Bunny Hop

The day chocolate rings hollow

By Bill Fields

Growing up in North Carolina at a time when holidays weren’t hyped in stores nearly as much — certainly not as soon — as they are these days, there still were a few things to count on as Easter approached.

There would be a trip to the barber, even if a forensic expert might be required to discern the difference between a crew cut before and after. You were expected to look sharp.

And looking sharp didn’t mean just how you were groomed but how you would be dressed on this particular Sunday in spring. This could mean a shopping trip to Belk or Collins in Aberdeen or the Style-Mart on the corner of Broad and Pennsylvania.

It never ceased to amaze my mother how the same boy who would play for hours without a pause and be mad when it was supper time would complain about being tired, or having sore feet, within minutes of setting foot in a clothing store and before a single pair of pants, seersucker suit, clip-on bow tie or shoes other than sneakers had been considered for purchase. My unease on these excursions didn’t make logical sense, because they didn’t last too long. But all I knew was that I would rather be back at home doing something — anything, even listening to one of my older sisters’ Johnny Mathis 45s — than loitering in Boys’ Clothes.

The Saturday before Easter, there would be the hard-boiling and dyeing of the eggs. This ritual fascinated, in part because I’d seen the women in our house change the color of garments with Rit in a bathroom sink more than a few times. They were smart and didn’t let me assist with the sweaters because they were trying to get more use out of them, not have them come to an unfortunate end thanks to a careless child. I was happily encouraged to help out with the eggs, probably for two reasons: Seeing a chicken’s work go from white to a pastel shade wasn’t very exciting, and eggs were only about 60 cents a dozen.

On Easter, before church and a delicious lunch of baked ham with the appropriate side dishes — a meal whose predictable ingredients year after year made it that much better — the Easter bunny would make a delivery, the basket lined with fake grass a color green not found in nature. There would be jelly beans, of course, but the main event was a hollow milk chocolate rabbit enclosed in a box with clear plastic sides.

I loved chocolate, but it would have been a blessing for humanity if these candy mammals had come in a box that couldn’t be opened. There are only a couple of tastes from childhood that still make me frown. A stuffed pepper is one. As for those rabbits, their taste was like that of the material on which they sat — not of the natural world. They had a sickly, chemical-like flavor, making a Hershey bar seem like a treat for royalty. And once part of a chocolate rabbit had been consumed, what was left wouldn’t get any better. Unlike sweets that were good and within reach, the rabbit would linger until being thrown away only to reappear a year later. I always thought they would taste better next time, but they never did.

The Easter egg hunt, usually occurring after our big meal, was a distraction from rabbit redux. Since we hid real eggs, though, and not plastic ones filled with trinkets that have become so popular, this practice had its drawbacks too. If a couple of eggs were hidden too well, the smell would let you know a few days later.

There was a point where I got too old for a traditional Easter basket, but there was a transition period. I had taken up golf by then, and Mom gave me a sleeve of balls from the dime store. They had the compression of a marshmallow and would cut if you looked at them wrong, but that was just fine because they had replaced the hollow rabbits. If I had sampled them, they might have tasted better too. PS

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

Dateline: Carmichael

When good things came in smaller packages

By Bill Fields

I’m not sure how my reading ability stacked up to that of my elementary school classmates, but I’m certain having the sports pages of the Greensboro Daily News at the breakfast table didn’t hurt. There were some big words in there.

The newspaper was very specific about where it was covering an out-of-town contest. After North Carolina moved into its new basketball facility in 1965, the dateline for Tar Heel home games spilled over into a second line of narrow-column type.

CARMICHAEL AUDITORIUM, Chapel Hill—

Occasionally, if the slot man was swamped and the typesetter was sloppy, it looked like this next to my bowl of grits:

CARMICHAEL AUDITORI-
UM, Chapel Hill—

Regardless of how it appeared in the paper, the building’s name stood out because it was where my team played. It was not CAMERON INDOOR STADIUM, Durham; or REYNOLDS COLISEUM, Raleigh; or other Atlantic Coast Conference basketball venues.

We had no family ties to Carolina, notwithstanding a summer school Spanish class my UNC Greensboro sister took there. My other sister went to Wake Forest, and while I proudly wore the black-and-gold sweatshirt she gave me, I was a Carolina kid. It was one of those decisions those of us in ACC country made early, before you were even able to write the name of your favorite basketball player in cursive.

I was in first grade when the Tar Heels played their first game in Carmichael, defeating William & Mary 87-68 on Dec. 4, 1965. Although I didn’t see the place in person until I got to campus as a freshman a dozen years later, I felt I knew it.

Aside from newspaper stories and box scores, there were the radio broadcasts. In the late-1960s — when Carolina won the ACC Tournament and advanced to the Final Four three straight years — play-by-play was handled by Bill Currie, a crazy-uncle type known as the “Mouth of the South” and starting with the 1971-72 season by Woody Durham, who was “The Voice of the Tar Heels” for four decades.

Televised games were rare when I first became a fan. We had to be content when a Carolina contest was on the Wednesday or Saturday C.D. Chesley network. And “The Dean Smith Show” was weekly Sunday morning viewing, with Smith always much more effusive about assists or hustle than how many points someone had scored.

One of my first memories of basketball on television is the NCAA title game on March 23, 1968, when the Tar Heels played UCLA. It was a 7 p.m. tipoff in Los Angeles, which made it a very late night for an 8-year-old in Southern Pines. I stayed awake until early in the second half, when the Bruins were well on their way to a 78-55 victory.

Nine years later Carolina played for another championship but had its heart broken by Marquette. I attended my first game in Carmichael in the second semester of my freshman year, a two-point victory over Wake Forest on Jan. 15, 1978. Working my way up the pecking order of The Daily Tar Heel sports department, I traded a seat in the student section for one on the press row-catwalk above it. When things went well for the team wearing light blue and white, it was deafening either place. After home games, reporters huddled around Smith in a corridor outside the locker room as he smoked a cigarette and looked forward to a Scotch.

My first time on a commercial flight, on Dec. 3, 1979, I sat beside then-assistant coach Roy Williams going from RDU to Tampa-St. Petersburg to cover Carolina vs. South Florida. Prior to the start of the 1980-81 season, I had a 90-minute interview with Smith in his office. I was DTH sports editor at that point, but, needing to mind my grades as a senior, left the job well before Carolina lost to Indiana in the 1981 NCAA championship game.  The following spring, I was back on Franklin Street as a fan — and graduate — enjoying the Tar Heels’ win over Georgetown.

Carolina men’s basketball relocated to the Smith Center in 1986. It has twice the seats of Carmichael, but if one grew up with the latter, not twice the charm. Carmichael Auditorium is no more, having been renamed Carmichael Arena in 2010 following an extensive modernization. They sold small commemorative pieces of the hallowed hardwood from the old building in 1998. I didn’t buy one then, but it might be time to check on eBay.

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

By Any Other Name

It still feels like home

By Bill Fields

Not long ago, to go with an application and prove that I am who I said I am, I had to retrieve my birth certificate. There are no surprises on it, mind you. I was born at what was then called Moore Memorial
Hospital on a May morning much longer ago than seems possible. But my birth year isn’t as jarring as my footprints on the reverse side, which are so tiny they can’t possibly belong to someone who has gotten his money’s worth on shoe leather since high school.

Although the legal paperwork of my coming into the world clearly notes that it happened in Pinehurst, sometimes I don’t know where I’m from. 

Let me explain. I have lived nearly six decades telling folks:

“I was born in Pinehurst.”

“I was born in Pinehurst but grew up about five miles away.”

“I was born in Pinehurst and grew up in Southern Pines.”

“I grew up in Southern Pines.”

“I grew up around Pinehurst.”

“I come from a town about 70 miles south of Raleigh.”

“Moore County.”

“Between the mountains and the beach.”

I suspect I’m not the only person to go through this geographical twister because what is a hometown? Is it where you were born? Where you were raised? Where you currently live? The tagline for this monthly column states that I am a native of Southern Pines, but am I really? 

My first days were in the 28374 not the 28387 and, for six months after graduating from college, I rented above what is now Dugan’s Pub a small apartment with factory-office carpeting and radiators that hissed an angry song on cold nights. A few years later, I lived in a cottage in Aberdeen that was lovely notwithstanding the electrical fire that started late on a November Saturday night and made me nostalgic for the vocal — but safe — heat in my $150-a-month home above the bar. 

If I am talking to golfers about my roots, “Pinehurst” is my go-to because they know where it is. Occasionally I elaborate and say I was born a couple of par-5s away from Course No. 2. But until I entered my teens, Pinehurst might as well have been Pittsburgh, so rarely did I visit. The village was what we skirted en route to my grandmother’s house in Jackson Springs on Sunday afternoons, an opponent for the Southern Pines Blue Knights and a bit of a mystery to someone who rarely ventured farther west than Knollwood Fairways on Midland Road.   

Pinehurst felt a little less foreign when I found out about “Fields Road,” a street named for a family with some connections to my dad. The road sign would have been a great backdrop for a selfie if there had been such a thing back then, but discovering it didn’t shake my identity as a kid from Southern Pines.

Arriving at Pinecrest reinforced how cloistered each town in the southern part of the county was. In those early weeks of sophomore year, I met — and became friends with — students who lived only a handful of miles from me: farm-strong football players from West End; Pinehurst folks who knew the quiet of a locals-only summer; a boy who had been the “Red Devil” mascot for Aberdeen High. 

The way the area has grown over the last couple of decades, town-limit markers don’t mean much on the commercial strips as franchise yields to franchise where U.S. 1 turned the corner onto Highway 15-501 and so much development seemed to follow. The core areas of the distinct dots on a map remain, certainly changed but recognizable, like the passport photos over one’s lifetime. 

For the last three decades, during which New England has been home but not home, I have an out when it comes to an explanation: “I live in Connecticut but am originally from North Carolina.”

Many times, though, I can’t resist making the finer distinction as well, pointing out that where I was born is not where I was raised. I didn’t need my name on my street to know it was mine.   PS

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

Batteries Not Included

A plugged-in and powered-up Christmas

By Bill Fields

There were some Christmases growing up that Carolina Power and Light and Eveready Battery must have loved. The same would go for the manufacturers of those flimsy extension cords whose “U.L. approved” tag didn’t inspire a lot of confidence.

It is tempting to think that the popularity of high tech gifts is a relatively recent development, but anyone of a certain age knows that isn’t true. Of course, high tech of 40 or 50 years ago must be considered for its day, the way a 260-pound offensive tackle would then have seemed only slightly smaller than Godzilla.

Still, Christmas was juiced long before Major League Baseball. Along with “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” there were other words unique to the season.

“TO PROTECT FROM ELECTRIC SHOCK, DO NOT OPEN
COVER OR BACK. NO USER-SERVICEABLE PARTS.”

That caution came on one of the best presents with a cord I ever got, a reel-to-reel tape recorder from Santa/Western Auto that allowed me to pretend I was one of those basketball play-by-play announcers I heard on the radio so many winter evenings from distant locales. The machine should have come with a different warning: Until you go through puberty and start pronouncing “Fayetteville” with three syllables, you have absolutely no chance of sounding like them.

I could amuse myself with simple things — a ball of crumpled foil and a hanger shaped into a hoop taped to a doorframe, anyone? — but there was a period when I was attracted to something that powered up like bream to a cricket.

Take indoor putting. I could groove my stroke just fine by rolling a ball toward a chair leg or coffee mug, but the “Electric Putt Return” from Sears took living room practice to a higher plane. In form it resembled a dustpan, but in function the device was positively Jetsonian in how a golf ball was propelled after an attempt, only rarely failing to make it back to your feet. The distinctive click occurring when a ball began its return is on the soundtrack of my childhood.

The putting trainer had a single purpose, but the glory of another of my 120-volt holiday delights from Sears was its multi-purpose utility. Shaped like an oversized loaf of bread about two feet long, there was a clock — with alarm — on the left, a tiny television — VHF and UHF — in the center and a radio — AM and FM — on the right.

Despite my most creative antenna directing, the TV picture was usually snowy, sometimes rolling and never fully satisfying. Still, the clock and radio worked well and the whole “solid state” combo sat on my desk, leaving enough room to do homework. Owing to its faux mahogany top and sides, it was even handsome in its early-’70s way. The appearance certainly trumped the value “entertainment system” my parents gifted themselves one year. It wasn’t lacking in functions with an 8-track, radio and turntable, but the lift-off plastic lid covering the record player made it a leisure suit of electronics.

Year over power corded-gizmo year, I would say I made out better than the adults.

There was the matter of the irons, blemished but numerous, in the years when Dad worked at Proctor-Silex, which manufactured them. A steam iron, no matter how good or how much of a bargain, should be purchased when necessary, like new sheets, and never adorned with a red bow.

One Christmas there was an electric knife under our tree. I’m sure it came with a warning, too, but wasn’t as useful or as much fun as my tape recorder. The man who is credited with coming up with the idea of an electric knife, Jerome L. Murray, also developed boarding ramps to get people onto airlines and a pump essential in open-heart surgery.

Two serrated blades going through a ham or a turkey a couple of times a year — the noise of the contraption sometimes punctuated by the jarring contact with a platter — surely doesn’t measure up to Murray’s other accomplishments.

But those were the times and, as sure as kitchens were done in avocado, those were our things. PS

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

Remembering Sgt. Frye

A young man gone too soon

By Bill Fields

Even without the stories in the morning paper and the footage on the evening news, if you lived on the east side of town during the late 1960s, it wasn’t hard to figure out that America was at war.

Periodically our house rattled, and not from one of my father’s major league sneezes. It was artillery practice at nearby Fort Bragg, lots of it, particularly after a good rain. The shelling happened so often it almost ceased to startle, but the vibrations left cracked plaster on our ceilings and walls.

If only the real scars of the Vietnam War could be handled with a fresh coat of paint.

That point was driven home in September as I watched The Vietnam War, the 10-part documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick on PBS. I was mad and sad well before the end of those powerful 18 hours of television. And I wished, more than anything, that Gary Nelson Frye could have watched too.

Born as World War II was ending, Frye also grew up in a house on the east side of town. He was a neighbor, a teenager when I was born. His mother, Mary O’Callaghan, was a family friend who for years sent me a birthday card and a couple of dollars. Gary went to East Southern Pines High School with my sisters. He was in the Class of 1964. For a time after graduating, he worked at the Proctor-Silex plant, where my father also had a job.

A little more than a year after he got his high school diploma, Frye enlisted in the Army on his 20th birthday. A year after that, as he turned 21 on August. 20, 1966, he was sent to Vietnam.

Frye hadn’t been there three months when he showed what kind of soldier — what kind of man — he was. On a search and destroy mission near Bong Son on Oct. 28, 1966, his unit was attacked. A radio-telephone operator with an artillery party, Frye called in accurate supressive fire.

According to his Silver Star citation, this is what happened next.

“… with complete disregard for his own safety, [Frye] raced forward under intense enemy fire to aid a wounded comrade. Finding the man mortally wounded, Private First Class Frye moved under fire to another casualty, carried the soldier to a covered position, then helped the company Aidman administer first aid …”

He earned another Silver Star for bravery, this time for running through enemy fire to direct supporting artillery and helping defend his platoon when it was trapped for nearly a full day.

Frye volunteered to extend his time serving in Vietnam after a year. In May 1968, he had been in Southeast Asia 20 months and was due to come home to Southern Pines in a month. On May 19, in the A Shau Valley — scene of some of the worst fighting  during the conflict and described in Part 6 of the Burns-Novick documentary — Frye was killed in action by an explosion.

Sgt. Frye was 22. I was a week from turning 9, and I went with Mom and Dad to see his mother after his death. She had moved out of the neighborhood and was living in an apartment downtown above Pope’s. It was a small place, full of folks paying their respects. Some of the male callers, like my dad, were veterans of a war that had a clearer purpose.

I wasn’t old enough to understand it all, but that space overflowed with grief exacerbated by the fact Gary was so close to returning to the U.S. when he was killed. I was old enough to understand some heroes don’t get the gift of years. Until my father became terminally ill a decade later, it was the most sobering event in my life.

As I grew up and began to read books on Vietnam — works by Graham Greene, Michael Herr, David Halberstam, Tim O’Brien, Neil Sheehan and others — Frye was in my mind, long after some of his fellow soldiers knocked on his mother’s door with the worst news, long after the rumblings of the war that claimed him stopped reverberating in the neighborhood. 

Sgt. Gary Frye is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery, and his name is one of nearly 60,000 American names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. Thirty years ago or so on a visit to Washington, I located him on that wall. I stood there for a good long while, crying in the fresh air the way people were crying in that stuffy apartment two decades before, tears that did not come with answers.   PS

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

Hometown

First Fall

The semester where it all begins

By Bill Fields

When I arrived at the University of North Carolina for freshman year in 1977, the idea that fall semester was sweater season turned out to be the Moby Dick of lies. It stayed hot deep into the football schedule. We would have been much better off drinking water instead of the contraband we brought into Kenan Stadium — Southern Comfort hasn’t touched my lips since — but I had a lot to learn.

My dormitory, close to classes (good) and Franklin Street (good, as long as you remembered with enough regularity the point of being in Chapel Hill), was three-storied and three-towered Old West, where my hometown doctor and multiple generations of students before him had lodged. After all, the residence hall was built in 1823. 

I settled into room 27 — first floor, north tower, a straight shot down the sidewalk to the main drag — with Keith, a senior studio art major from Greensboro in his mid-20s. He turned out to be a great roommate, good company when he was there, the kind of fellow whose teasing never crossed the line, and considerate when he returned after a late night creating one of his abstract works. Skinny as a paintbrush, he ate a lot of toast, usually while sitting cross-legged on his bed.

It didn’t take long to understand what a long straw I had grabbed when it came to who was sharing my room. A fellow who became one of my best first-year friends not only was placed in an Old West triple in quarters meant for two, but one of his roommates once took the keys to his car and drove it to Rocky Mount and back without asking first. Handing over the keys, he called my buddy’s Chevette “the worst car made.” He was, I’m afraid, as right as he was rude.

Those first few months in my new world, I encountered moonshine offered by a suitemate from eastern Tennessee, a guitar-playing redhead from Pennsylvania who believed with all his heart he was Neil Young and, in the TV room one evening, a pet tarantula owned by a guy whose roots I never cared to know.

Unlike some of the newcomers to Old West, I arrived with no visions of med school, did not have to cram for an introductory chemistry mid-term, and, therefore did not have to return to my room after flunking that test and realizing, quickly, I was not cut out to be a doctor. That was not the fate of a number of my dorm mates from elite prep schools in the Northeast, some of whom arrived on campus with a semester or more of college credits, an eye-popping revelation for a public high school graduate who was starting from zero and naïvely believed that everyone did.

I tended to my studies well enough that I made the Dean’s List for my only time, doing well in an intensive Spanish course that did wonders for my G.P.A. that would dip in subsequent semesters as I put in more hours at The Daily Tar Heel. When we put in an all-nighter, three of us usually spent it in a classroom at nearby unlocked Smith Building, our studying fueled by what came to be known by us as a “One Thirty Four,” the cheapest offering at Subway, a foot-long bologna sandwich that cost $1.29 plus five cents tax.

My Smith Building preparation worked well enough until I stayed up until 5 a.m. cramming for an Astronomy 31 final and slept through my alarm. I woke up mid-morning to guys talking outside my room having finished their various finals, a sound that shocked me into a pair of sweatpants and a windbreaker, and out the door to Phillips Hall, a short distance down Cameron Avenue. My professor took pity and let me take the exam, and I returned by noon to friends who never let me forget that day.

It’s tempting to say that was my biggest embarrassment of fall semester, but the nadir likely occurred at the Daniel Boone Ice Rink in Hillsborough, site of a mixer with one of the north campus’ women’s dorms. Since I had never ice skated, the prudent move would have been to skip it. But I loaded on the bus and went forth to the ice where I fell over and over to the point that I was soaked from failure, while the experienced skaters from up north went round and round, wowing the southern girls.

I picked up no phone numbers that night, only a cold.

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

Friendly Confines

The local knowledge and pleasures of Knollwood

By Bill Fields

Driving past the sandy parking lot at Knollwood Fairways filled with SUVs and other 21st century models, I easily envision my father’s second-hand Thunderbird or Don Smitherman’s custodial service van from 45 years ago.

Don was one of the cadre of adults I regularly played with at Knollwood, one of my informal but important teachers of golf and life, and when he passed away in 2014 at 80, it tickled me to read up high in his obituary that “golf was a game he truly enjoyed.”

He sure did, changing out of his brogans into his golf spikes in a flash, eager as the rest of us to get in a quick nine before dark. Don’s swing was taut and reliable, conjuring Doug Sanders, and he was a savvy golfer who rarely wasted a shot. I don’t think I ever rooted harder for a tour pro than the year Don caddied for Frank Beard at Pinehurst No. 2 in the 1974 World Open, when he lost in a four-man playoff.

I’ve been to 48 states and 10 countries as a golf photographer and writer, but none of my travels might have occurred without my formative years around the game at Knollwood Fairways. It’s where I caught the bug, searched for the secret, built calluses and realized that carrying an extendable ball retriever with a rake-like tip was not a good look.

The 140-yard first hole seemed like 1,400 yards when I first played it with my starter set of Johnny Palmer signature clubs from Sears, so ominous loomed the water hazard between tee and tiny green with a 3-iron in hand.

Knollwood’s compact nine holes — a lighted, nine-hole par-3 also existed before it was eliminated for housing — and practice range was the scene for many of my golf revelations.

It was where I made my first par; saw a club pro (Bob Round) hit a tight draw; gasped as a tour pro (Chuck Thorpe) launched one of the early graphite-shafted drivers; watched a boy (who shall remain nameless) mark his ball on the green with a pine needle; and a man (also nameless) smear Vaseline on his clubface to try to thwart a slice.

At Knollwood, I found out what it was like to play for money, marvel as a wedge shot backed up, break 40 for nine holes, hear an idiot in a passing car shout “Fore!” and get hit in the chin with an errant shot (by my father, as his Top-Flite ricocheted off a tree on the fifth hole, fortunately resulting in only a bruise).

Thanks to the largesse of pro shop manager Jesse Nelson, who treated me like a son, I helped out in exchange for free range balls, saving myself $1.25 for every large bucket. One of my duties was serving Stewart Sandwiches in the snack bar, ham-and-cheeses, grilled cheeses, or, if someone was splurging, the salami-ham-cheese “Torpedo” hoagie — all infrared-heated in a small magic oven.

My best recollection of Knollwood is secondhand. Bob, my brother-in-law, was playing with my father. My dad the high school graduate really enjoyed the company of his biochemist/molecular biologist son-in-law. They bonded at Knollwood trying to figure out the science of a difficult sport, convivial cold beers enjoyed when they were done regardless of score.

Despite being a strong swimmer and graceful tennis player, Bob struggled at golf. He swung too fast, and he topped a lot of shots. The par-4 eighth hole, where a pond fronts the tee, was Bob’s nemesis for his semi-annual rounds at Knollwood. I think it started psyching him out before he walked past the first of the kinks on the double-dogleg seventh. One afternoon in the early 1970s, before Bob attempted to hit his tee shot over the water on No. 8, Dad tossed him a ball to use. It was imprinted with the logo of Mayflower Movers, a tall ship.

A jerky swing, thin shot and predictable result later, my father was on the ground he was laughing so hard. Dad told that story until he died, and Bob tells it still.  PS

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

A Fast 40

And the fabric of memories

By Bill Fields

Measured by bricks and mortar, Pinecrest High School wasn’t quite finished in 1977 — having recently gained a cafeteria and a gymnasium, it still lacked an auditorium — but goodness knows, those of us graduating that spring also were works in progress.

“Home is where one starts from,” T.S. Eliot wrote in a poem quoted in our senior yearbook, the Spectrum.

Those three years at Pinecrest, which commenced when, as sophomores, we were herded by alphabet into homerooms for fall semester in 1974, were part of our opening lap. At the same time, though, it was a finish line, the familiar about to be traded in for something else, make and model to be determined.

Can it really be 40 years? The color of my hair and the length of my belt say it’s so, yet the gap between then and now is bridged by sharp, scattered memories: benevolent teacher Julianna White doing her very best to help a clueless student grasp a concept in Advanced Math; assistant principal Bobby Brendell reading the daily skip list over the intercom with his distinct inflections; coach John Williams in the field house warming up for calisthenics and a cross-country run by doing arm circles and toe touches.

Mrs. White was indeed very good to me, realizing the subject she taught was a requirement and, given my career goals, not my future. She gave me the benefit of the doubt during one senior year grading period so that I would have no worse than a C on my high school transcript, an assist I sorely needed since my SAT math score was so poor I still treat it like a state secret.

If not for her kindness, I have a hunch I wouldn’t have been handed an envelope by my father on my 18th birthday a couple of weeks before graduation.

On May 25, the day Star Wars was released, I found out by letter that I had been accepted off the waiting list by UNC-Chapel Hill, where I’d long wanted to attend. In a season of Cross pens and Belk ties this was the only present I really wanted, and my parents didn’t fret over the loss of my dorm room deposit at East Carolina. Nor was I bothered that a number of classmates had wished me luck at ECU when they signed my yearbook because it appeared I was bound for Greenville. 

If the proximity to graduation hadn’t heightened spring fever, then getting into Carolina and turning 18 surely did. By that juncture we were more intent on the Pizza Hut buffet or a Tastee-Freez burger than any classes before or after our lunchtime excursions, although I didn’t have much of an appetite on May 26.

Thanks to a classmate whose family had connections to Terry Sanford, our commencement speaker was a cut above average, to say the least. I wish I could remember what wisdom the former North Carolina governor — then president of Duke University and a future U.S. senator — offered the approximately 300 capped-and-gowned Patriots. Unfortunately, my overarching recollection of that Friday night in the campus gym is how badly some in the audience behaved, talking and yelling over Gov. Sanford’s speech, Southerners having forgotten their manners.

I didn’t have a lot of school pride that evening, but when I look through my 1977 edition of the Spectrum, it returns. It was my school. They were my classmates, too many now absent. In the formal yearbook pictures — clip-on bow ties for the boys, v-neck tops for the girls — most everyone is following the photographer’s command and looking slightly away from the camera. I have overcooked his direction, my gaze appearing to be down the right field line.

Forty years later, after home runs and strikeouts, for this member of the Class of ’77, the pleasure is in coming up to the plate.   PS

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

A Telling Tale

Things worth more than money

By Bill Fields

On Mother’s Day, I think of a working mom: mine.

Growing up in a time when more mothers than not stayed at home, Mom always had a job. Although she has worked in a department store and a small dress shop in her later years, when it comes to life outside the home, she is a bank teller in my mind’s eye.

No matter what it houses, I will never think of the building set back from Broad Street as anything but Citizens Bank and Trust, Southern Pines’ first and, until the early 1960s, only bank. It became part of First Union in the early 1970s and went through other mergers and acquisitions along the way and is part of Wells Fargo today.

Mom’s years at the bank spanned from the 1950s in the Broad Street location into the 1980s at the branch in Pinecrest Plaza. Although I can’t say having a bank teller for a mom was as exciting as if she had been a zookeeper, basketball coach or pilot, there were advantages.

I might not have gotten larger denominations than other kids from the Tooth Fairy, but I bet nobody found more shiny quarters under his or her pillow. When I began a coin collection, it was easy, with Mom’s help, to get started on filling the slots in those blue folding books — Buffalo nickels, Mercury dimes, even the occasional aluminum penny from World War II would show up.

I got to tour the place, of course, beyond the teller windows. The break room was nifty, but getting to step in the vault was better than a school field trip out of town. When I was real little, I asked her why we couldn’t take all the money and move to Mexico. But life on the lam, even in a warm, sunny place by the water, wasn’t in her dreams. I did, however, get a gross of No. 2 pencils once that she bought at wholesale from the office supply salesman. I also got one winter of Tuesday nights at the bowling alley when she was part of the Citizens Bank team, and her white shirt with green lettering was the best sporting attire I’d seen that wasn’t in Carolina Blue and white.

Mom went to work whether she felt good or felt bad. Pretending a sniffle was something more in order to get a day off was considered on the order of burglarizing a neighbor’s home — something you would never even think about. Sometimes she came home on her lunch break to watch a bit of As the World Turns, but she always returned to the bank at the appointed time, even if some good stuff was going on in Oakdale.

And when the workday was over, she did not have the luxury of being able to pick up a roasted chicken at Harris Teeter or takeout from dozens of restaurants. Dad occasionally cooked supper, but it was mostly Mom’s responsibility. We had a home-cooked hot meal — tasty, filling — for supper almost every night.

Mom did these things — one job for which she was paid and another for which she wasn’t — without fanfare or complaint, that being the way things were and the way she was. If, over my working life, I have met deadlines and for the most part not had colleagues who wanted to throw things at me in frustration, I owe a lot of that to her example.

She never failed to be courteous to customers, whether they were insurance agents, shop clerks, doctors or factory workers who endorsed their paycheck with an “X” instead of a signature because they didn’t know how to write. There was a dignity in her job and in everyone she waited on.

I’ve been to plenty of banks from Georgia to Connecticut since my middle school days when my mother made me put most of the money from a brief summer job into a new savings account instead of blowing it on something I didn’t really need. Some of these tellers have been nice and helpful, perfectly fine folks, but I am a very tough grader.  PS

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

Bottle Rocket Cousins

Special days with the Purvis boys

By Bill Fields

A couple of times a year there would be a letter or a phone call, and the countdown would begin. When the arrival was imminent, antsy with anticipation, I would scout our street for a well-waxed sedan turning into the driveway.

There were few things in childhood better than a visit from the Purvis boys.

Sidney, Bob and Phil were my cousins from Martin County, the sons of Uncle Whit and Aunt Blyn. Sid was closer in age to my mother, his aunt, than to me. Bob and Phil were contemporaries of my two older sisters, who for their many redeeming qualities never pored over box scores, fantasized about driving Richard Petty’s Plymouth in the Southern 500 or saved up for a Zebco 33.

My cousins, on the other hand, couldn’t get their fill of sports, cars and the outdoors. Plus, they liked to arm wrestle.

I didn’t lack boys on the block to play with — between the Hursts and the McNeills there were plenty — but the Purvises were kin and I didn’t get to see them often. The latter reality made their visits special, and it didn’t hurt that they never tired of hitting their little cousin fungoes or playing endless games of “21” on our backyard hoop. For a kid whose pyrotechnics were limited to lighting a sparkler or two on July Fourth, it seemed beyond daring to see my cousins set off firecrackers in tin cans or fire a bottle rocket.

Bob and Phil went to college in Tennessee, staying there to raise families and for long careers in state government. They would stop in the Sandhills on their long drive home to northeastern North Carolina, where they played ball against the Perry brothers, future major leaguers Jim and Gaylord. When UCLA and Houston played the basketball “Game of the Century” in the Astrodome in January 1968, the younger Purvises watched with Dad and me.

Once, when Phil was in town he went squirrel hunting. He brought me two of the tails, which I attached to my bike handles with electrical tape. I then proudly rode around the neighborhood until some neighbor dogs caught the scent and chased me to the curb.

Sometimes they would lodge at the Charlton Motel. Bob was floating in the deep end of the pool one summer weekend and dared me to jump in. I couldn’t swim yet but figured he would catch me. He didn’t, but scooped me up before I became a story for the next edition of The Pilot, and we laughed about the moment for a long time.

My cousins were push-up and sit-up strong. Phil, especially, was a heck of an athlete, becoming a martial arts black belt and playing on high-level softball teams for many years after he got out of college. We were visiting him outside Nashville and went out to eat at an Italian joint before one of his games. Most of the table enjoyed pizza. “I’m just going to get something light,” Phil said, ordering a sandwich. The grinder that arrived at the table remains the largest I’ve seen outside a sub catered for a Super Bowl party, and I can still hear the howls when the waitress came with Phil’s meal.

All three of them had their culinary favorites when they came to visit, whether a meat-and-three lunch at Blake’s Restaurant in Candor, a Dairy Queen chocolate shake, fish supper at Russell’s or fresh peaches from the Auman orchard.

Sid settled in eastern North Carolina, solving engineering problems for the telephone company. He had a passion for ham radio, and I remember being amazed at the amount of equipment that involved. He developed a love of aviation too, earning his pilot’s license. On a Sunday, Sid flew from New Bern to Southern Pines to go to church and have lunch with Mom. One of his prized cars was a yellow Corvette.

In retirement, his wife gave him a present of a day at the Richard Petty Driving Experience at Charlotte Motor Speedway. To hear him describe those speedy spins on a high-banked track, it was as exciting as those long, ago visits by the Purvis boys to our home.

Sid passed away in 2015 at age 77. His brothers survive, along with lots of good memories.  PS

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