John Moyer Sink was born on July 15, 1885 in Davidson County, North Carolina. He joined UNCG (then the Woman’s College) payroll as “Superintendent of Laundry” in 1910, with a salary of $20 per week. Sink had previously worked in the laundry business in Lexington, North Carolina. Just a year after being hired, Sink was promoted to Superintendent of the new department of “Laundry, Building and Grounds.” Eventually, the “laundry” was dropped from the department name. Sink served as the Superintendent of the department for 42 years. The John Moyer Sink Building, built in 1954, the year after Sink’s retirement, is named for him, and fittingly, houses the present department of Facilities Operations, the successor of Buildings and Grounds.
When Sink began at the Woman’s College in 1910, there were only 8 buildings on the campus. During his tenure as Superintendent, the Buildings and Grounds Department went from a relatively small cadre to a round-the-clock operation as the College increased to 39 buildings, grew to 131 acres, and added dozens of employees: gardeners, carpenters, painters, plumbers, night watchmen, janitors, etc. Sink built the Buildings and Grounds department into something the University Facilities Operations would recognize today, albeit as a smaller version of itself. Sink not only oversaw this huge growth of the Woman’s College, but was an integral part of the expansion, serving on committees concerned with new buildings and campus design. Sink truly devoted most of his working life to the Woman’s College, and even once listed his only hobby as the “Continued growth of the Woman’s College.” Sink retired on June 30, 1953, just shy of his sixty-eighth birthday. Upon his retirement, he told the Greensboro News that he planned to go into the real estate and insurance business with his son Edwin. Sadly, Sink was to live only three more years, dying on June 27, 1956 from a heart attack.