Tag: Hometown

Hometown

Hey, Where Did We Go?

Down the old mine with a transistor radio

Occasionally during a New England winter, if I am in the car after dark and know North Carolina has a basketball contest that evening, I will abandon SiriusXM for old-fashioned AM and tune the dial to 1110 WBT in Charlotte. The 50,000-watt station’s old boast that it could be heard from “Maine to Miami” is still true, some static notwithstanding, and hearing the Tar Heels play takes me back to when listening to games was nearly as important as playing them.

Sports on the radio was a year-round pleasure when I was a child. There were baseball games from spring into fall, reception at the mercy of the signal and the atmosphere. When conditions were such that I could hear announcers from stations in Chicago or St. Louis, many hundreds of miles from our house in Southern Pines, it felt like there was something more powerful at work than a couple of Eveready C-cell batteries.

Wintertime meant there were basketball games on the radio, though, and I devoured anything revolving around my — and the region’s — favorite sport. I was listening to hoops over the air before I started elementary school. One of my earliest memories is hearing the exploits of a star guard for N.C. State in the mid-1960s. Eddie Bidenbach was a mouthful for the Wolfpack radio voices.

I was fascinated by the faraway hometowns of some of the players when starting lineups were introduced: Duke’s Bob Verga of Sea Girt, New Jersey, and fellow Blue Devil Mike Lewis from Missoula, Montana. My first basketball hero, Carolina’s Larry Miller, master of pump fakes and scoop shots while maneuvering toward the basket, hailed from Catasauqua, Pennsylvania, a borough that sounded as exotic as some of Miller’s moves.

The man who called Carolina’s games on the radio during the 1960s was as inventive as number 44 in light blue and white, which made each broadcast an adventure regardless of the plot of the game. Bill Currie’s nickname, “The Mouth of the South,” was well earned. Currie, voice of the Tar Heels from 1962 to 1971 after forming the school’s radio network, was cut from a different cloth.

“Sports announcers nowadays are about as colorless as a glass of gin,” Currie told Sports Illustrated in 1968. “They are so immersed in themselves, so determined to pontificate about what really is nothing more than a game that they have forgotten that sports are supposed to be fun.”

Currie never forgot, infusing his broadcasts with a whole lot of this and that about what wasn’t happening on the 94-foot-long basketball court — especially during one-sided games. In a strong Southern accent reflecting his High Point roots, Currie critiqued what folks were wearing or the quality of an arena’s concessions. He interviewed fans, recited poetry, and talked about current events. Currie’s unique style made other announcers seem as if they were narrating a funeral procession. During a 1968 ACC Tournament game when State beat Duke 12-10 after both teams went into deep slowdowns at a time well before a shot clock, Currie described the play as “having all the thrill of artificial insemination.”

The irreverence went north in 1971 when Currie took a television job at KDKA in Pittsburgh. I spent the rest of my youth listening to his more businesslike and traditional successor, Woody Durham, call Tar Heels games. It didn’t take Durham long to build a strong relationship with his audience, and his 40 years behind the mic made Currie’s run seem like a cup of coffee.

For all the pleasure that the college basketball games provided on those winter evenings as I huddled with my transistor radio, there were a couple of games a week on television thanks to the C.D. Chesley network. Radio was all I had for Carolina Cougars games, and I listened to Bob Lamey call most of their American Basketball Association schedule. The ABA lineups became second nature to me, whether the Cougars were up against the Pittsburgh Condors, Virginia Squires or Kentucky Colonels. The sound of sneakers on hardwood in some of those less-than-sold-out gyms made it feel like I was beside Lamey courtside.

Listening to so many Cougars games paid off for me on March 18, 1972, when they hosted the Memphis Pros in Greensboro. None other than Larry Miller lit it up for the home team, finishing with an ABA record of 67 points, and I happily heard every one of them. PS

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

Hometown

The Unscathed Christmas

When bad things don’t happen to good people

By Bill Fields

Looking back on the Christmas season, I realize that we were lucky.

It wasn’t just that our family had a roof over our heads, that we always had enough food and presents to make us happy, or that we never let disputes occurring in our spirited Monopoly games that were an entertainment centerpiece escalate into unpleasantness. (The adults at the table even indulged very young me when I wanted to be able to put houses and hotels on Baltic Avenue even though I didn’t own Mediterranean.)

Although a vicious intestinal bug did hit us one year with the ferocity of a Dick Butkus tackle, the miracle was that we survived each holiday season without serious harm. We didn’t have a fireplace, so there was no danger of a stray ember setting fire to G.I. Joe’s fatigues or tissue paper that had swaddled a something new from Collins department store. In place of the real thing, after one of my mother’s largest lapses in judgment, we were the proud owners of imitation logs illuminated by orange incandescent bulbs. The “flames” flickered from foil circles that rotated near the lights, although one would have needed a lot of enhanced eggnog to feel warm.

Our fire threat came from another source. We had two sets of Christmas lights, those to decorate the camellia in the front yard and those to string on the Christmas tree in our living room. They were labeled “outdoor” and “indoor,” but the difference was less than that between Carolina and sky blue. The large bulbs on each strand seemed to approximate the heat of a glowing briquette charring a steak.

Before moving on to white pines and later firs or spruces, we were a cedar tree clan. Even if we regularly filled the red stand with water, those things would get pretty crispy. It’s a wonder there was never a real fire next to the faux logs, not that there wasn’t a close call. The same angel that graced the top of our trees for many years — well into the era of tiny lights that didn’t heat up — bore a melted spot from her years of service with the big bulbs.

We skirted a lot of trouble around Christmas time, when you think about it. Nobody crashed when a neighbor got a mini bike. We avoided getting hit by a car when testing new tennis rackets by playing a set with an imaginary net out in the street. Lawn darts landed only in the rye overseed. Bruises and scrapes were the worst that came from tackle football. Dad somehow managed to get the barbecued chicken done when he cooked out in the dark.

Indoors, there were potential hazards everywhere. Owing to my father’s job at Proctor-Silex, there was gifting of irons for a few years, but no one ever dropped one of the heavy devices on themselves in their zeal to unwrap such a utilitarian present. Nobody tripped over the Hot Wheels track after I set it up to emulate the Rockingham drag strip, but I heard a few curse words when an adult stepped on a plastic soldier or Tinker Toy.

Santa Claus never forgot to bring bags of walnuts, pecans and Brazil nuts. The pick that went along with the nutcracker could have been classified as a weapon of war so sharp was the point, but we escaped with minor puncture wounds for which a little mercurochrome would do the trick. A dab of butter took care of any burns from rogue Crisco escaping a cast-iron skillet.

But the kitchen hazards didn’t stop at the stove. Man was going into space, but he also had time to invent the electric knife. The whir of the blades was part of the Christmas soundtrack as much as “Jingle Bells” or “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.” Mom worried as Dad took on a turkey or a ham or a roast. There was the occasional grinding of metal on platter if he misjudged his cut, but fortunately the only red on the table came from the apple rings. PS

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

2023 Department Hometown

Hometown

A Sight for Sore Eyes

Being thankful for the small print

By Bill Fields

I travel some for work, and some of the trips are on planes. Over the last year-and-a-half — as sure as people are determined to wedge steamer trunks into overhead compartments designed for briefcases — you would have seen me closing my left eye and training the right on something. It might be the no-smoking symbol, the lavatory locator, or a chyron on a fellow passenger’s television screen. This is not idle squinting.

I do these in-flight vision tests to reassure myself that my right eye is seeing crisply. Fortunately, it is, which is a reason I’m particularly grateful this Thanksgiving.

In early February 2022, my right eye suddenly wasn’t working properly one morning. It was as if a dark curtain was being pulled up from the bottom. I got to my ophthalmologist’s office by mid-afternoon.

The technician who does the scans is usually cheerful and chatty but didn’t say much this time. In the exam room, looking at the eye chart confirmed why he had been mum minutes earlier.

It wasn’t that the smaller letters were blurry — they were obscured by whatever was going on inside my eye. My vision was limited to the largest letter on top, the “Big E.” I joked about Elvin Hayes, but the young man asking what I could see had no clue about my reference to a basketball star from many years ago.

In the nervous minutes waiting for the doctor to come into the room, I thought about the life of my eyes.

I didn’t even need glasses until I was in college. Covering a Carolina-State football game in Raleigh during the fall of 1979, I realized I was having trouble seeing the jersey numbers. A subsequent exam indicated nearsightedness, and I got glasses for distance.

Contact lenses came later. In my early 40s, like so many others, I began to have trouble seeing up close. I thought about my dad at the breakfast table and how he had held the newspaper increasingly farther away before finally getting a pair of magnifying readers. I recalled my mom saying, “You’re in my light” and not understanding why that was a big deal.

My moment came when I was helping a friend hook up a television on a shelf in an armoire. The back of it was a shadowy tangle of cords, and I had a hard time. I stopped at a drugstore on the way home to purchase reading glasses.

Cataract surgery on both eyes in the fall of 2020 was liberating — I was able after 40 years to ditch corrective lenses for distance. But my vision bliss was short-lived. The ophthalmologist told me I had a detached retina and presently was on the phone to a retina specialist across town. A doctor there confirmed the retina in my right eye was fully detached, and I was headed for surgery the next day.

“You were a 5 out of 10,” the surgeon told me after he had finished. “Not the easiest, not the hardest.”

He had reattached the retina and inserted a gas bubble to encourage healing. The bubble appeared as a dark circle in my vision for more than two months, getting smaller as it dissipated, from the size of a nickel to a speck of black.

For three weeks after the operation, I had to be face-down — “Looking at the Earth,” as the doctor put it — eight to 10 hours per day to maximize the bubble’s effect on the repaired retina. I rented a chair designed for such recoveries. Its mirror allowed me to watch TV, which mitigated the boredom because reading was difficult.

Through months of checkups and eye drops, vision in the surgical eye improved. After the bubble shrank enough to allow some sight, what I had was like looking through a frosted window. Over time, the vision improved and I began to be able to read the smaller lines of type on a poster across my living room couch, my at-home eye chart.

It was 20/120, then 20/80. Earlier this year, an eye test indicated even more improvement: 20/25. Being able to see the little letters is a big deal indeed. PS

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

2023 Department Hometown

Hometown

Picture This

A wallet-sized memory

By Bill Fields

A fall ritual, as certain as football and Halloween, was the school picture.

It seems to be the thing now for parents to pose their kids with a sign as they depart for the first day of classes, a label of grade and year reminding everyone in the family and on social media of the historic moment, often occurring now in the ungodly heat of summer.

In the dark ages of my youth, I’m sure a minority of families documented the coming of another academic year with Polaroids or Kodak snapshots in a primitive version of the current practice. But most of us relied on the visit of the nomadic professional photographer, who would show up around the same time the bags of bite-sized candy were being stocked at the A&P.

We would be alerted by our teacher in advance of the taking of the school pictures, so haircuts and clothing could be considered. Going to public school and not wearing uniforms, the latter factor was a biggie — for our parents if not ourselves. Over the years, I wore T-shirts, short-sleeved seersucker, mock turtlenecks and wide-collared golf shirts. Senior year of high school, for reasons unknown, the boys were decked out in light blue tuxedo jackets. (I must have liked the look, owing to my allegiance to the Tar Heels or that I was able to rent that color on the cheap at Storey’s in the Town and Country Shopping Center. I wore one to the prom the forthcoming spring. Paired with black pants, it made me resemble a giant indigo bunting who had spent too much time at the feeder.)

Regardless of grade or costume, we would make our way to the photographer’s makeshift studio on the appointed day. The flash attachment for Dad’s Brownie camera or flashcubes for my Instamatic were no match for the pro’s equipment: Strobes bounced into white umbrellas, evenly illuminating subject and background. Take a seat on a stool, smile (or not), click. It was over quick. I couldn’t tell you the identity of anybody who was behind the camera in those years but was fascinated to hear, years later, from a friend who grew up in New Castle, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh, that the major leaguer Chuck Tanner had an off-season gig as school photographer in his hometown. That was a long time ago.

When the photo proofs were made available weeks later, especially as we moved into junior high and beyond, it was obvious that a comb or Clearasil would have been a good idea on picture day. Until about eighth grade, I sported a crew cut. The year I began to go to the barber shop less frequently, my school picture documents why some classmates called me “Wolf Head” for a while. Fortunately, the transitioning hair and the nickname were short-lived.

I don’t recall us ever not ordering a set of prints, regardless of how I looked. A popular “package” comprised an 8×10, two 5x7s and a sheet of wallet-sized images. Using scissors to separate the small ones was a challenge, but most of them ended up in a drawer, never having to worry about being faded by sunlight.

For a long time, a nearly complete collection of my school pictures, along with those of my sisters, was stored in my childhood home, a file of growing up and growing older. Recently I came upon a strip of wallet-sized images in a box of my stuff. In them I don’t look like a carnivorous wild animal, so I’m guessing ninth or 10th grade. I used to tease my father about an unfortunate brown leisure suit of his, but this school picture proves I once wore brown, too.

Years after Dad was gone, I finally looked through his last wallet. There was the usual stuff: driver’s license, credit card, doctors’ appointment reminders, golf handicap card, receipts for gasoline, a few dollars in folding money. And in one of the plastic slots behind the snap enclosure there was 17-year-old me, imagining the skies ahead, skies the color of my coat. PS

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

2023 Department Hometown

Hometown

A Little Misdirection

A lake by any other name isn’t always as clear

By Bill Fields

Photograph © The Tichnor Brothers Collection, Boston Public Library

Our next-door neighbor, Dom Scali, was a good man: World War II veteran (European theater), father of a boy and a girl who were my pals. A native New Yorker and a butcher, for years after moving to Southern Pines — where he ran the Mid Pines Golf Club locker room from fall through spring — Dom went north with his family in the summer and worked in his old trade on Fire Island.

Dom drove an Oldsmobile Delta 88, dark green with a white top, a first-class car that made the parade of bargain, well-used models in our driveway feel like junkers. One late summer day around 1970, though, I discovered Dom’s sense of direction wasn’t as good as his sense of style.

We didn’t have school because of a teacher workday, and the Scali family kindly invited me to join them on a day trip to White Lake in Bladen County. This was a big deal because White Lake was to freshwater bodies of water what a Delta 88 was to sedans.

White Lake is one of many Carolina bays, oval depressions in the Coastal Plain. There were many theories about how the bays were formed, from the impact of meteorites to the spawning of giant fish. Experts eventually agreed that when the ocean receded, waves created pools of standing water shaped in elliptical forms by wind from a constant direction (northwest to southeast).

Many of the Carolina bays were the color of strong tea, but the water in the 1,200-acre White Lake was so clear it was as if it had come from a bathroom faucet. You could walk in up to your shoulders and still see your feet on the smooth, white sand bottom — you didn’t have to worry about stepping on something icky. I never saw anything that compared to the pristine water of White Lake until a few years later on a trip to the Florida panhandle and a visit to Wakulla Springs, which was so crystal clear the manatees could spot one another from a football field away.

I never rode a glass-bottom boat at White Lake, but there was a pier, concession stands and carnival rides. Away from shore, expert waterskiers performed tricks. It was about half as far from home as the Atlantic Ocean, but nearly as much fun as our annual vacation to the beach. In flip-flops, bathing suit, T-shirt and carrying a beach towel, I eagerly piled into the back seat with Donnie and Karen for the 75-mile drive southeast to White Lake. Dom was behind the wheel with wife Rose riding shotgun.

We were counting license plates and otherwise entertaining ourselves. After a while, the chatter in the front seat led to a stop at a gas station. We spent dimes on Cokes from the drink machine. I saw Mr. Scali speaking to the attendant. “It won’t be long now,” he said when getting back behind the wheel.

In fact, it wasn’t too long until we found ourselves on a commercial strip and saw signs for . . . Spring Lake. We had spent most of the morning heading toward the pawn shops and military surplus stores of the town near Fort Bragg. Mr. Scali had maneuvered us to the wrong “lake.”

I sat quietly. Dom’s wife and children were capably critiquing what had happened.

“We’ll get there,” Mr. Scali said after everyone had calmed down.

And we did, a long time after we should have. As we rolled into the parking lot in late afternoon, we saw families packing up their stuff to head home.

We had a swim; the White Lake water as clean and the bottom as smooth as I remembered from my previous trip. We weren’t there long enough to worry about getting sunburned. Before we knew it, we were knocking the sand off our flip-flops and getting into the Olds for the ride home — a journey that fortunately didn’t include any wrong turns or detours to Spring Lake.

Our stories of the day lasted longer than that roundabout ride to White Lake and were always told with a smile. PS

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

2023 Department Hometown

Hometown

The Best Laid Plans

The resort that almost was

By Bill Fields

On childhood visits to sleepy Jackson Springs, where my parents grew up and my maternal grandmother still lived — across the street from the Presbyterian church — the stories told of the community’s bustling days were hard to believe.

As I tried to catch minnows in Jackson Creek or filled jars of mineral water from a spigot for Ma-Ma’s kitchen, few cars drove by on Highway 73. Inside the gas station once owned by my grandfather, B.L. Henderson, there was never a line to get to the penny candy or hoop cheese.

It was hard to imagine tourists in the 1890s and early 20th century having flocked to Jackson Springs, most traveling by train on the 4-mile spur line from West End, to take the water and take a load off, lodging at the 100-room hotel on a bluff above the springs. The guests went swimming and boating in a nearby lake. They played tennis, bowled and went quail hunting. Where I spent those solitary Sunday afternoons dangling a tiny hook baited with a morsel of bread, there had been a pavilion with music and dancing.

Why didn’t Jackson Springs endure as a resort, the way Pinehurst did?

There wasn’t any golf, for one thing, although in perhaps Jackson Springs’s most intriguing chapter, in the mid-1920s, there was talk of a course — designed by Donald Ross — among other big plans that never came to fruition.

News broke in 1925 that a “Northern syndicate” was purchasing the Jackson Springs Hotel from a local owner with intentions to invest $1 million in upgrades and expansion. The New Yorkers talked about building a new, larger hotel, converting the existing structure into a sanitarium and maternity hospital, and aggressively marketing the mineral water, lauded for its curative power.

The organization incorporated in early 1926. Its president was Dr. Joseph Darwin Nagel, a physician. Born in Hungary in 1867, Nagel immigrated to the United States in the 1880s and attended the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City. An author of medical textbooks, Nagel was affiliated with the Hotel Pennsylvania, then the world’s largest hotel, as medical director.

“A man of sterling worth and whose name carries confidence and assurance wherever it is known,” The Sandhill Citizen noted of Dr. Nagel.

The corporation’s general manager, Henry Stockbridge, told The Pilot in February 1926: “As soon as Donald Ross can get to it, we intend to have him establish an eighteen-hole golf course. We will enlarge the dam and raise the height of it to supply ample water power as well as to the advantages of the lake. We have other plans in view which will be unfolded when the time is ripe and which will make Jackson Springs a more prominent influence in Moore County than it is at present.”

Stockbridge’s boast turned out to be a fiction. In the late summer of 1928, Nagel wrote to Pinehurst owner Leonard Tufts, explaining that he hadn’t been able to devote the necessary time to make development in Jackson Springs a reality. “The thought occurred to me,” Nagel wrote, “that possibly you or some of your friends, might be interested in the property . . . ”

Richard Tufts, responding for his father, told Nagel that the family had operated the Jackson Springs Hotel “for several seasons” and knew full well what it would take “to put the place on a paying basis.”

The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 was a hammer to the Jackson Springs Hotel’s by-now tenuous existence. The resort chapter came to an end in April 1932, when a fire destroyed the hotel weeks before a new owner, Frank Welch of Southern Pines, planned to open it for the late spring and summer seasons. By the following summer, instead of tourists, Jackson Springs was filled with young men working at a Civilian Conservation Corps camp, one of dozens of CCC installations in North Carolina.

In 1961, by which time the heyday of my parents’ hometown was a distant memory, Dr. Nagel died at age 93 in Winter Haven, Florida, where he had long wintered and later retired. His brief and ultimately aborted involvement with Jackson Springs didn’t make his obituary. PS

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

2023 Department Hometown

Hometown

Teach a Man to Fish

Or just get in line at Hoskins

By Bill Fields

In a modest fishing career that produced nothing for the wall and little for the table, I wish I’d caught one flounder, because I sure ate plenty of them.

Other than whatever mystery-from-the-sea comprised the fish sticks in the freezer that would be supper if my working mom had a particularly long, tough day, flounder was the fish of my childhood. It would have made my beach vacation to land a summer flounder, but Paralichthys dentatus was as elusive as winning a large stuffed animal at Skee-Ball in the Ocean Drive arcade.

On a good outing, Dad and I, equipped with the gear we usually took to Moore County ponds in pursuit of bream or bass, would catch our share of tiny spot, croaker and whiting from the Tilghman Pier, trinkets from the surf. But even if I could convince him to splurge on “flounder rigs” that kept the hooks baited with shrimp floating just above the bottom where the species supposedly liked to dine, instead of flush on the ocean floor where the less desirable fish scavenged, we’d come up as empty as the shark-fishing men with heavy-duty tackle at the far end of the pier.

There was no chance of Curt Gowdy reaching out to us to appear on The American Sportsman.

The futility of fishing for flounder went away, though, if our family was going to Hoskins Restaurant that evening. The Ocean Drive eatery had lost a needed apostrophe in its sign sometime between when it opened in 1948 and when we were patronizing the place a couple of decades later but maintained a mastery of fried seafood — particularly flounder.

Hoskins was one of the first things we’d sight when driving into Ocean Drive headed for the rental cottage or motel where we were staying. It wasn’t a matter of if we were going to go there during our stay, but how many times.

No one got out of sorts if there was a wait to get in. We knew the air conditioning would be cranking — at a time when AC still wasn’t commonplace — and we could count on the quality of the food. I went through a fried shrimp phase but always went back to the flounder.

The filets of the mild-tasting flatfish were sizable and the outside golden brown and never heavy. Paired with the can’t-eat-just-one hushpuppies, there was nothing better. Even a midday sno-cone and corn dog from a strand vendor couldn’t compete with a Hoskins’ flounder plate.

Fortunately, we had fried flounder options the other 51 weeks of the year.

Russell’s Fish House on Highway 22 on the outskirts of Southern Pines opened in the mid-1960s offering all-you-can eat fish for $1.50. We went many a Friday or Saturday night, and I eventually worked there, first as a busboy, then in the kitchen. I cooked the hushpuppies for a time and some of the other teenagers working for owners Larry and Mary Russell handled the fries and manned the grill.

The flounder, though, was the purview of an older man named Herbert, who masterfully tended his bubbling fryer of peanut oil and didn’t want the youngsters messing with his fish. We could be a loose bunch, no strangers to horseplay while cleaning up at the end of a long night, but we obeyed Herbert.

Given the volume of fish that was served, the quality of the flounder was consistently good even if some of the fillets weren’t as plump as those we ate on vacation. My appetite for flounder would wane occasionally because I was around it so much for several years, including filling lots of takeout boxes, but there were still times when I savored a plate for my meal at the end of a busy shift.

Our third option for flounder in those years was at my brother-in-law Bill’s restaurant in High Point. Everything was good on the broad menu at Brinwood — fried chicken, country-style steak, spaghetti, meatloaf — but his fried flounder was especially tasty.

After enjoying my brother-in-law’s light, never-greasy fish for several meals, I was convinced the only thing Hoskins had on Brinwood was the beach down the street. PS

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

2023 Department Hometown

Hometown

The Boys of Summer

In a league of their own

By Bill Fields

There aren’t too many highlights sprinkled in my sporting life. The enjoyment, perhaps by necessity, has come from playing not winning.

I’ve had a few moments when I flipped the script, most occurring in a small ballpark on Morganton Road in Southern Pines across from the National Guard Armory, where kids still play baseball today. Win or lose, though, on that compact field of dreams the crack of bat on ball and pop of ball in glove was a soundtrack of fun.

The site was home to the Southern Pines Little League field more than a half century ago when the Pirates, Cardinals, Dodgers and Braves duked it out on Monday and Friday evenings from spring into summer, games at 6:00 and 7:45. The lights really kicked in for the second match-up, especially early in the season, making it seem a bigger stage.

We were boys chewing Bazooka bubble gum, savoring the stirrup socks that made us look like major leaguers, hoping some pixie dust would fly out with each pat of the rosin bag, and quenching our thirst with some not-so-cool water from the dugout fountain.

Each season started the same way. There would be a trip to Tate’s Hardware on N.E. Broad Street to purchase a pair of rubber-cleated baseball shoes. We’d put on our flannel team uniforms and parade through downtown on a Saturday in May, then scatter to sell candy door-to-door to raise money for the Little League.

It was a long time before travel teams or meddlesome parents who want to make the games about them. Our moms and dads didn’t argue with umpires or second-guess coaches. They sat in the bleachers or in their cars beyond the field. They volunteered in the concession stand or as the public address announcer. They cut the grass and chalked the foul lines.

The outfield fence — 180 feet from home plate when I started Little League and lengthened to 200 feet before I was done — was covered with advertisements for local businesses not protective padding. I one-hopped a couple of hard hits off the metal barrier in left center but never hit a dinger in my three years with the Braves. I am a man without a home run or a hole-in-one but still hold out hope for the latter.

My most meaningful at-bat probably came in my first Little League season when I was 10, after moving up from the Minor League Tigers. We were playing the always formidable Pirates coached by Willis Calcutt. Their ace pitcher, a strapping boy who could have passed for a second-year Pony Leaguer, had a no-hitter going deep into the six-inning game. I somehow managed to make contact with one of his fastballs, hitting a blooper just over the second baseman into shallow right field.

I was better with glove than bat, a confident infielder who played second and a little shortstop before settling at third base when I wasn’t pitching. (I threw a knuckleball that, on my good outings, fluttered just enough to keep batters guessing.)

The Braves won the 1970 Southern Pines championship thanks to fellows who could really play like David Smith, Jay Samuels and Ian McPherson. (I’m far right, top row.) It didn’t hurt our chances that two of Coach John Williams’s sons, John Wiley and Mike, were part of the Braves. Coach was a de facto assistant to David Page and always willing to spend extra time working with us.

I made the All-Star team as a 12-year-old third baseman in 1971 when I had the privilege of playing for Jack Barron, whose many years of devoted community service in the Sandhills included being coach of the Dodgers for a long time. Mr. Barron did everything he could to prepare the All-Stars in our practices.

I’m not sure I knew there was a Warsaw, N.C., until we suited up in our blue and white Southern Pines uniforms and packed into a couple of station wagons for the two-hour drive east and our first game. But I’m certain I’d never seen a curveball on Morganton Road like the opposing pitcher threw that afternoon. I struck out in my one hapless at-bat, and my teammates didn’t fare much better. Our post-season didn’t last long.

But our disappointment, I recall, didn’t linger either. There was a stop for supper, at a restaurant that sold Andes Mints for two cents apiece at the cash register. We stocked up. Someone in the backseat figured out if a mint was released just so on top of the car, it would travel such that it would be sucked back into the wagon’s open rear window. The trick amused us for miles. If only we had solved the curve ball problem as proficiently. PS

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

2023 Department Hometown

Hometown

Talking Heads

Life in the booth

By Bill Fields

Feature Photo caption: Christine Morgan, Bill Fields and Janet Caldwell

When the PGA Tour turned up in the Sandhills during the early 1970s for the first time in two decades, it was a big deal for a sports-loving kid.

I was excited to attend the U.S. Professional Match Play Championship not only because my golf heroes were going to be in town, but because, on pro-am day at least, so were some of my sports television heroes who were teeing it up as celebrities.

At that point in my life, it probably was a toss-up whether I wanted to be Julius Boros, Arnold Palmer or Jack Nicklaus when I grew up; or Don Shea, Charlie Harville or Woody Durham.

Shea was the sports anchor at WTVD in Durham. Harville delivered the sports for WGWP in High Point. Durham handled sports for WFMY in Greensboro and in 1971 became the “Voice of the Tar Heels” on radio, a role he would have for 40 years.

During the 6 o’clock local news — depending on the preference of my parents and/or the trustiness of the antenna on our roof in Southern Pines — one of those sportscasters came into the house.

I wanted to be them. What could be better than talking sports, and getting paid to do so?

Sooner rather than later, I got to find out — about the “talking” part, at least. During senior year of high school, I hosted a weekly radio show on 990 WEEB, “Pinecrest Sports Spotlight.” One Saturday morning a record might have been set for most interview subjects in one room as most of the state champion girls’ basketball team and coach James Moore crammed into the studio.

Thanks to being in a television production class at Pinecrest that utilized the school’s closed-circuit television system, I was a TV sports anchor myself. The scripts were handwritten on carbon paper. I sat between Christine Morgan (news) and Janet Caldwell (weather). A high school with a broadcasting class was novel in the 1970s, prompting a reporter from The Sanford Herald to visit one morning.

I mentioned Woody Durham in one of my quotes to the reporter, but what I said was overshadowed by what I was wearing during the show in a photograph run by the Sanford newspaper: garish plaid sport coat paired with perhaps the widest collar ever manufactured showing outside my jacket, wings ready for takeoff. The best I can say about that image now is that I had a nice full head of dark hair.

Although I was in the broadcast sequence of journalism school at UNC, almost all of my experience during college was in print, not on the air. After graduating, there were jobs in newspapers followed by writing and editing positions on magazines.

My TV experiences were limited to occasionally appearing as a golf expert offering perspective on the sport’s history or hot topic of the day. (Over the last couple of decades, that’s usually been Tiger Woods.) But in 2017, I was asked to work as a researcher/statistician for NBC Golf Channel’s golf broadcasts. I’ve worked about a dozen tournaments annually since I first filled in as a replacement for someone who had left the position.

My microphone only allows me to talk to a colleague in the graphics department, but I’m just feet away from the pros who are talking to viewers. It has been quite an education for an ink-stained scribe to be a part of live television in a supporting role as I provide information and otherwise be as helpful as possible to the hosts.

I work most often with Dan Hicks but occasionally other broadcasters such as Terry Gannon, Mike Tirico and Steve Sands. They are as good at their jobs as the athletes they are covering. Without hesitation, I can say the teenager in the loud jacket could not have made his way up the on-air broadcasting ladder regardless of how much effort he put into it. I gravitated toward the media lane I should have been in.

To young dreamers out there who watch today’s top-notch announcers do their thing and imagine being in their headsets one day, work hard. Then work harder. And dress better than I did. PS

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

2023 Department Hometown

Hometown

Hitting the Century Mark

Thomas Wolfe was wrong, you can go home again

By Bill Fields

For those who haven’t viewed my academic transcripts, a confession: I was not a math all-star. In teacher Juliana White’s advanced class during my senior year at Pinecrest High School, I excelled at reading the problems aloud. Solving them was a different story. I was flirting with failure. Mrs. White’s grading kindness, never forgotten, likely allowed me to get into the college I always wanted to attend.

But simple arithmetic I can handle, which matters this month. Unless I’ve tripled-bogeyed the count, you’re reading my 100th^.PineStraw column, which I began writing in 2014 when then-editor Jim Dodson invited me to become a regular contributor over lunch at a restaurant on West Pennsylvania Avenue across the street from the offices of PineStraw and The Pilot.

I had recently lost a longtime job at Golf World magazine when its print edition was eliminated and, after nearly a quarter-century in one place, was cobbling together a new professional existence in my mid-50s. Despite having a good track record in golf journalism, it was an uncertain time. I’m grateful for Jim’s confidence in my telling stories about growing up in the Sandhills and to the magazine’s readers for appreciating them.

Although golf — only occasionally my subject matter in the “Hometown” space — still gets most of my attention elsewhere, writing this column is an unanticipated pleasure of late middle age. The same goes for the longer features I’ve written, including articles about pro wrestler André the Giant, who settled in Ellerbe, or coach John Williams, a giant in the lives of so many of us from the 1960s through the 1980s.

Doing a hundred columns has spurred thousands of memories, significant and trivial, about Southern Pines and the surrounding area. If I ever get a memoir finished, the column will have played an important role.

When Arnold Palmer attended a high school reunion in his native Latrobe, in western Pennsylvania, he told classmates that “your hometown is not where you’re from, it’s who you are.”

The golf icon made a great point. Roots matter, whether you savor where you come from or spend your life running away from it. Even though I’ve lived elsewhere longer than I resided in the Sandhills, this area is a big part of who I am. No doubt my strong connection was boosted by the fact that my mother lived to 95 and remained in her home until a couple of years before she passed away, and that I returned for regular visits.

In revisiting my formative years over the last decade for the purpose of this column, I’ve had to come to grips with how much the place has grown since I was a kid living in what I like to call a “sophisticated Mayberry,” or even as a young adult eager to see new horizons. The extent of change in Moore County over the last couple of decades — particularly in the last five to 10 years — has been astounding as more and more people have chosen to live here because of its distinctive, appealing qualities.

One only must spend a day driving through eastern North Carolina to see plenty of tiny towns that have dried up, that are sad vestiges of what they used to be. We’re the opposite of those places, with all the positives and negatives that come with it. I still recognize my hometown, but each time I return its evolution can be jarring to the senses.

When I moved to New York in the 1980s, I was eager to experience a world so different from the one where I’d grown up. At that time, there weren’t national chain stores or so many high-rise condos, and there seemed to be a stationery store on every other block. In my mind, I got to live in “old” New York. But people who had lived in the Big Apple of the 1950s likely thought the 1980s didn’t line up with their memories. When I was a kid, getting a Hardee’s — 15-cent hamburgers! — and seeing the Town and Country Shopping Center open on U.S. 1 in Aberdeen were cool, but I’m sure some longtime locals might have viewed those additions as abominations.

I’m glad I grew up where I did, when I did. And it’s fun to remember. PS

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

2023 Department Hometown