SOUTHWORDS

When Golf World magazine, the publication birthed in Pinehurst in 1947 by Bob Harlow, had a vacancy in 1979, I was asked to leave my job as a sportswriter at the South Bend Tribune in northern Indiana to join the staff. In those days GW and its printing presses were housed in what is now one of Southern Pines’ municipal buildings along U.S. 1. Dick Taylor, the editor in chief, offered me the exalted position of the No. 3 person on a staff of, well, three. My official title was associate editor only because I don’t believe Dick thought it kind to use the term peon.

It was, however, a job that any self-respecting golf-obsessed journalist would have fallen all over themselves to get. And I took a cut in pay — which, by the way, was none too generous to begin with — to accept it. I did not, however, make this brilliant career move out of an unbridled love of golf. My wife, the War Department, our 3-year-old little girl, Jennifer, our cat, Tang, and I were driven out of South Bend by far more powerful forces — the Blizzard of ’78.

It began snowing on a Thursday. The Tribune was an afternoon paper, and I was doing the layout of the sports section that morning. I went in at 6 a.m., though to be honest this schedule often featured a phone call from the sports editor, Joe Doyle, who wanted to know where the hell I was. On that particular day, after discharging my office duties, I was set to travel with the Notre Dame hockey team to cover their Friday and Saturday night games against the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. This would never happen. You try explaining to some people in North Dakota that you couldn’t make it because it snowed.

Anyway, at roughly 10 a.m. I left the office and attempted to go home. It had already snowed 20 inches or so. In fact, it wouldn’t stop snowing until Sunday, piling up something in the neighborhood of 35 inches altogether with drifts much, much higher. Trust me, that’s a rough neighborhood.

It was clear that getting home was going to be a challenge. Our modest house on Fox Street was more or less in the middle of the city, and while I managed to slalom, slip and swerve to within roughly four blocks of home, that was as close as I was going to get.

Up North, there are unwritten rules covering these things. One is that you don’t, under any circumstances, abandon your car in the middle of the road. One sunny day, the snowplow will come, and snowplows don’t give a damn about your car. So, when I’d gone about as far as I could go, I backed up, turned the wheel hard left, stomped on the accelerator and lurched into someone’s front yard. I came back to dig it out five days later.

That evening on the local news — please explain to me how we could get three feet of snow and not lose electricity in South Bend, but if a squirrel walks across a power line on Indiana Avenue seven blocks of Southern Pines goes dark for two days — the local sheriff gave a Knute Rockne-esque pep talk. It went something like this: “Now listen everyone, we’re going to get the emergency routes cleared as fast as we can, but the side streets are going to take some time. My advice to you is, if you really need to go somewhere, start digging.”

And we did. The whole neighborhood. We dug an elaborate network of paths to each other’s houses. The snow was two Jennifers high on both sides. The shoveling brigade dug out the alley behind our row of houses — no plow was ever going back there — so people could get their cars out of their garages. The War Department’s sister had left her copper-colored Hornet parked next to our garage in the backyard while she was off to college. We didn’t see it again until April.

True to the sheriff’s word, the emergency routes were cleared with reasonable dispatch. People attached little orange flags on sticks (the kind you see on some bicycles) to their cars so they could see one another at intersections.

Nothing came down our street for seven days, and then it was a front-end loader. So, when Dick Taylor called, North Carolina seemed like a very good idea indeed. I could figure out all that pesky golf stuff later.