Tag: Hometown

Hometown

HOMETOWN

Home, Sweet (Not) Home

But it’ll do after a long day

By Bill Fields

Near the end of a recent stretch of hectic business travel that included four canceled flights in a week, I arrived in Houston late on a Wednesday evening. After having to employ debating-level skills to convince a skeptical rental car agent that “Bill” was in fact a common nickname for “William,” I secured a vehicle and drove to my hotel, arriving past midnight.

Entering my room, I deadbolted the door and took a deep breath.

In the calm of my temporary quarters on the 12th floor 1,600 miles from home, the frustrations of the not-so-friendly skies eased. The spacious room was quiet and cool, with crisp, fresh sheets on a king bed. The flat screen television was large, the desk ample. Unpacking enough to settle in for the night, it struck me that as wearying as life can become when the travel gods are angry, a room on the road is one of my happy places.

Certainly, I don’t qualify as an ultimate road warrior, the kind of person who leaves on Monday and returns on Friday, week after week for most of the calendar. There were years, though, when I was away covering golf upwards of 25 weeks. My travel has been about half that annually in the last decade but with periods of concentrated trips. During those busy times, a comfortable room is a sanctuary for sleep, work or watching a favorite movie that just happens to be on TV.

I’ve had a fascination with motels and hotels since early childhood when my visiting grown-up cousins lodged at the Charlton Motel on U.S. 1, long since replaced by a convenience store. Whether jumping on the bed or into the pool, which was tucked amid tall pines behind the building, the novelty of the experience made it seem as if I were much farther away from home than a couple of miles.

My family didn’t travel often, but most summers we ventured to the beach. If not accommodated in a cottage, we stayed in one of the oceanfront motels. The Buccaneer on Ocean Drive comes to mind: room key attached to a plastic fob; water glasses wrapped in paper; a window-unit air conditioner to soothe skin after hours on the strand; sand on the carpet; an ice machine nearby.

We ventured to Atlanta once to visit Six Flags Over Georgia and stayed in a suburban Holiday Inn near an Interstate exit. I pored over the room service menu before pestering my parents to let me order a hamburger and a Coke. Getting a delivered meal was almost as cool as riding the log flume at the amusement park.

The thousands of nights on the road since those first trips have been spent in all kinds of places, from a plush Ritz Carlton on the Gulf of Mexico — turndown service! — to a grim budget chain on a trucking route in Kansas, where I was stuck in a “smoking” room so stale it was the only time I expensed Lysol spray. There were mouse sightings too, but I fared better that week than a cadre of tour caddies who booked a motel so sketchy they purchased sleeping bags to put atop the bedding.

On a few of my first trips to the Masters, during the 1980s, I was lodged in a motel distinguished by its unusual color scheme. The “Purple Palace,” as we called it, was $29.99 a night 51 weeks a year, a rate that soared to five times that much the second week of April.

Although a chocolate on your pillow is a nice touch, when you travel a lot the basics are what matters: walls thick enough to neutralize noisy neighbors; a bed that neither swallows you up nor makes it seem as if you’re lying on plywood; a shower with plenty of pressure and hot water whose sliding door doesn’t have a mind of its own.

I can take or leave fluffy towels, but I appreciate a sink at the right height. The only time I hurt myself in a hotel room was in Binghamton, New York. Leaning way over to shave one morning, I tweaked my back and ended up on the floor in pain, causing me to look scruffy and smell of Bengay the rest of my stay.

Mostly, you want your room to be your room. Checking into a Denver hotel one night a couple of years ago, I encountered a clerk with problems greater than nickname awareness. Upon reaching my assigned room, when the key card turned the light green and I pushed the door open, it slammed loudly into the security lock. Hearing someone rustling inside, I didn’t stick around for a conversation.

Hometown

HOMETOWN

Knuckling Under

The fabulous flutterball

By Bill Fields

My baseball career ended at 13 after I suddenly became afraid of the ball during my first season in Pony League, the destination in those days after aging out of Little League. At the lower level, I’d been a dependable third baseman with no fear at the hot corner even when the strongest boys with the quickest bats came to the plate 60 feet away. There were plenty of “5-3” notations in the Braves’ clay-dusted scorebook.

In a year I went from All-Star to also-ran and, in short order, out of the sport. No more seasoning my glove with castor oil before the first practice. No more Bazooka bubbles between batters. My knuckleball retired with me.

That’s because in addition to my years as an infielder at the sweet little ballfield across Morganton Road from the National Guard Armory in Southern Pines, a dearth of pitchers my last season meant I was recruited to take the mound when I wasn’t playing third.

Possessing a fast ball which wasn’t very speedy and not being able to throw a curve ball — couldn’t hit one either — I had been messing around with a knuckleball in the neighborhood well before using a rosin bag and stepping on the pitching rubber for the first time.

With the knuckles of my index and middle fingers of my right hand touching the ball instead of a normal grip — some early knuckleballers had thrown the pitch that way, but later skilled practitioners used their fingertips — I discovered the ball did funny things when thrown.

With a knuckler, a pitch could become a magic act. And it helped a kid with an average arm sit down some batters.

Because the unique grip minimizes spin, a ball can’t make up its mind when you throw it. The aerodynamics — most of the time — make its flight unpredictable. A knuckler flutters in flight, mimicking a butterfly, its destination uncertain. The mystery novel of pitches, it has confounded generations of hitters and catchers with devilish dances and darting movements.

“The knuckleball,” wrote the famous sportswriter Jimmy Cannon, “is a curve ball that doesn’t give a damn.”

Joe Torre, sometimes tasked with being on the receiving end of the can’t-make-up-its-mind pitch for part of his long and distinguished career in the major leagues, said, “You don’t catch a knuckleball, you defend against it.”

Toad Ramsey, a 19th century pitcher, is cited by some historians as the originator of the fluttering, frustrating pitch, but the ballplayer who first brought a lot of attention to it was Eddie “Knuckles” Cicotte, of the Chicago White Sox. Cicotte possessed a legendary repertoire of junk pitches, a knuckleball among them, before being caught up in the scandal of 1919, when he admitted being one of eight Chicago players taking cash to throw the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds.

My youth coincided with the final seasons of the 21-year knuckleballing career of Hoyt Wilhelm, the most famous athlete to come out of Huntersville, N.C., north of Charlotte, before Drake Maye, the current New England Patriots quarterback. Like successful knuckleballers who followed, Wilhelm, the first relief pitcher to make it into the Baseball Hall of Fame, lasted a long time, appearing in more than 1,000 games and retiring when he was just shy of 50.

Other top knuckleballers enjoyed similarly lengthy and successful careers because the slower pitch is less stressful on the arm: Wilbur Wood, Charlie Hough, Phil and Joe Niekro, R.A. Dickey and Tim Wakefield among them. In 1973, Wood started both games of a doubleheader; knuckleball pitchers can pitch on little rest and don’t have to ice their arm after games.

Despite the plusses, fewer than a hundred major leaguers have thrown the baffling pitch. Speed has become the realm of modern baseball. A lone knuckleball pitcher, Matt Waldron, of the San Diego Padres, is on a MLB roster at the start of this season. The pitch that the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Willie Stargell referred to as “a butterfly with hiccups” is practically grounded, its vexing vagaries left to history.

2026 Department Hometown

Hometown

HOMETOWN

Wearin’ o’ the Green

A little luck goes a long way

By Bill Fields

I’m going to wear something green on St. Patrick’s Day.

I’ve never been fully committed to doing so, but upon reviewing my ethnic origins for the first time in a while, I’ve decided that this March 17 I ought to get dressed with more purpose.

An updated DNA report shows there is more Irish in my background that I had thought, with single-digit percentages of my roots linked to each of three areas in Ireland: Connacht, Munster and Donegal. Some 18 percent of my heritage comes from the ancestral region of “Central Scotland and Northern Ireland.” Ancestry doesn’t break down that number; I hope the latter locale is well-represented.

Last summer, for the second time in a decade, I spent an enjoyable week working at The Open Championship in Portrush, Northern Ireland, where the commute from hotel to NBC Sports television compound consisted of a 15-minute walk through town or along the beach. The twice-daily stroll, including stops at friendly establishments for coffee in the morning and Guinness in the evening, was a pleasant antidote to many long drives in snarled traffic to major golf events over the years, trips sometimes punctuated by a parking lot attendant on a power trip.

It felt like luck was on my side in Portrush, including the day that a bat flew around the TV tower while we were on the air, causing analyst Kevin Kisner to duck and cover as it darted right over his head. Having had to receive a series of rabies shots after a close encounter with a bat while I was taking out the trash at dusk on a summer day in 1997, I was grateful our visitor stayed clear of my workspace. Someone purchased a large, long-handled net that we had at the ready the rest of the week, but to the relief of everyone in the tower, the bat never reappeared.

Luck is an apt topic in March, regardless of how one feels about the origins of “Luck of the Irish.” Rather than considering the idiom as ironic or derisive (as was the case when used about the success of Irish miners in the American West during the late 1800s), this seems the right time to simply place it in the context of extremely good fortune.

The enduring Irish symbol of luck and prosperity, the shamrock, is a three-leafed clover. Come March — which not only includes St. Patrick’s Day but marks the start of spring and the arrival of golf season in many places — I think of the much rarer four-leaf variety, believed to be a truly lucky plant.

Years ago, while I was researching a story for Golf World about the legendary golfer Glenna Collett Vare, one of the things people remembered about the record six-time U.S. Women’s Amateur champion, a trailblazing athlete of the 1920s and ’30s, was her uncanny knack for finding four-leaf clovers.

One such instance occurred at the 1950 Curtis Cup at the Country Club of Buffalo when Vare captained the American team that included a young Ohioan, Peggy Kirk, later known as Peggy Kirk Bell, the matriarch of Pine Needles. Kirk trailed late in her singles match when Vare approached to ask her how she stood. Learning of Kirk’s deficit, Vare stepped away for a few minutes, then returned with a four-leaf clover and a message — “Go get her” — for Peggy. Kirk won the match, 1 up.

Given how finely groomed golf courses have become since Collett Vare’s era, it’s harder to find clover of any kind these days, not that modern players haven’t gotten some very good breaks. Less than a month prior to St. Patrick’s Day last year, in a playoff at the Mexico Open, Brian Campbell badly sliced a drive that was surely headed out-of-bounds until it struck a tree and caromed back in play, setting up his subsequent victory.

Campbell’s was as lucky a moment seen on the PGA Tour since 1992 when Fred Couples’ ball defied the odds and clung to the steep bank of Rae’s Creek on Augusta National’s 12th hole; or perhaps The Crosby in 1984 when Hale Irwin’s tee shot, headed toward the ocean left of Pebble Beach’s 18th hole, bounced off the rocks and onto the fairway, the ball appearing as if a seal had headed it to safety. Irwin birdied, then defeated Jim Nelford in a playoff.

From personal experience, I can report those rocks aren’t usually so kind.

2026 Department Hometown

Hometown

HOMETOWN

The Way We Were

Let your fingers do the walking

By Bill Fields

While cleaning out my childhood home almost a decade ago, I held on to some random items, one of them having been tucked in a cabinet below the wall-mounted phone in the hallway, an instrument through which good and bad news, salty gossip, and the time and temperature had been received for decades. In the final days of 692-8677, the long cord hanging toward the floor looked like it always did, a tangled mess that made privacy or pacing difficult.

I salvaged an old phone book that had been published in November 1975, its white and yellow pages good for the following year. “A Century of Telephone Progress” was heralded on the cover, along with renderings of antique and current phones — a state-of-the-art pushbutton model! — and the bearded visage of Alexander Graham Bell, who received a patent for the telephone on March 7, 1876.

Perusing the thin 6-by-9-inch volume of residences and businesses compiled by the United Telephone Company of The Carolinas five decades after it landed in our mailbox is nothing short of time travel to the way we were, before the Southern Pines area had grown and phones had shrunk.

Some of the “instructions” in the directory’s early pages are so rudimentary they are a reminder that, 50 years ago, a land line was considered a modern marvel.

“One way to avoid wrong numbers is to keep the area code and number before you as you dial.”

“When you make a call, give your party time to answer — about 10 rings — before you hang up. This could save you having to make a second call later.”

“You can save money by dialing all your calls direct without involving an operator.”

Making an out-of-state call? There was a 35 percent discount on weekday evenings and 60 percent off on Saturday and Sunday. Trying to describe a “collect” call to someone who came of age during the cellphone era is like explaining when gas was 49 cents a gallon or that airplanes had smoking sections.

By the time this directory came out my father was a policeman, and we had elected to have an unlisted number, not that teenagers joyriding through the Town & Country Shopping Center parking lot to whom he gave a warning would have done us any harm. My Grandmother Daisy, born 16 years after Bell’s invention, and Uncle Bob, both Jackson Springs residents, are listed.

So many familiar names were in the phone book: neighbors and friends, teachers and pastors, doctors and dentists. If you needed to reach the editor of The Pilot after business hours, Ragan Sam was on page 87; the owner of radio station WEEB, Younts J S, could be found on page 112.

There were lots of Blues and Browns, Davises and Fryes, Jacksons and Joneses, McKenzies and McNeills, Smiths and Thomases. Perhaps more Williamses than any other name, among them John W, otherwise “Coach” to so many for so long.

When you “let your fingers do the walking in the yellow pages” there was plenty to see.

Remember “Service Stations” where you’d get your windshield cleaned and oil checked while filling up? Dezalia Phillips 66, Poe’s Texaco, Red’s Exxon, Styers Gulf were among the dozens of such establishments listed in the yellow pages.

Restaurants? There was The Capri and The Chicken Hut, Dante’s and Duffy’s, Lob-Steer Inn and Park-N-Eat, Cecil’s Steak House and The Sandwich Shop, Mr. Flynn’s and Tastee Freez. None of those exist today, but Bob’s Pizza (“Call for Quicker Service”) does.

St. Joseph of the Pines was still a hospital. Mac’s Business Machines could set you up with a typewriter. You could get lodging at the Belvedere Hotel or Fairway Motel, groceries at A & P, Big Star, Piggly Wiggly or Winn-Dixie (“The Beef People”). The Glitter Box is no more, but Honeycutt Jewelers still sparkles.

Among the clip art (dogs, golfers and termites) and bold fonts, one of the categories caught my eye: “Ice.” Half a dozen places were listed, including Brooks Min-It Market and Ice Masters Service of Carthage, which boasted “clean, hard ice cubes” and “ice never touched by human hands.”

Now, we hold computers in our palms and text with our thumbs. That’s “person-to-person” these days.

2026 Department Hometown

Hometown

HOMETOWN

Grit and Grace

Remembering a boyhood hero

By Bill Fields

This college basketball season is hitting me in a different way, and I can’t blame it on the transfer portal or other tradition-wrecking aspects of the current era, as dispiriting as they might be.

Larry Miller died last May, at 79, and it felt as if an important piece of my childhood went with the legendary Tar Heel, who starred for coach Dean Smith in the 1960s and led Carolina to two straight Final Fours.

I read something not long ago that one’s deepest bonds with sports are rooted in associations which date to elementary and middle school days. Sports certainly have never been a bigger passion for me than they were when I was that age and beginning to play as well as becoming a devoted fan.

About the time I was just starting to digest the daily sports section, three players in three sports were drawing my fullest attention: Willie Mays, Sonny Jurgensen and Miller. As much as I loved the star centerfielder who could do it all for the San Francisco Giants and the pure-passing quarterback of the Washington Redskins, Miller captivated me most of all.

Playing on the other side of the country, Mays was mostly a name in a box score. If the rooftop antenna was doing its job, Jurgensen regularly showed up on our television on Sunday afternoons in the fall. But during the three seasons he was on the UNC basketball team — freshmen weren’t allowed to compete on varsity teams until the early 1970s — Miller was a more frequent presence in my sports universe. I read about him in the paper, watched him on TV, and listened to his exploits on radio.

Miller filled gyms across Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley as a prep star. His hometown, Catasauqua, was one of the first far-flung locales to stick in my mind. Convincing Miller to come to Chapel Hill after he graduated from high school in 1964 was vital to Smith, whose early years at the helm were rocky. More than a hundred colleges had offered scholarships to the 6-foot-4 forward, whose jumping ability allowed him to play bigger.

To the coeds who flooded the UNC Sports Information office with fan mail for their handsome favorite, Miller was a matinee idol. For a young boy who couldn’t get enough basketball and loved the Tar Heels, Miller suited up on the Carmichael Auditorium hardwood at the perfect time to fuel my hoops obsession. I would root hard for other Carolina stars, from Charlie Scott to George Karl to Phil Ford, but Miller stood alone as my first basketball crush.

The Tar Heels didn’t have their names on the back of their jerseys in those days, but there was no mistaking No. 44 in light blue and white. Miller was an effective blend of grit and grace on the court, an excellent outside shooter who also had a crafty way of driving to the basket and scoring on scoop-style layups after faking out the opposition with his creative moves. Being a righty, I couldn’t emulate Miller’s left-handed shots, but I otherwise tried to be him around our rickety backyard goal or in Saturday morning youth-league games in the Southern Pines gym. There were thousands of other kids in their Converses or Keds around North Carolina just like me.

As a junior, Miller made 13 of 14 shots in a win over Duke in the final of the 1967 ACC Tournament, and the Tar Heels became the first Smith-coached team to reach the Final Four, losing to Dayton in the semifinals. ACC Player of the Year in 1967 and ’68, Miller was a consensus first-team All-American in 1968, when Carolina repeated as conference champs and again advanced to the Final Four, losing badly in the championship game to Lew Alcindor-led UCLA.

The Tar Heels’ 23-point loss to the Bruins didn’t dampen my enthusiasm for wanting to see Miller in person later that spring at an exhibition game of barnstorming college seniors at the Pinehurst gym. Not only did my dad take me to the game, but at halftime he also bought me an autographed 8-by-10 glossy of Miller at the souvenir stand. I’ve held on to that $3.00 picture all this time, and when I heard Miller had died, I retrieved it from a box and looked at it for a good long while, remembering.

2026 Department Hometown

Hometown

HOMETOWN

Christmas in a Nutshell

The spirit lingers in little things

By Bill Fields

Most of the presents I received long ago, on those Christmas mornings of excitement and eggnog which seemed as if they would never arrive, are long gone. The Rock ’Em, Sock ’Em Robots, those red and blue plastic heavyweights, haven’t gone 12 rounds in years. No rough representations of cats or dogs have appeared in squiggly lines on the Etch A Sketch in forever. The future-telling of a Magic 8-Ball is far, far in the past.

But my “Christmas Nutshell Library” still sits on a shelf, a symbol of the season to be checked out each December, more than 60 years since it appeared under our tree and I marked it as mine, the black letters forming my name on the slipcase now very faint or claimed by time.

Growing up, I loved little things: a 10-cent water pistol that could be hidden in a palm; pocket-sized checkers set; “Tot 50” Swingline stapler about the size of my index finger; Matchbox cars that could race on a windowsill.

Given that the volumes in the holiday collection each measured just 2 7/8 x 3 7/16 inches, they were right up my alley. Talk about truth in advertising — the $2.95 set, published by Harper & Row in 1963, was promoted as “four small books for small people.” The Lilliputian release was Harper & Row’s follow-up to the 1962 publication of the popular “Nutshell Library” by noted children’s author and illustrator Maurice Sendak. The Christmas-themed encore was entrusted to another giant of the genre, Hilary Knight.

Knight, whose father, Clayton, and mother, Katherine, were talented illustrators and immersed him in art when he was a child, was well known by the early 1960s for having illustrated author Kay Thompson’s 1955 Eloise: A Book for Precocious Grownups, about a mischievous 6-year-old girl who lives with her nanny, dog and turtle on “the tippy-top floor” of the Plaza Hotel in New York City. The character, based on an imaginary friend Thompson had as a child, was further developed in three Eloise book sequels by Thompson and Knight in the late 1950s: Eloise in Paris, Eloise at Christmastime and Eloise in Moscow.

For the “Christmas Nutshell Library” Knight drew the artwork for Clement Moore’s classic The Night Before Christmas. He wrote and illustrated the other three books: A Firefly in a Fir Tree, a parody of “The Twelve Days of Christmas”; Angels & Berries & Candy Canes, an alphabet book; and A Christmas Stocking Story, accurately described in one 1963 review as “a merry mix-up yarn.”

I enjoyed the tiny books, again and again, across numerous childhood Christmases. The missing dust jackets are a casualty of how often I read them each holiday season. One particularly loosened binding, though, reveals my favorite.

A Christmas Stocking Story is the charming, rhyming tale of eight creatures — Stork, Hippo, Lion, Fish, Elephant, Snake, Fox and Bug — to whom Santa Claus delivers ill-suited gifts to their stockings. “Fish fell in a solemn hush,” Knight wrote, “finding hers held comb and brush.”

But the recipients go from glum to giddy when they “found each had what the next preferred” and remedy the situation by swapping presents. Among the happy do-overs:

“Stork, who suffered from sore throats, wore his sleeve with winter coats.”

“Hippo, hiding giggling fits, shyly showed her lacy mitts.”

“Snake, who yearned for gaudy things, slipped into her diamond rings.”

Knight’s skilled hand brought the critters’ emotions — dejection at first, followed by delight — to vivid life. His 1964 Where’s Wallace? is the tale of an orangutan who repeatedly flees the zoo and has escapades around the city. Young readers were challenged to find the ape in Knight’s detailed panoramic illustrations nearly a quarter-century before kids began searching for a human character in Where’s Waldo?

Over a career that extended into his 90s, Knight has illustrated more than 50 books, created artwork for magazine and record album covers, advertisements, greeting cards and Broadway shows.

“I got a lot of work to do,” Knight told Forbes.com when he was 90. “I have to take care of myself because I have to live at least another 10 years.”

The man who provided children plenty of pleasure celebrated his 99th birthday last month.

2025 Department Hometown

Hometown

HOMETOWN

Wonderful Wood

When the persimmon tree reigned supreme

By Bill Fields

Every fall, at some point after the days began to cool, I could count on hearing a complaint from my father.

“Those damn persimmons,” he would say. “That tree needs to go.”

Our yard was mostly populated by longleaf pines, half a dozen of which loomed taller than the two-story house they surrounded. Their fellow evergreen was a bulky cedar, thickened over the years like a college freshman with a generous meal plan and little willpower. Several maples and sycamores gave our corner of the block a little color around Halloween.

Dad realized that having to clean up the needles and leaves after they drifted to the ground was the price of shade. But he was much less understanding about what dropped from our Diospyros virginiana each autumn.

About 40 feet tall, our American persimmon tree, with its dark, blocky squares of bark, stood next to the driveway. It was in just the right location for its fruit to fall on our cars and stain them. We were a (well) used-car family during my early childhood. But Dad kept the vehicles washed and waxed and didn’t appreciate the mess made by the fleshy persimmons, which were about the color of a basketball and the size of a ping pong ball.

Sometimes, we kids threw them like baseballs at each other, unaware that the sweet pulp of the ripe fruits could be — when mixed with the proper amount of milk, sugar, eggs, flour and butter — turned into a tasty persimmon pudding. (I only sampled an unripe persimmon once, so astringent was its flavor.)

One day, my father hired a man with a chain saw, and the persimmon tree was no more. Its remains were hauled to the curb to be hauled off by town workers. For decades a small stump marked its former presence and demanded a slight detour when mowing.

Dad was not a golfer at that point, and I was a mere fledgling in the game. Neither of us knew that the type of tree chopped into pieces and piled by the curb figured so prominently in golf. Beech, ash, dogwood and other species were utilized for wooden clubheads during the 18th and 19th centuries in Great Britain, but American persimmon (native to south central and eastern parts of the U.S.) became the material of choice beginning in the early 20th century. Persimmon is dense and durable, ideal for golf clubs. I have wondered whether any clubheads could have been produced from the wood of the tree we had taken down because it was a nuisance.

I was a young teenager when I acquired my first persimmon-headed woods, lightly used MacGregor Tourneys manufactured in the late 1960s. Experiencing the “satisfying thwack” of a well-struck shot was a revelation. The sensation was something golfers of all abilities, from duffers to legends, sought to feel. When a golfer found a certain persimmon club to his or her liking, it could be a magical and productive union.

Ben Hogan broke through for his first individual wins on tour in the spring of 1940 — in Pinehurst, Greensboro and Asheville — with a MacGregor driver just given to him by Byron Nelson. Sam Snead used an Izett model driver and Jack Nicklaus a MacGregor 3-wood for decades. Persimmon clubs crafted in the 1940s through the early 1960s were regarded as being of the highest quality because of the old-growth trees the wood came from. Johnny Miller won the 1973 U.S. Open with a MacGregor driver made in 1961 and 3- and 4-woods manufactured in the 1940s.

The development of metal-headed woods in the 1970s and 1980s spelled the end of persimmon’s prominence for clubheads. Bernhard Langer was the last to win a major championship with a persimmon driver, at the 1993 Masters. Most of the high-tech drivers on the market now have clubheads more than twice the size of the persimmon classics.

Not that the old beauties which were such a part of golf history aren’t used today. There is an enthusiastic subset of golfers who enjoy collecting and playing vintage persimmon-headed clubs in at least some of their rounds. I am proudly among them. You get some strange looks from playing partners. A kid I got paired with at my local muni asked, “Don’t you like technology?”

But on the occasions when your drive with a 65-year-old club finishes in the same vicinity as theirs struck with a current model, it can be very satisfying. Golf’s much different with the modern stuff, but I’m not sure it’s better.

2025 Department Hometown

Hometown

HOMETOWN

Keep on Truckin’

New life for old wheels

By Bill Fields

My mother drove until she was in her early 90s, an age-defying feat that made me happy until it made me scared.

I witnessed things on successive visits that caused concern. After Mom dropped me off early one morning at the Southern Pines train station to catch Amtrak’s Silver Star to New York, from the platform I noticed she lingered a long time in the parking space before leaving.

When I was in town the next time, she took more than an hour to return with a bag of groceries from Bo’s (the former A&P and now an arcade), arriving as I was calling the store to see if someone had any knowledge of her whereabouts. Mom claimed nothing was out of the ordinary, but it seemed likely she had gotten lost making the 1 1/2-mile trip home from Bo’s, a route she knew like the back of her hand.

Not too long after that incident, one of my sisters drew the unpleasant task of telling Mom it wasn’t safe for her to be behind the wheel anymore — even on the very short in-town trips that had become the extent of her driving — and that we were taking away the car keys for her safety and that of others. As our mother stewed about the blow to her independence, we children deliberated about where to hide the keys.

In 1982, two years after becoming a widow, Mom had upgraded from an aging Mustang to a gray Honda Civic, her first new car since our family splurged on a 1969 Ford Fairlane from Jackson Motors. She drove that Civic for a decade and a half, trading it in not long before her 75th birthday to purchase a new 1997 Honda Civic.

Mom’s second Civic, “cyclone blue metallic” in color, provided reliable transportation around Moore County and on occasional trips to visit my sister Sadie in High Point, which she was comfortable making until age 87. Once my mother stopped highway driving, I would take the Honda for an engine-exercising spin when I was home, driving north on U.S. 1, getting it up to 65 or 70 miles per hour before turning around in Dunrovin and heading back south.

More than once when taking Mom’s car to get the oil changed, I had someone ask if I was interested in selling it, so clean was the body and so low was the mileage.

I’m so glad I never entertained those offers. In 2018, a year after my mother went to live in an assisted-living facility, my nephew John and his son, Tristen, picked up the Civic, which had only 35,000 miles on the odometer. Tristen has driven “Old Blue,” as his dad calls the car, since getting his driver’s license in 2019.

Tristen is a muscular, 22-year-old college student who was an all-conference defensive lineman in high school, but he fits in the small sedan — and it has been a great fit for him.

“I’m very blessed that my car is still working perfectly fine and giving me the transportation I need,” said Tristen, who has doubled the mileage on his great-grandmother’s former vehicle since it became his. “The only things I’ve done is gotten new tires, a new radiator and new fuel injectors. My dad talks about getting me a bigger car, but honestly I don’t need it. I enjoy my car, and I’d rather keep driving it until I can’t.”

Only 5 percent of the cars on the road today were manufactured in the late 1990s. The oldest car among Tristen’s friends is a 2012 model. He just drove the 28-year-old car on its longest journey, 400 miles to Pennsylvania and back, to attend a friend’s wedding.

“Just a couple of tanks of gas and no problems whatsoever,” Tristen reported. “I don’t have plans for another trip like that anytime soon, but if I need to, I’ll have even more faith that it’ll make it.”

I have friends with Hondas that have more than 250,000 miles. Mom’s former car might be in the family for a while, and that is fine with its second owner. “I think,” Tristen said, “I will always be an old-car guy.”

2025 Department Hometown

Hometown

HOMETOWN

Guiding Lights

To the ones who lay the foundation

By Bill Fields

Amid some recent decluttering — well, to be honest, plain old rummaging through the contents of a castaway cardboard box obtained from the ABC store that had sat for years in the closet of my childhood home — I found a letter to my mother from my first-grade teacher at East Southern Pines Elementary, Alice Caddell.

“It has been a joy to teach Bill this year,” Mrs. Caddell wrote. “He is a very intelligent boy, and I am expecting great things from him. Bill has been so good to share his books and toys with us. We do appreciate it. I shall miss Bill next year.”

Two thoughts immediately came to mind upon reading the handwritten message:

1). The dusting powder Mom gave Mrs. Caddell at the end of the 1965-66 school year must have been of the highest quality.

2). I peaked way too soon.

Clearly — and thank goodness — Mrs. Caddell never compared notes with math teachers I had further down the line when the work was more complicated than adding and subtracting the wobbly numbers I’d formed with a thick pencil on wide-ruled paper. My score on the math portion of the SAT was the equivalent of getting blown out 56-7 on a Saturday afternoon in September. If she had seen that, she might have reconsidered her praise for a boy who had let classmates play with his G.I. Joe and Matchbox cars.

Even if it has been a long time since you’ve been in a classroom, recollections of the good and the bad come flooding back this time of year.

You certainly recall the places where you learned. In my case, that meant nine years of elementary and middle school on the campus between New York Avenue and Massachusetts Avenue in Southern Pines, three years at Pinecrest High School, followed by four years (plus a summer session) at UNC-Chapel Hill.

What you learned? Of course, from cursive to typing, “Run, Spot, run!” to “Emilio y Enrique están aquí.” Montpelier and Pierre were state capital challenges for those of us who grew up taking field trips to a museum or prison in Raleigh. Attempting to dissect a frog in 10th grade biology wasn’t nearly as much fun as chasing tadpoles. My world view broadened upon discovering there are bodies of water in America that make Aberdeen Lake look like a puddle.

But the people we learn from linger most vividly in memory. No one goes through a dozen or more years of school without experiencing at least a few teachers whom you’d rather forget, people ill-suited for the profession going through the motions, more eager for the last bell of the day to ring than even some of their least-motivated pupils. I had a college journalism professor who thought small, throttling my ambition — it didn’t work —instead of feeding it.

Fortunately, those types of individuals are outnumbered by their more skilled and passionate brethren who regardless of personality possess the gift to inspire as well as instruct, whose command of a subject and enthusiasm for it rubs off. That kind of talent results in a student chasing knowledge long after a final exam in a particular course.

Since I didn’t go to kindergarten, Mrs. Caddell got me off on the right foot, and Mrs. Robbins was just as kind and good at her job in second grade. My sixth-grade teacher, Miss Hall, had a gift for making you want to learn, to show off by making excellent grades. In the ninth grade, Spanish teacher Jeanette Metcalf enthusiastically guided me through my introduction to a foreign language.

At Pinecrest, Karen Hickman (journalism) and Eloise Whitesell (English), got me off on sound footing when I was trying to learn how to string sentences together. Once I began taking courses in the School of Journalism at Carolina, Jan Johnson did a great job teaching the basics, although I’m glad none of my early newswriting efforts from J-53 are archived for anyone to see. In a couple of advanced courses I took later, professors John Adams and Richard Cole, true scholars of the craft, were demanding yet nurturing. And regardless of what level or subject someone is teaching, that is an unbeatable combination.

2025 Department Hometown

Hometown

HOMETOWN

Sweet, Sweet Summer

The days of sand and frozen dessert

By Bill Fields

When categorizing good times growing up by the calendar, I settle on summer as the best season.

Sure, the other parts of the year had some positives. In winter, there were the occasional opposite delights of enough snow to cancel school, along with days mild enough to play outside without a jacket. Fall meant the county fair and football, Halloween and Thanksgiving. Even a sports-obsessed child with his head buried in box scores couldn’t fail to notice the splendor of the Sandhills in springtime, when the azaleas and dogwoods show off, relegating pine green to backup-singer status for just a bit.

For me, though, summer wins.

The longer days were a gift that seemed a thank-you from the universe for December’s dwindling daylight, when even a go-getting kid could get the blues from early sunsets that sent everyone inside. In summer, there was time to play, to read, to loll. I didn’t mind that it was rerun season on television, because I was on a porch with a transistor radio, fiddling the dial like a safecracker, trying my darndest to hear what they were saying in Nashville or New York or some other city I’d seen in the encyclopedia.

I remember a lightness in my parents, even when the air was heavy. There was one notable exception for Dad, in the years when he was a police officer in Aberdeen. The Fourth of July festivities at Aberdeen Lake meant that he had to direct traffic on U.S. 1, an assignment that caused him to loathe fireworks as much as did the county’s canines. Once he was home and out of uniform, his first beer went down quickly.

Summer meant a well-earned vacation, usually at the beach, where, for a week, my parents’ worries of mortgage payments and utility bills receded like an outgoing tide. Dad fished, but it didn’t matter too much whether a baited hook on the bottom ever attracted a spot, croaker or whiting; the pleasure was that he didn’t have to be elsewhere doing anything. My mother read magazines or closed her eyes under dime-store sunglasses and napped in the sun.

On these annual getaways, they didn’t have to check their wristwatches. Time was told by Krispy Kreme in the morning, corn dogs on the strand come noon, flounder at Hoskins Restaurant at night.

At home, Dad loved to cook out anytime, but the charcoal grill saw more action during the hot months: hamburgers, hot dogs, barbecued chicken, steak if it was on special. My father loved these evenings, even if, half the time, he was commanded to trudge back to the grill to give my mother’s entrée more time above the glowing briquets to suit her well-done preference after she had scrutinized the plated beef under the kitchen’s fluorescent fixture.

We ate plenty of vegetables year-round, but the can opener largely rested in summer. Sourced from our small garden, the overflow bounty from friends’ larger plots, or purchased from the back of someone’s pickup at an intersection, fresh produce highlighted our menus for a couple of months. I loved corn on the cob and fried okra in equal measure, but each pleasure came up short to tomato sandwiches, garnished with salt and pepper and a little mayonnaise, the red fruit ripe enough to require multiple napkins.

For a few years, before it broke, we had an ice cream maker that Dad occasionally used during peach season, but the path to a perfect homemade frozen dessert proved elusive. We were mostly a bargain carton of Neapolitan clan — the remnants of the strawberry third always the last to be consumed — but during a hot spell I had limited success slipping a package of Popsicles or Fudgsicles into our grocery cart.

We cooled off on steamy evenings with watermelon eaten in the backyard — but not too close to bedtime, per Mom’s marching orders — followed by a game of horseshoes at dusk. Ringers were rare but lightning bugs weren’t, their presence a sign that another long, lovely summer day was drawing to a close.

2025 Department Hometown