Tag: Hometown

Hometown

HOMETOWN

Hail, Cedar!

Friends, aroma, countrymen, lend me your gifts

By Bill Fields

There was a remarkable consistency to the trappings of Christmas in our house when I was a child. This was the case for what was under the tree (treats such as walnuts and tangerines that didn’t grace our kitchen the rest of the calendar), on the tree (some vintage ball ornaments made of glass as fragile as a first frost), and the tree itself.

I come in praise of Juniperus virginiana, the botanical name for Eastern red cedar, the humble type of conifer that decorated our Decembers for years.

My fond memories are possible for two reasons. I never was charged with cleaning up the detritus of scalelike foliage that had fallen to the floor during a cedar’s fortnight as our living room centerpiece. And none of our cedars, even with their tendency to get as dry as a Baptist social, ever caught fire despite our using strands of big colored bulbs that seemed to get as warm as a stovetop.

A cedar tree was as much a part of Christmas as carols, festive cards taped around the dining room doorway, poinsettias, baked ham, and getting to speak to Santa Claus at the Collins Department Store in downtown Aberdeen.

Gardening blogger Allen Bush has called the Eastern red cedar the “Chevy Corvair of Christmas trees.” True, a cedar didn’t strike much of a figure, especially when compared to evergreens that came later, produced for holiday consumption — particularly the more pyramidically perfect spruces and firs. But when decorated and illuminated, with presents and stockings nearby, a lowly cedar was as sharp as a fancy-finned Cadillac.

Mom told stories of traipsing through the Jackson Springs countryside with her father when he chopped down a cedar for their house across the street from the Presbyterian church. He would nail it to a simple wooden stand, and she and her mother would then adorn it with strands of popcorn. Given that the Eastern red cedar could be found in nearly 40 states, there were lots of kids who went on the same mission as my grandfather and his youngest child.

My father didn’t own an axe and, after roughing it plenty during his World War II service, didn’t relish a walk in the woods to obtain a Christmas tree. Eschewing the old-fashioned way, Dad bought our cedars from one of the pop-up lots that appeared in town at the beginning of the holidays. If his wallet wasn’t as thin as usual, there might be additional purchases from the seasonal vendor: a wreath for the front door and a Claxton Fruit Cake, made in southeast Georgia and distinguished by its horse-and-buggy label.

It took fortitude to decorate our cedar tree. Mom could be picky about which ornament went where, and the nature of the evergreen — a lack of long, definitive branches on which to hang things — compounded the process. Finding a spot that would support the heaviest objects, the ceramic angels, wasn’t easy. Sometimes the ornament hooks bought for the task weren’t long enough, which necessitated improvisation in the form of paper clips partially straightened.

After the ornaments and lights had been situated, it was time to put on the silver tinsel garland and artificial icicles. I usually tried to get out of dealing with the latter decorative touch since I lacked the patience to satisfy my supervising Mom, who had high icicle placement standards and wouldn’t tolerate slipshod dangling of the slippery strands. Every Christmas I would hear, “You can’t just throw it on there,” after she noticed my icicle imprecision.

I recall considerable debate within the family about whether to apply a final touch to the cedar tree: snow in a can. Photo album evidence indicates the practice being phased out not long before we became a white pine family in the 1970s.

Years after that, when she was widowed and alone, for as long as she was able, Mom took care to put up a tree each Christmas. They were beauties, too — Fraser firs of perfect dimensions, fit for the Hallmark movies she loved to watch. And dotting those ideal branches were some of the ornaments that festooned those budget, boxy cedars, witnesses to so many smiles.

Hometown

HOMETOWN

It Still Stings

Stuffed and trimmed on Thanksgiving

By Bill Fields

Inundated as we are with sports on television these days, it’s easy to forget that wasn’t always the case. Prior to cable television, college football teams weren’t playing on multiple nights of the week. Until Monday Night Football debuted in 1970, NFL games were, with rare exceptions, only on Sunday.

Thanksgiving was a longtime exception. Turkey Day college games were popular in the 19th century and have been a staple of the National Football League since its founding in 1920. When I was a sports-loving kid in the 1960s and ’70s, having a holiday football game to watch on TV was almost as big a treat as getting to eat my mother’s once-a-year dressing that went with the bird.

Fifty years ago, though, the pleasure of a big game on the tube gave way to the pain of its outcome. Thinking about the events of that Thanksgiving still gives me indigestion.

By 1974 I had been a Washington Redskins (now Commanders) fan — there were a lot of us in North Carolina back then — for about a decade, a period marked mostly by frustration. My football hero, quarterback Sonny Jurgensen, was great, and so was his favorite receiving target, Charley Taylor. But the team from old D.C. always seemed to be missing some puzzle pieces. Things seemed poised for change when Vince Lombardi became coach in 1969, but the former Green Bay mastermind died just a year later. It would be up to George Allen, who came east from the Los Angeles Rams in 1971, to build on Lombardi’s positive impact. The Redskins made it all the way to Super Bowl VII after the 1972 season, losing to the undefeated Miami Dolphins.

Through wins and losses, the common thread for Washington players and supporters was disdain for the Dallas Cowboys, our opponent on Thanksgiving Day 1974. The Cowboys had been NFC East champions for five straight years until Washington dethroned them in 1972 on the way to the Super Bowl. Dallas was back on top in 1973.

Prior to the Washington-Dallas Thanksgiving tilt at Texas Stadium, which came 12 days after the Redskins beat the Cowboys 28-21 in D.C., Redskins defensive end Bill Brundige summed up the rivalry this way: “They hate our guts, and we hate theirs.”

One of Brundige’s comrades on the defensive line, Diron Talbert, was particularly salty in talking about the Cowboys’ star quarterback, Roger Staubach. “If you knock him out,” Talbert said, “you’ve got that rookie facing you. That’s one of our goals. If we do that, it’s great. He’s all they have.”

“That rookie” was strong-armed Clint Longley from Abilene Christian University, who hadn’t taken a snap all season but was thrust into action after Staubach was knocked out (literally) early in the third quarter and Washington was ahead 16-3. With such a lead and a seeming liability behind center for Dallas, the visitors were in an enviable spot. “Get in,” Cowboys coach Tom Landry told the 22-year-old after he found his helmet. “Good luck.” But as Staubach sat dazed on the bench, Longley was dazzling on the artificial turf.

Longley led one scoring drive, then another. Still, Washington led 23-17 with time running out. It looked like the dreaded Cowboys were going down despite the admirable efforts of the backup QB, and my Thanksgiving night turkey sandwich was going to be a celebratory meal.

Then, with only 28 seconds left, given lots of time in the pocket, Longley threw a 50-yard strike to wide receiver Drew Pearson, who had streaked past defensive backs Ken Stone and Mike Bass to get wide open to catch Longley’s perfect pass and glide into the end zone. Efren Herrera’s extra point made it Dallas 24, Washington 23.

As Washington frantically tried to move into position to give Mark Moseley a field goal attempt, quarterback Billy Kilmer was hit by Jethro Pugh and fumbled. That Jurgensen, in his final season, wasn’t in the game to have a chance for his golden arm to pull off a miracle made it even worse for a devotee of Number 9 in burgundy and gold.

“I don’t know what to say,” Allen said. “It was probably the toughest loss we ever had.”

A half century later, you’ll get no argument from this fan.

2024 Department Hometown

Hometown

HOMETOWN

The Memories Inside

Cruising past the old homestead

By Bill Fields

On a rainy afternoon not long ago, I drove by my childhood home not far from downtown Southern Pines. An old friend was with me, someone who also had grown up in town when it was its former drowsy and piney self, when “a sophisticated Mayberry” was an apt description of the place where we were lucky to live, those days now as distant as rotary phones and drugstore orangeades.

We pulled over to the curb, on the north side of the property and then on the east, our conversation seeming to take on the rhythm of the rental car’s intermittent wipers. It was easier to talk about the focus of the visit, a 1950s Cape Cod that held so much family history, than see it, which is why we assumed a couple of different vantage points and why, for me, this has been a rare excursion.

The original structure endures, but it takes some effort to get a glimpse of it, given that it’s surrounded by three “cottages” constructed on the property after we sold, one of them tall and painted a gray so dark it is nearly black. Our former five-bedroom residence is overwhelmed by the looming houses, making it seem like a shed out back of someone’s mansion.

My parents bought our home a handful of years before I was born in 1959. They had been living in Pinedene, close to Mt. Hope Cemetery. When the Highway 1 bypass was being built through their neighborhood, they were forced to move. About 10 years ago, when my mother was in her early 90s, she was in a car with me on a side street not far from the old Lob Steer Inn.

“There’s our old house,” she said.

I thought her mind was playing tricks, but I subsequently confirmed that the Pinedene house wasn’t torn down but relocated to where Mom said it was. While some other family settled in there, my parents and two sisters moved to their new home. My siblings were off to college and their adult lives less than a decade after moving there, but 390 East New Jersey was my only address growing up.

That fact, as well as maintaining closer ties to our hometown through the years, is why I felt a closer attachment to our house than my sisters did. But we all found pleasure in being able to return there for a long time, perhaps too long if we’re being honest. Increasingly stubborn in old age, when her cognitive decline made things difficult and dangerous, Mom didn’t want to leave for a safer environment.

I won’t forget that day in 2017 when I walked her out the back door for the last time, toward the car and on to an assisted living facility. I would turn that lock dozens more times until the house wasn’t ours anymore. On those visits, I didn’t miss the volume on the television being set to a nonagenarian-without-hearing-aids level. It was nice to put a six-pack on the top shelf of the refrigerator instead of burying it in the vegetable drawer. How, though, I wished she was still there, sitting on her screened-in patio that she enjoyed so much, in a wicker chair that had been on her mother’s porch, azaleas and robins the sights and sounds beyond her favorite oasis.

It had been a home, not a house. As my friend and I chatted in the car so near yet so far from that memory, I was reminded of that.

I suppose I’m glad the structure still stands in its renovated form — that the walls that contained our hopes and fears weren’t demolished — but I will never go inside again. What went on in and around that home lives in my interior, easily recalled, the view unobstructed.

2024 Department Hometown

Hometown

HOMETOWN

Repeat Offender

Sharpshooter with a ketchup packet

By Bill Fields

Around Labor Day, give or take, the long, free-range days of summer break in the Sandhills paused. Games played with everything from golf balls to basketballs, the construction of mighty forts and quenching one’s thirst from a garden hose gave way to the more structured schedule that came with the resumption of school. It was time to toe the line.

The threat of a keen switch (home) or a hefty paddle (school) was usually enough to keep me from misbehaving. My tendencies were to follow the rules and stay out of trouble, regardless of the season. I even received a DAR Good Citizens Award during a luncheon at the Country Club of North Carolina, a distinction I trumpeted on college applications as a counterpunch against terribly low math grades and board scores.

Had the fine ladies recognizing me done a more robust background check, however, someone else might have been feted over chicken cordon bleu at CCNC. They clearly hadn’t been aware of my checkered past, three occasions in childhood when I did not live up to my reputation.

We hung things on our clothesline to dry, but there were exceptions. Every so often, a trip to wash and dry bedspreads and slipcovers was necessary. There was a small laundromat located on South Bennett Street, near the rear of the A&P, not far from the intersection with Morganton Road.

One Saturday morning when I was in elementary school, I accompanied Dad there. Hearing the quarters tumble out of the coin changer was cool, but soon I was fidgeting in the plastic chair. I started to run around and loitered by the entrance, glancing at Dad.

“Don’t play by the doors!” my father said after taking a deep drag on his cigarette.

I returned inside to the heat and methodical whir of the oversize dryers and sat in one of those plastic seats that seemed to exist only in laundromats. But I returned to the glass doors, opening one side toward the parking lot. I did so a few times, until it collided with a car bumper poking over the curb. The ride home was as silent as the shattering of the glass had been loud.

Not long after that incident, I accompanied Mom and Dad to Greensboro, where one of my older sisters was going to college. She also had a part-time job, and she wanted to take us out, her treat. The restaurant of choice had two parts, fancy and casual. It being a special night, we went to the former.

I was in a brief hamburger phase, when that was my preferred supper, particularly on infrequent meals away from home. Well, the fancy side of the restaurant didn’t have hamburgers on its menu. I reacted by getting on the floor and having a tantrum, like some overwrought, overacting kid in a B movie. It is a wonder my sister ever spoke to me again.

Just months later, my good behavior went missing a third time. The setting was innocent enough as our family gathered around the kitchen table enjoying plates from Russell’s Fish House. It was a feast of flounder and all the trimmings: slaw, hushpuppies, French fries.

Aunt Blyn, my mother’s sister, was in town, visiting from her home in northeastern North Carolina. Mom to my three very cool older cousins, Blyn smoked Camels and drank Sanka, talked slowly, and dressed properly. She had sung and played the piano most of her life, and even though she couldn’t hit all the notes anymore, that did not stop her renditions of “Release Me” on the upright in our living room.

The evening we were all enjoying the takeout seafood, Aunt Blyn was seated across and slightly left from me. There was a bottle of ketchup on the table, but the meals had come with plastic packets of the condiment. I played with one as I ate, squeezing it and daring it to pop. My mother noticed and told me to stop. I did not and mashed it harder. There was presently a ketchup explosion, the red stuff shooting onto Blyn’s aghast face and the wall beyond.

“Oh, lawd,” was the last thing I heard her say as I shot out of my chair and ran from the house.

I sought cover behind a cedar bush at the end of our driveway. It wasn’t long before I looked up and saw my father. But, to my surprise and relief, he was wearing a grin instead of carrying a belt. I apologized and never squeezed another pack of ketchup.

2024 Department Hometown

Hometown

In the Swim

The summer of staying afloat

By Bill Fields

There was a lot going on in the summer of ’68, much of it heavy and consequential. But being only 9 years old during those tumultuous months, I was mostly oblivious to the real-world turmoil and focused on things that mattered to a rising fourth-grader.

Swimming — or more accurately, being at a pool — was near the top of the list.

We were not really a swimming family. Mom loved excursions to a lake or the ocean but was mostly an observer, content to take in the water from a dock or beach, and only occasionally getting in up to her thighs to cool off. She was a hawk-eyed sentry on shore, real or imagined rip currents a specialty. There is home movie footage of Mom in a suburban Atlanta hotel window waving me out of the pool’s deep end. Dad enjoyed floating on his back just beyond the breaking waves at Ocean Drive on annual vacations, a pleasure that guaranteed angst for my watchful mother.

I can’t blame all my early swimming trepidation on my mother. Before I had started first grade, my older cousins were in town for a visit and lodging at the Charlton Motel. Getting to go over there for a dip with them in a real pool — instead of the modest Sears above-ground model in our yard whose plastic bottom always felt slimy and whose primary focus seemed to be attracting bugs of one sort or another — was a big deal. My cousin Bob, treading water near the diving board and wrongly believing I knew how to swim, urged me to jump in. I thought he was going to catch me. There were a few moments of panic before Bob realized what was going on and scooped me up and carried me to the shallow end.

I soon would learn how to dog paddle. Aberdeen Lake, Rec Department outings to the Southern Pines town pool, White Lake and the rare family road trip motel pools were my learning laboratories. Whether in murky or clear waters, though, I was still a novice.

That’s why 1968, which I call the Summer of Sore Toes, was important.

My sister Dianne and her husband, Bob, hosted me for a visit in Winston-Salem, where they had gone to Wake Forest. It was a memorable week. They showed me the college campus, treated me to cherry Slurpees at 7-Eleven, took me to an aquarium-fish store that featured a tank of piranhas. My sister baked lasagna and made tacos, exotic fare given the basic Southern food Mom and Dad served at home. They were living in a Winston-Salem apartment complex whose best feature was a pool, where I was determined to spend much of my time.

With Dianne patiently poolside with a good book or three keeping a loose eye on her little brother, I spent hours in the water. Bob, an excellent swimmer and former lifeguard, joined me in the pool when he got back from his graduate school classes and tried to help me get more comfortable and proficient in the water.

The dog paddle evolved into a reasonable freestyle stroke I could do a full lap with. I proudly learned how to do a dead man’s float. I still was too timid to go off the diving board, but I got bold enough to dive in from the pool’s edge — over and over and over. The rim had a rough concrete surface, and we helped Eckerd’s bottom line with the Band-Aids put into duty over those seven days, the week I became a swimmer.

About a decade later, when I was at Carolina, students had to pass a swim test to graduate — the requirement was staying afloat for five minutes in the manner of your choosing: swim, tread water, float. If you couldn’t pass, a physical education swimming class was in your future. I confidently signed up for the test, arrived at the appointed time, dove into the 10-foot-deep water, and had no problem lasting until the monitor’s whistle of success. If only calculus had been as easy. PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

2024 Department Hometown

Hometown

Photograph courtesy of Moore County Historical Association

Universe of the Mind

By Bill Fields

The address is 180 South West Broad Street, but I never needed a map to find it.

People pay their water bills there now. For many years, though, the building with the arched windows set back from the street was the Southern Pines Public Library. It was designed by well-known architect Aymar Embury II, who also was responsible for the structures on either side, the post office and a doctor’s office, and other homes, businesses and schools in the Sandhills.

It is difficult to imagine childhood without Embury’s creation, constructed in the late 1930s and expanded a decade later. The exterior is appealing. The magic, however, was inside.

I love libraries, and that affection began among the books and periodicals in that cozy space when I was a boy. We had some reading materials at home, of course, but the library offered a vast universe beyond the World Books and fiction on our modest shelves. And while the Greensboro Daily News landed in our driveway each morning and a couple of magazines arrived in the mail each month, there was a bounty of publications at 180 S.W. Broad: National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, TIME, Popular Mechanics, Field & Stream and many others.

I was always excited to go inside, even though in those days, more so than now, a library was a land of whispers. One’s enthusiasm had to be tempered. But I’m not at all sure I was using my inside voice when, as a third-grader, I pleaded my case to Mrs. Kathleen Lambourne, the librarian, to check out my first grown-up book.

It was Willie Mays: My Life in and out of Baseball, by one of my baseball heroes as told to Charles Einstein. The cover featured “Willie Mays” in large script in the orange and black colors of the San Francisco Giants. The autobiography had 320 pages between its hard covers, a lot of words for a kid.

But Mrs. Lambourne was on my side. For the next couple of weeks, I found out a lot about Mays. Before long, I was checking out another adult title, Paper Lion, by George Plimpton, about the journalist-author’s brief turn as a quarterback for the Detroit Lions. The English-born Mrs. Lambourne, who held the position in Southern Pines from 1955 through 1969, didn’t have a hard time figuring out that I loved sports.

The library was a regular destination in my relatively free-range youth in a safe small town, whether on foot or by bicycle. It would be a lie to say I went there more often than to the downtown park, a ball field or a golf course, but the library was an important aspect of growing up — a place that offered calm, rewarded curiosity, and fostered a love of words.

Growing older, the two public libraries in my larger town hundreds of miles north from where that serene spot existed are valued locations in my current life. Many things are available digitally, a great convenience, especially when traveling. Nothing beats perusing the shelves. I regularly roam the stacks of biography and memoir, my favorite genre, and always check the displays for new titles and staff recommendations.

Working from home for the last 10 years, I enjoy a change of scenery, and a day or two a week I’ll go to either my main or branch library and settle in at a table for a couple of hours or longer to write. Sometimes, words that are coming slowly at my residence come more easily in the library.

I’m typing this on the eve of a week-long stay in Southern Pines, where no doubt I will spend time in the town’s current library on West Connecticut Avenue, which opened in 1995. While enjoying that pleasant space, I’ll have memories of the hours spent blocks away, the library card with the tiny metal plate a ticket to a world beyond what I knew. PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

2024 Department Hometown

Hometown

A Dann for All Seasons

And a missing face in the crowd

By Bill Fields

Thousands of people will be in Pinehurst for the 124th U.S. Open. I’m going to miss someone who won’t be there.

I saw Michael Dann for the last time in 2014 during the back-to-back Pinehurst Opens. We played golf at Pine Needles, the final round of what had to be hundreds together, most of them in the 1970s when I was a teenager, he a young man, two golf nuts on a search for the secret.

His was the lower score that June day, as it usually was, although there was one notable exception in the late ’70s when we were playing at Hyland Hills in qualifying for the town amateur. I came to the 18th tee three under, needing a par to break 70 for the first time. In those days there was a bunker behind the 18th green. Pumped up, I found it with my approach and had to get up-and-down for 69. When my sand shot trickled into the hole for a birdie, Michael was happier than I was. I don’t have the scorecard or the ball from that day but can still hear him, my gallery of one, shouting, “William Henderson!” as he liked to do.

Despite a 10-year age difference, Michael was one of my best friends in those days — buddy, sounding board, mentor. We clicked from the start. I met him in 1973 when he was a volunteer instructor for Recreation Department golf lessons at the Campbell House field. I could get the ball airborne in a group of mostly rank beginners, and soon Michael and I were playing and practicing together.

We played in the heat and the cold. Once, arriving at Foxfire for a frigid one-day event, I wondered why there was a roll of Saran Wrap in Michael’s trunk. “For our feet,” he said. They stayed warm, if a bit sweaty. When Michael and Jeff Burey played a 108-hole charity marathon for National Golf Day in 1978, Mike packed a jar of pickle juice in case he started cramping on the hot summer day.

Michael had a poor man’s Hale Irwin action — a steeper plane on the way down than going back — that was grooved from years of playing a lot. He shot in the low- to mid-70s plenty of times we played, so it was no surprise when he averaged 76.50 for the six-round fundraiser at Pinehurst.

He was a writer-photographer at Golf World magazine in the 1970s, and even though he was just in his 20s, had a seasoned background in the game. His father, Marshall, had been a sportswriter in Detroit before becoming the executive director of the Western Golf Association in 1960, a post he held for 28 years. Michael grew up in the Chicago suburbs and studied journalism at the University of Illinois, where he was on the golf team. His dad ran the Western Open as part of his duties, so it made sense that the son did his master’s thesis on “Preparation and Operation of a Major Professional Golf Tournament.”

When he became director of the World Golf Hall of Fame, Michael had a chance to follow in Marshall’s footsteps and run the 1981 Hall of Fame Tournament. Because of a lack of sponsorship dollars, the event was in jeopardy until a couple of months prior to the September dates. When they had rustled up enough money to make it happen, Michael hired me, fresh out of UNC, to handle public relations. Michael and I didn’t get to play much golf in that period, but we had plenty of laughs. You are forgiven if you don’t recall that Morris Hatalsky was our champion.

Michael and his wife, Dianne, had two sons and a daughter. From 1992 until his unexpected death in July of 2014, at 65, he worked at the Carolinas Golf Association as director of course rating and handicapping. It was a long title that simply meant many folks around the two states had the opportunity to spend time around him, whose kindness, wit and love of golf made him hard to forget.

His friends and colleagues at the CGA play their annual staff tournament, The Dann Cup, in his honor, and many of us think of him often. PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

2024 Department Hometown

Hometown

Quiet Time

A tranquil week at Weymouth

By Bill Fields

It’s always great to come to Southern Pines, but a return last fall was special. I’d passed the hounds on Ridge Street marking the entrance to the Boyd House many times — walking, on my bike or in a car — going back to when I started elementary school in the mid-1960s. In November, though, I drove up Vermont Avenue, crossed Ridge and went through the stone canines.

For the first time, I wasn’t just passing by; I was arriving to settle in for a week at Weymouth as a writer-in-residence. My writing chops pale in comparison to some of the authors who have graced the estate going back more than a century, but I was certain no visitor had closer roots given that I’d grown up only three blocks away. Not only was I excited to see what I could get done over seven days in an inspiring environment, I was proud to be there.

I was booked to bunk in a room named for Max Perkins, the legendary book editor who helped shape 20th-century American literature with his vital ties to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and North Carolinian Thomas Wolfe, among others. The room assignment pleased me. As I unpacked, I recalled reading A. Scott Berg’s 1978 biography Max Perkins: Editor of Genius while in college. Given that typing a high school hoops gamer on deadline in the sports department of the Durham Morning Herald was the big time at that point in my life, discovering Perkins’ New York world was a revelation.

By week’s end — when two fellow resident writers and I celebrated with a lovely dinner at Ashten’s and afterward shared aloud samples of what we’d produced while at Weymouth — I’d written thousands of words for what I hope will someday be a memoir. My output, in longhand (I was reminded of the pleasure of a fountain pen) and on my laptop, didn’t quite reach the five-figure goal I’d set for myself. Yet as I waved goodbye to the dogs as I left the property and began the long drive home to Connecticut, I realized that my time at Weymouth shouldn’t be measured by word count alone.

If I’m not careful, I watch too much television and spend too much time on social media. While staying in the Boyd House, I watched no TV and paid scant attention to what was being said online. In that small bedroom and in those large common rooms alike, I had time to think.

I’m not nearly as plugged in as some people, and my texting thumbs will never reach warp speed. Stepping out of a normal routine for a week, however, and holing up in a place where the point is to get away from everything, made it easier to realize just how much sway technology holds over us.

It was quiet at Weymouth. The lack of noise took me back to late night studying in an unlocked classroom building not far from Old West dormitory, or the hours in a lonesome carrel in the Wilson Library stacks. I’ve written plenty of stories over the years in crowded press rooms, and there is satisfaction in tuning out the surroundings and turning out smooth copy in time to make an editor happy.

But I think my best work has come in quiet hotel rooms after golf tournaments, when Sunday night has turned into Monday morning and, somehow, a couple of thousand words were on the page by dawn and by deadline, in an order that mostly made sense.

Months after my peaceful week at Weymouth, I don’t get the message on my smartphone that my screen usage has been up as often as it used to. Not only did I write something there, I learned something too. PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

2024 Department Hometown

Hometown

April in Augusta

Golf’s glorious pilgrimage

By Bill Fields

When the time comes when I don’t get to cover the Masters, I’m sure spending the first full week of April somewhere else will feel strange.

The 2024 edition will be my 39th trip to northeast Georgia in the spring. I’ve been every year starting in 1985 except for 2002, when I was writing a fun story about other places that share the name of the major championship’s host city and visited several of them during Masters week.

Augusta, Iowa, featured the not-so-scenic Skunk River. A course in Augusta, Illinois, had greens the size of a throw rug. I observed a tournament of ordinary golfers on Sunday afternoon in Augusta, Kansas, which meant I missed Tiger Woods successfully defending his title. But I believe that having been on hand when Woods won his first green jacket, in 1997, and his fifth, in 2019, make up for that absence 22 years ago.

Given that it’s a week or so in Augusta on each assignment — I was credentialed as a photographer for the first 11 and a reporter for all the rest — that makes almost 10 months of my life there. Outside of locations where I’ve lived, I haven’t spent that much time anywhere else.

I regret not having taken a photo of the places I’ve laid my head down for those couple of hundred nights in Augusta. In the 1980s, we called the Knights Inn the “purple palace” for the color of the bedspreads and curtains of its “medieval themed” rooms. I spent more than a few nights in rental-house beds usually occupied by small children. A ceiling fan crashed to the floor in a den where we were watching a basketball game on TV. One home in an upscale neighborhood was overpopulated with ceramic wildlife and jungle-cat artwork. I had a Tiger painting on my bedroom wall, on tasteful velvet. In recent years, I’ve stayed in a clean but spartan (no closet, just hooks on the wall) hotel on the western outskirts of ever-growing Augusta.

Whatever the quirks of the temporary quarters for a particular Masters, you’re usually up early and back late. The work, whether with a camera or keyboard, has been rewarding.

I have wonderful memories of my years as a photographer, the satisfying images having supplanted the stress of trying to be in the right place at the right time, at an event where, unlike most golf tournaments, photojournalists must work outside the gallery ropes, finding shooting positions among the large galleries. In a large photo on my wall by friend and longtime colleague Stephen Szurlej — a wide angle of Augusta National’s 18th green as Jack Nicklaus finished his stunning 65 on Sunday in 1986, taken with a remote camera — there I am on the front row of spectators at the rear of the putting surface having scrambled into position on the historic afternoon. You can just see my left arm and hand steadying a telephoto lens and dark brown hair spilling out of a green visor. It was a long time ago.

If I had to guess how many words I’ve written in Augusta over the decades on a deadline of one sort or another, I venture it’s close to 100,000, the length of a novel. Sometimes those words came easily, but on other occasions it was like trying to two-putt from 60 feet on a slick, sloping surface — you’re happy when the task is completed.

I’m glad I got to experience those Masters of the 1980s and ’90s, before so many holes were lengthened in reaction to how far the ball was going thanks to inaction by those responsible for equipment regulation. Sure, things were more manicured than they had been in the 1930s, ’40s or ’50s, but the design was still largely as it had been for Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan and some of the other greats who walked the fairways in the mid-20th century or before. Now, the walks from green to tee are longer, less natural. Augusta itself has grown like the course, and it isn’t so sleepy the other 51 weeks a year.

Still, come Sunday evening, after a week when the flowers and shrubs have popped and memorable shots have been played, golf has been the language and currency of a city, and a champion full of pride is filling out a sport coat in that distinct shade of green, what has changed yields to what hasn’t. PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

2024 Department Hometown

Hometown

Dianne and Sadie

Growing up in the sisterhood

By Bill Fields

I consider myself a “semi-only child” because I came into the world so long after my sisters — 14 1/2 years after Dianne and 12 1/2 after Sadie. They were both off at college before I started first grade.

If what they say about an adult’s first memories is correct — that they usually go back to when someone was 3 or 4 years old — my recollections of Dianne and Sadie date to their teenage days in the early 1960s, about the time we posed in our Sunday finest in the backyard in the accompanying snapshot taken shortly after my fourth birthday. (They look more comfortable in their nice dresses than I do in a bowtie.)

I remember wanting to play — and them not wanting me to in equal measure — with their lipstick and fountain pens, and being intrigued when they utilized the upstairs bathroom sink to change the color of a sweater with Rit dye. There was often music, from their tickling the ivories on the upright piano in our living room to 45s spinning on a record player.

One vivid musical memory makes me think I have some earlier-than-average recall. As much as “Moon River” and “Chances Are” were a soundtrack to those days on East New Jersey Avenue, a silly pop song in my sisters’ record collection stands out in my mind. “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini,” by Brian Hyland, came out in June of 1960, and I’m convinced its lyrics were among the building blocks of my early vocabulary.

When Dianne and Sadie set out to further their educations at Wake Forest and UNC Greensboro, respectively, I tagged along on rides to and from campus. This proximity gave me a backseat vantage point to our father’s frustration upon taking the wrong exit in Winston-Salem or Greensboro, and fatigue after helping haul his daughters’ stuff to their dorm rooms. Once, our family gave Sadie’s roommate a ride to her hometown of Valdese in the North Carolina foothills. It was about a 100-mile trip but seemed like an exotic journey for a little boy who hadn’t seen much beyond Moore County.

My sisters’ college experiences netted me much more than the Wake and UNCG sweatshirts I got from them for Christmas. If they could go to college, why couldn’t I when the time came? That was a lesson more valuable than anything I was learning at East Southern Pines Elementary. And it didn’t hurt that both were fine students, applying themselves in school. Dianne was high school valedictorian, her name on the wall for years next to a painting of the Blue Knight, which was always a source of family pride as I matriculated through those same halls and classrooms until going to Pinecrest as a sophomore.

My sisters weren’t sportswomen, but I could coerce them into shooting a basket. They tolerated my obsession with miniature golf and joined me for countless games on the carpet, although under oath they would confess to not sharing my sadness when the ball disappeared down the chute on the 18th hole.

The difference in our ages mimicked the gaps between our mother and her two older siblings. Mom always hoped the chronology wouldn’t adversely affect our relationship as we aged, that her children would stay connected as they got older, after she was gone.

Five years after our mother passed away not long before her 96th birthday, we are doing what she hoped. My sisters and I haven’t lived in the same area since they left Southern Pines, but despite the geography we remain in touch. Sometimes we talk on a three-way call, a Jetsonian advance from the days when my sisters were lining up to use the party-line phone to speak to a pal, my little self likely tugging on their hemlines. PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

2024 Department Hometown