Hometown

Man on the Run

Life at a different pace

By Bill Fields

Wearing my orange slicker with the hood up, I must have looked like a large buoy that had escaped Long Island Sound. As I lumbered east toward the water on a chilly and rainy afternoon, my short, choppy strides weren’t earning any style points.

It was the last Sunday in March, and the inclement weather meant I had the street to myself. Social distancing amid the coronavirus pandemic wasn’t an issue. Whatever description fit what I was doing — running, jogging, slogging — moving at a pace faster than walking felt good.

This exercise was rooted in a hot afternoon last fall when I was walking near Southern Pines Golf Club on a route I used to run. A high school cross-country team appeared on my left, where they were beginning practice on the fallow Little Nine. I passed them as they stretched, but a minute later the teenagers — some in singlets, others in T-shirts but all as skinny as a young slash pine — glided past, their laughter and chatter receding as they crested a hill, leaving me to make a much slower, solitary climb.

As I continued a long walk through the Weymouth neighborhood and back to my rental car parked by Downtown Park, I surveyed my running life, meager at its apex and missing for a decade, replaced by workouts on the treadmill, climber or stationary bike at the gym.

I never was fast nor did I possess notable endurance, which explains why for many years a tiny red ribbon signifying second place in a first-grade race shared space in an envelope of Turkey Trot numbers accumulated as an adult.  I never entered anything longer than a 10K — and only a few of those to go with a larger number of the Thanksgiving Day 5-milers — and never exceeded 8 miles in a workout. Career highlight: finishing one of the Turkey Trots in 43:50 when I was in my early 40s.

But “having run” was still satisfying, a feeling of accomplishment. This was so whether the journey was from my Old West dormitory room to Gimghoul Castle in Chapel Hill to clear the head before a long night of studying; through a Georgia neighborhood on sticky summer evenings; along a windy seafront in England, wishing I’d worn another layer.

My most purposeful trips took place in the late-1990s when I set out to lose weight by running multiple laps on a nearly traffic-free perimeter road at a city park near my home. I kept at it each evening after work for months regardless of the weather, shedding pounds through my plodding routine, motivated by a fellow jogger who did his many laps wearing a headlamp at dusk and told me he had dropped 50 pounds after several years of running there.

While on a 45-minute walk in mid-March, after my gym had shut down, I remembered that guy. I turned my stroll into something more for a block or so, resumed walking, then jogged a bit more. I did this for most of a week before stepping out with a different goal — to go for a run.

I began at a shuttered restaurant that in a previous iteration had a tiny bar packed with folks after work. Later on, it was a sports-themed place with 25-cent wings on Tuesday nights, which ensured a big crowd.

It was dark, the parking lot empty as I began the first of three round-trips up a stretch of Riverside Drive, over Ash Creek and between the marsh. Others also had escaped the indoors, and we made our way giving each other a wide berth. There were as many paces as faces, some slow and some fast. I was solidly in the middle but exerting enough energy that after 25 minutes I was sweaty and winded.

On my calendar, over two weeks of canceled out-of-town work the second half of March, are times and distances denoting my new daily habit. As one month melted into the next, I was sure of very little, only that I would try to keep putting one foot in front of the other, running both for and from something.  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.

Hometown

Creature Discomfort

Not all pets are created equal

By Bill Fields

Among the sounds of a North Carolina childhood that linger many years later and hundreds of miles from where I heard them: sausage frying on a weekend morning; a lawnmower starting up and piercing the late afternoon quiet; a neighbor mom calling her daughters home at dark; the pop of ball in glove, over and over, once my arm got strong enough to make it happen.

But sometimes, out of nowhere, this one: Dad in the backyard at the end of the day, shaking a bag of cat chow like he was keeping rhythm in a swing band. It was the felines’ dinner bell, and they ran toward my father as if it had been a month since their last meal. That he diluted their milk with water from the hose mattered not.

Lucy and Linus arrived first, about the time I started school, kitten siblings from a litter belonging to one of Dad’s co-workers. Lucy was black and white; Linus was a gray tabby. It being the 1960s, and pet ethics not being what they are today, Lucy grew up to have a lot of kittens herself, her maternity ward usually a cardboard box from the ABC store. The stars of her offspring were Tuffy and Fluffy, each white with black accents. Fluffy’s fur was softer than a baby blanket, but she gave no quarter when wrestling Tuffy on my parents’ double bed, the cats’ favorite daytime playground.

Linus was a handsome boy, strong and athletic, until the big ice storm in the late 1960s, when he scaled a longleaf pine next door and was frightened to return to terra firma, choosing to howl a desperate howl overnight to the dismay of every house on the block. Once the sun was up Dad climbed a ladder, its rungs coated slick, to rescue him. Linus thawed out in front of a heat duct and thereafter seemed particularly grateful for the crunchy grub distributed daily at dusk.

If a boy didn’t have a pet dolphin in that era he surely had a dog, yet my canine experiences weren’t happy — certainly not like one nearby family who possessed an assembly line of dachshunds or another with a beloved beagle. We got Skippy, a midnight-black cocker spaniel, when I was in first grade but gave him away not long after we got the pet, when he kept nipping at passersby on Ridge Street.

I loved Peanuts, a Chihuahua puppy acquired when I was still in elementary school. Peanuts could well have been with me until I graduated from Pinecrest, if not for his early and unfortunate demise. My father created a flap in the little dog’s cardboard-box residence, but it got caught in the entryway one day while I was at school. I found Peanuts when I returned home from classes. He was trapped in the flap, his fate already clear.

Years later, as a grown man, I would have temporary co-guardianship of a couple of dogs, friendly cocker spaniels in one case and sweet but undisciplined Labradors in the other. The Labs were amazingly determined and creative when it came to anything involving food, to the point where they could even chew through a tin can. They forced us to tape shut the refrigerator door, lest we come home to a royal mess. With the bigger, stronger Lab on a leash one evening, it nearly dislocated my right shoulder when a squirrel suddenly appeared.

In the last couple of decades of my mother’s life — when she lived alone and could have, by any measure, used some company — I occasionally told her I had a cat or dog coming her way for a Christmas present. These teasings were not something that made her smile; her pet-managing days were long over.

I now wonder if mine aren’t, too. Occasionally my partner and I wish there were such as thing as Rent-a-Corgi, where one could enjoy a dog (the breed her family had when she was a child and that I have also liked from afar) for a couple of hours, then return it before any dog bites, bathroom accidents or vet bills.

If I were to ever own a cat, I am certain its cuisine would resemble that of my childhood felines rather than of the pets owned by a woman for whom a friend of mine cat-sat a decade ago. There were three dozen cats in a big house, and each got its individual can of wet food in its preferred flavor. The feeding stations were as long as the serving line at a K&W Cafeteria.

I helped with the horde one evening. I confess, without remorse, to not being worried if a cat that was supposed to receive tuna primavera instead dined on shredded wild salmon. And I walked out into the winter night thinking perhaps the only creatures in my house should be on Animal Planet.  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.

Hometown

A Rose is a Rose

No matter what the cable guy says

By Bill Fields

In the early stages of my seventh decade of being called something, I know I am not “will.i.am.” And the singer William James Adams Jr. need not fear that I will encroach on his lower-case and punctuated stage moniker.

Beyond that, though, all bets are off as I deal with an identity crisis.

My name game was simple for a long time. As with many folks, there were family reasons my birth certificate says what it says. William was the first name of my father and of the man who, with his wife, adopted him. Henderson, my mother’s maiden name, was chosen for the middle of mine. Both sides had a stake in how I would turn out.

From as early as I can remember, people called me Bill, never the two-syllable variant of the nickname. This was obviously a choice, for whatever reason, by my parents. As a child, I had no reason to argue with them. Neither Billy the Kid nor Billy Graham had something I needed.

Once I started school, I began to see how the world’s male Williams — or at least those in my classroom — were divided into Bills and Billys. The Duncan boy was a Billy. The Perham boy, like me, was a Bill. Folks seemed as likely to switch up their nicknames as to mistake the Blue Knights for the Red Devils. I was Bill on my lesson papers and my report cards. I also was Bill on my Little League team, although if someone had labeled me Willie, same as one of my baseball heroes, Willie Mays, I would have taken it in a heartbeat.

This “rule” followed me to the barbershop, where I never heard anyone voice the first name of my favorite haircutter, Billie Joyce Hill, with fewer than two syllables. The same was true for a longtime teacher in Southern Pines, Billie Bowen, although in the hallways she received an alliterative addition, “Bat Cave” Billie Bowen, because of her roots in that tiny western North Carolina community.

I was a plain, boring Bill until encountering golf professionals at Mid Pines for whom I worked as a teen golf cart attendant. I was Billy to them just as sure as there were longleaf pines along the fairways.

As I got older, outside of passports, bank statements and driver licenses that utilized my legal name, I was Bill — to friends and family, in bylines and, most of the time, to co-workers. The difference between the nickname’s versions was as different as Billy Crystal and Bill Kristol.

The last couple of years, one of my freelance assignments finds me on the road a dozen times a year working long days with a great bunch of people, some of whom like to call me Billy. Although I still don’t see myself as a Billy, I answer to it and have come to see it as the term of endearment that it is. I am the same person, after all, with or without a “y.”

I wish a phone agent had been as understanding a year ago when I was attempting to close a cable television account for the service in my mother’s room in an assisted living facility.

“This is William Fields,” I said, identifying the account and explaining why I had called.”

The voice on the other end of the line was helpful at first, collecting salient information to allow him to retrieve the account from the virtual vault of cable TV land. Just when I thought we were close to finishing the conversation, a snag appeared.

“What did you say your name was?” he asked.

“William Fields,” I answered.

“This account was opened by Bill Fields.”

“Yeah, that’s me. Bill is short for William. It’s a nickname. It’s my name. That was me — it is me.”

“But the account was opened with a different name. I can’t do this over the phone. You’re going to have to go to an office.”

After a couple of more tries weren’t able to inject any common sense into the conversation, I gave up and hung up.

As the steam dissipated, Bill v. Billy seemed way down the list of the world’s woes.  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.

Hometown

Untold Stories

A simple man’s jump into history

By Bill Fields

To my memory, still keen though he has been gone 40 years, Dad wasn’t big on sit-down discussions of serious matters. If, in the early 1970s, we had been wearing Fitbits instead of Timexes, they would have shown considerable steps taken during our “Facts of Life” conversation as we paced around the house one afternoon, each doing his best to speak of anything but the birds and the bees.

We got through that talk, fragmented though it might have been, despite our mutual reluctance. That was not the case when it came to my father’s military service, memories of which were as off limits to me as the bottle of Canadian Club stashed in the far reaches of a kitchen cabinet.

The hard stuff of war had come years earlier as my father, a corporal in the 161st Parachute Engineer Company, fought in the Pacific theater in 1944-45. Like so many others, William E. Fields had been plucked from an ordinary life — in his case, a long-haul truck driver transporting produce from his hometown of Jackson Springs to locales along the Eastern Seaboard — to do extraordinary things in the Allied war effort.

In 2020, the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, plenty of stories will be told about men and women who never wanted to talk about themselves or what they went through.

Dad was inducted Oct. 15, 1942, in Fort Bragg. By the spring of ’44, he had his wings, a wife and a will. My parents’ first child was due that November, by which time Dad was about 9,000 miles from home. An assistant unit foreman, second in command of a squad of parachute engineers, my father directed combat and demolitions work, and helped erect barriers and traps against the enemy.

His unit of airborne engineers was attached to the 503rd Parachute Regimental Combat Team. After fighting in the New Guinea and Luzon campaigns, Corregidor was next as the United States sought to reclaim the rocky island in Manila Bay overtaken by Japanese forces in 1942.

“The airborne landing was one of the most — if not the most — daring, unusual and successful in the history of airborne operations,” authors James and William Belote wrote in Corregidor: Saga of a Fortress, of the Feb. 16, 1945 operation involving 2,065 paratroopers descending from C-47s only 400 feet above a tiny landing zone on a windy morning. The first time I watched a Pathé newsreel film of the jump, the jeopardy of the troops became very real.

I’ve wondered if my mother, in North Carolina with her infant daughter, Dianne, read this Associated Press account published Feb. 18 in the Charlotte Observer and papers across the country: “Plane after plane dropped 10-man teams, some beyond the cliffs, some in rocky ravines but the majority on the ‘topside’ where they were to the rear of enemy guns pointing out to the China Sea. The ’chutists carried full equipment.”

Dad wasn’t in the majority and became one of hundreds of casualties when he landed on uneven terrain, shattering his right ankle. After a long recuperation, he would recover to walk without a limp but was plagued the rest of his life by tropical ulcer or “jungle rot” on the joint and varicose veins in his right calf.

As I found out just recently from an older cousin to whom Dad once confided a decade after the war, getting badly hurt was only part of his Corregidor story. Wounded and alone after being blown off course, he had to hide in a crater covered by his parachute to avoid being seen by Japanese troops before eventually being rescued and evacuated by comrades. It would be two months before he returned to the United States, and September until he was discharged from a convalescent hospital in Virginia with $144.14 and a Purple Heart that cost much more than that.

On Feb. 16, I will be thinking a lot about an ordinary man and the stories he wouldn’t share.  PS

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

Hometown

Period Pieces

Vintage cameras can yield vintage shots

By Bill Fields

I’ve decided I’m going to start a new decade with an old camera.

In fact, multiple vintage cameras. I’ve had them for a while as the only thing I really collect aside from a meager stash of old signature golf balls bearing the names of pros you probably haven’t heard of.

But, after a couple of false starts the last few years, I’ve made a commitment to use them regularly in 2020, the challenges of airport X-rays and film loading be damned. (I’m writing this with a view of some stray bits of film leader, the end game of a practice run with a bottom-loading screw-mount Leica.)

Still, it was great fun to take my 1937 Leica IId to the top of the Arc de Triomphe on a trip to Paris in late 2018, where it stood out in a sea of selfie sticks and smartphones. I’ve shot film sporadically over the last two decades, from an 85-year-old leatherette Kodak Brownie to a brand-new plastic Holga and any number of models in between.

An image I made with that Brownie about a decade ago on a beach not far from home is one my favorites. A handheld exposure at dusk, it includes two swimmers, one appearing as a sea serpentlike apparition, the mood enhanced by a bit of motion and the late hour of the day. My satisfaction with the photo is no doubt also influenced by the vagaries of the camera itself, a basic design that wasn’t foolproof in its heyday, much less now. I sure didn’t know what I had when I looked through the cloudy viewfinder and clicked the shutter that evening.

I thought about a one-camera/one-lens approach to 2020, a popular method for simplifying one’s photographic mission. One of my very old Leicas with a collapsible Elmar 50mm f/3.5 lens will likely see the most duty, but I’m going to mix things up by utilizing an Olympus OM-1n from the 1970s and probably the box camera as well. I noticed recently that a couple of places even still sell 110-format film, meaning that I could put my first camera, a Kodak Pocket Instamatic 20 model, in the rotation. What I’m sure of, though, is my vow to have a film camera with me.

I don’t know my way around a darkroom, so I won’t be souping my own film or making my own prints, yet I am energized by the prospects of the photographs I will be producing. Budget alone will force me to pick my spots and compose carefully. I may develop specific themes or it could turn out more random. It will be fun — I think — to experience the hopeful anxiety between shooting and having the film developed as I experienced in shooting golf professionally for more than a decade in the 1980s and 1990s.

One of the most vivid memories of my work life is picking up my slides at a New York City lab on the Monday after the 1987 Masters and quickly going through boxes to find the one containing Larry Mize’s winning shot and celebration. Dinner tasted a lot better once I realized I had the moment in focus and it was properly exposed, no gimme in a less-automated era.

My career won’t depend on what I shoot on film in 2020. In a way, it’s akin to playing golf with hickory shafts or persimmon clubheads — a different game than today’s way. Vintage cameras can be beautiful objects even if they’re just sitting on a shelf. Using them can be rewarding. To consider who before me might have shot with them — and where — is a fascination, and there is romance in film that isn’t in a memory card.

My friend Martin Axon has printed for many renowned photographers and is a master of the platinum process. In 2013, I did an essay about Hy Peskin’s famous image of Ben Hogan at the 1950 U.S. Open. Axon has printed the iconic shot.

“When you hold someone’s negative,” Axon told me then, “you go, ‘This was the actual moment,’ because you know the film was there at that moment in time.”

Here’s hoping negatives will be a positive in 2020.  PS

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

Hometown

Treasures Under the Tree

The beginning of a beautiful friendship

By Bill Fields

There was an episode of The Waltons titled “The Best Christmas” in which mother Olivia is determined to have the merriest of holidays even without sipping a drop of the Baldwin sisters’ white lightning. She wanted her large brood all together for perhaps the last time, but her plans went awry because of a snowstorm, downed tree, car-in-a-pond and other misfortunes.

That show aired in 1976, but my best Christmas — still Santa-believing division — occurred seven years earlier.

As the turbulent 1960s came to a close, for me, a sports-loving 10-year-old, a door opened to what became my favorite sport and, to a larger degree, my life.

Up to that point I had batted around golf balls with a Kroydon putter and a Wilson 5-iron I talked my parents into buying on separate visits to the Sky City High Point. Those implements, though, didn’t make me a golfer like the ones I saw playing around town and on television or read about in the paper. In my mind, I needed a set of clubs for that to be so.

For my parents, those were tiring months leading up to Christmas 1969, because I brought up my desire for a set of golf clubs many times. A Mom and Dad with more Scrooge in them might have denied me, but they weren’t built that way.

Presents from Santa Claus weren’t wrapped in the Fields household, so when I came into the living room on Christmas morning and glimpsed something long and red on the floor with shiny things sticking out the top, I squealed with joy.

It was a Spalding “Tournament” starter set including a rectangular vinyl bag. The driver and 3-wood were made of “Persimmonite,” the Naugahyde of wooden clubs, and guarded by black covers. The irons were Nos. 3, 5, 7 and 9. There was a blade putter, which upon use and research I would discover was a cross between a club you’d find on a miniature-golf counter and Spalding’s venerable “Cash-In” model.

The clubs had Palmer’s signature on them — Johnny, not Arnold. I didn’t know who Johnny Palmer was, but his handwriting was neat, and since his name adorned a set that sold for about half of my dad’s weekly pay, he must be somebody special.

The grips were tacky rubber and the whole kit oozed opportunity. I removed each club out of the bag, took a grip — all fingers on the handle, having not discovered the overlapping style — and waggled above the carpet. Mom had a wide cautionary streak, but on this happy occasion I don’t think she warned me once about breaking a vase or marring the ceiling.

Frank Beard was the leading money winner on tour that year, but I don’t think his season was better than mine, thanks to the acquisition of my Spaldings.

Later on, I learned that John Cornelius Palmer Jr. was a fellow North Carolinian, born in 1918 in tiny Eldorado, the same birthplace as my grandfather Henderson. Johnny grew up in Badin and was one of the finest golfers to come out of the Old North State, winning seven times on the PGA Tour between 1946 and 1954. Twenty years before I found his name under our tree, Palmer finished second in the PGA Championship, tied for fourth at the Masters, and also was in the top-10 at the U.S. Open.

I used the Johnny Palmers for a couple of years, as my love for the game deepened, until graduating to a full set of used MacGregors purchased from Frank, a retiree I played with at Knollwood Fairways. The starter set was passed along to my father and subsequently to my brother-in-law Bob, an infrequent golfer.

The Spalding driver has been in my possession throughout adulthood. Only recently has the gang been back together, sans 3-wood, my sister digging the four irons out of a basement where her late husband had stored them, and shipping them from Oklahoma. I reclaimed the putter and bag when we cleaned out Mom’s house. I waggle them occasionally, the grips having slickened and hardened over time. The bag also holds my MacGregor woods, clubheads made of the real thing.

This fall I bought my first fresh sticks in about a decade. I was reminded there is nothing like a glossy new golf club, empty of errors and full of hope. But there is nothing like an old one either, especially when the nicks and scuffs are yours on a starter set that fulfilled its mission.  PS

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

Hometown

Fallback Position

Saving a season of discontent

By Bill Fields

As the Washington Redskins dropped their fourth straight game in the early stages of another lousy NFL season on the same weekend my alma mater North Carolina came heartbreakingly close to beating Clemson, I had one thought: Thank goodness for Ohio State.

There is no way that sentence could have come from my keyboard prior to 2013, when I started dating Ohio-born Jen, whose sporting interests start and end with Buckeye football. They were her parents’ favorite and quickly became her team, too. Jen keeps track of the Buckeyes like a meteorologist watching a hurricane, then, when college football season is over, contentedly returns to reading, cooking or needlepoint.

Since Ohio State wins regularly, it wasn’t a hard sell for me to become a fan, because who wants scoreboards making them sad several months a year? Washington has had only nine winning seasons since 1991, and although things are looking up for the Tar Heels with the return of coach Mack Brown, he is not a miracle worker.

I’m not going to abandon my NFL favorite despite their owner or their nickname, both of which are problematic. I have rooted for Washington since Sonny Jurgensen was passing to Charley Taylor and still have the Sonny-signed 8×10 I sent away for. I had NFL bed sheets, a Redskins toboggan and jacket, and was glued to the television every time they played.

During my childhood of fandom, Washington didn’t have a winning record until I was 10. But the Jurgensen-led offense could always move the ball, as evidenced in a 72-41 victory over the New York Giants in 1966, the 115 total points still an NFL regular season record.

I remember well the joy of the 1983 Super Bowl, when Washington finally won the big one. I drove to Charlotte to watch the game with my friends Brad and Lynne, Brad having grown up in the D.C. area and been a long-suffering fan like me. Washington was Super Bowl champion again in 1988 and 1992. In that decade I was well rewarded for many years of football futility, but recently, with the wayward team management, those highlight memories seem very distant.

The Tar Heels played some of their finest football when I was in school at Chapel Hill, no surprise given their roster included Lawrence Taylor on defense and Kelvin Bryant on offense. Although I was typing for The Daily Tar Heel, which ruled out face paint or a flask in Kenan Stadium, those were heady days. In 1980, when UNC was 7-0 and traveled to perennially good Oklahoma, there hardly had been a bigger Carolina football game.

Alas, the Dick Crum-coached Tar Heels were humbled, 41-7, but there was so much interest in the contest I was able to string for a couple of newspapers and make a few bucks to spend at the Porthole and He’s Not Here. Carolina won the rest of its games that season, concluding with a victory over Texas in the Bluebonnet Bowl, the only time I was in the Astrodome.

After meeting Jen, I soon discovered that despite her longtime allegiance she had never attended an Ohio State game at “The Shoe.” We remedied that in 2016, driving to Columbus to watch OSU play Bowling Green State University. Jen was like Ned Beatty’s character in Rudy, finally going to a Notre Dame game after many seasons of watching on TV. Our seats were way up high, but the Buckeyes and The Best Damn Band in the Land were great, and so was the weather, gloriously warm and sunny. Final score: Ohio State 77, Bowling Green 10.

The Buckeyes were scoring plenty of points in their early games this season, guided by quarterback Justin Fields, whose name makes their games even more fun for this fan. Come the Saturday after Thanksgiving, Jen and I will be in front of a television for Ohio State-Michigan. It’ll never be Carolina-Duke hoops for me, but I’m happy “The Game” is at least a little bit my game too.  PS

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

Hometown

Unhooked

Avoiding a real drag at dawn

By Bill Fields

Walking through the Atlanta airport to my departure gate for an early morning flight late this summer, I trailed a couple of passengers who took a hard right into a glass-doored room with rows of seats. I didn’t understand their detour until I glimpsed someone settled in with a cigarette, the smoke headed upward toward a powerful vent in an attempt to mitigate the odor.

I checked later, and there are more places at Hartsfield-Jackson International for animals to go to the bathroom than for their owners to have a cigarette.

Smoking is an increasingly lonely and expensive — at my local convenience store, a pack ranges from $7.99 to $11.10 — proposition in the United States. Less than 15 percent of the population is lighting up compared with about four out of 10 Americans half a century ago, not long after the surgeon general first warned of the health risks. Chick-peas grow and solar panels collect the sun’s energy in many places where tobacco once grew.

I’ve smoked cigarettes — probably not a carton in total, right after I graduated from college — but thankfully never got hooked and, growing up in North Carolina when I did, that probably put me in the minority. Going to tour the R.J. Reynolds plant in Winston-Salem was as natural an outing as a trip to a museum in Raleigh or the battleship in Wilmington. We were very proud the Christmas we gave Dad, a Salem man, a kit to roll his own cigarettes. He was less enthusiastic, and Dad never missed a week of purchasing his carton of Salems from the Big Star (for about half the cost of what a single pack runs today).

It is hard for me to picture Dad without a cigarette. He smoked at least two packs a day most of his adult life. He didn’t want a shirt unless it had a pocket to store his smokes — even his T-shirts were so designed. He smoked inside, outside and when he was driving, fishing or playing golf. He had lighters inscribed with his initials.

I don’t know if he agreed with the Salem advertising that the brand had “a taste as soft and fresh as springtime,” but he was thoroughly hooked until he was diagnosed with a smoking-related cancer and had surgery. Dad only lived a little more than a year after that operation. He never smoked again, though, and after he quit came to realize how offensive the habit was.

Given that even doctors endorsed smoking when Dad started as a teenager in the late 1930s, and that cigarettes were part of a soldier’s standard kit during World War II, it’s not hard to see how so many people in his generation got hooked.

As I tried to discourage a young friend of mine from smoking recently, I thought about my father’s life and death, and of those smokers in the airport, who ought to know better, taking a drag at dawn and counting the minutes until they could have another cigarette.

I’m lucky that I quit before I ever really started, unhappy with how smoking made me feel and my clothes smell, beyond what had become indisputable health hazards. The stale scent was so different from what I remembered from a decade earlier when Dad took me to a tobacco warehouse in Fairmont, where the sweetly powerful and appealing aroma of the cured product was more distinct than the auctioneer’s rapid delivery.

I bought my last pack of Salems almost 40 years ago. It was a short smoking experiment, not quite as abbreviated as when I tried chewing tobacco for one inning during a college intramural softball game. As I attempted to manage the chaw, I felt as if I were getting greener than the sparse, end-of-semester grass on which we were playing. I was in left field and out of my league. My first purchase of Red Man was my last.  PS

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

Hometown

Matchless

Low mileage, one owner, gently used

By Bill Fields

My ’66 Mustang needs a paint job, and the wheels are wobbly on my ’62 Ferrari. But compared with my ’63 Vauxhall Estate Car, whose windows are broken and back hatch is missing, the first two vehicles are looking good.

Now, I’m not really a car collector. I’m not even a real collector of these 1:64 scale miniatures that had so many of us hoping we had 49 cents in our pocket — approximately two visits from the tooth fairy — for a purchase years ago. My dozen were rescued from the corner of a closet where they had been garaged for a long time.

Lots of things shout “child of the ’60s,” but does any toy do it better than a Matchbox car?

As the advertising copy said: “For boys and girls of all ages . . . built of pressure die-cast metal by English craftsmen . . . nothing to assemble, ready to use . . . colorful nontoxic baked enamel finish, authentic in every detail.”

I’m glad I never snacked on my vehicles, just in case, but the Matchbox Series did have a lot going for it. Detroit might not have ever been usurped as a car capital if its workmanship had been as fine as that in the toys manufactured in England by Lesney Products.

Although small enough to fit in a child’s hand, some of the models consisted of more than 100 parts. They were finely assembled, with details that mirrored the real thing. Automakers on both sides of the Atlantic, happy with the publicity, shared specifications with the toy company that allowed for great authenticity in the replicas.

As a kid who loved small things — a pocket magnetic checkers set, tiny stapler, mini-football helmet pencil sharpener, miniature golf — Matchbox cars were right in my wheelhouse.

Lesney began after World War II in London, a collaboration of friends and military veterans Leslie Smith and Rodney Smith, who used syllables from each of their first names as the company moniker. Toys weren’t the focus of the die-cast business until another man, Jack Odell, joined the original partners.

The Matchbox brand sprouted from Odell’s initial Lilliputian design — a brass steamroller he built in 1952 for his daughter that met her school’s edict that students couldn’t bring toys larger than a matchbox. Odell and Leslie Smith started producing their line of vehicles in 1953, Rodney Smith having sold out to his partners two years earlier. Their first design was a miniature gilded coach for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, a hot seller that was followed by a bulldozer, fire engine and, in 1954, Lesney’s first car, an MG.

Lesney was producing more than a million vehicles a week by the early 1960s as Matchbox cars were being sold in great numbers all over the world. “We produce more Rolls-Royces in a single day,” Odell told The New York Times, “than the Rolls-Royce company has made in its entire history.”

My fanciest Matchbox model is a ’64 Lincoln Continental, sea-foam green, whose trunk was just big enough to hold a piece of candy corn. I like my oldest model, a ’61 gray and red “Bedford Tipper” truck that I probably was given before I was old enough to really bang it around, which could explain why it looks as if it just came off the lot.

I was well-equipped for emergency response, owning a ’62 ambulance, ’65 wrecker and ’66 firetruck, its removable plastic ladder on the roof and ready to rescue someone trapped on the second story. There are versions of the Dodge Wreck Truck that make them a rare and valuable collectible because of a manufacturing quirk, but mine is run-of-the-mill and a little sad, its tow hook gone. I’ll blame the snapped-off part on my nephews, who were playing with my little cars on visits to their grandparents about the time I was getting my driver’s license.

New generation, same old fun.  PS

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

Hometown

The Gift of Years

A farewell to Mother Fields

By Bill Fields

When I saw that a voicemail from one of my sisters had landed in the middle of the night, I didn’t have to call her back to know what had happened.

Our mother’s long, largely happy and healthy life had come to an end less than two months from her 96th birthday. The day we laid Juanita Henderson Fields to rest was sunny and warm, much different from our father’s burial on a chilly spring forenoon nearly 40 years ago, when it was hard to tell the tears from the rain.

Different weather seemed appropriate, because a life that is over at 95 is not the same as a life cut short at 59. That gift of years also was our present.

How lucky I was to be able to go home for so long — much longer than most folks can — to East New Jersey Avenue and those familiar rooms and all those memories, of cookouts and penny poker games, giddy Christmas mornings and sunny Easter afternoons, looking for dyed eggs in the yard, one inevitably hidden in a hydrangea.

My sisters always called her “Mother,” and she was “Mom” to me. After becoming a grandmother, in the early 1970s, she also was “Mother Fields.” That sounded like a gospel singer on tour through the South, but it fit. By any name, she was a good wife, mother, daughter, sibling, aunt and friend. She was good, in the broadest definition of that short word. Someone who came by the funeral home called her classy. Mom was that too, along with being well-dressed, sneaky-funny, generous and, especially in her last decade, stubborn as a tight jar lid.

I’m convinced part of Mom’s stubbornness to leave her home, to stay a couple of innings too long there, was rooted in her desire for us to have that home to return to as long as possible because it was something she could do for us. Once we had finally gotten her into assisted living, we had to tackle cleaning out the house. By the end of that week, our backs were sore but our souls were full, having gotten to explore Mom’s life as we dealt with the many possessions.

We found out our mother really, really liked clothes. We discovered she was Most Improved in the Tar Heel Bowlerettes in the 1964-65 season, wearing the white and green shirt of Citizens Bank. We found autograph books and a West End High School diploma, in the days when she was a raven-haired beauty, and a steno pad of tender notes Dad wrote to her as he recovered from an operation that temporarily stilled his voice.

She let us learn from our mistakes when we were kids, and she respected our decisions when we were adults — even those she didn’t agree with. The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve appreciated that aspect of her parenting because not all mothers are that way.

Women had just gotten the right to vote a few years before Mom was born in Jackson Springs. She lived through the Great Depression, a world war, profound technological and societal change. About half of her life was lived in a segregated South. But in 2008, when she was recuperating from a back injury and was allowed to vote curbside from a car I was driving, I got to see her vote for our country’s first African-American president. Eight years later, she voted for a woman for the same office.

I got Mom an iPad for Christmas when she was 90, and teaching her the basics wasn’t easy. Despite the steep learning curve, she got the hang of it well enough to check email and check The Pilot’s website, although she still bought a print edition downtown on Sundays as long as she was able. Smartphones amazed her the most, all the things those tiny devices can do.

As private as she was, I think Mom might be happy I used mine to slyly record a voice memo of a conversation with her in December of 2016. According to the wizard inside the phone, it’s 10 minutes and 33 seconds long. One day, I’ll listen to it.  PS

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