The Pleasures of Life Dept.

Midlife Mulligan

One duffer considers pulling his sticks out of storage

By Tom Allen

“So you’re movin’ to the Sandhills? What’s your handicap?”

“Uh, eyesight’s not great.”

A golfer friend raised the question, when a job move brought the family to Moore County in 1998. He joked. I was serious. But perhaps a new job in a new town called for embracing the favorite pastime.  

I played that first 18 holes, 20 years ago, at the Southern Pines Golf Club. A gracious hacker from my new congregation invited me to join a church charity foursome.

“I’ve never played,” I warned.

“We’re awful. You’ll fit right in.”

“Let’s do it.”

One guy secured a set of clubs and provided tees and balls. Another loaned a pair of shoes. Wife, Beverly, recalled her college P.E. elective. “You’ll need a glove.”

“A glove? Why? For what hand?” Novice is an understatement.

My heart rate doubled on the first tee. Had I missed the club selection chapter of Golf for Dummies? At least I grabbed a driver. A par-4 loomed. The ghost of a weekend hacker whispered, “Hit it straight down the middle. Head down, knees bent, eyes on the ball. Grip, squeeze, swing.” I topped my first shot, then sliced a mulligan. On the green in four, or maybe six. Two-putt. Or was it three? I shot 118. Or was it 128? No matter. I had a blast. After 18 holes of whiffs, lost balls and unplayable lies, I was hooked. Maybe captivated is a better word.

My first set of sticks cost $120, at Sam’s Club. On to Walmart for gloves, tees and sleeves of Titleists. I owned plenty of khakis and short-sleeved polos. A church member left a couple of caps in my office cubbie. FootJoys completed the ensemble. At least this duffer looked the part.

My first par was memorable — the sixth hole of then Pinehurst No. 5, a par-3. I topped my tee shot. On in two. Inches from the hole. Tap, plop, sweet. I hollered. Friends shushed me, with something between a smile and a frown. Is exuberance bad etiquette or just not cool?

Over the years, I hit the driving range after work, even took a few lessons. I gradually lowered my score, nearly breaking 100 on a perfect spring day at Mid Pines. If you’ll allow a couple of mulligans and a gimme putt or two, my scorecard would read 95.

I shot a 46 on nine holes at Knollwood, once. Double that (which I’m sure would have happened had we played another round) for 92. A fudge, for sure, but I can dream.

With time, club selection and reading lies came easier. With help, I grasped the lingo. “It’s a bunker, not a sand trap,” a low-handicap friend once chided. I even had a “most incredible shot” story. The 18th hole, old Pinehurst No. 1, a par-3 that concluded the round. My tee shot was short of the green, second shot in the bunker and a really bad lie. I pulled out my sand wedge, a Christmas gift from Beverly (that cost more than my set of clubs). A perfect out, and into the hole. I yelled. My buddies yelled. Fist pumps and high fives. Yes, sweet.

My worst day? The summer of 2002, Pinehurst No. 6. I was playing the best ever. My friend trustingly pulled forward, anticipating another hit down the middle of the fairway. I shanked a shot off the sixth tee, popped my cart buddy above his left eye. Eight stitches and he was fine. Me? Sick the rest of the day. Just pull the pin and let me crawl into the hole.

The most fun round? When I turned 50. Three buddies and I played what was then National Golf Club. We were probably the only ones on the rain-drenched course. Talk about mulligans. By the 18th hole, we were putting with our drivers. Soaked and humbled, we laughed and made memories.

I haven’t played in five years, but three Pinehurst U.S. Opens, a trip to the Masters, up close with Tiger, Phil, Fred Couples and Davis Love III remain highlights. My clubs rest in a storage unit, next to my grandmother’s mahogany four-poster bed. Life intervenes — caring for parents at the end of their lives, raising two daughters, seeing them off to college, walking one down the aisle. Between work and marriage, family and friendships, golf’s allure faded. But who knows? Maybe I’ll take another swing this year, when I turn 60.

Because sometimes, on that perfect fall day, when the temps are cool and the fairways green, a voice whispers through the towering pines, “Head down, knees bent, eyes on the ball.” I grip my 3-wood, squeeze and swing. Straight down the middle. On in two. Tap, plop. Sweet. Very sweet.  PS

Tom Allen is minister of education at First Baptist Church, Southern Pines.

Good Natured

The Great Pumpkin Seed

By Karen Frye

October is the month for the pumpkin harvest in the Sandhills, but by late summer, you begin to find them in the farmers markets and roadside stands. Some are ornamental pumpkins used to decorate for the fall season, and some are edible pumpkins for pies, breads and seeds. Pumpkin is a member of the squash family and while the flesh has many health benefits, the seeds are the real powerhouse of nutrients.

Pumpkin seeds, also known as “pepitas,” are flat, dark green and football shaped. They have a chewy texture, and a subtle, sweet, nutty flavor. The use of the seeds for the nutritional value and medicinal benefits dates back to the Native Americans. A few of the nutritional highlights are the minerals magnesium, iron, copper, manganese and zinc. The seeds are also rich in vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, protein, good fats and phytosterols, particularly beta-sitosterol.

Natural medicine has used pumpkin seeds in the treatment of prostate conditions. Zinc and beta-sistosterol are important nutrients that can help reduce BPH (benign prostatic hyperplasia). Beta-sistosterol is also highly beneficial in reducing cholesterol. Other ailments that improve with eating the seeds are nausea, motion sickness and parasites.

If you haven’t explored adding these nutritious seeds to your diet, now is the time. To ensure your seeds are as fresh as possible (and don’t contain any moisture), store them in an airtight container in the refrigerator. It’s best to eat them within two months but they will be OK for up to six. Always check for any musky smell, an indication the seeds have gone rancid. Of course, the freshest seeds are right out of the pumpkin. Clean the pumpkin flesh off the seeds, then let them dry by spreading them out for a few days exposed to the air.

The seeds are delicious raw or soaked overnight in a bit of water. One-third cup of seeds contains 90 calories, 4 grams of fat, 4 grams of protein, and 11 grams of carbohydrates. Roasting the seeds is easy and brings more depth of flavor, especially if you are using them in a salad or to top baked bread.

To roast them, spread the seeds on a baking sheet or cast iron skillet. Drizzle a little oil over them if you’d like. Bake in a 300-degree oven for about 30 minutes till golden brown. Shake the pan often to prevent burning. For spicy pumpkin seeds, add 1 teaspoon of ground cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon of ground cloves and 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg to 3 cups of seeds. If you want them salty, add a little Celtic salt. If you want a little zing, add a pinch of cayenne pepper. Follow the baking instructions.

Other pumpkin seed ideas:

Add to sautéed carrots, broccoli and onions.

Sprinkle liberally over a salad for extra crunch.

Add crushed seeds to hot cereal.

Add to your meat or veggie burger for a delicious, nutritious treat.

Make a new habit of munching on pumpkin seeds instead of chips or pretzels. They are easy travel companions, too. Delicious, nutritious and good for the whole family, even your pets.  PS

Karen Frye is the owner and founder of Nature’s Own and teaches yoga at the Bikram Yoga Studio.

Simple Life

Ancient Roads

Wherever in the world they happen to be, all of them lead home

By Jim Dodson

Over a year ago I began traveling the route of the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road, said to be the most traveled road of Colonial America, the frontier highway that brought a quarter of a million
European immigrants to the Southern wilderness during the first two-thirds of the 18th century.

From 1700 to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, successive waves of German, Scotch-Irish, English, Welsh and Swiss immigrants — many of them refugees fleeing their war-ravaged homelands — found their way to the Southern backcountry following an ancient trading path used by Native American tribes for millennia.

The Great Road, as I prefer to call it, stretched from Philadelphia’s Market Street to Augusta, Georgia, traversing the western portions of half a dozen colonies before crossing the Savannah River in Georgia.

Both wings of my family (and quite possibly yours) came down it — my father’s English and Scottish forebears who settled around Mebane and Hillsborough in the mid-1700s followed by my mother’s German ancestors, who hopped off the road in Hagerstown and migrated into the hills of what would later become West Virginia.

In one way or another, much of my life has been spent traveling major sections of this old road from the Carolinas to western Pennsylvania, for either work or pleasure or when I left my native South for two decades to live on the coast of Maine.

The route of the original road is buried beneath modern highways, towns and cities, suburbs and shopping centers, but it is still with us — a pathway fully determined by extensive research by scholars, state archivists, local historians and organizations that specialize in finding historic lost roads. As one leading old road researcher put it bluntly to me, “The Great Wagon Road is the granddaddy of America’s lost roads — the reason we’re all here.” 

I first heard about it on a winter day in 1966 when my father took my brother, Richard, and me to shoot mistletoe out of the oak forest that grew around our grandmother’s long abandoned home place off Buckhorn Road near Chapel Hill. On the way home, he showed us the site of his great-grandfather’s gristmill and furniture shop where I-40/85 now crosses the historic Haw River. That man’s name was George Washington Tate. A street in Greensboro is named for this rural polymath who helped establish Methodist churches toward the foothills and made such beautiful cabinetry. Surviving pieces are displayed in important decorative art museums across the South.

From that day forward, I’ll admit, I was quietly obsessed with the Great Road, germinating a plan to someday travel the road of my ancestors just to see what they had seen of early America’s landscape.

It only took me a half-century to finally get around to making the journey.

My original thought — silly me — was to drive the full 800-plus miles of the Great Road over several unhurried weeks beginning in late summer of 2017, stopping to investigate the historic towns and villages along the way, checking out the important battlefields and burying grounds, equal parts listening tour and journalistic inquiry, learning whatever I could about the most important road of early America. After years of preparation — reading everything from colonial histories to the biographies of Founding Fathers, academic monographs to personal journals, and building a network of experts and contacts along the way — my larger hope was to meet people for whom the Great Road is a living passion and see how the culture of the Great Road had shaped their lives — and mine.

In theory, it was a nice approach. With the exception of one problem.

By my fifth day out, I’d only reached Amish country east of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, just 60 or so miles from the start of my journey in Philadelphia, when I realized something. There was so much unique history and culture arrayed along this pioneer pathway — to say nothing of colorful characters, great local food, quirky hometown events and tacky roadside attractions that appealed to my inner coonskin-capped kid — there was simply no way three weeks could possibly do the old road justice.

No less than seven American presidents, after all, were either born on or near the Great Road and at least a dozen key military engagements from our country’s two primary wars happened on it — Kings Mountain and Guilford Courthouse during the American Revolution, Antietam and Gettysburg during the Civil War.

After 10 days out in my own vintage “wagon” — a 1996 Buick Roadmaster Grand Estate, the last true station wagon built by Detroit — I rolled home with a full notebook and a revised plan to travel and research the road in segments of three or four days at a time.

If this realistic approach did little to benefit my (neglected) garden, the people I met and stories I heard along the way were nothing shy of eye-opening and even healing at a moment when America at large was bitterly divided over the presidency of Donald J. Trump. For what it’s worth, the Great Wagon Road bisected the heart of Trump Country from Pennsylvania to Georgia.

As this October dawns, I’ve clocked more than 1,200 miles researching the past and present of this great American road and plan to settle in to write my interaction with it over the coming winter months. I just hope I can keep the book under 900 or so pages.

Ironically, this has been a year of dramatic travels along other notable historic and ancient pathways.

In late June, my son Jack married a fellow journalist and beautiful Palestinian gal named Henriette that he met during graduate school at Columbia University. Their wedding was a charming five-day affair in Old Jaffa on the coast of Israel. On the morning of the wedding at an ancient church where legend held that St. Peter received the vision to take Christianity to the wider world, I was tasked with calling upon the Chacar family’s 84-year-old patriarch to ask permission for my son to marry his granddaughter.

Tennuce Chacar smiled, grasped my hands and kissed my cheeks. We shared a glass of very fine whiskey over the matter. The party lasted way after midnight.

On our last day in the Middle East, we followed an Israeli archeologist through the crowded streets of old Jerusalem, following the path Christ took, carrying the cross. We also stood at the Wailing Wall and walked the outer walls of the most besieged and contested city in human history. Soldiers and pilgrims were everywhere, armed, respectively, with Uzis and icons. Between us, I felt little in the way of peace in the old city of Jerusalem, a place that seems captive to blood and tears.

Finally, as summer ended, my wife and I joined 60 souls from our Episcopal church for an 80-mile pilgrimage along an ancient road called the Via Francigena, the medieval pathway that connected Canterbury to Rome.

For a week we trekked through the glorious Tuscan countryside, through breathtaking hills of ripening vineyards and olive orchards, through dense forests and sleepy villages, exploring hill towns and ancient abbeys, sharing good wine and great pasta, thunderstorms and theology, sore feet and simple meals and a few unexpected thin moments between earth and sky.

For this sore-footed pilgrim, exploring walled Lucca (where we honeymooned 17 years ago) and Siena with its proud family flags and bustling central piazza was a deeply rewarding experiences. Farther along the pilgrim’s path in teeming Roma, I loved seeing the statue of my hero Marcus Aurelius and poking around the ruins of the Pantheon and Cicero’s Forum, places I’ve hungered to see since I was a knee-high to toga.

But on the opposite end of town, quite unexpectedly, I found myself spiritually suffocated by the over-the-top art and power of Vatican City with its soaring heights and monumental treasures, a gilded city on a hill full of tourists, pilgrims, polizia and pickpockets. Thus, I skipped the Sistine Chapel altogether in favor of a quiet compline service at a Greek Orthodox church on a neighboring hill.

In the nick of time, the message seemed to be that it was high time to end my year of traveling ancient roads and turn for home — arriving just as a historic hurricane swept ashore to wreak death and devastation on the Old North State and finish off whatever was left of my unfinished garden.

Looking back, what a curious and unforgettable year it has been. The beauty of any road, ancient or otherwise, is that it takes you somewhere you’ve never been and provides a useful new perspective.

Old Roads tell fascinating stories, I’ve been reminded anew.

But being home for a quiet October is a story I never get weary of hearing.   PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Coach

Coach

Remembering a man who made us better

By Bill Fields

John Wiley Williams, “Coach” to most, was a motion offense of a man, always on the move, as much shark as bulldog, although he certainly got the latter nickname for good reason. If he wasn’t jogging — at least 10 miles a day for a year when he was in his 40s, just to prove he could do it — he was cycling. If he wasn’t teaching someone the hook slide, he was demonstrating how to pole vault.

“It is better to wear out,” said one of the many slogans posted in Williams’ field house office at Pinecrest High School, “than to rust out.”

Coach, who seemed born with a whistle around his neck and a large ring of keys on his belt that jangled with every jumping jack, had bow legs and an odd gait. But few knew just how improbable it was that he could run and jump and make a drag bunt look like ballet.

Serving stateside in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, Williams was badly injured when a load of artillery shells fell on his legs. He spent a year in a Michigan hospital, had four knee operations and was informed by doctors upon his discharge from the service that he would never walk without crutches.

“They told Dad, ‘You’re never going to walk right again,’” says Dr. John Wiley Williams Jr., the oldest of John and Patricia Williams’ three sons. “But through rehab and work, he was able to recover.”

Star athletes who revered Williams, even as he ordered wind sprint upon wind sprint as the epilogue to a tough practice, didn’t know. Slacker boys in a Pinecrest physical education class, who would rather have been sneaking a cigarette than trailing Coach on a run through the woods to Midland Road and back, didn’t know. They didn’t know either — he didn’t know, until years after he boxed in the Golden Gloves and played high school football — he was born with one kidney.

“The only substitute for hard work is a miracle,” was another of Williams’ favorite aphorisms, and he came down squarely on the side of perspiration.

Williams was a fixture in the Sandhills for three decades — teacher, coach and athletic director — from his arrival in the summer of 1960 until his death at age 59 in a car-train accident the day before Thanksgiving in 1990.

“I don’t know how you judge things like this, but to me he was the most valuable citizen that we had in the county bar none,” says retired pediatrician Dr. David Bruton, 83, who became a close friend of Williams after opening his Southern Pines medical practice in 1966. “He was an extraordinary person, no doubt about that, devoted almost full time to others.”

Attending his 40th Pinecrest reunion two years ago, John Jr. encountered Tommy Grove, a fellow member of the Class of ’76 who had starred on the Patriot football and baseball teams. “Anyone who played for Dad, the typical response was how tough he was. They were bound by memories of how hard he worked them, that they survived Coach Williams,” John Jr. says. “Tommy came up and said, ‘I think of you as a brother, because your dad was like my father.’”

Plenty of Southern Pines residents saw Williams lining an athletic field, stripes as straight as the man pushing the chalk spreader. It was a smaller cadre of folks who knew he often lined up temporary shelter for young people who needed it.

“As a kid I had many, many roommates,” says Mike Williams, the middle son. “They might have an alcoholic parent, they might be getting beat up — they became my brother. It wasn’t an everyday occurrence, but when the need arose, my parents opened their home to anyone.”

And not just their home, as Joe Robinson, Pinecrest Class of ’71, discovered when he returned to the Sandhills to teach and coach after graduating from N.C. State.

“I was renting a little efficiency at the Pinehurst Motel down on the highway,” says Robinson. “Two beds and a kitchenette. One night about 10 o’clock, a kid knocked on the door and said, ‘Coach Williams told me I could stay with you for a little while.’ A ‘little while’ turned out to be three months. Everybody thought he was a hard man, but in a lot of ways he really wasn’t.”

He was, in Bruton’s memory, a “consummate con man” that swept up other members of the community to lend a helping hand, whether for new bleachers at the ball field or a new beginning for boy who deserved it.

“He would farm out the kids to us and other families if he got more than he could handle,” Bruton says. “He’d tell you an awful story that you had to get up the money to take care of it. He sent a lot of kids to school, to camp, whose parents couldn’t afford it. It was probably the best money I’ve ever spent. He was an unusual fellow — he didn’t seem to care much about John Williams, but he sure cared about others.”

Coach was born on Jan. 29, 1931, in Lenoir County, the middle child of Walter Spencer Williams, a successful Kinston businessman, and Marjorie Earnhardt Williams. Marjorie died shortly after giving birth to her third child. Less than a month later Walter took Williams, not yet 2 years old, and his two sisters (Lib and Billie) across the state to Cabarrus County to be raised by Marjorie’s parents, John and Willie Irene Earnhardt, Lutheran farmers (and relatives of future stock-car legend Dale Earnhardt) trying to eke out an existence in hard times.

Walter Williams remarried quickly, to a friend of Marjorie’s, and had little contact with his three children. His son — born Jackie Arnie but renamed John Wiley by his grandparents when he was baptized — grew up loved but with few material possessions. “John slept in a crib until he was 6 years old,” Patricia Williams wrote in an unpublished memoir. “He told me he remembered his feet sticking out at the end of the crib before he got a real bed.”

By the time he was sleeping in that bed, Williams was already contributing to the family effort, “Pop” Earnhardt having fashioned a diminutive plow so his grandson could work the fields. “He’d be at the field at the crack of dawn from the time he was 5 or 6,” says John Jr., “and once he was in high school he worked on a loading platform, throwing heavy things on the train. That’s how he got strong, from working.”

At Mount Pleasant High School, Williams was a talented athlete but struggled in the classroom because reading was difficult. His wife, a longtime elementary school teacher, believes it was because he was dyslexic. High school might have been a miserable experience for Williams if not for the guiding hand of Mount Pleasant teacher/coach Luther Adams. Raised in an orphanage, Adams saw potential in the gritty student who, Patricia wrote, “had the heart and desire to excel in sports” but was growing up in a household whose priority was its crops.

Adams moved to Southern Pines as school superintendent in 1959. A year later, when a larger student body gave Adams the authority to expand the faculty, he hired the young man for whom he had been an instrumental mentor a decade earlier. After graduating from Atlantic Christian College, Williams had been at Pineland College in Sampson County for two years when he was hired as physical education teacher at East Southern Pines Elementary, becoming an assistant coach for several Blue Knight teams as well. Three years later he established a track and field team, the first in Moore County, and began to become an integral part of the town using sports to build community bonds.

“John saw the difference [Adams] made in his life,” Patricia wrote, “and he set out to pattern his life’s work after his role model. He wanted to coach, to help young people, to do special things for poor people, and to be a good father and husband. He did all that and more.”

A religious man who carried a Bible and could quote it, Williams wasn’t a saint. He was well known to local law enforcement for a habit of driving too fast. It was in his blood — after all, he was a cousin of the racing Earnhardts of stock car legend.

“He couldn’t not speed,” says Gary Barbee, Pinecrest Class of ’75, a four-year pitcher on Williams’ baseball squad. “Sometimes the police would let him go, but still he got a lot of tickets. His wife gave him a spool of thread to screw into the floorboard below the gas pedal on his old Studebaker so it wouldn’t go above 55 miles an hour. That was the only way to keep him from getting any more tickets and having their insurance go up any higher.”

“Might be true,” Mike Williams says. “He did not like to go slow. If we were going to the beach with a group of folks in several cars and we stopped to have a soda, it was very rare that somebody didn’t ask him to slow down because they couldn’t keep up.”

Driving to away track meets in Southern Pines’ aging and slow activity bus, the “Blue Goose,” Williams would navigate winding back roads to shave time and beat other schools to the venue. “Getting there first was an event to him,” Mike says. “That was pretty competitive.”

Keeping up with Williams when he wasn’t behind the wheel was difficult enough. As a young football coach, he liked to have players tackle him rather than dummy runners — breaking four watches in one season. “He lived up to his ‘Bulldog’ nickname fighting for rebounds or diving for a loose ball in a pickup basketball game,” says Robinson.

Mike Williams remembers trips when he and his older brother would be in the back seat, squabbling the way siblings do. “Mom would have had enough,” Mike says, “and he would just reach around with his right arm and the next thing you know we’re elevated off the seat while he continued to drive down the road. He was very calm as he asked if we were ready to settle our differences.”

Coach would roughhouse with his baseball players and always came out on top. “We’d jump on him, two or three of us, trying to wrestle him to the ground and you just couldn’t hold him,” Barbee says. “He’d bite, kick, whatever it took. Someone was adjusting our old pitching machine once. He was in the batter’s box and a ball hit him in the back of the head. It would have knocked you or me out. He just rubbed his head a little bit and kept going. He was a tough cookie, man.”

And he sought to make his players tough. Barbee’s lungs still burn recalling “Burma Road,” a practice drill. “You’d run to first and back, then to first and second and back, then to first, second and third and back. Finally, to first, second, third and home. Then the next time, you did each sprint twice. And after every game, home or away, win or lose, we ran 10-to-15 100-yard wind sprints. Opposing teams would say, ‘Y’all, we need to cut the lights off.’ It didn’t matter. We ran. We were in shape.”

Williams’ own running — he built up his muscles with leg lifts, but his limbs still ached constantly — became part of Coach lore. As a sentence for a speeding violation, a judge in Southern Pines offered an option of paying a fine or walking to Howard Johnson’s on U.S. 1 in Aberdeen, round trip of about 4 miles. That was easy pickings for Coach, who would run there and back in less time than it took to watch an episode of The Andy Griffith Show.

The feat that caused the most stir was a hot and humid day in the mid-1970s when Williams ran home to Southern Pines from Raeford, the best part of marathon distance. Mike watered him down with a garden hose in the backyard while his wife phoned David Bruton to ask him what she should do for her exhausted husband. “Quick,” Bruton said, laughing, “go grab him before he runs to Raleigh.”

One of the best runners to graduate from Pinecrest, Jef Moody, a middle-distance star who was poised to make the 1980 U.S. Olympic team before the Moscow boycott, spent more than a year of Saturday mornings as an eighth-grader logging miles with Coach. The experience normalized what had been a jarring move from Philadelphia to a still-segregated South as an African-American fifth-grader in the spring of 1968.

“He asked me if I wanted to come run with him on Saturdays at Mid Pines,” says Moody, 61, who now coaches the men’s and women’s track and cross country teams at Sandhills Community College. “We’d run the 18 holes, just the two of us, then I’d run home. It really meant a lot to me. I never had him for a P.E. teacher or a track coach, but he was my buddy.”

When Robinson was back in his hometown as fledgling teacher and coach, Williams gave him some advice about his new students. “You’ve got to love every one of them,” Coach told him.

Williams’ support for his athletes, present and past, was resolute.

Coach finagled funds from Bruton and other townspeople so he could buy an early whirlpool bath — which looked like a metal washtub with a small boat propeller — so young pitchers could soak their throwing arms. “He could con me and others out of whatever he needed for his sports activities,” Bruton says. “That tub cost more than it was worth, of course. But he was very proud.”

Once I pulled a back muscle at a Little League practice that Coach was overseeing.

“We’ll go get you in the tub,” he said, “and get some Cream of Jesus on it.”

At least that’s what it sounded like he said. Sometimes Coach’s sentences, voiced in his husky Tar Heel accent, were like a hiking trail that didn’t quite make it to the summit. When we got to the high school field house, I noticed an industrial-size container of orange goo.

He had been talking about Cramergesic, a therapeutic muscle balm that made Vick’s vapor rub seem as mild as a peppermint. But it helped my back.

That was the side of Coach who would gently catch a wasp between thumb and index finger and deposit the insect out a car window instead of swatting it dead, perhaps the day after he’d set his watch back twice so a jayvee football practice would finish at “six bells” an hour after weary players had heard a half-dozen chimes waft to Memorial Field from the Episcopal church.

“I was always challenged getting rides,” says Tim Maples, a senior star pitcher on Williams’ 1979 state championship Pinecrest baseball squad. “It seemed that I was always spending time with him. ‘Where you going to be, Maples? I’ll pick you up.’ I’d be at home, or at the Elks Club pool, and he’d pick me up in the bus, and he’d take me home in the bus after practice.”

Coach — the generous spirit and the drill sergeant both — stuck with people long after they’d left his class or his gridiron. His boys carried the connection and attitudes to college campuses, pro ball and war.

“He walked the walk,” says Maples. “He’d talk a lot of times about intestinal fortitude, heart, 110 percent. It was like he had invented those terms.”

Those who became educators themselves brought Coach’s ethos to their lives. “The one big thing he did was mentor others to become leaders and grow community involvement,” says youngest son Mark Williams. “For me, it is this handing down of a sense of responsibility, ethics, knowledge, sportsmanship and values that continues and is so powerful.”

One of Williams’ disciples, Bill Strickland, took his lessons to the Vietnam War, where he was terribly injured. “He told me he could remember waking up, after several days, having gone through surgeries,” says Mike Williams. “He was in a bed, flipped upside down so he couldn’t move. He said, ‘Mike, I woke up and my doctor was laying underneath.’ He said, ‘Soldier, you should be dead. You should not be here. What force has kept you alive?’ And Billy said, ‘Coach Williams.’”

By the fall semester of 1990, Williams had passed on his coaching duties to others and was teaching and serving as athletic director at Pinecrest. On Nov. 21, the day before Thanksgiving, he had an early morning dental cleaning appointment, then ran an errand to McDonald Brothers Inc., a building and lumber supply company north of Southern Pines.

John and Patricia, who had moved to Whispering Pines, were looking forward to a family gathering — sons, daughters-in-law and grandchildren. He went to the store to buy chains to complete a swing set he was building for the youngest members of the family. As he drove across a railroad crossing, his sedan was hit on the passenger side by an Amtrak passenger train, the Silver Star, which had just left Southern Pines on its journey from Miami to New York.

“I don’t think anybody knows exactly what happened,” says John Jr. “My theory is that they had a new puppy and he had that new puppy with him. I bet either the puppy distracted him or it got down into the footwell where the pedals are, and he couldn’t make things work.”

The long holiday weekend was transformed into a period of grieving across the Sandhills. “It was such a shock,” says Nat Carter, 78, Williams’ longtime teaching and coaching colleague in Moore County. “It was hard to figure what happened with the train. We lost a great one when we lost him. You could learn a lot just watching Coach John and being in his presence.”

Pinecrest sports teams compete at the John W. Williams Athletic Complex, facilities that honor his longtime contributions. Those who knew Coach are in middle age or beyond, their memories aging but vivid.

“We always said the Lord’s Prayer before a game,” Maples says, remembering his Pinecrest baseball days. “We put in our hands, in the dugout. Coach’s hand was always down first, and I always tried to get my hand on top of his.”

When the Patriots were at bat, Williams jogged to the third base box. Everybody took the first pitch, sometimes two. Tug of the cap, touch of the face, swipe of the chest, rub of the arm. You didn’t want to be the player who blew a sign.

“I missed a suicide squeeze at Laurinburg and about killed a guy,” Barbee says. “He was running on the pitch and I took a cut. Coach would get right in your face and just chew you out. He wouldn’t put up with anything. But we all trusted him and believed in him.”

The feeling was mutual.  PS

Georgie Porgie, Oh My!

Georgie Porgie, Oh My!

The sometimes ghoulish roots of innocent nursery rhymes

By Michael Smith     Illustration by Romey Petite

Nursery rhymes are forever. Even the scary ones. They stick in your brain like bubble gum on hot pavement. Here’s proof: “ . . . and dried up all the rain. And the itsy bitsy spider went up the spout again.” Who among us doesn’t remember the opening lines?

Many nursery rhymes are played out in singsong fashion. With some, like Patty Cake, there is physical interaction while you both belt out the lyrics. Now that’s fun. But there’s more to it than fun. Nursery rhymes facilitate the development of a bond between Mom and baby or between siblings or friends. Fun and interaction work their magic, so that the next time Mom says, “Want to play patty cake?” Zap, your hands go up, palms out, ready to play. Your sense of competence subtly notches upward.

According to child development experts, nursery rhymes, especially those with music, significantly aid a child’s mental development and spatial reasoning. On NBC’s Today show, Seth Lerer, Dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of California-San Diego, said nursery rhymes both foster emotional connections and cultivate language ability.

So, the sweet words and lulling lyrics of today’s nursery rhymes cement relationships. Time was, though, that nursery rhyme words were not so sweet and nursery rhymes functioned more as transmitters of historical events. They were full of political satire, ribald jokes, religious disputes, violence and sexual innuendos — definitely not for young and innocent ears, not according to today’s standards.

So bad were they that British Victorians founded an association to clean the things up. As late as 1941 the British Society for Nursery Rhyme Reform was still culling X-rated content, excising accounts of animal torment, descriptions of violent human deaths — decapitations, hangings and the like, even cannibalism. Tales for the babies? Not.

Let’s take a closer look at several long-since sanitized nursery rhymes. The majority derive from England. Theories about their origins are numerous and varied, and are difficult, sometimes even impossible, to substantiate. Most have gone through a number of revisions over the years. All the same, the ghouls and goblins might find them interesting.

London Bridge Is Falling Down is as good a place as any to start. One account of its origin has it that a bridge would collapse unless a human sacrifice, particularly a child, was entombed within it. The child would be bricked into the bridge foundation while alive and slowly die from lack of food and water. Lore is that the child would eternally watch over the structure and ensure its stability.

Substantiation, complete with references, of such grisly immurement practices can be found in A Walled-Up Wife: A Casebook: “In 1615, Count Anthony Günter of Oldenburg, visiting a dyke under construction, is said to have found the workmen about to bury a child beneath it. He rescued the child and reprimanded the mother, who had sold it for the purpose.” Another passage suggests that, “When the castle of Liebenstein in Thuringia was being built, a child was purchased from the mother and walled in.” And so on. So much for the hod carriers union.

Children play a game that may have derived from that very goriness. Two children face each other and hold hands forming an arch. As other children run beneath, the arch is slowly lowered till one is “selected” while all chant “London bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down . . .” Macabre little game there.

Then there is Ring Around the Rosie. As with most, there are several claims regarding this nursery rhyme’s origin. One refers to the 1665 Great Plague of London. The “rosie” was a rash that appeared on those who contracted the plague. It gave off such a stench that the afflicted would attempt to suppress it with a pocket full of posies.

“Ashes! Ashes! We all fall down!” supposedly reflects the fear that all would eventually get, and die from, the plague. (Indeed, about 15 percent of the country did just that.) The “ashes” were the cremated remains of the deceased.

The daughter of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon, Mary I, is thought to be the subject of Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary after Henry got big on Protestantism and established the Anglican Church when the Catholic Church repeatedly denied him the right to a divorce. But Mary wasn’t having any of that business. She was hardcore Catholic and after she took the reins, though unsuccessful, she was quite contrary about returning the country to Catholicism.

Her reign was a scant five years, yet, during that time her garden grew — her “garden” being graveyards populated by Protestant martyrs. Not for nothing did they call her “Bloody Mary.”

Mary was a busy beaver. She instituted a turn-or-burn policy and during her brief reign, had over 280 religious dissenters burned at the stake. To assist those having trouble deciding to convert, she employed little gadgets like “silver bells,” actually bone-crushing thumbscrews. She also was fond of “cockleshells,” torture devices that were attached to males’ nether reaches.

Fortunately for an English population quite satisfied with their Anglican Church, Mary’s stint as the first Catholic woman on the throne of England was limited. Weakened possibly from uterine cancer, she is thought to have died at the age of 42 from the flu.

One of the oldest nursery rhymes is Three Blind Mice. The earliest version, along with music, was published in 1609. (Incidentally, that was the year Thomas Thorpe published sonnets written by a dude dubbed the Bard of Avon. Hint: nothing to do with cosmetics.) Moving right along, Three Blind Mice, as we know it, is also said to be grounded in Bloody Mary’s reign. The three mice are thought to be two bishops and the Archbishop of Canterbury, who plotted to remove Mary from the throne. Big mistake. Mary uncovered the scheme and had each of them burned at the stake. You don’t mess with Mary.

Our final nursery rhyme is Georgie Porgie, the origin of which actually has been substantiated through court documents and diaries. Remember Georgie Porgie? “Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie; Kissed the girls and made them cry; When the boys came out to play; Georgie Porgie ran away.”

Certainly sounds innocent enough for tender ears. In fact, George was none other than George Villiers, bisexual nobleman and lover of King James I. George’s close friendship paid off nobly, too, when the King publicly proclaimed his love for George and named 31-year-old George Villiers the Duke of Buckingham.

George was equally fond of the ladies and had affairs with daughters and even the wives of powerful Englishmen. Ladies were warned against being alone with George, kind of an early Harvey Weinstein. Understandably, George’s randy nature and activities generated a certain amount of strain, but his relationship with King James also generated a certain amount of immunity.

And so it was that today’s delicate expurgated nursery rhymes evolved from backgrounds well suited to Poe or perhaps Steven King or maybe the Brothers Grimm.

“Itsy bitsy spider went up the water spout. Down came the rain and washed the spider out. Out came the sun . . . ” PS

Michael Smith lives in Talamore, Southern Pines, with his wife, Judee. They moved here in 2017 and wish they had moved here years earlier.

True South

Closet Conundrums

When it’s time for the big switch

By Susan S. Kelly

Now approacheth the dreaded biannual chore, at least for the females of the species: The Closet Changeover.

The way I understand it, and if the pictures in People magazine can be believed, people in LA never have to do this. Los Angeles is seasonless. Celebrities: They’re not just like us, actually, as People would have you believe.

And for Wisconsinites, Vermonters, Floridians and even some Texans, whatever seasonal change they have is so short that barely a hanger or a shelf needs disturbing. Ten-month winters, two-month summers, and vice-versa. But for those of us who live with real seasons, it’s time to get to it.

Now, normal people, sane people, probably schedule this task; take a Saturday and tackle it all at once, chop-chop. Then there are the folks who wake up one chilly morning and say, “Where is that sweater?” And tackle it all at once. And then there’s me — and I suspect a lot of others — who begin with good intentions and get sidetracked not by the internet, but by decisions, so that the task takes six weeks, on and off. You can’t tell, but I do have a system.

Throw everything on the floor and bed. (Hope it’s a king-size.) First, separate into categories of Too Tight, Too Short, Too Bare, and Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should. Likely, there will be a tall pile of Not Sures. And, like that old saw that warns if you have to ask the price of something, you can’t afford it, it follows that if you have to take a selfie wearing the garment in question and send it to your sisters and ask if you should keep it, the answer is probably no.

(Speaking of not affording, now’s a good time to get out the Goof Off and scrub away the tell-tale Marshalls and TJ Maxx stickers on your shoes.)

During this process, you’ll experience acute apparel anxiety. One of my sisters has said, “I’m living in separates hell.” (Remember that term, “separates”?) To escape, she’s decided to convert nearly her entire “’drobe,” as she calls her wardrobe, to dresses, and tech clothes. The other sister is such a shopper that she began putting clothes on layaway when she was in seventh grade. (Remember that term, “layaway”?) I ask you, what kind of 12-year-old knows what layaway is? A born consummate clotheshorse, that’s who, and that sister hangs tags on her clothes to remind herself what event she last wore it to — a dinner, a cookout, a meeting. I kid you not. She’s the sister who coined two of my favorite ’drobe terms: The Punishment Dress (or shirt, or whatever) that you’re sorry you bought but you have to wear to punish yourself for buying it. And The Whistle Dress, for the dress that’s so easy, and is ideal for so many situations, that you just whistle and it jumps out of the closet. Often, it must be admitted, Whistle Dresses don’t touch your body anywhere but the shoulders.

“Is this out?” I text the clotheshorse sibling, attaching a picture. “Houndstooth is never out. Neither is leopard print,” she messages back. OK, that’s settled. Onward.

Here are the clothes you’ve simply turned against, have developed an inexplicable and unreasonable hatred toward. Pitch. Here are the ones to downgrade, meaning that you “saved” it for in-law dinners, a charity speaking event, etc., but this year, it gets demoted to church. In-laws judge in-style. God does not.

I know it looks great on you, but if it itched last year, it’s going to itch this year. Pitch.

It’s also OK to toss something just because you’re tired of it. But, a warning: When photographs of you wearing it come up later in some post, or in the photo drawer that’s never been properly organized, you might find yourself saying, “Dang, that looked good. Why did I get rid of it?” Too late for regrets.

Now, here comes the poundage pile, the five-fewer-pounds-and-this-will-fit-fine-again layer, I mean pile. The clothes that my mother calls “tailored,” I call “tight,” and my daughter calls “body con” (for “conscious”). Here’s how you’re gonna deal with that. If you’ll still need Spanx with it even after the five pounds magically evaporate, pitch.

A moment, now, of self-congratulation for all the stuff I don’t have to pitch, the trends I managed to live through and do without: poufs; shrugs; tracksuits; Crocs; boiled wool jackets. The trend I wish I’d bowed to: jean jackets. The trend I fell victim to, but only once: Ultrasuede. What I will never, ever give up: clogs and cardigans. What I am, thank you Jesus, too old for: bralettes.

My final advice, born of experience, is to always buy something at the end of a season, when it’s on sale, and then, facing that shelf or rack of been-there-worn-that duds the next closet changeover (April), you’ll spot something fresh, unworn, and new-to-you, which makes the chore the faintest bit more bearable.

In Los Angeles, everybody from bums to billionaires just wears T-shirts. In New York City, everybody but Hoda and Kathie Lee just wears black. But you’re Southern. What’s in your closet?  PS

Susan Kelly is a blithe spirit, author of several novels, and proud grandmother.

Sporting Life

River Adventures

Adrift in streams of memory

By Tom Bryant

I’m sure you know how it is when one outdoor chore leads to another. That happened to me a couple of Saturdays ago when I was trying to catch up on some much-needed yard work. I’d just finished hauling my sixth or seventh cart full of sticks and pine cones to the trash pickup area on the road behind our garage when I noticed my old 17-foot Grumman canoe had wild grapevines growing up over the bow like a natural duck blind. I felt bad for the old canoe, my fault entirely that it had been ignored all these years, perched up on a pair of sawhorses like a monument to the past.

I put yard work on hold and dragged the ancient boat, vines and all, out to where I could get to it and clean it up a little. Bird nests were in the bow and stern area. I figured it was a perfect location for little house wrens, and it was fortunate that the nests had already served their purpose and were empty. The old derelict looked worst for the wear, but aluminum is remarkably resilient, and in no time, I had knocked off the accumulated pine straw and dirt. The repaired broken keel and tear in the port side were still quite evident, but the detraction to the serviceability of the craft was just in looks; on the water, she was as good as ever. Old camouflaged paint was peeling from the sides and under the seats. I used to paint her every fall for duck hunting, and my past efforts were in need of repair. I really should get her sand blasted, I thought. Then she would be almost as good as new.

I dragged the old canoe to the front of the garage and immediately remembered why I had retired the craft many years ago. Weight. She had to scale in at well over 100 pounds. In my day, I could hoist her on top of the truck with little effort, but in my advanced years and learning that it’s much easier to walk around than climb over, I had relegated her to the sawhorses behind the garage and bought a new, much lighter canoe.

I had been using my power washer to clean the sidewalks, so I turned the boat on her side and washed off years of accumulated grime. She looked a lot better, even with the still-clinging camouflaged paint. The repair to the keel and tear in her side were more evident after my cleaning effort, and I thought back to the river outing that caused the mishap.

Ever since I was a youngster boating with my grandfather on the Little Pee Dee River, I’ve always had a paddle in the water. I’ve canoed black-water creeks, lakes and white-water rivers. The damage to the Grumman came from one of those white-water adventures, and a friend and I were lucky to escape with our lives. But it wasn’t that trip I was remembering. I dragged a camp chair from the garage and a libation from my cooler and kicked back and thought about that amazing late summer.

Two friends, John Mills and Andy Alcroft, and I decided to take on Drowning Creek, Lumber River, Little Pee Dee River, and the mighty Big Pee Dee River and paddle to the coast and Georgetown, South Carolina. It was to be an amazing trip, requiring all our outdoor survival skills and a lot of luck in the wild swamps that bordered the rivers.

We would be returning to college in a couple of weeks. I was a rising junior at the University of South Carolina, Andy was a sophomore at Ohio State University, and Johnny was a sophomore at the University of North Carolina. The trip began on a whim, as I remember it. Like most young folks that age, we were bored with summer and wanted one last adventure before heading back to the books. We grew up loving nature and probably spent more time outdoors than in, and Drowning Creek played a big part in most of our nature adventures. Johnny was the unofficial official Pinebluff historian and was up-to-date on all the statistics of the creek and which explorers had attempted to float the rivers to the Atlantic and when.

I can’t remember who had the initial idea for that boating adventure, but I do remember that we determined that we were really going to have to push it because time was short. In a day or two, we had gathered our gear, borrowed a little 12-foot skiff from our good friend Cliff Blue, and were ready to shove off.

The night before our jumping-off river adventure, Pricilla Mills, Johnny’s cute, younger sister, had a sleepover at their house with several other girls. Naturally, we had to get them involved with our last-minute preparations, quite enjoyably for us. The next morning several of the young co-eds accompanied us to the creek and waved as we floated around the first bend in the river. That was the last civilized moment we enjoyed for several swamp-filled days.

Unfortunately, we didn’t finish that river trip, running out of time and energy at about the same place. We pulled out of the river at a country store named Pearl’s and called Cliff to come haul us, our gear and the boat back home. Good memories.

I replaced the ancient, much cleaner canoe on her sawhorses and gave Johnny a call.

“Hey Johnny, this is Tommy. What say you and I take a little canoe ride down Drowning Creek?”

I thought sure he would say, “Are you crazy?” But he replied, “I can’t leave before tomorrow.”

We both laughed and agreed to get together for lunch and explore Camp Mackall in search of the old canoe club cabin.

According to Johnny, Dr. John Warren Achorn and Alexander Holbrook, leading citizens of the new village of Pinebluff, started the Mid-Winter Canoe Club in 1903. Vestiges of the cabin are still there, having been rebuilt and now owned by the Special Forces as a place for rest and relaxation.

Ironically, our good friend Andy Alcroft and his lovely bride, Mary, were enjoying some time at Holden Beach and had made arrangements to visit John before they went home to Ohio. We planned to meet for dinner while they were here.

We gathered at the Sly Fox and had a superb supper. It was a great occasion, sort of like old home week. We remembered Pinebluff when the population was around 400, some streets were still unpaved, and The Village Grocery sold Coca-Cola for a nickel. Mom and Pop Wallace owned the phone company with the switchboard in their living room, and our phone number was 212. Most folks didn’t have keys to their houses, and all a youngster needed to have a grand time was a bicycle and a dog.

That night as I drifted off to sleep, I thought back to the uncompleted river trip down Drowning Creek and wondered if Johnny, Andy and I had it in us to make another try. “I’ll talk it over with Linda in the morning,” I whispered to myself.

“Talk what over?” Linda said sleepily.

“Nothing, Hon,” I wisely replied. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”  PS

Tom Bryant, a Southern Pines resident, is a lifelong outdoorsman and PineStraw’s Sporting Life columnist.