Note: The Skinny blog is written by Rick Smith, editor and co-founder of WRAL TechWire and business editor of WRAL.com. We decided to pull from our 12-year-old archives a column about Fred Eshelman in 2009 as he was honored by Wilmington where he built – and later sold – PPD. On Monday, Furiex, which he spun off from PPD, was sold for $1.1 billion in cash. Enjoy the look back at a North Carolina entrepreneur who continues to make headlines as well as links to other Eshelman stories that are included with this post.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. – If you were fortunate enough to receive a Hall of Fame honor and had a chance to describe yourself on a trophy or permanent marker of some sort, what would you write in a few words?

Fred Eshelman, founder of Pharmaceutical Product Development, had a chance last week in PPD’s home port of Wilmington which picked him for its “Walk of Fame.”

The marker has written in stone what he chose:

• Father
• Philanthropist
• Entrepreneur

Eshelman is among the rare leaders who emerged in North Carolina over the past 25 years to help lay the foundation on which the state’s economy is slowly being transformed from low tech to high tech. PPD is a global company (38 countries; 10,000 employees) with major operations in Wilmington and the Triangle and is one of the world’s top life science contract research organizations along side Quintiles as well as several other N.C.-based CROs. Its market cap stands at $2.6 billion despite a hammering over the past 12 months on Wall Street.

Like Dennis Gillings of Quintiles plus Jim Goodnight and John Sall at SAS, Eshelman not only built a world-class company but also has given back millions of dollars as a philanthropist. His $20 million-plus gift to the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Pharmacy, from which he graduated, is named in his honor. He graduated from there in 1972 and went on to found PPD as a one-person consulting firm in 1985 in Maryland. Eshelman moved his fledgling company to Wilmington in 1986. After a decade of rapid growth, Eshelman took PPD public.

The Wilmington honor for Eshelman from the non-profit group Celebrate Wilmington certainly was a well deserved. And it is a highlight of what has been a year of transition as well as challenges for the 60-year-old who remains PPD’s largest single shareholder with more than 7.7 million shares.

With the world’s economy slumping, PPD shares have been hammered, falling from a 52-week high of $43.98 a year ago to under $18 in May. PPDI closed at $21.94 Monday.

The recession also led to layoffs at PPD. Eshelman also canceled plans for a 300-plus employee expansion at the new North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis.

In May as the stock plunge reached bottom, Eshelman also stepped away from his CEO job at PPD and took on the new role as executive chairman. He turned daily control over to David Grange as of July 1.

But Eshelman remains extremely active in PPD, and at the Walk of Fame ceremony he said he wanted to expand the company in Wilmington as well as N.C. and the U.S., according to the Wilmington Star-News.

A photo of the event shows him smiling broadly as his own stone was unveiled on the Walk. Perhaps part of the reason was the select company he joined:

• David Brinkley
• Frank Capra Jr.
• Charlie Daniels
• Althea Gibson
• Roman Gabriel
• Meadowlark Lemon
• Sonny Jurgensen

And another fellow entrepreneur – Jim Goodnight.