Hometown

Up and Away

Revisiting the first rung of a long climb

By Bill Fields

Someone asked me not long ago the number of states I had visited, and my answer got me thinking.

For work or pleasure, I have at least set foot in 48 of the 50. Alaska and North Dakota are the places I haven’t gone, my travels having been much broader than I could have imagined growing up as the youngest child of parents who had stayed put in their home county.

But well before I ventured out of state — before I ever consulted one of those road maps that seemed impossible to fold up neatly once you had opened it — I went up to get away.

It was a dogwood located within a boy’s best forward pass from our house, yet climbing up to sit on its lowest branch was my first adventure.

I was back at that tree recently, during a season of change that had me thinking. The limb still looks like an arm bending toward the sky, its distinctively textured bark peeling from age. My old perch is at eye level now, still only 6 feet or so from the ground, a height that allowed me to touch it without strain.

Decades ago, when I was close to 6 instead of 60, it took real effort to reach. But it sure was worth it. 

That crook was sanctuary and observatory, but mostly it was mine. It was a place to think, laugh or pout, a vantage point from which I could look down upon our cats, the occasional passing car, neighbors raking leaves. It gave me a different perspective on our horseshoe pit, basketball goal and swimming pool, which sat upon the yard like a large yellow can that had been sawed in half.

My getaway place was neither secret nor far away, although it felt as if it was both of those things, particularly the latter the one time I chickened out on my descent and summoned help to get down. Hattie, who cared for me while my parents were at work, could only laugh as she came to my rescue but kindly coaxed me back to Earth.

That day notwithstanding, I came to feel quite comfortable in that dogwood, my tree house without walls. Traveling to that space, even though a very short journey, made me feel like I was part of a larger world that, with effort, might be within reach.

I never explored the heights of another tree. About the time I had gotten old enough to consider climbing higher, a friend and neighbor much more adventuresome than I was took an awful tumble from a large sycamore and broke her leg. It was a severe injury that had her in a cast and on crutches for a long time. But given how far she fell, the outcome might well have been much worse. Even so, her mishap was a cautionary tale.

When I studied my old climbing tree recently, I considered who I had been when I sat in that spot — how much I didn’t know and how many places I hadn’t been, that the borders of my world then were school, church, the grocery store and my grandmother’s house on Sunday afternoons.

In those hot summer days when I retreated to my space in that tree, my world wasn’t much bigger than the globe on my desk. I hadn’t yet ridden on a train or flown in a jet.

I stood by that dogwood this August and touched the limb that used to be my summit and wondered how many times I have been tens of thousands of feet in the air on the way to somewhere and, as we all have, taken it for granted. I thought of the paper airplanes I tossed from that branch all those years ago, their journeys as uncertain as my own.   PS

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

A Whole New World

It was a marvel when the pros came to town

By Bill Fields

Seeing the U.S. Open played at Pinehurst No. 2 three times in the last 20 years — and the U.S. Women’s Open, too, in 2014 — has been wonderful. For many years the prospect of holding the national Open here was as unlikely as landing an NFL franchise. The negative chorus was loud: too small, too remote, too you-name-it. But the championships went off without hitches, and a fourth Open is already penciled in for 2024.

My best memories of elite competition on No. 2, though, pre-date the majors and are of a time when people didn’t go to golf tournaments to shop or drink, when “corporate hospitality” was not yet a glint in a marketer’s eye, when knuckleheads weren’t shouting inanities after someone’s shot. 

I didn’t know then, more than four decades ago, that Donald Ross’ masterpiece design had lost its way architecturally, with acres of Bermuda rough, soft putting surfaces and love-to-hate grass planted in all the wrong places. If you were a young, aspiring golfer — and there weren’t a lot of us around in those days, Mecca of the game or not — it seemed just shy of magical that the PGA Tour came to town.

Arnie. Jack. Lee. Raymond. Chi Chi. Even Sam, more than 30 years since the first of his three victories in the North and South Open on No. 2, the golf gods having given him not only glorious tempo but the gift of time.

And there were the tour rabbits that came out of the Monday qualifying hat to fill the field in a given season, players such as George Cadle, Bunky Henry, Lyn Lott, Ed Sabo, Curtis Sifford and Alan Tapie.

All ours for a week — or two, in the case of the inaugural World Open in 1973, which copied the State Fair without the cotton candy and candy apples. But to a local golf-loving teenager who knew the difference between Terry Diehl and Terry Dill, even though their surnames sounded the same in our accent, the tournament was plenty sweet.

Watching the pros in the flesh, particularly while carrying a scoring standard on weekends at the World Open from 1974-76, was inspiring but also sobering, like seeing my swing for the first time on our Super 8 movie camera. What they (best in the world) and I (decent high school golfer) were capable of seemed galaxies apart. Everything looked orderly, coordinated, purposeful. Putting a cabretta glove in a back pocket before putting was origami. No one got grass stains, even on dewy mornings. The sound of their spikes on a hard concrete path even played a different tune.

Tom Watson was a decade older than me, but he and caddie Bruce Edwards looked impossibly young the several times I drew a grouping that included the rising star who fearlessly made his way around No. 2. Stray tee shot? No problem. Missed green? No worries. Almost every time I thought I was going to have to denote a dropped shot on my standard, he holed a putt. That this par-saving machine went on to win at Pinehurst in consecutive years (1978-79) was no surprise.

Before or after my volunteer shifts inside the ropes, or after school on Thursday or Friday, it was never hard to see the action in the low-key atmosphere so different from the gallery choke points during the Opens when so many spectators made roomy No. 2 seem claustrophic in places. In 1975, late on Sunday afternoon, I hustled back to the 15th hole for the start of a playoff between eventual winner Johnny Miller, Frank Beard, Bob Murphy and Jack Nicklaus. I was sitting so close to the players I felt like I could reach out and grab Murph’s long iron when he made his signature pause at the top.

Some of my friends picked up work with ABC Sports when the Pinehurst stop got televised, one of them dispatched to a drug store to buy hair spray for Jim McKay. My paying gig was limited to the Mondays after the World Open when our golf coach would get us out of school.

For $20 and a sandwich apiece, a handful of us would collect the gallery stakes and ropes, somehow managing to avoid hurting ourselves and invariably pausing on a couple of tees to make air swings, the only times I never missed a fairway.   PS

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

My Type of Machine

The clackety-clack of communication

By Bill Fields

An acquaintance took his family to the Newseum in Washington, D.C., recently. He reported that when one of his children saw a typewriter on display, the machine might as well have been an artifact from an ancient pyramid. The child had never seen a typewriter. Ribbons were for hair and home keys were for locks.

About the time I heard this story earlier this year, I read that Laura Cagle, one of the teachers in the business department at Pinecrest when I was a student there, had passed away. It got me thinking about my own typing history.

“My fingers are too big for the keys,” I would complain to my mother as I approached high school, wary about enrolling in a typing class. An old manual on our bookshelf, 20th Century Typewriting, a leftover from someone’s typing education, was intimidating with its commands about “reach-stroke practice” and “control of the tabulator and carriage return.” And “timed writings” sounded about as much fun as having to go on the pommel horse during gym.

But my fingers weren’t too big after all, and I did learn to type. If you wanted to be a reporter, you had to acquire this skill whether by the book or trial and error. Speedy hunt-and-peck artists seemed to be of another planet, so rapidly did their index fingers depress the keys, so I figured that learning to use all my digits was the way to go.

When I managed not to choke on the end-of-semester timed writing junior year, I even got an A. My mother was proud and I was pleased. I might not have known how to put all the words in order yet, but I knew how to type the words. It wasn’t long before we were on the road to Fayetteville to buy a typewriter to take to college. I settled on a portable electric in a faux leather zippered case for $129.95.

I was surprised how many arriving freshmen got to Carolina and didn’t know how to type. Over the course of my first year I more than covered the cost of my first machine by typing papers for classmates, not to mention handling my own assignments in English, political science or history.

My harvest gold Smith-Corona made it through my UNC days, although it balked during a marathon of term papers for several classes over Thanksgiving weekend senior year when a case of major league procrastination resulted in a couple of all-nighters and more than 40 pages total.

By then I had augmented the Smith-Corona with an Underwood manual portable with a clamshell cover for sports writing road trips for The Daily Tar Heel — a purchase that truly made me feel part of the fraternity. At the DTH offices, we typed on sturdy desk model Royals and Remingtons on paper that had one margin for pica type and another for elite, the sound of keys on platen loud and comforting regardless of font size.

Compared to the first wave of portable computers — finicky and unreliable — for which journalists were guinea pigs in the late 1970s and early 1980s, typewriters did their tasks well. They might not have had spell check or word count, but they didn’t give you the spinning wheel of freeze-up frustration either.

“There is something I find reassuring, comforting, dazzling in that here is a very specific apparatus that is meant to do one thing, and it does it perfectly,” actor, filmmaker and typewriter aficionado Tom Hanks told NPR last year. “And that one thing is to translate the thoughts in your head down to paper. Now that means everything from a shopping list to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Short of carving words into stone with a hammer and chisel, not much is more permanent than a paragraph or a sentence or a love letter or a story typed on paper.”  PS

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

Hometown

Road Game

Putt-Putt: a miniature obsession

By Bill Fields

I’ve gotten to interview some of the greats of golf, stars whose names will resonate as long as the game is played — golfers like Gene Sarazen, Sam Snead and Arnold Palmer. Once, I even got to fly into the Moore County Airport on a jet Palmer was piloting. There might not be any cheering in the press box, but that was cool.

A few years ago, it was a thrill to talk with Rick Baird, John Napoli and Rick Smith.

You probably don’t recognize the latter trio or know why I would have been interested in learning their stories. But for someone who loved Putt-Putt the way I did as a kid — despite not getting to play very often — speaking with those putting legends was as good as it gets, the opposite of the feeling when your colored ball disappeared down the chute on the last hole.

Baird and Napoli are two of only three people to shoot an 18 in a Putt-Putt competition, making a 1 on each of the approximately 30-foot putts. (By comparison, there have been 23 perfect games pitched in Major League Baseball.) Smith was one of the best putters in the heyday of the Professional Putters Association. A teen phenom, he won world titles in 1969 and 1972 and was so skilled with his center-shafted blade that Don Clayton, who opened the first Putt-Putt course in Fayetteville in 1954, nicknamed him “The Ace Machine.”

I’m pretty sure my family believed I got a bit too excited about miniature golf, particularly when I wouldn’t budge from the couch when the Putt-Putt televised series, Parade of Champions, was on Sunday mornings. Smith, Vance Randall, John Connor and the other pros showed that Sam Jones had nothing on them when it came to bank shots. They just made theirs wearing dress loafers.

I was usually in flip-flops while trying to imitate the putting pros — open stance like Smith or closed stance like Randall? — on vacation in Ocean Drive, South Carolina, where I looked forward to the beachside Putt-Putt course more than Hoskins’ flounder or Sno-Cones. One of the other kids going round and round those same 18 holes was none other than Rick Baird. About 40 years later, he shot his “Perfect 18” at a tournament in Richmond, Virginia.

My marathon Putt-Putt days occurred while spending a summer week with my sister in High Point, where there was a 36-hole facility on North Main Street. It was three bucks for as much as you wanted to play on a weekday. Practice didn’t make perfect by any means, but I occasionally broke 30, convinced I would have scored better if I had splurged on an official “steel center” PPA ball. Truer roll, and all that.

Young nerves went a long way on those surfaces. Putt-Putt carpets aren’t as fast now because the specific material isn’t manufactured, but back then they were closer to linoleum than Bermuda overseeded with rye. On a real course, I never played on anything approaching Putt-Putt speed until the mid-1970s on the well-manicured bentgrass surfaces at Quail Ridge in Sanford.

I was not a miniature golf snob, happily going to Jungle Golf or Wacky Golf or whatever other names the places with dinosaurs, rhinos and windmills on Highway 17 in Myrtle Beach were called. My parents and sisters indulged me and played too, although I think they tried to pretend they didn’t know me on the occasions I insisted on using my own putter rather than one of the loaners.

My mother relished her holes-in-one, all the more if I had recently critiqued her grip as better suited for a broom handle than a golf club. She was not a great putter but a very good sport, joining Dad and me at the South of the Border miniature golf course, the round a consolation prize on a desultory ride home from a thwarted trip to the beach. All the motel rooms on the Grand Strand were filled by bikers, which sabotaged our spur-of-the-moment attempt at a long weekend.

On Mom’s 80th birthday trip, a long time since we had done so, we had a game at the beach. I asked a stranger to take a snapshot. We are standing next to a giant plastic flamingo, colored balls in our hands and smiles on our faces.  PS

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

Radio Days

The perils of a talking head

By Bill Fields

Once in a while when checking the time, I go back in time.

It’s 4:15 . . . The current time brought to you by Bulova . . . Bulova available at The Glitter Box on Main Street in Aberdeen.

I hear myself — or my fellow WEEB-990 part-timer Keith Smith — reading that 10-second spot on the radio. The Glitter Box jewelry store is long gone, but the commercial has stuck in my memory like lint on a blue blazer.

Working for Southern Pines’ 5,000-watt AM station in the summer of ’77 was the first position related even a little to what I would do in the years ahead. Compared to bussing tables or parking golf carts, two of my other early jobs, turning onto WEEB’s driveway off Midland Road seemed a tiny journey toward a career.

I wasn’t entirely green to WEEB when Mitt Younts, then the manager and son of the station’s founder, Jack Younts, hired me.

Occasionally I had been part of a Key Club radio hour on Saturday mornings, when the booth was turned over to a couple of high school boys who would play records and yap mindlessly between songs. The Key Club show aired without incident, notwithstanding one weekend when, being Elton John fans and forgetting we were not on WQDR, the cool rock FM station in Raleigh, we put “The Bitch Is Back” on the turntable. We were allowed back but only after apologizing to the owner, who seemed to be on the phone before the chorus expressing his displeasure about our choosing such an inappropriate number.

Despite being part of that blunder, I got my own weekly show, “Pinecrest Sports Spotlight,” during which I would report on Patriot athletics and usually have a guest or two to interview in the studio. (When the Pinecrest girls won the state basketball championship, most of the team plus coach James Moore came, the microphone passed around like a bowl of mashed potatoes at Sunday supper.)

I had to pass up a post-graduation trip to the beach to start my job, but getting paid to come to work at the building I’d seen so often from the ninth tee while playing golf at Knollwood Fairways made that not seem like so much of an opportunity lost. I even got to cover some golf later that summer, the Women’s Trans National Amateur Championship held at Mid Pines.

Figuring out how to use Mitt’s tape recorder to get sound bites was infinitely easier than correctly pronouncing the surname of participant Lori Garbacz, which I butchered as “Gar-box.” Fortunately, Cathy Reynolds beat Beth Daniel in the final, two names that even I could handle.

A couple of shifts per week I got to be an actual disc jockey and got competent at cueing up vinyl, reading the required live advertisements and switching to ABC News at the top of the hour. Other days, much of the time was spent monitoring the auto-play operation that WEEB had adopted for the bulk of its programming. On Sundays, a preacher from one of the local churches would deliver a recording of that day’s service. I would collect his $30 payment and play the tape at the scheduled time.

One particular Sunday afternoon while on duty alone, there were prayers before the prayers.

I had my key to get into the station on a separate key ring from my car and house keys. Taking out the trash, I didn’t prop open the door. And, after emptying the garbage can and trying to re-enter the studios, I realized the WEEB key wasn’t in my pocket with my other keys.

It wasn’t Bulova time but panic time. 

If I used one of the golf clubs in my trunk to break in, everybody would know. If I left to go borrow a key and something happened to the station’s audio cruise control before I returned, everybody would know.

I decided to chance the latter choice, guessing correctly that Keith, one of the best athletes in my class as well as my co-worker, was lifting weights at a gym in downtown Southern Pines. Through his laughter he loaned me his key. Avoiding pine trees and police cars, I drove back to WEEB, the dust flying behind my Fairlane as I tore down the dirt lane toward the building.

Feeling as if I had been running wind sprints, I got inside and heard something. The programming had held. WEEB didn’t go off the air that day until sunset, as usual, nor had my career gone dark prematurely either.  PS

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

Landmarks of Life

The joys of the familiar

By Bill Fields

If I’m going to have a hot dog not terribly far from where I live, I’ll go to Walter’s in Mamaroneck, N.Y. There is a reason Walter’s has been serving its excellent hot dogs since 1919 and the stand where I go a couple of times a year has been there since 1928. The franks — once rated by Gourmet magazine as best in America — of a beef, pork and veal blend are made in-house and delicious. A little mustard, also Walter’s own, is the only condiment that should be added to $2.65 worth of flavor.

I don’t believe the hot dogs sold at The Ice Cream Parlor in downtown Southern Pines have received national acclaim, but one “all the way” makes me almost as happy. For North Carolina natives, there is something about a dog with chili, slaw and onions that sparks memories of the pit stops on childhood trips. Our road food — and that meant a hot dog loaded with Carolina-style toppings — on drives from the Sandhills to the Triad came from a place in Seagrove. The highway is quicker and the car seat safer from spills now, but the trip not nearly as anticipated.

Much of the comfort from a hot dog at the corner of New Hampshire and Broad these days is simply because The Ice Cream Parlor has been around for a while — not as long as Walter’s but for decades. Given how much change has taken place in Southern Pines, Pinehurst and the surrounding communities — how much is different from when I was growing up or even just 20 or 30 years ago — I consider constancy an increasingly treasured thing when I can find it.

I feel similarly about a pint from O’Donnell’s, a bucket of range balls at Knollwood or a walk on Ridge Street and back retracing the steps to and from school in days that simultaneously seem both distant and near.

If memories are, as someone said, the cushions of life, to be able to experience now what was experienced then is a sturdy foundation that grounds, informs and enriches.

I haven’t flown a kite in an empty field just north of Southern Pines in a long time, but I could. I hit tennis balls on the downtown courts as I did. The courts are smoother and the nets don’t sag, but for night play I miss putting in a quarter and hearing the lights whine before kicking on.

The Country Bookshop and the Southern Pines Public Library are in different locations than when I first discovered the joy of reading so long ago, but they’ve been in their present spots many years and it is a pleasure to spend time in either.

My friends aren’t playing guitar at The Jefferson Inn for the fun of it and a few Budweisers on the house as they did in the late 1970s, but I can still go there for a drink as folks have since the formative days of Southern Pines. The Lob Steer Inn — I loved that name and its salad bar — is no more, but Beefeaters remains. John’s Barbecue on Highway 15-501 is long gone, but Pik N Pig has been a Carthage staple for great barbecue for many years.

They’re still playing ball at Memorial Field and across the street from the National Guard Armory like they have for decades. Likewise at the town basketball courts, except the rims and nets are in better shape than when I played there if someone was desperate to fill out a pickup game with a good-shooting, slow-footed kid whose vertical leap could be measured with a ruler.

I sure can’t jump any higher now, but my spirit soars about what endures on my old turf, especially since so much doesn’t. PS

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

Bunny Hop

The day chocolate rings hollow

By Bill Fields

Growing up in North Carolina at a time when holidays weren’t hyped in stores nearly as much — certainly not as soon — as they are these days, there still were a few things to count on as Easter approached.

There would be a trip to the barber, even if a forensic expert might be required to discern the difference between a crew cut before and after. You were expected to look sharp.

And looking sharp didn’t mean just how you were groomed but how you would be dressed on this particular Sunday in spring. This could mean a shopping trip to Belk or Collins in Aberdeen or the Style-Mart on the corner of Broad and Pennsylvania.

It never ceased to amaze my mother how the same boy who would play for hours without a pause and be mad when it was supper time would complain about being tired, or having sore feet, within minutes of setting foot in a clothing store and before a single pair of pants, seersucker suit, clip-on bow tie or shoes other than sneakers had been considered for purchase. My unease on these excursions didn’t make logical sense, because they didn’t last too long. But all I knew was that I would rather be back at home doing something — anything, even listening to one of my older sisters’ Johnny Mathis 45s — than loitering in Boys’ Clothes.

The Saturday before Easter, there would be the hard-boiling and dyeing of the eggs. This ritual fascinated, in part because I’d seen the women in our house change the color of garments with Rit in a bathroom sink more than a few times. They were smart and didn’t let me assist with the sweaters because they were trying to get more use out of them, not have them come to an unfortunate end thanks to a careless child. I was happily encouraged to help out with the eggs, probably for two reasons: Seeing a chicken’s work go from white to a pastel shade wasn’t very exciting, and eggs were only about 60 cents a dozen.

On Easter, before church and a delicious lunch of baked ham with the appropriate side dishes — a meal whose predictable ingredients year after year made it that much better — the Easter bunny would make a delivery, the basket lined with fake grass a color green not found in nature. There would be jelly beans, of course, but the main event was a hollow milk chocolate rabbit enclosed in a box with clear plastic sides.

I loved chocolate, but it would have been a blessing for humanity if these candy mammals had come in a box that couldn’t be opened. There are only a couple of tastes from childhood that still make me frown. A stuffed pepper is one. As for those rabbits, their taste was like that of the material on which they sat — not of the natural world. They had a sickly, chemical-like flavor, making a Hershey bar seem like a treat for royalty. And once part of a chocolate rabbit had been consumed, what was left wouldn’t get any better. Unlike sweets that were good and within reach, the rabbit would linger until being thrown away only to reappear a year later. I always thought they would taste better next time, but they never did.

The Easter egg hunt, usually occurring after our big meal, was a distraction from rabbit redux. Since we hid real eggs, though, and not plastic ones filled with trinkets that have become so popular, this practice had its drawbacks too. If a couple of eggs were hidden too well, the smell would let you know a few days later.

There was a point where I got too old for a traditional Easter basket, but there was a transition period. I had taken up golf by then, and Mom gave me a sleeve of balls from the dime store. They had the compression of a marshmallow and would cut if you looked at them wrong, but that was just fine because they had replaced the hollow rabbits. If I had sampled them, they might have tasted better too. PS

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

Dateline: Carmichael

When good things came in smaller packages

By Bill Fields

I’m not sure how my reading ability stacked up to that of my elementary school classmates, but I’m certain having the sports pages of the Greensboro Daily News at the breakfast table didn’t hurt. There were some big words in there.

The newspaper was very specific about where it was covering an out-of-town contest. After North Carolina moved into its new basketball facility in 1965, the dateline for Tar Heel home games spilled over into a second line of narrow-column type.

CARMICHAEL AUDITORIUM, Chapel Hill—

Occasionally, if the slot man was swamped and the typesetter was sloppy, it looked like this next to my bowl of grits:

CARMICHAEL AUDITORI-
UM, Chapel Hill—

Regardless of how it appeared in the paper, the building’s name stood out because it was where my team played. It was not CAMERON INDOOR STADIUM, Durham; or REYNOLDS COLISEUM, Raleigh; or other Atlantic Coast Conference basketball venues.

We had no family ties to Carolina, notwithstanding a summer school Spanish class my UNC Greensboro sister took there. My other sister went to Wake Forest, and while I proudly wore the black-and-gold sweatshirt she gave me, I was a Carolina kid. It was one of those decisions those of us in ACC country made early, before you were even able to write the name of your favorite basketball player in cursive.

I was in first grade when the Tar Heels played their first game in Carmichael, defeating William & Mary 87-68 on Dec. 4, 1965. Although I didn’t see the place in person until I got to campus as a freshman a dozen years later, I felt I knew it.

Aside from newspaper stories and box scores, there were the radio broadcasts. In the late-1960s — when Carolina won the ACC Tournament and advanced to the Final Four three straight years — play-by-play was handled by Bill Currie, a crazy-uncle type known as the “Mouth of the South” and starting with the 1971-72 season by Woody Durham, who was “The Voice of the Tar Heels” for four decades.

Televised games were rare when I first became a fan. We had to be content when a Carolina contest was on the Wednesday or Saturday C.D. Chesley network. And “The Dean Smith Show” was weekly Sunday morning viewing, with Smith always much more effusive about assists or hustle than how many points someone had scored.

One of my first memories of basketball on television is the NCAA title game on March 23, 1968, when the Tar Heels played UCLA. It was a 7 p.m. tipoff in Los Angeles, which made it a very late night for an 8-year-old in Southern Pines. I stayed awake until early in the second half, when the Bruins were well on their way to a 78-55 victory.

Nine years later Carolina played for another championship but had its heart broken by Marquette. I attended my first game in Carmichael in the second semester of my freshman year, a two-point victory over Wake Forest on Jan. 15, 1978. Working my way up the pecking order of The Daily Tar Heel sports department, I traded a seat in the student section for one on the press row-catwalk above it. When things went well for the team wearing light blue and white, it was deafening either place. After home games, reporters huddled around Smith in a corridor outside the locker room as he smoked a cigarette and looked forward to a Scotch.

My first time on a commercial flight, on Dec. 3, 1979, I sat beside then-assistant coach Roy Williams going from RDU to Tampa-St. Petersburg to cover Carolina vs. South Florida. Prior to the start of the 1980-81 season, I had a 90-minute interview with Smith in his office. I was DTH sports editor at that point, but, needing to mind my grades as a senior, left the job well before Carolina lost to Indiana in the 1981 NCAA championship game.  The following spring, I was back on Franklin Street as a fan — and graduate — enjoying the Tar Heels’ win over Georgetown.

Carolina men’s basketball relocated to the Smith Center in 1986. It has twice the seats of Carmichael, but if one grew up with the latter, not twice the charm. Carmichael Auditorium is no more, having been renamed Carmichael Arena in 2010 following an extensive modernization. They sold small commemorative pieces of the hallowed hardwood from the old building in 1998. I didn’t buy one then, but it might be time to check on eBay.

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

By Any Other Name

It still feels like home

By Bill Fields

Not long ago, to go with an application and prove that I am who I said I am, I had to retrieve my birth certificate. There are no surprises on it, mind you. I was born at what was then called Moore Memorial
Hospital on a May morning much longer ago than seems possible. But my birth year isn’t as jarring as my footprints on the reverse side, which are so tiny they can’t possibly belong to someone who has gotten his money’s worth on shoe leather since high school.

Although the legal paperwork of my coming into the world clearly notes that it happened in Pinehurst, sometimes I don’t know where I’m from. 

Let me explain. I have lived nearly six decades telling folks:

“I was born in Pinehurst.”

“I was born in Pinehurst but grew up about five miles away.”

“I was born in Pinehurst and grew up in Southern Pines.”

“I grew up in Southern Pines.”

“I grew up around Pinehurst.”

“I come from a town about 70 miles south of Raleigh.”

“Moore County.”

“Between the mountains and the beach.”

I suspect I’m not the only person to go through this geographical twister because what is a hometown? Is it where you were born? Where you were raised? Where you currently live? The tagline for this monthly column states that I am a native of Southern Pines, but am I really? 

My first days were in the 28374 not the 28387 and, for six months after graduating from college, I rented above what is now Dugan’s Pub a small apartment with factory-office carpeting and radiators that hissed an angry song on cold nights. A few years later, I lived in a cottage in Aberdeen that was lovely notwithstanding the electrical fire that started late on a November Saturday night and made me nostalgic for the vocal — but safe — heat in my $150-a-month home above the bar. 

If I am talking to golfers about my roots, “Pinehurst” is my go-to because they know where it is. Occasionally I elaborate and say I was born a couple of par-5s away from Course No. 2. But until I entered my teens, Pinehurst might as well have been Pittsburgh, so rarely did I visit. The village was what we skirted en route to my grandmother’s house in Jackson Springs on Sunday afternoons, an opponent for the Southern Pines Blue Knights and a bit of a mystery to someone who rarely ventured farther west than Knollwood Fairways on Midland Road.   

Pinehurst felt a little less foreign when I found out about “Fields Road,” a street named for a family with some connections to my dad. The road sign would have been a great backdrop for a selfie if there had been such a thing back then, but discovering it didn’t shake my identity as a kid from Southern Pines.

Arriving at Pinecrest reinforced how cloistered each town in the southern part of the county was. In those early weeks of sophomore year, I met — and became friends with — students who lived only a handful of miles from me: farm-strong football players from West End; Pinehurst folks who knew the quiet of a locals-only summer; a boy who had been the “Red Devil” mascot for Aberdeen High. 

The way the area has grown over the last couple of decades, town-limit markers don’t mean much on the commercial strips as franchise yields to franchise where U.S. 1 turned the corner onto Highway 15-501 and so much development seemed to follow. The core areas of the distinct dots on a map remain, certainly changed but recognizable, like the passport photos over one’s lifetime. 

For the last three decades, during which New England has been home but not home, I have an out when it comes to an explanation: “I live in Connecticut but am originally from North Carolina.”

Many times, though, I can’t resist making the finer distinction as well, pointing out that where I was born is not where I was raised. I didn’t need my name on my street to know it was mine.   PS

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

Batteries Not Included

A plugged-in and powered-up Christmas

By Bill Fields

There were some Christmases growing up that Carolina Power and Light and Eveready Battery must have loved. The same would go for the manufacturers of those flimsy extension cords whose “U.L. approved” tag didn’t inspire a lot of confidence.

It is tempting to think that the popularity of high tech gifts is a relatively recent development, but anyone of a certain age knows that isn’t true. Of course, high tech of 40 or 50 years ago must be considered for its day, the way a 260-pound offensive tackle would then have seemed only slightly smaller than Godzilla.

Still, Christmas was juiced long before Major League Baseball. Along with “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” there were other words unique to the season.

“TO PROTECT FROM ELECTRIC SHOCK, DO NOT OPEN
COVER OR BACK. NO USER-SERVICEABLE PARTS.”

That caution came on one of the best presents with a cord I ever got, a reel-to-reel tape recorder from Santa/Western Auto that allowed me to pretend I was one of those basketball play-by-play announcers I heard on the radio so many winter evenings from distant locales. The machine should have come with a different warning: Until you go through puberty and start pronouncing “Fayetteville” with three syllables, you have absolutely no chance of sounding like them.

I could amuse myself with simple things — a ball of crumpled foil and a hanger shaped into a hoop taped to a doorframe, anyone? — but there was a period when I was attracted to something that powered up like bream to a cricket.

Take indoor putting. I could groove my stroke just fine by rolling a ball toward a chair leg or coffee mug, but the “Electric Putt Return” from Sears took living room practice to a higher plane. In form it resembled a dustpan, but in function the device was positively Jetsonian in how a golf ball was propelled after an attempt, only rarely failing to make it back to your feet. The distinctive click occurring when a ball began its return is on the soundtrack of my childhood.

The putting trainer had a single purpose, but the glory of another of my 120-volt holiday delights from Sears was its multi-purpose utility. Shaped like an oversized loaf of bread about two feet long, there was a clock — with alarm — on the left, a tiny television — VHF and UHF — in the center and a radio — AM and FM — on the right.

Despite my most creative antenna directing, the TV picture was usually snowy, sometimes rolling and never fully satisfying. Still, the clock and radio worked well and the whole “solid state” combo sat on my desk, leaving enough room to do homework. Owing to its faux mahogany top and sides, it was even handsome in its early-’70s way. The appearance certainly trumped the value “entertainment system” my parents gifted themselves one year. It wasn’t lacking in functions with an 8-track, radio and turntable, but the lift-off plastic lid covering the record player made it a leisure suit of electronics.

Year over power corded-gizmo year, I would say I made out better than the adults.

There was the matter of the irons, blemished but numerous, in the years when Dad worked at Proctor-Silex, which manufactured them. A steam iron, no matter how good or how much of a bargain, should be purchased when necessary, like new sheets, and never adorned with a red bow.

One Christmas there was an electric knife under our tree. I’m sure it came with a warning, too, but wasn’t as useful or as much fun as my tape recorder. The man who is credited with coming up with the idea of an electric knife, Jerome L. Murray, also developed boarding ramps to get people onto airlines and a pump essential in open-heart surgery.

Two serrated blades going through a ham or a turkey a couple of times a year — the noise of the contraption sometimes punctuated by the jarring contact with a platter — surely doesn’t measure up to Murray’s other accomplishments.

But those were the times and, as sure as kitchens were done in avocado, those were our things. PS

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