Tag: Hometown

Hometown

HOMETOWN

Wonderful Wood

When the persimmon tree reigned supreme

By Bill Fields

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hometown

HOMETOWN

Keep on Truckin’

New life for old wheels

By Bill Fields

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2025 Department Hometown

Hometown

HOMETOWN

Guiding Lights

To the ones who lay the foundation

By Bill Fields

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

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

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

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

2). I peaked way too soon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2025 Department Hometown

Hometown

HOMETOWN

Sweet, Sweet Summer

The days of sand and frozen dessert

By Bill Fields

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

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

For me, though, summer wins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2025 Department Hometown

Hometown

HOMETOWN

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.

2025 Department Hometown

Hometown

HOMETOWN

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

Hometown

HOMETOWN

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

Hometown

HOMETOWN

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

Hometown

HOMETOWN

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

Hometown

HOMETOWN

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