Tag: Hometown

Polyester and Plaid

The ghosts of fashion don’ts

By Bill Fields

After retrieving the items from a box and making a cursory inspection, one thing was as clear as my vision after cataract surgery: Moths have better taste than I did.

This particular sweater and sport jacket are nearly 50 years old but, notwithstanding a few small stains, they have survived the decades intact, their synthetic fibers not even on the menu for a couple of generations of nocturnal insects.

These are not just any clothes. They were two of my go-to garments during high school, possessions I wore with pride despite their effect on my social life. I loved them.

The canary cardigan and tan, blue, red and white plaid coat weren’t exceptions but the rule for my 1970s dress code. Multiple photographs in my high school yearbooks are proof of these fashion crimes. Among plenty of denim and flannel there I am, over and over, ready for a tee time.

I blame golf for leading me down the polyester path, although I take full responsibility for my rust-colored corduroy suit (with vest). If what I wore led to where I was on Friday and Saturday nights — upstairs in my room, alone, reading and listening to the radio — I was OK with it, such was my obsession with the game.

Part of playing golf was dressing the part, and I did my best. I was aided and abetted in this pursuit. In ninth grade, by which time I had abandoned other sports to concentrate on making the tour, my social studies teacher was Mrs. Troop, a kind, young woman whose husband, Lee, was an assistant pro at the Country Club of North Carolina. Told of my golf habit, he gave me a trio of lightly used, 100 percent orlon, men’s size large Izod sweaters in blue, red and yellow. They were Crayon-bright colors with a green crocodile on the left breast, what cool golfers (as opposed to cool teenagers) were wearing in 1974.

I donned those sweaters regularly, in class and on the course, over the next several years. They were in my regular cool-weather rotation along with a zip-up crafted from velour, the poor man’s cashmere. Regardless of the season, chances are I had on a pair of polyester slacks, some of them in plaid or check patterns purchased with my employee discount in the pro shop at Mid Pines Golf Club, where I worked part time as a golf cart attendant. And I might have been wearing my casual deerskin shoes popular with the septuagenarian crowd.

The synthetic-fibered sport jacket (Andhurst by Belk) had padded shoulders and was of a sturdy hand. It was plain ugly, yet I often wore it senior year while delivering the sports on Pinecrest’s student-produced daily closed-circuit television show over a golf shirt with a wide, hard collar. The garish jacket is in the annual, too. I am telling the score of some Patriots’ game while sitting next to the weather girl, who that day was wearing a shirt with “Foxy Lady” inscribed on the front. At least I wasn’t the only one committing a fashion faux pas.

Besides playing much better than we did, I’m sure the golf-mad teenagers at Pinecrest these days dress better as well. Golf clothing still has its quirks — quarter-zip anyone? — but the game’s fashion doesn’t, for the most part, scream like it did during the Synthetic Seventies.

That said, there probably are a few Rickie Fowler wannabes who will feel about their head-to-toe Creamsicle-colored outfits the way I recall the days I looked like a goldfinch. At least my yearbooks were printed in black and white.  PS

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

Young Friends

In our old days we know what it means to have them

By Bill Fields

There is a beauty in friends that you’ve had since childhood, generational peers with whom you’ve darted around a basketball court, consumed too much beer and sweated out the college boards. These friends know what it is like to go gray or bald, to wish for a WD-40 for creaky knees, to see a parent decline and pass away.

In the last couple of years, I’ve discovered the pleasure of a different kind of friend, someone young enough to be my son.

I’ve always tended to have older friends. There were a couple of reasons. One was the influence of my sisters, who are 12 1/2 and 14 1/2 years older than me. I pored over their copies of the Lance, the East Southern Pines High School yearbook, well before I got to Pinecrest. After I immersed myself in golf, I played with plenty of folks who could have been older siblings or benevolent uncles and will always be grateful for those relationships. The rounds and practice-range sessions with these older friends were as enjoyable, and likely more meaningful, than all the hours with contemporaries who were searching for the secret, too.

When I began to freelance for NBC Sports in 2017 as a researcher/statistician in the main booth, eventually traveling to a dozen or so golf tournaments a year for the network, I was thrust into a new and hectic world. I’d done lots of media tasks over the decades — reporting, editing, photography, on-camera appearances talking about golf history — but TV production was a different beast and took some acclimation.

My friend Harrison, who will turn 30 this year, already was an old hand. He comes from a family with a history in sports television going back to his grandfather being instrumental in the development of ESPN. As I discovered, lots of golf TV folks start out as runners on the crew, working long hours helping everyone else get their jobs done. It is invaluable experience, and for those who are motivated and talented, can be the gateway to bigger things. NBC producer Tommy Roy, who has won dozens of Emmys, started as a runner, and so did quite a few of our colleagues.

Harrison began as a runner and has been a scorer/statistician for a handful of years, usually working with tower announcer Gary Koch. He knew the ropes I was trying to learn, but not long after he had helped me find the right trailer or truck — and trust me, there are a lot of them — we started spending time together outside the TV compound.

I have three nephews — another tragically passed away when he was 27 — and while we certainly get along, geography doesn’t help foster relationships when you live hundreds of miles apart. Harrison and I have become good friends in part because we regularly spend time together when we’re on the road.

We’ve shared fantastic cheesesteaks in Philadelphia and mediocre Indian food in the Chicago suburbs, sipped bourbon on an Orlando hotel balcony, played golf on a legendary Texas public course, Lions Muny in Austin. I chipped in at dusk on the 18th to win our match, then we went to a barbecue joint with another colleague, Mike, to chow down on ribs and brisket.

Harrison and I have broad conversations. He has seen a lot of the world and has traveled much more than I had by my late 20s. We talk a lot about work, as people do, but our talks cover plenty of ground. It has been refreshing to get the perspective of a smart person half my age. When I had to leave a tournament early to travel to see my ill mother in her last months, Harrison was a supportive sounding board over a meal before I went to the airport for my cross-country, red-eye flight.

We kid each other in the easy way that happens between good friends. I forgave him after he called my driving “soft” as I cautiously turned left onto an Atlanta freeway ramp. Sometimes, he even listens to me. When Harrison showed me the footage of a toast he offered at his sister’s wedding, I was pleased that he had followed my advice: Be brief and use humor.

On a table by the water in a Connecticut park last year, Harrison, his mom (whom I hadn’t met) and I ate pizza and salad and drank pinot grigio out of paper cups as the sun went down. There was a long week ahead for the two of us at the U.S. Open, but the takeout meal in a scenic spot was a perfect calm before the storm.

When we aren’t working together anymore — when we aren’t comparing airline upgrades or grading the telecasts — I have no doubt Harrison and I will keep in touch. Life throws you curve balls when you get older, some of them mean, but our friendship has been one of the good surprises, and I’m grateful for it.  PS

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

Map Mysteries

Navigating the old-fashioned way

By Bill Fields

On a Golf World assignment in Nebraska in 2013, I procured something for the first time in many years. Not bubble gum, a baseball glove or bottle of Brut 33. I bought a road map.

I had decided, in addition to reporting on the action in the U.S. Senior Open at Omaha Country Club, to see some sand-green golf courses for the first time. There used to be a bunch of them in the Midwest and Southwest; only dozens remained. We were well into the GPS era by then, but as I discovered on my first late afternoon drive to explore the throwback brand of golf, a smartphone wasn’t so smart on the byways of rural Nebraska. The $6.95 map I purchased at a convenience store turned out to be as essential as my cameras and notebook as I drove hundreds of miles around the Cornhusker State.

Maps used to be free at gas stations for decades, of course, as anyone who remembers 40 cents a gallon or less is aware. From the 1920s through the 1970s, all the big brands — Esso and Shell, Gulf and Phillips 66 — offered them as a service and promotion. Sometimes an attendant dug them out of a drawer, but often they were in a display between the fan belts and the wiper blades. Put a tiger in your tank . . . and a map in your glove compartment.

They were tool and talisman, objects of both utility and aspiration. It wasn’t just about where you were going on this trip but where you might go on the next one if you twisted Dad’s arm just right.

A highway map was a neat 4 inches by 8 inches in its pristine state. Unfolded, the 16 panels would cover a lot of the backseat in the family Fairlane. A friend recently remembered how much of a master his father, an engineer, was in map usage, from pinpointing various routes to putting it away so the creases were like new on the next trip.

A map would not age as well in our possession. One trip from Southern Pines to Ocean Drive Beach and it would be rumpled and guaranteed to contain Toast Chee cracker crumbs and Salem ashes the next time it was put into action, perhaps accompanied by a line drawn in Magic Marker from the Sandhills to the shore. (When you got to Loris, South Carolina, you knew you were close.)

It was all there on the map, the size of towns and cities delineated by font and type size. As the state capital, Raleigh got boldface and all caps. Greensboro was bigger than Lexington, which was bigger than Thomasville. You knew Southern Pines had a bigger population than Vass. Hoffman, Candor and Tramway? Tiny places all.

Ours was a North Carolina/South Carolina map family because we rarely ventured out of the two states. But this edition, regardless of which gasoline brand distributed it, still provided for a bit of dreaming. The mileage chart always included Atlanta, a whopping 350 miles from Southern Pines. And there was some extra territory on the map’s edges: a tiny strip of Virginia, containing Danville; a wedge of Georgia denoting Augusta and Athens; a sliver of Tennessee showing Bristol, Johnson City and Kingsport. Also, on the Volunteer State portion, on the outskirts of green-shaded Smoky Mountains National Park, Gatlinburg.

My father was a let’s-get-there kind of guy, especially if home was the destination. He once set out from High Point to Southern Pines during a heavy snowfall, convinced it wasn’t that bad. I got a call that evening in my freshman dorm room at college from the Holiday Inn in Asheboro, where my parents were lodging because the roads were impassable.

After an early 1970s trip to Nashville to visit relatives, “Gatlinburg” became code for Dad’s road ways. Traveling east after our visit, my mother and I pestered him about stopping in Gatlinburg. It would be great, we assured him. He grudgingly relented and made the detour so we could see the wonders of this mountain town he thought was a tourist trap with little redeeming value.

Dad wasn’t always right, but he was right this time. Gatlinburg was all trinket shops. It was hard to find a parking spot. The miniature golf course was poor and crowded. We didn’t stay long. Dad got out the map, took a long look, passed it back to me for folding, lit a cigarette and put the car in gear. We would visit other spots on the map, names in both bold and light type, but as for Gatlinburg, it was definitely one and done.  PS

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

The Best-Laid Plans

Or, what I did on my summer vacation

By Bill Fields

It was a good plan. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

The first five semesters of college, I carried a full academic schedule, but as the spring of my junior year at North Carolina approached I decided to take four classes instead of five. I was incoming sports editor of The Daily Tar Heel, a position that would take up a lot of time. Most of the requirements outside my major, journalism, had been met.

That semester, when the time came to register for classes in Woollen Gym, I signed up for two courses in J-School and one in the department of Radio, Television and Motion Pictures. I filled out my lightened load with Sociology 95, the Sociology of Sports.

For someone who loved sports, thought that sports writing or broadcasting was a likely career path, and had already shown some potential in that field, the sociology course sounded enjoyable and useful. What was not to like about a couple of hours a week studying games and the people who play them?

Moreover, Sociology 95 was known around campus as one of UNC-Chapel Hill’s easier classes, its seats populated with scholarship athletes who wore familiar numbers and fraternity boys majoring in keg operations. A student journalist busy putting out five editions of the school paper each week in addition to his studies would fit right in.

There were no exams in professor James Wiggins’ course; the only requirement was a term paper explaining a particular sport or team. It seemed right up my alley — I blithely figured to add another A to the handful of top marks I’d earned in two-and-a-half years, along with a bunch of Bs, a few Cs and one D, in calculus. The math grade was no shock. I was in the National Honor Society during high school, but numbers were not my strength. Mrs. White had mercy senior year, passing me when it could have gone the other way and sabotaged my hopes of getting into Chapel Hill. But the Sociology of Sports? I was as confident as Al Wood open in the corner.

It was an eventful semester. I made what turned out to be a terrible spring break trip to visit a friend I’d hoped would be more than a friend. I came down with mononucleosis. Soon after regaining my strength, my father passed away after a tough illness. As the term wound down, though, I just knew I could type my way to an A in Sociology 95. I chose a subject I knew well: the Tar Heel men’s basketball team, detailing the dynamics and history of Dean Smith’s program, and handed in the paper on time.

In early May, during exam period, on one of those perfect spring days that gives resonance to Chapel Hill being called the “Southern Part of Heaven,” a friend and I played 18 holes at Finley Golf Course. Driving back to my apartment, a well-worn but cheap place down Hillsborough Street, I stopped by campus to find out what I’d made in Sociology 95.

There was a box of graded papers on the floor next to Dr. Wiggins’ closed office. The light was dim in the hallway, but it wasn’t too dark to quickly see what was written on the onion-skin page. I got an F in the Sociology of Sports.

Wiggins contended that my paper had not met the requirements set forth by the class syllabus, a view that, to my shock, was upheld when I formally appealed the grade. The first and only F of my life stood. My adviser, then the J-School dean, seemed mystified as well.

The F kept me from going to commencement at Kenan Stadium with my classmates a year later. I got to participate in a ceremony for journalism graduates at Howell Hall but received a blank sheet of paper instead of a diploma. I got my sheepskin in the mail a couple of months later after going to summer school to get my necessary credits.

Taking English and psychology courses, my syllabus for that session called for playing a lot of darts, drinking many beers and spending most afternoons at the Townhouse Apartments pool. I passed with flying colors.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent. Bill can be reached at williamhfields@gmail.com.

My Two Cents

What’s your oldest possession?

By Bill Fields

This particular Sunday afternoon more than a half century ago was different from the others.

On a regular weekend visit to my grandmother Daisy’s house in Jackson Springs, looking for entertainment beyond the porch swing and GRIT magazine, I found a jar of coins on a table in a dim hallway. Ma-Ma, as we called her, gave me permission to examine them. 

Some of the coins might have been change Ma-Ma carried home from the Red & White grocery in West End or Kimes Blake’s store just down the hill. I discovered others, though, minted much earlier. With Ma-Ma’s blessing, a few Mercury dimes, buffalo nickels and Indian head pennies became the foundation of my boyhood collection. So did two badly tarnished coins, each slightly larger than a quarter but smaller than a half dollar, about 1 ¹/⁸ inches in diameter.

“They’re very old,” Ma-Ma told me. I confirmed this after borrowing her magnifying glass. One was so browned and worn that no date could be ascertained. The other, though, was in a bit better condition — it was an 1854 one-cent piece with a lady’s head encircled by 13 stars.

After I purchased a coin guide from The Country Bookshop — then located in a tiny space at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Bennett Street in Southern Pines — I found out my treasures were copper “large cents.” I later learned this denomination was produced from 1793 to 1857, when it was replaced by the smaller penny. A half-dozen variations were minted in that span. My discoveries were of the “braided hair” final design that debuted in 1839. All of the millions of large cents were made at the Philadelphia mint.

“Old things are better than new things because they’ve got stories to tell, Ethan,” one character says to another in Beautiful Creatures.

My large cents — under a jeweler’s loupe the other one appears to be from 1851 — remain my oldest possessions. They pre-date the Civil War, the telephone, automobiles and manned flight. They were minted during the California Gold Rush. The New York Times came off the press for the first time in 1851, the same year Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick, and the Great Flood ravaged the Midwest. In 1854, the Republican Party was founded, and George Eastman and John Philip Sousa were born. There were just over 23 million people in the 1850 U.S. Census, including 3 million slaves.

The early 1850s was a time of pungents, leeches and tinctures, cod liver oil and pickled oysters, parasols and goatskin bootees. A large cent went a long way: It was 11 cents a pound for flour. A bushel of potatoes ran 90 cents. You could buy a lard lamp for 25 cents and a ton of coal for $6. Board might be $1.50 a week, and steady work could leave something left over for a bottle of Scheidam Schnapps, for medicinal purposes, of course. Life expectancy at birth was less than 40 years.

I’ve pondered whose pocket or purse held my large cents more than a century before I claimed them. Had they been passed along to my maternal grandfather, who was born in 1861, when he was a boy? Where might the coins have been other than Montgomery and Moore counties, where my family has roots?

Although it is a coin-collecting no-no but aware that they aren’t worth much as collector pieces, recently I couldn’t resist cleaning my Coronet cents. I soaked them in various solvents — vinegar, ketchup, Coke — and rubbed their surfaces with a pencil eraser. The wear and nicks are still there, but the original copper color is nicely revealed.

Their history always will be a mystery, but I hope my youngest relatives, now of elementary-school age, some day will wonder about their heritage decades down the road the way I do now. If they have children and pass the cents along, these mid-19th century coins could be the oldest things owned by someone in the 22nd century, when they will be very, very old, and cash itself might be ancient history.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent. Bill can be reached at williamhfields@gmail.com.

How Southern Am I?

The latitude changes, the attitude doesn’t

By Bill Fields

I can hear traffic on Interstate 95 from where I live. The cars and trucks are far enough away that the noise usually doesn’t annoy — you hear it, but you don’t. I became part of the automotive Muzak not long ago, heading down South, as I’ve done many times over decades, 620 miles from home to home, even if the latter doesn’t have four walls and a roof.

Thanks to cataract surgery I was seeing great — I would have been a formidable foe in the license plate game if there had been someone in the passenger seat — but my vision of who I am felt clouded.

After almost 35 years in New England, how Southern am I?

I’ve asked myself this question before, yet it seemed more acute during this journey. Near the tail end of a year when so many considered so much, it was natural to ponder the reach of one’s roots. Spending nearly two weeks in the South without having a bite of barbecue made it essential.

I sound no different than childhood friends who stayed put. Syllables can still glide together as if there is WD-40 between them, same as when a college roommate from New Jersey made me the front man when we were subletting our apartment in Chapel Hill one summer. Yet I never called my parents “Momma and Daddy,” nor a store a “bidness.”

A work colleague said I was driving “soft” two years ago in downtown Atlanta when I was less than aggressive making a left turn. That critique notwithstanding, I contend anyone who negotiated the toll area of the George Washington Bridge at rush hour in the days when you had to give money to a person is forever hardened behind the wheel.

Commuting up North was no picnic either, in particular those days when a lot of drivers seemed angry at the world not just their boss. Sometimes they were. In the mid-1980s, the first time my mother rode in a New York City taxi, not far from Penn Station after getting off Amtrak’s Silver Star, the cabbie jumped out and ran after a driver who had cut him off.

I associate the South with good manners while acknowledging they sometimes are like one coat applied to an old house that needs more. Others can judge whether I’ve grown more blunt as I’ve grayed, but I’d like to think being nice endures. And I know, after many years as a transplant above the Mason-Dixon Line, that the South has no monopoly on kindness or treating others the right way.

I’m proud of where I’m from, but during a time when there is heightened awareness about racial injustice, it’s jarring to be less than an hour from my hometown and drive past several Confederate flags flying in front yards a couple of curves down the road from the former North Carolina Motor Speedway. The symbols used to be plentiful at the track on race days; they wouldn’t be allowed were it still a NASCAR venue.

I know folks who, for one reason or another, don’t ever go back, don’t long for a taste of the familiar, don’t enjoy a reunion with a place or its people. There are often good reasons for such judgments, but I don’t think I will ever feel that way.

There was a distinct pace where I grew up, and that speed, or more to the point, lack of it, was related to the room we had. Much of what I recall — relish — as Southern simply was small-town. Much has changed, a point reinforced when I visited the Southern Pines cemetery where my parents are buried. It was a warm, clear morning in early November, and Boy Scouts were placing small American flags on the graves of veterans such as my father. As the teenagers did their service, I was alone with my thoughts and the sound of cars on Morganton Road, a noise not of memory but of now, that I heard but didn’t hear.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent. Bill can be reached at williamhfields@gmail.com.

The Greatest Gift

The season of a lifetime

By Bill Fields

Like all of us, my father had his moments. He could be short or overly critical about things that didn’t — or shouldn’t — matter much. These lapses didn’t overwhelm the good of the man, but they were there. Every December, they seemed to vanish.

Dad was happiest around Christmas, and not just because of a free ham from work or a fresh bottle of brown from the ABC Store. He weighed less that time of year, regardless of how much of his homemade fudge or my mother’s “Trash” (an addictive baked snack mix of cereal and nuts, flavored with Worcester sauce) he ate.

With the tree up and lights placed around the front door, the extended forecast for Dad’s mood was pleasant and calm. He preferred an all-blue display inside and out, although he wasn’t Jewish, Catholic nor had gone to Carolina. The color had a soothing effect unless you touched one of the big glass bulbs late in the evening; then it seemed the Christmas miracle was how the cedar (1960s) or white pine (1970s) hadn’t turned into kindling.

We made do with a faux fireplace, enhanced with plastic logs illuminated by amber lights that flickered thanks to a spinning wheel. The real flames were in the backyard grill. Dad loved to cook out, even in winter and especially around Christmas, when there was more likely to be steak than hamburger. A flashlight was a necessary tool, lest he have to return outside to make sure Mom’s ribeye was as done as she liked it.

With the exception of assembling some toy with a lot of parts when I was little, Dad liked everything about Christmas. He enjoyed procuring the fruit, nuts and candy that went under the tree, and the little gifts that filled the red felt stockings my sister sewed, our names in green glitter. He was happy when carols came on the radio.

We wore out our Monopoly set, and when he worked at the Proctor-Silex factory, it was natural for him to be represented by the iron. Family poker games were a holiday staple, and Dad overruled Mom and bought the proper set of chips I had eyed at Hill’s downtown. His last Christmas, 1979, weak and frail with cancer, he still found the strength to play a few hands.

That Dad’s birthday also was in December, celebrated on the 20th of the month, contributed to it being a special season for him. Not until a dozen years ago, nearly three decades after he died, when I went poking around a cluttered records room in Carthage, did I truly understand why.

He knew he was adopted, and we knew too, but details, if known, were never shared. Then one afternoon in the county seat, in the fall of 2008, searching for his history and my own, I made a discovery in the court records from March 5, 1921:

“FIRST: That on or about the 14th day of December, 1920, as petitioners are informed and believed, one George Parker found upon the roadway, or near there-to, in the County of Moore, near a place known as Frix, an infant newly born, manifestly abandoned by its mother.”

“SECOND: That the said Parker states that he is ignorant of the parentage of said child, and the parentage of said child is unknown to petitioners . . . and that notice of this petition and motion be given and served upon George Parker, the only person known to petitioners to have any rights or interest in the matters alleged in the petition.”

After finding the newborn and caring for him, Parker gave the child to William and Chattie Fields a handful of days before Christmas. The couple, who had lost their grown daughter, Sadie, to diabetes, named their gift William Eugene Fields. If a certain mystery accompanied Gene through life, so did the love of the people who took him in a hundred years ago. As much as Dad loved the holiday season in my lifetime, his best Christmas had to be his first.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent. Bill can be reached at williamhfields@gmail.com.

Hooked on Office

Supplies — not Dunder Mifflin

By Bill Fields

I realized I might have a problem last year during a business trip to South Korea. My hosts were showing me around a shopping mall outside Seoul, and after seeing an array of high-fashion boutiques and stores with the latest tech, I had one request: Take me to the pens and pencils.

I was on the hunt for Korean-made writing tools unavailable back home. The tour guides were helpful, my interpreter, Chris, touting a popular, inexpensive, smooth-writing ballpoint stick pen favored by many Korean students and office workers. In a few minutes, I was checking out of a variety store with a couple of packs of Monami 153s, blue ink with a 1.0 tip. The purchase wasn’t the highlight of a full week in a foreign land but, for an office-supply geek, flying home with those pens certainly was satisfying.

Not that I loiter in my local Staples — weekly visits aren’t over the top, are they? — but I’ve been smitten with stationery for a long time, even before I secured my first pencil case in a loose-leaf notebook with the audible cinching of the three rings.

When the Swingline “Tot,” a tiny version of a desk stapler, appeared in stores, I saved my allowance to buy one. It didn’t take long for me to pop one of the staples into the pad of my left thumb.

That didn’t scare me away from office supplies. Nor did a pencil accident. I was at the time too short and not possessing enough hop to touch the top of the doorframe leading into our dining room. I was only inches away from my goal and figured, correctly as it turned out, that I could touch it while holding a pencil. But I carried it eraser-up, and the point gouged my right palm. More than a half century later, that speck of lead remains just below my middle finger.

Who didn’t love the retractable, push-button splendor of a Bic Clic? The different Flair colors for drawing up football plays? The bold letters that Magic Markers could make on poster projects? When my mother purchased a gross of pencils for me through her bank job and we attached a sharpener to my bedroom wall, it felt better than the Tar Heels winning a big game.

As I got older and into journalism, pens and notebooks were a perk of the profession. I got $150 a week to intern one summer at the afternoon newspaper in Winston-Salem. Being able to procure supplies from an office closet — all you wanted — was a life I could get used to.

My notebook tastes grew more refined. In the 1990s, fellow golf writer Michael Bamberger and I discovered we shared an affinity for a certain model of Boorum & Pease notebook with 48 sewn-in pages. They were small enough to fit in your pocket but large enough for good note-taking and cost only a dollar or so. Michael and I each hoarded a stash, but they don’t make them anymore.

Even during this “Everyday Carry” era with lots of fancy notebooks on the market, I lament that cheap and functional B&P style isn’t available anymore — they’re as extinct as the many little stationery stores in New York City that used to sell them. The Japanese-made Muji brand has some good offerings, about as close as you can get to my old favorite.

I’ve splurged on nice pens from time to time in recent years — mostly rollerballs and ballpoints, having figured out I am not a person for fountain pens no matter how much I admire their beauty. Whether on a legal pad or in a quality journal, putting pen to paper is its own pleasure in this digital age.

Not long ago I retrieved an Aurora rollerball from my desk caddy, a pen I bought not long after I moved to New York decades ago. It’s not old enough to be “vintage” as classified by the collecting world, but using it sure takes me back. For now — this might be as fleeting as April snow — it’s my favorite.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent. Bill can be reached at williamhfields@gmail.com.

All’s Fair

A ride on the wild side

By Bill Fields

Anticipation is  — or at least, was, in simpler times — a big part of childhood. And there wasn’t much of anything to look forward to more than the Moore County Agricultural Fair.

It was an annual tradition to ride up Highway 15-501 toward Carthage, hang a right and pull into the field that served as the fair’s parking lot.

When I heard that the county fair was being canceled this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it struck me that, even in these much different times when entertainment is on demand instead of on-site, kids would be disappointed their families weren’t making the same trip mine did a long time ago.

This would have been the 74th Moore County Fair, it having been held each year since World War II ended.

I must have attended more than a dozen growing up. We weren’t a “state fair” family. We went to the amusement park at the beach, and took a special trip to Six Flags Over Georgia in the early 1970s — log flume! — but the county event was a staple.

For a small-town boy, the Tilt-A-Whirl was a big deal. For that matter, so was cotton candy, corn dogs, Sno-Cones and candy apples, which, to my memory, were the four main food groups in the years before any vendor had sold his first giant smoked turkey leg or microwaved some nachos.

With a warning from Mom to keep the vast sum of money in my pocket safe, I would be off for an adventure — choosing a rubber duck, riding the carousel and Ferris wheel, shooting at balloons, pitching nickels. I ate applesauce and drank juice from the “china” my nickels settled in.

Even though it wasn’t too far from home, the fair seemed exotic and full of things that didn’t populate our daily lives. These many years later, I still don’t know if it was a “Hoochie Coochie Show” or “Hootchy Kootchy Show” that lurked in the shadows away from the rides and games. Whatever belly dancing or other entertainment happened in the forbidden tent I never knew. But regardless of the spelling, they were five syllables to speak and ponder each fall.

A year ago, when I happened to be in town during the fair, I went for the first time in decades. Many things from childhood seem physically smaller than they used to. Things seemed more spread out, too, as if socially distanced before we knew what that term meant. The rides and games conjured memories, and so did the carnival workers who sold chances or clicked the safety bar down on your waist before the Ferris wheel spun into action. In the exhibition building, blue ribbons spoke of things cooked or sewn well.

I investigated all corners of the grounds for evidence of risqué entertainment, but saw no tent or heard any crowds. The fair seemed to have survived nicely into the 21st century, but the same couldn’t be said for the Hootchy Kootchy Show.

Riders shrieked while spinning through the air on the “Yo Yo.” A little girl carried a large stuffed bunny toward the exit. I did not observe anyone heading for their car with dishes or glasses.

I stayed away from the fried dough but capped the night with a cherry Sno-Cone. There were three places in my world where you could get such a treat: the fair, the beach and the concession stand at the Little League field.

The fair looked and felt a bit different than it had but tasted pretty much the same. A year from now, folks will be eager to return.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent. Bill can be reached at williamhfields@gmail.com.

From Otis to Opie

The ultimate Carolina classic

By Bill Fields

I was only 16 months old when the first episode of The Andy Griffith Show aired Oct. 3, 1960. It’s safe to say in the six decades since, I’ve made up for what I missed from Mayberry that Monday evening.

If I had to classify my fandom for the classic situation comedy, I would put the needle somewhere between devoted and rabid.

I don’t have a handmade Mayberry sheriff’s uniform hanging in my closet. My car antenna is not of the whip variety like that on the squad car driven by Andy and Barney. I have never made a pilgrimage to Mount Airy, Andy Griffith’s North Carolina hometown and inspiration for the fictional Mayberry.

However, I have scared a few folks through the years with my TAGS knowledge. I wouldn’t win a trivia contest with a true diehard — someone who can quote everything Ernest T. Bass said in his appearances — but I wouldn’t lose in the first round. A loser wouldn’t know the two characters Allan Melvin played who threatened to beat up Barney (Fred Plummer) and Howard Sprague (Clyde Plaunt). A loser couldn’t recall that the long-sought fish, “Old Sam,” was a silver carp. A loser wouldn’t know, as if quickly recalling a first cousin, that the pen name given to teacher-turned-children’s author Helen Crump was Helene Alexian DuBois.

The show ran eight seasons, a total of 249 episodes — the first 159 filmed in black and white, and the remaining 90 in color. Some devotees dismiss the three seasons of color shows because they lacked Don Knotts as Barney (except for a few guest appearances) and seem stale compared to earlier seasons. The Nielsen Ratings — and I — disagree. The show, never lower than seventh in the ratings, went out in 1967-68 (Season 8) at No. 1. The only other TV shows to bow out on top were I Love Lucy and Seinfeld.

No doubt Knotts as Deputy Fife was the genius character in the series. Knotts played Barney to perfection, a bumbling but lovable character whether he was getting locked in a jail cell or was on a date with Thelma Lou in his salt-and-pepper suit. Griffith knew Knotts was the show’s comedic engine, and after Season 1 the sheriff shelved hayseed ways — including an extreme Southern accent — in order to be a straight man offering counsel and comfort to Knotts’ character when he inevitably screwed up. Barney and the other characters wouldn’t have resonated as much as they do without strong writing either. It was smart.

Anyone my age or younger — I was 8 when the final episode was broadcast — basically knows The Andy Griffith Show through reruns, DVDs and now, streaming services. About 130 hours of TAGS were filmed. It has given me many multiples of that time in pleasure. Beyond the comedic value, North Carolinians always felt pride that the show depicted the Old North State despite being filmed in California. (And a clip of Seattle was used to portray Raleigh in one episode where Andy and Barney visited the state capital.)

Most of the actors who brought Mayberry to life and have made us laugh for so long are gone now. Betty Lynn (Thelma Lou) is in her 90s and lives in Mount Airy. Ron Howard (Opie Taylor) is 66, having grown up from child actor to big-time movie director.

When I was in college at Carolina, Griffith, one of the school’s celebrated alumni, returned to Chapel Hill as University Day speaker. I arrived early at Memorial Hall to make sure I got in. He worked in a couple of Duke jokes and had me laughing, the way his show still does when I watch it on my phone — so many years after the unseen Sarah worked the switchboard in Mayberry.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent. Bill can be reached at williamhfields@gmail.com.