fire there in 1991 -- and he was married to the same woman for 56 years.

(Me? I'd have given him an award just for that.)

He also raised three children who are all decent and successful human beings. His son Dr. Allen Mask Jr. is the health reporter on WRAL-TV.

When I first started as a journalist -- if you call writing unpaid-for editorials in my local newspaper being a journalist -- I wrote something that, believe it or not, made lots of people angry. Of the scores of letters and calls that came in, the only one I remember 30 years later was from Mask. He wasn't a doctor then, but a journalist. He told me in an unimaginably nice way that I was full of hooey and kindly suggested that I read Alex Haley's recently released book, "Roots" to gain some perspective: I did, and I did.

So when he called me last week and asked whether I could write something about his dad -- "this prince of a man," he called him -- I felt it was important that the elder Mask's death not go unremarked upon.

As I wrote this, I received one of those automated e-mail messages from Obama's campaign thanking me for my support.

Don't thank me. He should be thanking people like Mr. Mask.