Hometown

In the Spirit

Home
Tag Archives: Hometown

What’s the Rush?

Slow down and smell the Thai food

By Bill Fields

When I made late plans to travel south by car in January, I did something without hesitation for the first time. More than 35 years since the maiden drive I took along the Eastern Seaboard, I knew I was going to break up the 600-mile trip with an overnight stay going and coming. Thanks to a reservoir of hotel points, I booked a room north of Richmond on the way down and north of Baltimore on the way back — segments of roughly 400 and 200 miles in each direction.

It wasn’t a proud moment because it was an acknowledgement of the personal rather than automotive odometer, of the miles traveled since making a right turn on May Street in my Ford Escort in the fall of 1986, handwritten directions to New York City on the passenger seat. I’m sure I’ll make it in one shot again but also believe that Ashland, Virginia, and Middle River, Maryland, haven’t seen the last of me. (The tasty green curry at a Thai place a short walk from the hotel in the latter location will be a draw.)

I’ve made the drive dozens of times since that first journey north, once or twice a year, in the wake of celebration or sadness, for work and pleasure, alone and with a significant other. The early trips seem medieval. My tiny hatchback didn’t have air conditioning, and there had to be cash in the car for tolls. On the chaotic, traffic-choked approach to the George Washington Bridge during the summer heat, those two factors combined to make things fairly hellish — either sweat like a pig as you inched through the narrowing funnel of cars toward the toll-taker, or be cooler and breathe the fumes along the way.

Despite the predictable jams on Interstate 95, I’ve seldom chosen the longer, calmer, more scenic Interstate 81-U.S. Route 220 path. Perhaps I’m a glutton for punishment, but the longer, indirect, more inland trip has never been my preference. Being so groggy that I had to pull over for a few minutes near Asheboro on the home stretch once when I traveled that way might have influenced my thinking.

Going the usual way without an overnight stop, the drive from Connecticut (first Stamford, and for a long time, Fairfield) to Southern Pines or vice versa ranges from 11 to 13 hours: the fastest (9 hours, 15 minutes) and slowest (19 1/2 hours), each beginning at my customary 4 a.m. start time. I recall the first happening with extraordinarily light traffic, only a couple of quick stops and my having an unusual lead foot. The second was a nightmarish wintertime journey heading north, black ice on bridges forcing a lengthy pause before even getting into Virginia. The weather cleared until we reached southern New Jersey, where it began snowing heavily. With no hotel vacancies, we poked along in the near blizzard, stopping only to clear the ice-encrusted wipers, making it home well after midnight, as road weary as I’ve ever been.

I’ve had SiriusXM in my car the last few years, a luxury that helps the time pass on the long rides. Satellite radio and the ability to make hands-free calls are a far cry from the old days, when it took a surgeon’s touch on the dial to get an uncooperative distant station, and it felt like a win when songs outmuscled the static for a while. I fondly remember long-ago trips when I tuned in to C-SPAN Radio around Washington, D.C., for an entertaining two hours of Lyndon Johnson White House telephone recordings. (The Texan was at his earthy best in a conversation with Mr. Haggar about his needs on some custom-tailored slacks.)

On the second, shorter leg of my most recent trip south, I settled for Morning Edition on a couple of public radio stations as I drove through Virginia and North Carolina. Heading closer to the Sandhills, I was struck by how much new stuff was alongside U.S. Highway 1 near Sanford —MIRO Country Hams long gone now — north of Southern Pines, whose growth is now evident in all directions. As I exited onto Midland Road and presently pulled into Pine Needles Lodge & Golf Club eager to walk 18 holes on a sunny and mild afternoon, I could feel my older, middle-age.  PS

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

Hometown

In the Spirit

Home
Tag Archives: Hometown

A Hardwood Homily

A gym is no place for badminton

By Bill Fields

I don’t look back on my days in the Southern Pines school gymnasium without angst. There were some miserable moments in physical education class. Activities like boxing, climbing rope, mounting a pommel horse and jumping on a trampoline weren’t my thing, regardless of how they were supposed to help me grow up and become a strong, upstanding citizen. I am not ashamed to have probably performed the lamest seat drops in Moore County history. Daydreaming classmates on the perimeter of the bounce mat didn’t inspire confidence that they would save the day if something went wrong. Nor did the limp of our wonderful teacher, Mr. Wynn, whose disability had been caused by a tumbling accident years earlier.

The pursuits of P.E. period would have been dreaded regardless of where they occurred — the only thing worse was tetherball during a cold recess. That they were forced upon me within those walls, on that shiny maple floor, made them more regrettable. Even badminton and volleyball, which could be fun, seemed miscast there. A gym was for basketball.

This was so because in the winter, in the land of the Atlantic Coast Conference, basketball was my reason for being during a good portion of childhood. Watching it on television. Listening to it on the radio. Playing it, as often as possible.

Most hoops time happened in our backyard on a dirt “court” whose dimensions were decidedly cramped on the left side due to trees and the property line. My first goal was attached to an old swing set. The backboard was just a grade above cardboard, and the rim wobbled after the first week. Then, one day after I got home from school, the old set-up was gone, replaced by a new goal with a backboard of thicker wood mounted on an honest-to-goodness utility pole. Dad didn’t volunteer any details about how such a sturdy support came our way, but I privately theorized that it was paid for with a case of beer or the largest bottle of Canadian Club sold at the ABC store on Connecticut Avenue. Whatever the payment, it was worth it, because the pole survived well beyond the afternoons when I dribbled a ball in its shadow.

But despite the upgrade, it was still outdoors, a far cry from the indoor surfaces played upon by my heroes in college and the pros. Once I got a little older, the hard surface courts at the downtown park were a better substitute, but the chain nets were a long way from the real thing.

Thanks to pictures in yearbooks belonging to my older sisters, I knew what the gym at East Southern Pines High School looked like before I started first grade in 1965. I dreamed of dressing for the Blue Knights in one of those uniforms with the short shorts and satiny material, the kind the players wore in the team pictures and the posed action shots.

I signed up for midget league basketball as soon as I was eligible. We had only colored T-shirts, but those Saturday mornings in the gym weren’t diminished by lack of a complete basketball outfit. With multiple games being played on the three-quarter courts, there was a cacophony of sounds: the thud of basketballs bouncing; referees’ whistles; sneakers squeaking on the hardwood; coaches yelling for a player to pass; a player who wanted to shoot hollering for the ball. When the games were over, stepping outside to walk home was as close to cryotherapy as I’ve experienced, so jolting was the temperature after hours spent in the cozy confines.

A few years later, I made a desultory exit from that building one weekday afternoon after being cut from the junior high team. The only times I would get to shoot at the competition goals on the fiberglass backboards was during half-court games in Mr. Fitch’s ninth-grade P.E. class and later when the gym would be open during Christmas break.

Not having a gymnasium when it opened in 1969, Pinecrest played in the Blue Knights’ former space for half a dozen seasons. The Patriots of Charles Waddell, Ricky Goldston and Dexter Pride rocked the place on their way to the state 3-A title in 1971 and a runner-up finish the following year. Those were great teams and good times. If there had been a home game the evening before us squirts showed for youth play, you could still smell the popcorn. If there was a better building in town, I didn’t know about it.  PS

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

Hometown

Hometown

Home
Tag Archives: Hometown

Toying Around

The oldies but goodies

By Bill Fields

For adults, the first month of the year is a time when we tend to take stock of ourselves and make resolutions on a host of fronts in the name of self-improvement, even though sometimes vows are gone quicker than the crispy tree put by the curb. But when I was a kid — back when a pressing concern was trying to convince my mother to splurge on a half-gallon of name-brand ice cream instead of store-label ice milk — January was perfect for another kind of inventory.

On the heels of Christmas, it was natural to consider the toys and games that you had — not just what a generous Santa Claus might have recently delivered, but diversions that stuck around season after season.

For staying power and hours of enjoyment, my Monopoly game was hard to beat. It brought the family together at the dining room table for years, my relatives tolerating my absurd early desire to be allowed to improve properties before owning all the properties in a color group. (I matured and played by the rules.) After many years of action, we had missing hotels, dog-eared money, Pepsi-stained Chance and Community Chest cards, and my mother, a teller by day, still detested being the banker or being stuck with the iron token.

In contrast to Monopoly’s time-tested appeal that made me love it from Day One, whatever initial excitement that came with receiving Lite-Brite and Etch A Sketch dissipated quickly. As for the former, when you start out with two misspellings in your name, how good can you really be? I would much rather watch Mickey Mouse on television than attempt to create his likeness by punching translucent, colored plastic pegs through a sheet of black paper illuminated from behind. When it came to Etch A Sketch, the detailed scenes said to be possible on the mechanical drawing screen by turning the two knobs weren’t in my wheelhouse. A crappy-looking mountain range was about the best I could muster. It never brought any cheer to realize that Lite-Brite and Etch A Sketch were in the recesses of my closet.

Then there were toys such as Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots and Electric Football that were much loved until fun turned into frustration. The heads of boxers Red Rocker and Blue Bomber were supposed to be knocked off with a powerful pushbutton punch. Over time, though, the heads would develop a mind of their own and occasionally raise from the shoulders without a hit, just from moving around the ring. Electric Football had a lot going for it — I don’t agree with author Bill Bryson’s contention that the game was “possibly the worst toy ever built” — but the vibrating players too often did want to spin around in circles as if drunk around a maypole instead of making forward progress. This was a reality regardless of how much surgery you’d done on their brushes that touched the metal field. And the tiny felt football utilized for passes and kicks was hard not to lose even with the excellent eyesight of youth. It was easy pickings for the Electrolux.

Just as a pet cat can enjoy an empty cardboard box more than an expensive “home” purchased by its owner, so it was with simple toy and game options growing up.

My plastic army soldiers fought multiple battles on hardwood, carpet or dirt, undeterred by bent bayonets or broken bazookas. A yo-yo was fun despite mastering a limited repertoire of tricks. Hot Wheels cars largely performed as advertised. Matchbox vehicles punched above their weight; opening and closing the doors to the ambulance shouldn’t have been fascinating but it was.

And there were the hours playing with things that didn’t cost a dime. While watching the Sunday afternoon NBA game on TV, by the second quarter I would have fashioned an indoor goal out of a clothes hanger on a door frame, convinced that neither Hal Greer nor Jerry West could fill up the hoop with a crumpled ball of tin foil better than I could.

A paper football was the only origami I was interested in, the finished product a much better use of a sheet of loose-leaf paper than multiplication tables. The thrill of having flicked a long touchdown by getting the triangular “ball” to hang over the table’s edge was only slightly less than scoring a TD out in the yard. If no corneas were scratched in the kicking of field goals, everybody was happy until next time.  PS

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

Hometown

Cards of Christmas Past

Ode to a lonely address book

By Bill Fields

Amid so many uncertainties in the current world, there is an absolute truth: December is the loneliest month for one of my possessions.

Residing in a drawer where it seldom is disturbed, near some old keys and dull pencils, I’m sure my address book feels left out most of the time. But around the holidays — when the contents on its dog-eared pages used to be as essential as eggnog — it must be forlorn beyond consolation.

The state of my address book this time of year is, of course, related to both habit and technology. I still mail holiday greetings to some friends and relatives, but the list is much smaller than it once was. I know a few addresses from memory; others are in the contacts on my cell phone.

I felt quite mature not long ago when I visited a college communications department and, with time to kill before I spoke to a class, looked around the lobby before going upstairs. A display on the history of journalism included a Rolodex, an artifact of an earlier age.

Right out of college, I purchased a Rolodex at Austin Business Supply, a fancy one with a metal cover that went over the rotating spindle and a lock with one of those tiny keys that would go missing in a month. By the time I abandoned my Rolodex years later, it still had plenty of blank cards and wasn’t even in the same league with the bulging desktop index of a former boss in New York. He called in from the road once and asked me to find a number for someone. In flipping through his cards, I couldn’t help noticing how he handled those no longer with us: * DEAD * written in felt tip by their names. 

My address book is nearly 25 years old, purchased not long after the Moleskine notebooks came on the scene. The pages have come free from the binding; the elastic closure has been stretched to where it is like a belt four sizes too long. Inside the black paperboard cover fraying at both ends of its spine are names in and out of my life, relationships that ended and those that endure. If I were so inclined, there could be plenty of asterisks. The book even contains information foreshadowing its obsolescence — a password here, an email there, lines drawn through an old home number in the “H” section that no longer works.

Even though I’ll only send and receive a handful of cards this year, the tradition evokes lots of memories. Growing up, we often taped the cards above the double door to the dining room, where the scotch tape was certain to fail at least a few times. Sometimes they stood on top of a china closet or sideboard. Occasionally, they rested in a basket.

People tended to be predictable in the Christmas cards they sent. Some families chose one with a religious theme each year. You could count on birds from some and snowy scenes from others. I used to be fascinated by the envelopes that contained more than a card: the typed letters of what had gone on in a life in the preceding 12 months. We used to get missives from a divorced distant cousin that mentioned the activities of “Parents Without Partners.” To a kid, all the PWP updates seemed like TMI, even before there was such an acronym.

Mostly, though, it was a joy when the post office box was filled with cards from friends or family who thought enough to take the time to write them. It was a delight to receive a card from my mother even when she was north of 90, her handwriting nearly as neat as when she was a schoolgirl.

Retrieving my address book from its resting place not long ago, I was reminded that it had an accordion pocket. There were a couple of old business cards and return addresses torn off envelopes. In a pleasant surprise, there also were two partial books of attractive “Holiday Evergreens” Forever stamps. The longleaf pine version looks particularly like home and deserves to ensure passage of something better than a bill.  PS

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

Hometown

Table for One

Thanksgiving on the road less traveled

By Bill Fields

By the fall of 1976, an honest appraisal of my golf game would have resembled that of the used cars my father bought when money was tight and he needed transportation: runs rough, could blow a tire at any time, uncertain future. I was 17 years old, a high school senior. Despite many hours spent playing and practicing through my teens, I was still a handful of strokes from being a scratch golfer. Only at the smallest of colleges would I have a prayer of making the team.

But my enthusiasm hadn’t evaporated, which is why I asked my parents if I could enter the George Holliday Memorial Junior Tournament held in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, over Thanksgiving weekend. I would make the 130-mile drive by myself in the family Fairlane, spend two nights at the Howard Johnson’s on North Kings Highway, distinguish myself with a good performance in the boys 16-17 age group, and take some confidence into my final spring of prep golf at Pinecrest High School.

I was a responsible kid, having only an occasional beer when Tuesday teen night at the Castle of Dreams was over. Mom and Dad knew the only damage I might cause in a motel room was scuffing a wall on a practice swing. They said, “Yes.”

Before dawn on Thanksgiving morning, I left Southern Pines for a tune-up round at the tournament site, Myrtle Beach National Golf Club. I had a couple of packs of Nabs on the car’s bench seat and a road map, but having made the ride 15 to 20 times, usually on family beach trips, I knew the route.

After making it to the course, I registered and went out for 18 holes, completing a foursome with boys from Virginia and South Carolina. We were among nearly 200 entrants in the event, played since the early 1970s to honor a Wofford College golfer, George Judson Holliday III of Galivants Ferry, who perished in a 1967 car crash.

By 4 p.m., I had checked into the motel on what was a quiet main drag and called home collect to let my parents know I was settled in. Traveling with my shag bag like pros of yesteryear, I hit some wedge shots on a nearby field. Later, after wiping my clubs clean, I walked into the Howard Johnson’s restaurant for Thanksgiving dinner. Given that there were only about a dozen people dining, getting a seat wasn’t a problem.

The excitement of the trip, of my grown-up adventure, gave way to a different emotion after sliding into the booth and watching the waitress remove the other place setting. I got lonesome thinking of my parents at the table back home and the familiar foods — turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, green beans, apple rings — they were eating. I was the only solo diner aside from an elderly man drinking coffee at the counter. 

I contemplated ordering a hamburger and French fries but decided I had to get turkey and all the trwimmings, even if it wasn’t going to taste like my mother’s cooking. I ate most of my turkey and the accompanying sides, eschewed one of HoJo’s 28 flavors for a slice of pecan pie, and paid my bill. Once I was back in my room, I chained the door and got a water glass off the bathroom vanity to use as a putting cup. Three-footers, 6-footers, 10-footers — for an hour I tried to groove my stroke. I wished my “make” percentage was higher, but at least I was faring better than John-Boy, who got injured in a sawmill accident during a special Thanksgiving episode of The Waltons.

A poor start Friday morning — bogeys on the first three holes — had me feeling like I’d been hit in the head, and I wasn’t able to reverse the mojo. Far from shooting a score that might have earned an instant’s worth of interest from any of the college golf coaches in attendance, I was in the mid-80s. Saturday’s score was only marginally better. Joey Sadowski of Hickory, North Carolina, finished at one-over-par 145 to beat Mike Cook of Cartersville, Georgia, by a single stroke. Each of them would go on to play collegiately at UNC and the University of Georgia, respectively; I would be in a golf physical education class at Chapel Hill, hitting wiffle balls off a door mat in Woollen Gym. 

I put my clubs in the trunk and pointed my Ford toward home. In 2 1/2 hours there would be leftovers.  PS

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

Hometown

My Flying Life

The good, the bad and the pressurized

By Bill Fields

About a decade ago, early on a Saturday morning, I was at New York’s LaGuardia Airport for a flight to RDU. The gate area was mostly empty except for a familiar face in a corner chair. Roy Williams, the UNC men’s basketball coach, had been in the Big Apple for the NBA draft. He was eating a candy bar when I introduced myself.

“You won’t remember this,” I said, truer words having never been spoken, “but you were sitting next to me on my first flight.”

In December 1979, Williams was a graduate assistant for the Tar Heels, among his duties driving copies of “The Dean Smith Show” to television stations around the state each weekend during basketball season. On this Monday, he was flying Piedmont Airlines from RDU to Tampa for Carolina-South Florida that evening at the Bayfront Arena in St. Petersburg. A 20-year-old junior journalism major, I was covering the game for The Daily Tar Heel.

Roy told me how to yawn to keep my ears from hurting on the climb and descent. When the flight attendant arrived with the beverage cart, I told her it was my first flight and was a bit disappointed I wasn’t given a pair of wings. 

Perhaps she knew it wasn’t really my first flight. That had been a 15-minute spin above Southern Pines in a single-engine plane two years earlier with an assistant pro I knew who had just gotten his pilot’s license. But the two-hour trip to Florida on a 737 made that brief sightseeing venture seem like a bucket of balls at Knollwood compared to 18 holes on Pinehurst No. 2.

Hearing a friend, now retired, tell me recently that he flew 6 million miles in his sales career got me thinking about how much I’ve flown over more than 40 years. Tallying up the totals in the loyalty programs of the two airlines I’ve flown the most comes to 790,135 miles. Counting the flights before I had frequent flier accounts and all the travel on other airlines that isn’t documented, I must be approaching 1.5 million miles up in the air.

My most memorable air travel (enjoyable division) wasn’t with any of the surviving legacy carriers or airlines such as TWA, Pan Am, Piedmont or Eastern that are no longer with us. Over four days in 1989, while profiling Arnold Palmer as he neared his 60th birthday, I had a seat on his Cessna Citation III, a $7 million business jet, while the golf legend traveled from a senior tournament to various course design projects.

Palmer, in the left seat beside co-pilot Lee Lauderback, flew N1AP into his hometown and to where he had long wintered — Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and Orlando, Florida — and then to Kansas City, St. Louis and Greenville, South Carolina. The biggest thrill was the next-to-last leg: Orlando to Moore County, where Palmer and longtime architecture partner Ed Seay were working on Pinehurst Plantation (now Mid South Club).

I was clearly well ahead of the aviation gods after that assignment, but they’ve gotten in their licks since. Just months after traveling with Palmer, I had a hellishly bouncy flight into Málaga, Spain, the last flight before the airport was shut down because of severe weather. Two decades later, flying on a Korean Air charter of senior tour pros from San Francisco to Incheon, about an hour from landing a pocket of clear air turbulence caused the plane to drop dramatically, banging up flight attendants and anyone who wasn’t belted in. The experience sure put into perspective all the windy, nervous approaches into water-guarded LaGuardia — aborted landings notwithstanding — that would follow.

One has no choice but to roll with the punches, especially in today’s chaotic world of airline staffing shortages, delays and cancellations. Edinburgh, Scotland, was a mess this summer as I attempted to begin a journey home, hundreds of travelers lined up outside on the sidewalk because of a technical snarl, missed connections on their minds. It was not, as I found out while getting a short sleep at a ring-road hotel in Amsterdam that evening, an unfounded worry.

But for almost every glitch, armrest hog or man wearing a tank top, there is a stunning sunset at 37,000 feet, or a gate agent more pleasant and patient than most would be. And I’ll always have memories of Air Arnie.  PS

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

Hometown

Home Again

The World Golf Hall of Fame returns

By Bill Fields

As a 15-year-old, on a Sept. 11 when that date was just another day, I watched the World Golf Hall of Fame get off to a rousing start in Pinehurst. They let us out of school early so we could see President Gerald R. Ford, who had committed to the appearance before his very recent promotion, and a dais full of golf legends as the facility was dedicated and the inaugural class of 13 individuals was inducted. In a subdued dark suit, Ben Hogan looked as if he had stepped out of 1953, but Jack Nicklaus’ red sport coat and wide tie made sure everyone knew it was 1974.

Like the Golden Bear’s attire, the World Golf Hall of Fame would go out of fashion quickly. Exhibits were thin. Honoree bronzes were unattractive. Attendance was sparse. As I knew from working there in 1981-82 and having put out buckets between writing press releases, the roof leaked badly. There were plenty of good intentions and no lack of effort among those involved with the WGHOF over the decades — both in Pinehurst and in St. Augustine, Florida, where it has been situated off Interstate 95 since 1998 — but in both locales it has been the institutional equivalent of a golfer with potential who can’t shoot a number.

The third time just might be the charm.

As announced this summer, the World Golf Hall of Fame is returning to its roots in 2024, when it will become part of the USGA’s Golf House Pinehurst, a 6-acre campus being developed not far from the Pinehurst Resort and Country Club main clubhouse. Fifty years after the hall’s first honorees were inducted a pitch shot away from the fifth tee of the Pinehurst No. 2 course, induction ceremonies will coincide with the 2024 U.S. Open on No. 2. In 2029, when the U.S. Open and U.S. Women’s Open are held in consecutive weeks as they were in 2014, another group of Hall of Famers will get their due.

If things go as planned in the handful of years between those U.S. Opens, the relocated and reimagined World Golf Hall of Fame will have become what many hoped for a long time ago: a secure, vital part of the golf landscape where the past is treasured and shown off in a thorough and distinctive way that makes visitors want to come.

“We look forward to celebrating the greatest moments and golf’s greatest athletes by including the World Golf Hall of Fame as an important part of our Pinehurst home,” said Mike Whan, CEO of the USGA. “Simply put, it just makes sense.”

The Hall of Fame will continue to be an independent organization, part of the World Golf Foundation, and will still administer the induction process. (Who votes, who does or doesn’t get in, and how honorees are categorized remain legitimate, longstanding questions that aren’t answered by the move.)

But the USGA, whose Golf Museum and Library in Liberty Corner, New Jersey, are first-class, will be in charge of day-to-day operations in the new location and will be able to draw upon its huge collection of golf artifacts — some of which never get seen by the public — to beef up what is on display in Pinehurst. The USGA and Hall of Fame will collaborate on digital and interactive content about WGHOF members.

There will never be one, see-everything-important repository in golf, just as there is no single art museum housing all the great works. The USGA’s counterpart across the Atlantic, the R&A World Golf Museum in St. Andrews, possesses many items. Some valuable collectibles are in private hands around the globe. For fans of the guy who wore the garish jacket in ’74, the Jack Nicklaus Museum in Columbus, Ohio, is the place to go. But as someone who occasionally played major championship highlight films on a 16 mm projector to a mostly empty theater in the old Pinehurst facility, the prospect of a fantastic visitor experience in the forthcoming home is enticing.

In an ideal world, the Hall of Fame wouldn’t have begun as a commercial venture, would have been housed in a suitable building instead of a white elephant, and never would have left Pinehurst. In the real world, it’s wonderful to see it coming home.  PS

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

Hometown

Blast from the Past

Keeping it cool when the heat is on

By Bill Fields

When I spent my last night in my childhood home — grown, gray and practically groaning from the aches of helping empty its considerable contents over several days — I went to bed upstairs comforted by a familiar sound I knew soon would be only a memory.

It was a hot summer evening, and the noise came from a window air conditioner that had been in the family for nearly 45 years, since I was a teenager. In old age the unit still cooled, even when set to the lowest of its three speeds, a limit mandated by my mother that I usually obeyed even after she was no longer living in the house.

Cranking up the temperature control to 6 or 7 (on a 1 to 10 dial) ensured a chilly output. The aging wonder wasn’t quiet by any means, and when it went through its cooling cycle it was as if the appliance was having a coughing fit before easing back into its customary sound.

Back in 1974 — I recall it arrived on East New Jersey Avenue in the days not long before Richard Nixon departed the White House — and in the following decade before central air was installed, the Sears purchase was situated in the living room and was powerful enough to cool most of the first floor.

That truly was a miracle summer of 20th century innovation. We had acquired cable television not long before, which meant the Atlanta Braves were on almost every night. The local access channel showed an endless loop of National Golf Foundation instructional films. And we could watch the Wilmington, Raleigh or Greensboro stations without having to adjust a finicky antenna.

During several months a year, though, the addition of AC seemed a bigger deal than acquiring cable TV, even to a very sports-minded boy. Shade trees, cold showers or electric fans could only do so much when the temperature soared in August.

I camped out on the carpet not far from the brand-new air conditioner for a couple of nights. Whether asleep or awake, it felt like our family had hit the jackpot because we now had the comfort of a motel room or restaurant at home when it was sweltering. After 18 holes in the heat or a steamy hour mowing the grass, nothing felt better than standing in front of the window unit for a quick, cold blast. Even my father, who liked to park himself shirtless on the back porch with a cold beer on toasty evenings pre-AC, got very used to the manufactured cooling.

A few years later, when I went off to college and a room without air conditioning — my dormitory’s location trumped its creature comforts by a long shot at the start of one semester and the end of the next if it was hot — I missed our AC dearly. My first summer in New York City, a decade later, out of stubbornness and thrift, I didn’t purchase a small window unit during a persistent heat wave and struggled to sleep despite a fan positioned as close to my bed as I could get it.

On trips home, I never had to worry about being too hot. The old reliable window unit was relocated upstairs after the house was equipped with central air. But the new system never seemed adequate for the second floor, making the original AC an important feature on my visits.

As the years went by, I kept expecting the window unit to fail each time I returned during hot weather, but it never did. Perhaps Mom’s speed restrictions had extended its life, or maybe they don’t make ’em like they used to. Like a baseball player closer to the end than the beginning who can still paint the black, it happily and capably pitched a few innings each summer in the week or so I would be in town. That last night home, I woke up with a blanket up to my chin.  PS

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

Hometown

Beach Dreams

Catching a wave and a sno-cone

By Bill Fields

The town where I have lived for a long time has lovely public beaches on Long Island Sound. I’m grateful to get a sticker for my car each spring and have access to them. There have been plenty of peaceful, breezy afternoons by the water, and notwithstanding the $75 ticket for parking in a fire lane — the signage wasn’t clear — it is an upside of residing in Connecticut.

That said, these beaches are not “the beach” that I and many of my contemporaries knew growing up. For our family it meant a week away if money wasn’t tight, a long weekend if it was. Our destination for vacation was usually Ocean Drive, with a Cherry Grove or a Windy Hill thrown in every couple of years, all the rental cottages or motels being in the same flip-flop shop region known for a long time now as North Myrtle Beach.

The anticipation of these summer trips can’t be overstated, for they were Christmas without the presents, the journey itself being the gift. If I could relive those days, I wouldn’t change much except sparing my father the annual request to drive all the way to the Gay Dolphin in Myrtle Beach one night during our stay so I could empty my change purse on a plastic shark or rubber gator.

Looking back, Dad had the right idea in floating on his back just beyond the breakers, oblivious to my mother’s worries that he was out too far. We kept closer to shore, always wondering if the wave-riding would be superior with one of the rental rafts than our flimsy dime-store model.

Overall, though, there was about as much envy as sand-free sheets. I got to eat corn dogs and sno-cones and drink all the soft drinks that I wanted. For a year or two I was obsessed with a brand that wasn’t sold in the Sandhills, Topp Cola, and urged Mom and Dad to pick up a supply when they went shopping at the Red & White upon arriving in Ocean Drive.

The culinary highlight every year was dinner — we called it supper — at Hoskins, the seafood restaurant in Ocean Drive that had opened in the late-1940s. The flounder, shrimp and oysters fried there were light and tasty. The hushpuppies were sublime, not as dense as the ones I cranked out on my weekend shifts in the kitchen at Russell’s Fish House. The air conditioning felt great after a day in the sun.

Hoskins was just two blocks from the best place we stayed at the beach, a house owned by Leland and Marquita Daniels. It had a large screened-in area in the middle with bedrooms on one side, and a kitchen and living room on the other. If, after eating at Hoskins, we didn’t go back there for cards or board games, it meant that I had gotten my way and our gang was going to play miniature golf. (I still have a wooden nickel from Jungle Golf on Highway 17 that I sometimes use for a ball marker.)

Most days I would already have gotten in plenty of practice at the Putt-Putt in Ocean Drive, then located right on the oceanfront. For a couple of bucks, you could putt all you wanted until 5 p.m., nirvana for someone whose town didn’t have miniature golf. Years later, I discovered that one of the kids who was spending hours at that same Putt-Putt location around that time was Rick Baird, who in 2011 became one of the rare few to ever ace all 18 holes in a round of Putt-Putt. Our family beach mini-golf games amid the faux tigers and lions were for bragging rights and, for this budding golf nerd, a highlight of the trip, even if I didn’t develop into a world-class putter.

When the car was packed and we were heading away from the ocean, another beach trip over, it felt like watching one of those colored golf balls disappearing down the chute on the 18th hole. For a year, I’d have to put a shell to my ear and listen. PS

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

Hometown

Golf’s Front Porch

The little magazine that could

By Bill Fields

 

Seventy-five years ago this month, Pinehurst resident Robert Harlow gave golf something, a present that provided pleasure for decades. His creation was Golf World, a weekly publication that would become an important square in the quilt of the game.

Remembering Golf World is personal for me because the magazine was my professional home for nearly a quarter-century.

I wasn’t around for the debut edition — June 18, 1947, which covered Lew Worsham’s U.S. Open victory over Sam Snead — but in two stints I worked in various capacities on more than 800 Golf World issues and was a senior editor when subscribers received their last print copy eight years ago. Current PineStraw editor Jim Moriarty, who like me had a long history with Golf World, wrote the final cover story on Rory McIlroy winning the Open Championship at Royal Liverpool (where, coincidentally, Fred Daly took the Claret Jug during Golf World’s first year).

A couple of days after we put that print edition to bed on a Monday night, positions were eliminated and so was a meaningful chapter of golf history. Those of us who worked there lamented the loss. So did thousands of Golf World readers, many of them avid players or part of the industry, for whom the publication was a pillar in their golf lives.

Harlow called his creation a newspaper when it launched, but soon enough it was seen as a magazine. By any name the publication was golf’s front porch and party line, where people found out what was going on in the game they loved. E. Harvie Ward Jr. of Tarboro was a subscriber. So was a young bank teller and budding golfer in New Zealand, Bob Charles, who discovered the world he one day would join despite the news being weeks late when he received his copy.

You could find Pete Dye in the results of elite amateur events and in tiny advertisements for his services as a golf architect. Philadelphia restaurateur Helen Sigel plugged her establishment and clubmaker Bert Dargie his 7-woods in the one-inch ads. Golf World also got local businesses to advertise, with The Dunes Club promoting “floor shows, excellent cuisine and dancing.” (It couldn’t come out and say it was a little Las Vegas in the longleaf.)

Golf World started small — Harlow, instrumental in the nascent days of the professional circuit in the United States, and his wife, Lillian, formed the early core — and never got very large. Over its first four decades, when it was located in Pinehurst and later Southern Pines, a skeleton staff put out the stories and the scores with help from a network of correspondents around the globe, scribes who made less for their contributions than the pros who tied for 37th in the tournaments they were covering.

Reporters doubled as photographers, and a few of us got competent with a camera. But our skills weren’t always evident, sabotaged as they were by limitations in color separations and printing that could make images appear as murky as Drowning Creek.

Before Golf World got big-time owners — The New York Times Company and later Condé Nast — it didn’t do much live photography. This meant that when someone won in Dallas in the spring, the shot of the victor on the cover was most likely taken a couple of months earlier on a tee with good light and a clean background in Los Angeles. The use of stock pictures was largely harmless, with one notable exception. When T.C. Chen won at Riviera Country Club in 1987, the photograph used on Golf World’s cover was of his older brother, T.M., taken the previous year at the Masters’ par-3 contest.

Given that I took that Kodachrome of T.M. Chen — correctly identified on the slide mount, by the way — I thought of the publishing blunder when the curtain was closed on Golf World in 2014. It made me laugh when I felt like crying. I also considered how much the magazine got right over nearly seven decades and how many readers renewed their subscriptions year after year, grateful that Bob Harlow’s idea was in the mail, with news of the game, of their game. PS

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