Few knew the South like George Tindall -- from Mississippi sharecroppers to Texas oil wildcatters, from hellfire preachers to cotton mill lint heads.

Tindall was one of the South's greatest storytellers, except the stories he told were true. You could hardly make up a Louisiana Gov. Huey Long or Texas Gov. W. Lee "Please Pass the Biscuits, Pappy" O'Daniel.

Tindall, a retired history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, died last month at age 85. A memorial service will be held Saturday at Carol Woods Retirement Community in Chapel Hill.

Tindall was regarded, along with the late C. Vann Woodward (a UNC-CH graduate) and John Hope Franklin of Duke University, as part of the holy trinity of 20th-century Southern historians.

"He, Franklin and Vann Woodward were the sources of a renaissance of Southern history that we are still benefiting from," said Ralph Luker, a retired historian living in Atlanta.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Tindall, Woodward and Franklin took Southern history out of the magnolia-scented Lost Cause legends of the Civil War and administered the smelling salts of reality.

"All three insisted that Southern history had to be written in black and white," Luker said. "Prior to their generation, Southern history had been written as a history of white people. That produced such a badly skewed and romantic vision of the South that we can look back on it with amusement and sadness."

Tindall, a native of Greenville, S.C., taught at UNC-Chapel Hill for 32 years before retiring in 1990. He was an elegant gentleman with a bow tie and a wry sense of humor who would sometimes ride his bicycle to class. The historians trained by Tindall are now the pillars of distinguished history departments across the South.

In his personal life, Tindall was ahead of his time. In the 1950s he made sure that dinners were held in hotels where white and black historians could eat together, and he sent his children to the first integrated day-care center in Chapel Hill.

His books are living legacies. His most famous, "The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945," is an 807-page masterpiece published in 1967. It will likely remain the authoritative history of an era that saw the South pull itself out of rural poverty and wrestle with the great questions of race.

Tindall may have been authoritative, but he also had an ear for a good anecdote.

When U.S. Labor Secretary Frances Perkins suggested in 1933 that the South was "an untapped market for shoes," it created a firestorm.

" 'Why, even the mules in the South wear shoes,' North Carolina's Josiah Bailey archly informed the [U.S.] Senate," Tindall wrote. "Not only that, the Jackson Daily News insisted, 'Even Huey Long, when he is at home, wears shoes sometimes.' "

Tindall knew things about the South that escaped most others -- from the Mississippi Chinese to the mulatto communities in the Appalachian mountains.

"In that sense," Luker said, "he really had no peer and no replacement, unfortunately."