Tag: Hometown

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Up to Speed

Adventures behind the wheel

By Bill Fields

My birthday came and went this spring without much fanfare, but not before I remembered that it marked 50 years of driving.

These days, not all teenagers are eager to get behind the wheel upon turning 16. That wasn’t the case in North Carolina half a century ago, when obtaining one’s driver license was a rite of passage that preceded the right to vote or buy a beer.

Of course, we were well prepared for the road test and written exam at the police station in Aberdeen because we had taken driver’s education in high school, where for decades instructor Otis Boroughs taught the course with the tenacity of a drill sergeant and the thoroughness of a graduate-level professor. Boroughs had intense eyes, a buzz cut, and his tone was as serious as the 16-mm films about the perils of drinking and driving that he showed during class.

When you were out in the training car with him, Boroughs rode shotgun. He was watchful and wary, making sure your hands were on the steering wheel at 10 and 2 o’clock, and that you were keeping the proper distance from the car ahead (a car length for each 10 miles per hour of speed). There was usually a second student, in the backseat, waiting for his or her turn to be scrutinized. I can still sense my right foot trembling over the pedals when Boroughs had me pull over on a quiet side street in Southern Pines to demonstrate whether I knew how to parallel park.

Mr. Boroughs died last year, at 87, but I believe he would be pleased that his favorite mantra still comes to me as easily as my Social Security number: “Keep your eyes on the road and your mind on the job of driving.”

Plenty of people driving these days never heard that slogan, or if they have, don’t follow it.

I was reminded of that recently when I drove from Connecticut to North Carolina and spent a couple of weeks in Southern Pines before returning north. On interstates, the lane drifters and weavers were many. For lots of drivers, a turn signal is merely a suggestion to be ignored. Tailgating is common.

The day after I got to town, while stopped at a red light on U.S. 15-501, a car hit my small SUV from behind.

“I wasn’t paying attention,” the young driver, a man who appeared to be in his 20s, admitted as we spoke before pulling into a parking lot to exchange information. It’s clear he wasn’t following either tenet of Mr. Boroughs’ frequent classroom admonition.

Fortunately, the damage to my vehicle — and his — was very minor. And hopefully, he learned a lesson.

I certainly was taught something a decade after getting my license, in what has been my closest call on the road. I was hurrying to Newark airport to catch a flight to Raleigh after the conclusion of the 1985 U.S. Amateur at nearby Montclair (N.J.) Golf Club. It had been raining, and I was going too fast on the exit ramp when I lost control. My rental car skidded sideways for what seemed like the length of a football field but probably traveled half that distance. I didn’t hit anything. After catching my breath, I continued — slowly — to the rental car return.

My other near misses have been because of others. I’ve dodged steel beams falling off a flatbed truck in Memphis, a car barreling through a red light in High Point, and a motorcyclist darting through traffic as if it was a death wish on I-85 in southern Virginia.

Perhaps owing to part of a semester spent with Otis Boroughs, along with my personality, I don’t have a lead foot. One time, however, early one morning on a long, lonely stretch of straightaway in rural Nebraska, driving a rental car that possessed some pep, I decided to see what it felt like to travel over 100 mph. Just once.

I topped out at 107 in my Don Garlits moment, keeping my eyes on the road and my mind on the job of driving all the while.

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A Wild Ride

It’s not for everyone

By Bill Fields

I was around someone recently whose significant other had gone to Disney World, leaving him behind, hundreds of miles away from Mickey Mouse and all the theme park’s other trappings, a distance that brought comfort. My friend loves his partner, but Disney World is not his thing.

It is also not my thing. And if that indifference makes me a crank or a killjoy, I am at peace with the label. I have some contacts on social media, contemporaries of mine, for whom trips to Disney seem to be a focus in their lives, a priority on their calendars. I’m glad they enjoy the experience but don’t understand the fascination.

When I was dealing with a detached retina several years ago, the surgeon who made the repair and monitored my recovery — I count my blessings that thanks to his expertise I got my vision back — offered a warning among his post-op advice.

“Stay off rollercoasters,” he said. The doctor’s admonition was so unnecessary he might just as well have urged me to avoid stepping in a rattlesnake den. I had no plans to do either.

Perhaps if I were a parent, if I had experienced a little one having a magical moment between turnstiles, I would feel differently about such amusements at my advanced age. But I also had been a teenager in North Carolina during the 1970s who didn’t feel there was a void in my life because I never traveled to Carowinds, in Charlotte, despite multiple youth group opportunities to do so. Although I loved going to the annual Moore County Fair, I was far from a regular attendee at the North Carolina State Fair, going just once with a large family from my neighborhood.

My last visit to a theme park occurred in 2008, when a friend and I went to Universal Orlando. On a boat ride during which “pirates” attack, there was an expectation of getting lightly splashed during one of their “explosions.” Instead, a geyser erupted from the lake not far from our seats on the starboard side, and we received a drenching from head to toe that sent us to the exit and toward a change of clothes.

I was not far from my 50th birthday at the time of that unexpected soaking. If I had been 12, I might have relished it. When I was that age, in the summer of 1971, my parents and I made a highly anticipated trip — I was looking forward to it, that is — to Six Flags Over Georgia, outside Atlanta.

Going to Six Flags was part of the biggest journey of my young life. We went all the way to Tallahassee, Florida, to visit my sister, Dianne, and her husband, Bob, who had been living in the Sunshine State’s capital city for a couple of years. Opened in 1967, Six Flags Over Georgia was the brainchild of Dallas businessman Angus Wynne Jr., whose Six Flags Over Texas was built in 1961.

Leading up to our unprecedented vacation, I had sent away for a Six Flags Over Georgia brochure and was familiar with its attractions by the time we pulled out of our driveway in Southern Pines for the long drive south. The park’s “Dahlonega Mine Train,” a rollercoaster, and “Log Jamboree,” a water flume, were both highly touted in its promotional material. Six Flags was described as having a “clean, cheerful and friendly atmosphere.”

I entered Six Flags most excited to get in a log-shaped raft and travel the 1,200-foot channel of the “Log Jamboree.” Its nose-diving, spray-flying conclusion didn’t disappoint, and the modest rides offered each fall in Carthage never thrilled in quite the same way after riding that water flume.

My parents were good sports that afternoon, even though Six Flags surely wasn’t their idea of a great time. When we were getting ready to leave, they even indulged me by traipsing hundreds of yards across the park to a souvenir kiosk. I had been whining about wanting a helium balloon.

Tired, happy, hungry, and holding a big blue balloon on a string, when we got out of the car at the suburban Holiday Inn where we were spending the night, my father looked at the $2 purchase in my hand. “Be careful with that thing,” he said. “Don’t pop it.”

Along with some other guests, we stepped into an elevator. A man got out on a floor below ours. As he did, I carelessly let the string attached to my coveted memento go slack, allowing it to be sandwiched by the closing doors.

I was smart enough not to ask if I could have dessert that night.

2025 Department Hometown

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Aced Out

The elusive hole-in-one

By Bill Fields

Given that I played my first shots on patchy grass in our yard to empty soup cans sunken in the ground, I’ve gone on to have a full golf life. I’ve played thousands of rounds, chronicled hundreds of tournaments with a keyboard or a camera, and been privileged to spend time with dozens of golfers who shaped the sport.

But there is a gap in my golf history. I haven’t made a hole-in-one.

Of course, more talented folks play longer than I have without making an ace. The odds are against anyone: 12,500 to 1 for an average golfer, and even 2,500 to 1 for a tour pro. Those kinds of chances remind me of the “Greyhound Derby” contest at the Colonial grocery store when I was kid. Every Saturday night that we watched the races on television, our dog looked like a lock for the $1,000 winner’s prize . . . until fading like a cur in the homestretch.

An ace has been the mechanical rabbit that I can’t catch.

About the same time the dogs were disappointing us, I was becoming obsessed with the Guinness World Records book that I received one Christmas. It was chock-full of the biggest or tallest you name it. As a budding golfer, I was fascinated by the entry for longest hole-in-one: 444 yards by Robert Mitera, Oct. 7, 1965, on the 10th hole of the appropriately named Miracle Hill Golf Course in Omaha, Nebraska.

I’ve seen holes-in-one in the flesh. Two flew straight in, another rolled in like a Ben Crenshaw putt, and a fourth took a fluky hard-right bounce off a greenside mound. A scorecard, as the saying goes, doesn’t have pictures. That said, a good friend of mine is loath to claim one of his 1s, a skulled short iron that was an ugly shot by any measure until the ball skittered into the cup.

No doubt the most memorable that I’ve witnessed occurred nearly 40 years ago at a par-3 course in New Jersey. I was playing with my pal Michael Dann, with whom I’d enjoyed many games when we lived in the Sandhills. He usually beat me in those days, and I was motivated to change that when we convened at the short course on a busy Saturday afternoon. The first tee was bustling, and we had a de facto gallery when it was our turn on the 80-yard opener. I went first, snuggling a wedge only a foot from the flagstick, and crowed about it to Michael. It was going to be my day.

Then he flew his shot into the cup.

I came close as a teenager. I one-hopped an 8-iron off the pin on the first hole at Knollwood. I hit a 4-wood to 6 inches on the formidable 13th at Mid Pines Inn & Golf Club. Although I’ve had a couple of hole-outs from the fairway from a hundred yards or so, since giving Michael something to shoot at that day in New Jersey, the closest I’ve come on a par-3 tee shot is about a yardstick away.

Perhaps I’m thinking about aces because there have been some notable ones made starting last summer.

I was working on the TV production of the 2024 U.S. Senior Open when Frank Bensel Jr. made a hole-in-one on the par-3 fourth hole at Newport (R.I.) Country Club with a 6-iron. Newport is the rare layout with back-to-back par-3s. Bensel used the same club to ace the fifth hole. It was only the second time in 1,001 USGA championships that someone made two aces in a round. The only other case of consecutive holes-in-one is thought to be by John Hudson in a 1971 tournament on the British PGA circuit.

Last fall, Bryson DeChambeau went viral by trying to make an ace hitting a wedge over his house. On his 16th day of attempts, the U.S. Open champion at Pinehurst succeeded. This February at the South African Open, Dale Whitnell became the second man to make a pair of holes-in-one in one round on the DP World Tour. Three golfers have achieved the 67 million-to-1 feat on the PGA Tour, most recently Brian Harman in 2015.

I am not greedy. One would be plenty. I checked in with my friend Mike Fields of Southern Pines, a golfer good enough in his mid-60s to have shot his age twice within a week. He didn’t make his first of three aces until he was 57. I shall keep swinging.

2025 Department Hometown

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Cleats and Reels

A boy’s spring outfit

By Bill Fields

I was a boy of two minds when the temperatures warmed up and the days got longer.

Spring brought baseball, of course, as it did for many kids of my generation. I’d read reports in the newspaper about the Citrus and Cactus leagues. Promos for the game of the week would show up on television. My friends and I would ready our arms in the backyard. Would this be the year I learned how to throw a curveball? Growing feet meant a new pair of cleats, which without question would allow me to run the bases faster and cover more ground as an infielder. The hopes of an aspiring ballplayer at the dawn of a new season are many.

But as things began to bloom outside our house in Southern Pines — white dogwood at the top of the driveway, azaleas of several colors on either side of the front door — my mind also was on fishing.

No doubt my father took me with him to an area pond when I was too young to remember it. Even if an outing ended with a bare stringer, he went home happy, the weight of everyday life seeming to have lessened a bit with every cast — the cigarettes and beers probably played a part too.

In my earliest, vague recollections of fishing, I am holding a bamboo pole and doing my best to follow Dad’s instructions to pay attention to the movement of the cork signifying a snacking sunfish below the surface. (Despite the fact that most of our “corks” were white and red plastic spheres, we never called them anything else.)

With rare exceptions, our fishing dreams were much bigger than our catches. Curt Gowdy, the marlin-catching host of The American Sportsman on ABC, had nothing to fear. We never needed to look and see if there was a taxidermist listed in the Moore County phone book.

Once, casting a purple worm off a dock at Badin Lake, Dad caught a largemouth weighing 3 or 4 pounds. The size of his smile as he posed for a picture looked as if he’d landed a lunker. That same trip I hooked a large carp, but it wriggled away before I could lift it out of the water and document the catch.

Our best haul came late one afternoon at a private farm pond in Eagle Springs on the property of one of Dad’s schoolmates. Going for bream, earthworms were the customary bait. Occasionally, Dad would splurge for a couple dozen crickets. But for this trip, we were armed with a special bait, a jar of catalpa worms.

They were velvety, brightly colored creatures that appeared every couple of years on a tree in our yard. Once harvested, we’d store them, much to Mom’s displeasure, in the produce drawer of the refrigerator. Threaded on our No. 8 hooks in Eagle Springs, the catalpa worms worked like magic. We caught dozens of bream bigger than one of Dad’s large hands on an angling day like no other.

Fishing was mostly about the preparation and the quest. Dad had an old aluminum tackle box that opened to reveal two rows of slots to hold hooks and lures. I pored over its contents between fishing outings, envisioning a healthy bass being attracted to one of the topwater plugs. I graduated from a bamboo pole to a hand-me-down rod and reel from my father.

It was a big occasion when I had saved enough of my allowance money to walk into Tate’s Hardware and buy a Zebco Model 33 spincast reel. Buying a Zebco 33 was a rite of passage, like getting your first pocketknife.

The Zebco 33 was a revolutionary design when R.D. Hull invented it in the 1950s, when it sold for a whopping price of $19.50. With the monofilament line enclosed in a metal cover and featuring a push-button action, the design was backlash proof and easy to cast.

Appropriately equipped, I at least looked the part. A Zebco 33 did everything but make a fish bite what was at end of your line.

2025 Department Hometown

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Never Too Late

The career path of a classmate

By Bill Fields

Not long after Sara E. Johnson and I began a recent phone call, I couldn’t resist reminding my Pinecrest High School classmate what she had penned a long time ago in my senior yearbook.

“When you’re a rich and famous news man and I’m a rich and famous news lady,” she wrote on a back page in my Spectrum, “let’s get together and talk over old times.”

The words were the earnest well-wishes from one eager aspiring journalist to another. Sara LeFever and I were on the staff of The Courier, the student newspaper, for a couple of years, and officers in the Quill and Scroll club. We alternated weeks reporting high school news in The Pinehurst Outlook, with fresh-faced class pictures as our respective column sigs.

Neither of us fulfilled the futures mentioned in her message. I gravitated to sports, specializing in golf coverage. A stay-at-home mother of three until earning a master’s degree from UNC and becoming a reading specialist in her 40s, Johnson contributed articles on family and education to newspapers in Chapel Hill and Raleigh.

When we talked in January, the conversation didn’t revolve around our high school days (although we agreed it can be tough to review examples of our early, raw writing) but rather newer, exciting developments in Johnson’s life, which should be an example for anyone of a certain age.

“I was 60 when my first novel came out in 2019,” she said. “People need to know it’s never too late.”

Johnson’s debut book, Molten Mud Murder, was the first installment in the “Alexa Glock Forensics Mystery Series.” The central character is a plucky and slightly geeky American investigator living in New Zealand, a traveling forensic who uses teeth to solve crimes. The debut has been followed by The Bones Remember, The Bone Track, The Bone Riddle and The Hungry Bones. The final book in the series, Bone Chilling, will be published this year.

The mysteries resulted from the nine months Johnson and her husband, Forrest, who live in Durham, spent exploring New Zealand in 2014. After returning home from a fascinating land that had intrigued her greatly, she pursued the notion of writing a book, something I had encouraged her to do in an email when we reconnected more than 20 years ago. “You said if you want to write a book, you can do it,” Johnson said. “Your message really stuck with me.”

Johnson has always been a wide reader, including mysteries. She has been enamored of the genre since she was 10 and read The Bungalow Mystery, a Nancy Drew book given to her mother in 1942. She spent a year writing Molten Mud Murder. Then came the hard part, which required much patience and persistence.

“I think I had 66 rejections from literary agents, but then the 67th came along,” Johnson said. “I don’t know where the cutoff would have been. Would I have contacted 75 or 100 agents? I don’t know. I was getting some positive rejections — people saying, ‘I like this and this, but don’t like that.’ What I call the positive rejections kept me going, and I kept honing the manuscript.”

Johnson informs her books with meticulous research provided by a cadre of professionals to ensure accuracy in her scenes. “I have wonderful experts who read over what I’ve written,” she said. “One forensic pathologist can spend two pages telling me how to flip a body on an autopsy table.”

At work on her seventh book, revolving around a coroner in northern Minnesota, Johnson will incorporate the forensics knowledge she gained producing the Alexa Glock series. She tries to write 1,000 words a day while relying on important assessments along the way from fellow writers.

“Hands down, the biggest help for me is being in a writers’ group,” Johnson said. “We meet weekly, not just mystery authors but folks in all kinds of genres. We bring 10 pages, read them, and people critique them. Reading your work aloud and getting good feedback is so valuable. I can’t thank them enough.”

As for others who might want to tap into their creative side later in life, Johnson believes it isn’t a mystery. “Sit down and do it,” she said. “If you have a dream to write a book, it’s possible.”

2025 Department Hometown

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Clear as Cursive

The handwriting on the scrawl

By Bill Fields

Hunting recently through a box of old stuff, most of which would have been thrown out long ago if I didn’t have a little pack rat in me, I found something I was glad hadn’t been tossed.

Over the years, I’ve filled many a reporter’s notebook. It’s a 4 x 8-inch lined pad with spiral rings at the top and cardboard covers, an essential tool for any journalist. Before the inconspicuously functional notebooks were widely available, while covering the turbulent civil rights movement in the American South for The New York Times in the 1950s and 1960s, Claude Sitton improvised them by cutting wider stenographer’s notebooks in half.

My discovery was of one of the first reporter’s notebooks I slipped into a back pocket, dating to 1979 when I was a student sportswriter for The Daily Tar Heel covering far less consequential events than Sitton — later the longtime editor of Raleigh’s News & Observer — was chronicling for the Times.

Beneath a creased and discolored front cover on its wide-ruled pages were my notes from assorted sporting events: North Carolina’s exhibition against the New York Yankees (green ink); a UNC-Duke baseball game (black ink); a spring football update from the Tar Heels’ second-year head football coach Dick Crum (blue ink).

“Going to keep it low and inside. Might even ask ’em to put the screen in front of the mound,” Carolina pitcher David Kirk told me the day before facing the two-time defending World Series champions. “If I get it up high, could be history. Chris Chambliss might hit one into Chase Cafeteria.”

“Sixth — P.J. Gay double off warning track.”

“OLB — Lawrence Taylor.”

Flipping through those old pages, I was pleasantly surprised that I could make out the vast majority of what I’d jotted down. Quotes from George Steinbrenner. “I’ve got professionals. Anybody who counts the Yankees out of the race because of spring is wrong.” Observations in the Yankees locker room before game time. “Pinella — cards, puffing cigarettes. Chambliss — 2 championship rings.” It wasn’t the neatest penmanship in the world, but it was readable.

I have notes from only a month ago that are harder to decipher.

That would no doubt be a disappointing admission for the person who taught me handwriting, Southern Pines third-grade teacher Peggy Blue, to hear. “Fine beginning in cursive writing,” Miss Blue noted on my report card in the fall of 1967. I earned straight As in “Writing” that year.

When it comes to notes taken on the job, there is a logical reason why I’ve become a sloppier notetaker. When I was in college, and for years afterward, tape recorders weren’t commonplace among journalists. Reporters took handwritten notes. In the case of a lengthy interview, if you weren’t on a tight deadline, you might type them up back in the office before writing a story. If you hadn’t written them so they were legible, you were out of luck.

Over the years, tiny digital recorders — and more recently, smartphones — have made it more convenient for journalists to record interviews. Convenient, verbatim audio leaves no doubt about what a subject said, but the technology has led to less thorough notetaking. Still, looking back on the period when I relied on pen and paper, I don’t recall being accused of misquoting anyone. Perhaps I inherited just enough of my mother’s steady, graceful penmanship, learned as a pupil of the Palmer Method in the 1930s, which endured into her 90s.

I can’t imagine not having learned how to write longhand, with joined letters. In this century, though, there has been a trend away from mandatory instruction in elementary school. I was stunned to find out that a young relative, who is now about the same age as I was when I wrote those notes in 1979, wasn’t taught cursive and only knew how to print block letters. About 15 years ago, many states removed longhand as a requirement. “The handwriting may be on the wall for cursive,” an ABC reporter quipped in the lede to a 2011 story about the trend.

Since then, however, education officials have realized that even in a predominantly digital age there is practical and cognitive value in knowing cursive writing. Many schools have reinstituted it as part of the third-grade curriculum. And someday, a budding reporter might even write down the profound thoughts of a coach, as I did with Dick Crum 46 years ago: “We want to play fundamentally sound football.”

2025 Department Hometown

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Boogie Oogie Oogie

Till you just can’t boogie no more

By Bill Fields

I went off to college in the fall of 1977, and Saturday Night Fever came out that December. If I was paying attention to the path outside my residence hall any given night during freshman year, I would see Randy walking toward Franklin Street in Chapel Hill.

He was a man on a mission, the closest thing our dorm had to Tony Manero, John Travolta’s character in the hit movie with disco as its core. Randy walked with purpose, dress-shoe soles on brick announcing his presence. Product in his blond hair, a couple of off-duty buttons on a fancy shirt with a substantial collar, he was a striding testimonial to various synthetic fabrics and soon to have a black-light handstamp to enter his favorite night spot.

Randy was headed to the Bacchae, which for a time was called Mayo’s Bacchae, the longer name including that of the establishment’s operator, a small-town North Carolinian with New York City tastes.

In the late 1970s, Tony Manero would have been right at home at the Bacchae. Its black-and-mirrored walls, lighted dance floor, colored strobes and faux fog were a backdrop for the pulsating, four-on-the-floor beat of the disco music: Bee Gees, Donna Summer, Yvonne Elliman, Heatwave, Chic, Wild Cherry.

I didn’t dress the part the way Randy did, although I’m sure I turned up at the Bacchae more than once wearing some residual polyester garment from my golf wardrobe. My clothing deficit notwithstanding, I met a couple of girlfriends there, one of whom I dated for about a year, until it became clear that her affection for Rod Stewart was greater than for me.

It is jarring to think that the disco days are as far removed from today as the Charleston era was when we were grooving to “Never Can Say Goodbye,” “We Are Family,” “Le Freak” or “Boogie Oogie Oogie.”

Disco peaked in 1978 and ’79, declining soon thereafter, much to the dismay of my dormmate Randy, but not before making an appearance in the then-sleepy Sandhills.

I was reminded of those times not long ago when I had a sandwich at 715 Broad in Southern Pines. In the mid-1970s that space was Castle of Dreams, which advertised being “The Best in Disco Entertainment.” Tuesday was Teenage Night, when those under 18 gathered to drink Cokes and summon the courage to ask a classmate to dance. The evenings would occasionally end with a beer on the sly out by a pond in Highland Trails, an activity that didn’t make my reply when Mom asked about my night out after I arrived home as the 11 o’clock news was coming on.

But the Castle was D-league disco compared to Crash Landing, which I discovered once I was of legal age. Crash Landing was located on U.S. Highway 1 North in Southern Pines, a large warehouse-style building situated on a slight rise, set back from the thoroughfare with a large parking lot in front sometimes not big enough to hold all the cars.

Many of us came to the Crash on college breaks and during the summer, catching up and doing our best on the dance floor. As was the case in Chapel Hill, there was a cadre of dancers at the Crash who knew what they were doing, who knew the kind of moves Travolta and company did in Saturday Night Fever. Most of us were just moving around, building up a thirst for a Budweiser or a Miller High Life. I had gotten put into a social-dance physical education class after most of the more common P.E. courses were filled up, but my foxtrot experience was of little help. On the very rare occasions I departed the Crash with someone’s phone number, it was harvested by conversation not my skill at the Latin hustle.

The best move I remember from the Crash Landing period involved a friend who was driving me home one winter night. Just as he was making a turn in Manly, it was suddenly like a fog machine was pointed at his sedan’s windshield. With the defroster obscuring his view, he made a left on the wrong side of the frontage road median. A highway patrolman was nearby and, blue light flashing, immediately pulled us over. They talked for five minutes standing in the cold, my buddy and the officer, then we were on our way. No ticket. No written warning. Just advice to be careful and go straight home. A lot has changed beyond the music.

2025 Department Hometown

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Hail, Cedar!

Friends, aroma, countrymen, lend me your gifts

By Bill Fields

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2024 Department Hometown

Hometown

HOMETOWN

It Still Stings

Stuffed and trimmed on Thanksgiving

By Bill Fields

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2024 Department Hometown

Hometown

HOMETOWN

The Memories Inside

Cruising past the old homestead

By Bill Fields

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

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

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

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

“There’s our old house,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

2024 Department Hometown