World on a Shelf

An encyclopedia of adventure

By Bill Fields

I pulled a volume off a shelf in a spare room and placed it on a table in front of my mother. Red with blue, gold and gray accents and fraying corners, it is seven years older than I am.

The World Book Encyclopedia, 1952 edition. I didn’t go to kindergarten, but I had our World Books, 18 volumes of information and entertainment, early childhood education without realizing it.   

“They were a good investment,” said Mom, who couldn’t remember how much they cost on an installment plan those many years ago.

Whatever my parents paid for them, it was a fair price, and I think my mother has long forgiven me for the stray crayon marks and torn pages in the “Farm” and “Fire” entries.

For my older sisters and me, the World Books were a window to the world far beyond our neighborhood, our school, our community, our state — although once I could read and not just look at the pictures, I did get a charge out of the “North Carolina” entry and seeing Southern Pines, population 4,772, among the rundown of the Old North State’s cities and towns.

But the real joy was in discovering things I didn’t know — that would have been almost everything in elementary school and earlier — and there was something on nearly every page. Thanks to the World Books, a housefly wasn’t just a pest to swat but a creature whose body parts were diagrammed. “Thorax” remains one of my favorite words. Before I saw a live tadpole, I’d seen “Life Story Of The Frog” in the encyclopedia.

Much of the set was in black and white, which made the bright four-color maps of American states and foreign countries stand out and seem special. When I flew to Great Britain for the first time, in 1988, it was to a country I initially had seen in Volume 7 of our World Books, when the longest trip was in a car for a couple of hours to the beach. The encyclopedia’s maps triggered an early interest in geography. At filling stations in the days when they gave away highway maps, if one was on a shelf I could reach, I took it for my collection.

Some of the World Book maps look silly more than six decades later, freeze-dried coffee in a Keurig Cup era. There is no Soviet Union, and many countries in Africa have different names. To see the “French Indochina” entry that was published years before the Vietnam War is a jarring reminder of history.

Being fascinated by balls and games from the time I was a toddler, I pored over the sporting entries. The football helmets shown were leather and without facemasks in 1952, which had drastically changed by the early 1960s when I first started poking through the World Books. A football field, however, was 100 yards long then and now.

The same can’t be said for the “Golf” entry. The diagram showing “distances a very good player should get with various iron clubs” indicates a 5-iron going 150 yards, something that hasn’t been so for decades, thanks mostly to the construction of balls and clubs.

That golf chart was only one example of how the World Books presented information. A country would be superimposed on a map of the United States to show its relative size. A pie chart displayed the food elements in a grape. The leading tobacco states were denoted by illustrated rankings, North Carolina at the top of the heap! There was a two-page spread highlighting “French Literature” from the 1400s to the 1900s, something I bet my sisters looked at more than I did.

Along with school texts and library books, The Pilot and The Greensboro Daily News, the 1952 World Books were what I read until I was in the fourth grade and it was decided our encyclopedias needed to be updated. There was debate over whether we would stick with World Books or switch to Encyclopedia Britannica, sort of a Ford or Chevy thing.

I remember a saleslady coming to the house one night extolling the virtues of the 1968 World Books, handsomely covered in white and green. She was a good closer, and before long the original set had been retired. But never forgotten.  PS

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

Unwelcome Visitors

When ice storms coat the pines

By Bill Fields

Let’s face it, the winters aren’t very wintry in the Sandhills. The place never would have taken off if they were. Golf, horseback riding and walking down lanes that smell better than any candle are, at their essentials, ways of thawing out.

That said, anyone who experienced the ice storms of the late-1960s — there were doozies in January of ’68 and February of ’69 — hasn’t forgotten them. For those of us not around in 1954, they were our Hurricane Hazel. Each winter storm affected a large swath of the state, with the Southern Pines-Pinehurst area practically ground zero for an inch or more of freezing rain followed by significant snowfall.

It was a sadistic snow globe of precipitation, the weight turning pine trees into matchsticks and making power lines as weak as rotted twine.

The weather turned nasty after sunset during both storms, as I recall, which meant that you heard the damage before seeing it. There were a dozen or so longleafs in our yard, along with sycamores, maples and cedars. The neighbors had plenty of trees, too, with undeveloped acres across the street, ensuring that the snap, crackle and pop went on for hours as trunks and branches were overmatched by the elements, a number of them sabotaging electric cables as they crashed down.

My parents’ legitimate worries — and mine, as I struggled to go to sleep while Mother Nature wreaked havoc — about something big falling off and hitting the house were unrealized, but the morning light revealed a mess. Many trees that weren’t broken were bowed as if waiting for a giant archer, limbs and needles glistening in a gorgeous yet destructive coating of ice.

After our street was scouted for downed wires, the icy-snowy surface made for great sledding. The conditions outside were not ideal for our gray tabby, Linus, but that didn’t stop him, the night after the ’68 winter storm, from climbing a pine tree in our next-door neighbor’s front yard and ending up on an icy branch unwilling or unable to get down. 

Cats can make quite a sound if they’re in love or get their tail caught in a closing door, but trust me, the meow-howl-distress call of a domestic feline stranded 20 feet off the ground on a cold, frosty night is a singular noise. The following day, no number of familiar faces below him could coax Linus down from his perch. My father had to borrow from another neighbor an extension ladder, its rungs icy as well, to go up and rescue our cat. Linus warmed up, eventually. He lived out his days without repeating such drama but was never again enthusiastic about joining me at my summer hideaway on a lower branch of a dogwood on the east side of our yard.

If you’re 8 or 9 years old, a week without electricity is an adventure. A motel was contemplated but my father — hoping it would be a shorter outage and mindful that $19.95-a-night would add up — decided to purchase a kerosene oil heater to keep us from freezing if we huddled in just a couple of rooms. Despite a pungent smell, it allowed us to warm up soup and wieners and make grits for breakfast, the limited menu broken up by a few restaurant visits.

We went through a lot of D batteries in flashlights and radios. We read, played checkers and listened to basketball games. We paid particular attention to WEEB if there was an update about when the lights — and heat — might come back on.

As the outage continued, I became as eager as Mom and Dad for the electricity to be restored. We weren’t a camping family — my father had far too much of the real thing during World War II — and it was starting to feel like camping out. Our neighborhood lines were some of the last in town to be repaired, causing us to stay on the lookout for a Carolina Power & Light crew like it was a Brinks delivery with our name on it. Seven days after the winter storm arrived, the tool-belted CP&L linemen showed up in their bucket truck. As we were returned to the 20th century, we were as grateful to them as Linus had been to Dad.

It was a good long while before we had hot dogs for supper.  PS

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

Sweat Show

The Kiwi Roll ain’t hors d’oeuvres

By Bill Fields

Wrestling, the real kind, never appealed to me.

When we were forced to try it during physical education class at middle school, the mats could have used lots of Lysol. The moves were always a mystery. I didn’t know the difference between a Fireman’s Carry and a Double-Leg Takedown, and despite the best efforts of Coach Wynn, I never wanted to know. Other than when the dreaded pommel horse and parallel bars appeared, it was the only time I hated changing into gym clothes. 

For every Dan Gable grappling for Olympic glory for the United States, there seemed to be a lot more fellows like my unfortunate friend in high school, who, being on the small side, was recruited as a Pinecrest sophomore to wrestle in the lightest class. But he often struggled to make weight, and running down the aisle of a hot bus wearing a plastic suit while spitting into a bucket en route to a match at Lumberton wasn’t my idea of a good time.

Wrestling, the other kind, was a different story.

I am not ashamed to admit that I loved the professional version, the faces and the heels of this wacky world as essential a part of my television entertainment when I was a young teenager in the early to mid-1970s as Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart and re-runs of The Andy Griffith Show or Dragnet.

Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling was on WRAL-TV 5 at 11:30 on Saturday nights. The shows, taped in the Raleigh studio earlier in the week, were hosted by Bob Caudle, a weatherman at the station in his day job. “Hello, wrestling fans,” Caudle said at the start of every broadcast, the signal that it was time to settle in on the couch with a Coke and some potato chips.

With my mother gone to sleep and my policeman-father off to work the overnight shift, I had an hour with a familiar cast of characters: Johnny Weaver, Jerry Brisco, The Missouri Mauler, Argentina Apollo, Swede Hanson, Brute Bernard, Nelson Royal, Nikita Koloff, Krusher Karlson, Rip Hawk, Paul Jones, Bearcat Wright, and El Gaucho.

There was a former NFL player, Wahoo McDaniel; brother teams of Gene/Ole Anderson and George/Sandy Scott; wrestling giants Man Mountain Mike and Haystacks Calhoun, who weighed more than 600 pounds. One of my favorites was New Zealander Abe Jacobs, in his mid-30s and an undercard wrestler in the latter part of his career. Jacobs’ trademark hold was the “Kiwi Roll,” in which he would lock legs with his opponent, rolling around in a circle applying pressure to the ankle until the writhing foe gave up. Lots of guys performed the Suplex or Piledriver, or whip-sawed someone hard into a turnbuckle, but Jacobs’ signature submission move was unique, the Fosbury Flop without any following suit.

Regardless of who was wrestling on a given Saturday evening, the soundtrack was the same — the stomping of boots and slamming of bodies on the elevated canvas mat interrupted by shouts from a small audience in the studio bleachers, narrated by Caudle and a sidekick. I never mulled how much was fake or if everything was. Until NBC’s Saturday Night Live debuted in the fall of 1975, it was what I wanted to watch on television late on a weekend night.

Despite my loyalty, I never could persuade my father to write in for tickets to a Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling taping at Channel 5. We never went to the Greensboro Coliseum or Dorton Arena to see the spectacle in person either. Once, though, pro wrestling did come to the Armory on Morganton Road. Tickets were cheap, and Dad agreed to take me.

We sat in metal folding chairs, the variety of which villain manager Homer O’Dell used to surprise-whack a rival on TV as Caudle was doing an interview. If  Jacobs was there and Kiwi-Rolled anyone, I don’t remember. It was loud, with plenty of yelling.

My lasting memory of the matches is of a town tough a handful of years older than me who jumped on the ring apron, agitated and ready to rassle. He deserved to be sat on by Man Mountain Mike but instead was restrained and led away, screaming, told, no doubt, that he was not part of the show.  PS

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

Special Sandhills Delivery

Remembering the happiest week of the year

By Bill Fields

A plastic rocking horse was as close as I ever came to getting a pony for Christmas, which is not to say Santa Claus didn’t deliver.

He was as reliable as a birthday, whether we had spoken at Collins Department Store in Aberdeen, at a gathering in the Sunrise Theater for the children of Proctor-Silex workers, or somewhere in Sanford on an out-of-town trip. It didn’t matter if his weight was down or his beard was spotty or his footwear looked more like cheap galoshes than proper North Pole fashion.

I gave him a list, and he gave me a candy cane. But during the weeks leading up to Christmas, the anticipation was sweeter than any treat.

There was no internet in the 1960s, of course, no method where a world of toys and sporting goods was within a few swipes or keystrokes. But there was no shortage of ways for a kid to discover what was out there, what to pine for.

In the run-up to Christmas, the content of commercials on the Saturday morning cartoons shifted from breakfast to playtime, from Frosted Flakes to G.I. Joe. Other things we could see up close, too. I had read most of Great Quarterbacks of the NFL on a shelf in The Country Bookshop before I got it as a gift. I don’t think my parents ever grasped my fascination with a pair of genuine Wilson wristbands at Patch’s Tog Shop. I kept going back to the electronics aisle at the Western Auto, where a reel-to-reel tape recorder seemed like the neatest thing in the world. Stopping in a Sky City discount store while visiting relatives during the holidays offered a wide look at athletic gear, including individual golf clubs that were my start in the game.

No place, though, was better than Aberdeen 5 and 10, which had a back room called “Toyland” open during holiday season and was full of Tonka trucks, board games of every stripe and Daisy B-B guns — the kind of things for which the money from an allowance and doing chores would never be enough.

That well-stocked dime store was as close as it got to seeing the Sears Wish Book come to life. It was this annual catalog of What-Seemed-Like-Everything that, once it arrived on the heels of Halloween, I pored over until the pages were crinkled, favorite items circled in Magic Marker. His baseball days over, I knew Ted Williams from the Sears book as a pitchman for the company’s fishing and hunting equipment.

How smart Santa Claus must have been, given that he was likely relying on a folding map from a filling station not designed for a presbyopic old fellow. But in a town full of streets named for states up north, he always found mine, regardless if — for my family — it had been a year of college tuition, car repairs or a stove that unexpectedly went on the blink.

Santa’s visits were always comfortably complete. He never forgot to fill the red felt stockings with our green-glittered names, and there was a thrill in dumping out the contents to discover a 19-cent ballpoint pen, a few new marbles or a ChapStick. There would be bags of candy, fruit and nuts under the tree, more than we’d see the other 364 days of the year — Hershey’s Kisses and thin mints, navel oranges and tangerines, whole walnuts, pecans and Brazil nuts.

After a morning of savoring what Santa had brought — his presents were never wrapped — the afternoon was about sharing with the other kids in the neighborhood. It was the best kind of Show-and-Tell, as long as a Super Ball didn’t go down the storm drain or the Twister mat didn’t get torn during its maiden game. No toy ever quite lived up to its billing on TV or a catalog listing. Some came close, including the tape recorder that Santa splurged on. But if someone can tell me today how to make an Electric Football runner dart for a long gain instead of moving in a wobbly circle, I’m all ears.

A real football game, the Orange Bowl, signaled the sad end of the school break. As a new year started, though, we were fueled not only by citrus but a bit of magic that lasted longer than any toy. PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north 30 years ago but hasn’t lost his accent.

Landslide

Memories of a campaign that fired up a budding journalist

By Bill Fields

The 1972 election is remembered mostly as a snoozefest because of the landslide victory by incumbent President Richard Nixon over George McGovern, but it woke up an eighth-grader to politics.

I had paid only sporadic attention earlier. I remember the sadness when my mother told me at the breakfast table that Robert F. Kennedy had died after being shot during the 1968 campaign, when we later had a mock election in fourth grade. I recall having a Bob Scott For Governor button and seeing a rare Eugene McCarthy bumper sticker on a car in Southern Pines, where my parents voted at the firehouse precinct on East New Hampshire. That same year, of course, with the Vietnam War and civil rights on the front burner, Jesse Helms was in peak form delivering his conservative editorials at the conclusion of the WRAL Channel 5 television news broadcast, spewed nightly since the year after my birth.

Four years later, as my interests broadened from the sports section to include the real world, I devoured what political news I could get. That meant the Greensboro Daily News that arrived in our yard each morning and forays to the town library to look at The New York Times. One of the Times’ political columnists, Tom Wicker, I would learn later, was born and raised in Hamlet and graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill.

Some Sundays, I settled down in front of Lawrence Spivak on “Meet the Press” and more closely watched the “CBS Evening News” with Walter Cronkite. Scanning the AM dial on winter evenings looking for basketball games from faraway cities, I paused for reports from primaries in New Hampshire or Iowa.

What really fired up my political passion was the presence downtown of the local Democratic and Republican party offices, each of which rented space on or near Broad Street. Although my views had already begun to lean far away from Helms — if he was Manteo, I was Murphy — I was an equal opportunity collector, taking any button or bumper sticker the volunteers for either side would let me have.

Making return visits, I rounded up what I could until realizing that the people manning the offices weren’t too keen on someone who wouldn’t be old enough to vote for a couple of elections hoarding their stuff. The folks were generous enough, though, that I created my own campaign corner in my bedroom, the buttons with their sharp pins and stickers with their pungent smell taking over my bulletin board, new teams to follow in a larger league.

Election Day, Nov. 7, 1972, was quite a day for the GOP. Nixon routed McGovern, winning everywhere except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. Helms, parlaying the recognition and support from his decade-plus on TV, defeated Democrat Nick Galifianakis for a United States Senate seat in North Carolina. With Scott unable to run because of term limits, Republican James Holshouser beat Hargrove “Skipper” Bowles for N.C. governor.

My immediate impressions of Nixon’s lopsided victory came from the Greensboro paper and the network news shows. “Nixon Wins Re-Election In Landslide,” the large, eight-column headline on the front page blared on Nov. 8. Wicker, acknowledging the rout and trying to look on the bright side, wrote in his Times “In the Nation” column on Nov. 9: “Those of us who have most seriously questioned Mr. Nixon in his first term and in his re-election campaign are all but compelled by the size of his victory to assume the best from him now.”

Like lots of aspiring journalists, before too long I would immerse myself in two books about the campaign: The Boys on the Bus, by Timothy Crouse, and Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, by Hunter S. Thompson. Although Crouse’s book in particular skewered the rise of pack journalism, those were glory days for print journalism, and newspaper ink was an intoxicating thing.

During college at Carolina, several of us in an advanced reporting class got to huddle with Wicker over a few Heinekens at Harrison’s bar on a Friday afternoon. It was a fascinating couple of hours with a legend generous with his time and his stories, an opportunity that a boy far from a press bus couldn’t have imagined.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north 30 years ago but hasn’t lost his accent.

Memories on Wheels

Sometimes there’s nothing basic about transportation

By Bill Fields

I never paid too much attention to four-leaf clovers or cracks in the sidewalk, but once, playing Kreskin’s ESP at a neighbor’s house in 1969, the “mystery pendulum” made a prediction the famous mentalist would have been proud of.

Many years later I’m not sure what I really think about “extra sensitive perception,” as Barney Fife called it. That particular Sunday afternoon, though, gave me a reason to believe.

With a notable exception of stranding us in Tabor City when it broke down returning from the beach one time, our well-traveled Plymouth station wagon — which took my parents to their jobs and my sisters to college — remained reliable transportation. There had been no talk around our kitchen table about getting a new car, no inkling of the possibility. When the board game said otherwise, it seemed as outlandish as forecasting I would be one of the tallest, fastest boys in fifth grade.

In less than two weeks, I was getting into a ’69 Ford Fairlane 500 with my dad as he drove it off the lot at Jackson Motors in Pinedene. At that point, if Kreskin had said Brooks Robinson was going to come to town and spend a week teaching me how to play third base, I would have believed him.

It was a beautiful automatic transmission (Cruise-O-Matic) automobile, a four-door sedan the lightest of blue, the color of the Tar Heels before television demanded a bit darker hue so the uniform numbers would stand out. It had comfortable and roomy bench seats. It had a large trunk. It had seat belts!

The Fairlane carried us to Florida for the first time, and on the way back stopped at Six Flags Over Georgia. It idled in heavy traffic in Atlanta and pulled over for a scenic vista on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

At different times, the Fairlane smelled like Salems, chili dogs, Brut 33, a stringer full of farm-pond bream, Juicy Fruit and the sweat of 36 holes on a July day.

I got my driver’s license in that car in 1975. I picked my mother up at her bank job, in the winter, when the sun set early, tuning in WABC New York while I waited for her in a parking space on Broad Street. I drove it to junior golf tournaments in Henderson and Myrtle Beach, to my senior prom via the JFR Barn, when gas was 69 cents a gallon.

Mom and Dad loaded me and my belongings in August of 1977 and took me to college in Chapel Hill, to my room in Old West. Less than three years later, I was behind the wheel driving south toward home with my tears and my sport coat for Dad’s end game with cancer.

The Fairlane went to Stoneybrook, Carolina Cougars’ games, a Supertramp concert, the GGO, North Carolina Motor Speedway and to Atlantic Beach in the wee hours, when that seemed like the perfect call one spring night senior year in college.

I never got a ticket in the Fairlane, but once, exiting Pinecrest High School in a long line of cars, I had to be at my most persuasive to convince a highway patrolman I was not the idiot tossing firecrackers out the window.

In the summer of 1981, after graduating from Carolina and setting out into the real world, it seemed like the time was right to move on from the Fairlane that had served so well. It was a dozen years old and had about 115,000 miles on it. There were nicks on the back bumper from changing into golf spikes in parking lots. The paint was corroded at the driver-side window, so often did my father rest his arm there.

From the same lot that had been home to the Fairlane before our very unexpected purchase, in what had become Bill Smith Ford, I bought a white Escort that would be mine for a decade. After spritzing the Fairlane and vacuuming the interior at the self-serve car wash, I drove it to the house of man near West End who had answered my classified.

I got $300 from the sale but still felt kind of empty getting rid of a car that had grown old as I grew up.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north 30 years ago but hasn’t lost his accent.

All Dressed Up

A boy, a dinner jacket and a new chapter in life

By Bill Fields

Late in the afternoon on Saturday, Sept. 3, 1966, I had a small part in a wonderful event. A very small part.

I was, like the mums, gladioli and snapdragons in the sanctuary of the First Baptist Church, a decorative touch.

When you’re getting married and have a 7-year-old brother — as was the case with my sister Dianne — you make him a junior usher, a role as vital as being a lifeguard in a parking lot. The groom, Bob, had a much younger sibling (named Bill, too), who also was enlisted for this non-essential duty. So the two of us, in dinner jackets like the rest of the males in the wedding party, gave no one a program and helped no one to his seat.

It was the best standing-around I’ve ever done.

The occasion had been a couple of years in the making, since Dianne and Bob met while students at Wake Forest College. She was a Spanish major, and he was studying biochemistry, which would underpin his esteemed career as a scientist-professor. They are both smart as a whip, with kind hearts, his patience balancing her energy.

It is difficult for me to remember Dianne without Bob because I was so young when they began dating. During their courtship, when Bob came to visit in Southern Pines, I’m sure I occasionally was 4 feet and 60 pounds of pain-in-the-neck when I sneaked up with a water pistol or begged them to come outside and shoot baskets. Any ambivalence about Bob becoming part of the family ended when he gave me my first Matchbox car, a red Ferrari, that made the cheap, tiny metal cars I bought at Pope’s dime store look like true clunkers.

The details from the Summer of the Wedding are hazy, but I remember lots of activity and conversation. The cake was made by Mrs. Bristow, whose house was out on the May Street extension north of town. I knew about “taffy” but wondered what was this “taffeta” that the dresses for the maid of honor (my other sister, Sadie) and the bridesmaids were made of. They were basically Carolina Blue, so whatever the material, that made me happy.

When the big weekend arrived, our house was full of cousins and anticipation. Months earlier the Fields clan had met the Broyles clan in Winston-Salem, a summit of familiarization and approval. The groom’s parents, who lived in West Virginia, put on the rehearsal dinner the eve of the wedding in a private room at Howard Johnson’s in Aberdeen, where the opportunity to have a hamburger and fries chased with an orange Fanta was about all for which a second-grader could hope.

My sister has recalled a sweet moment when she and my father were about to walk down the aisle, toward the altar and a new chapter in her life, and given the flood of emotions wondered if they both could make it. Arm in arm, they did, of course. It was a beautiful ceremony in that small, simple structure on the corner of New York and Ashe that sadly was torn down years ago when the church moved into a larger facility. The vows were followed by cake and punch in the basement fellowship hall that was the junior ushers’ favorite part of the day, followed closely by the throwing of the rice.

Dianne and Bob honeymooned at Fontana Village in western North Carolina. I have a remnant of their trip within arm’s reach on my desk as I type this — the painted stone head of a souvenir tomahawk they brought back for me. They also gifted me a Fontana Dam T-shirt with a cartoon of a bear on the front. I’m wearing it in one of our family’s favorite pictures, all of us posing on a couch suppressing a mighty group giggle.

No marriage is all laughs, but Dianne and Bob have had lots of them in five decades together, a union that has produced two children and two grandchildren, a union that is an example of living well.

It was an honor to be there at the starting line.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north 30 years ago but hasn’t lost his accent.

Beating the Heat

The endless battle with the Dog Days

By Bill Fields

We had a long list of defenses against the heat in the years before air conditioning — things to drink, eat or do — but moving into the last leg of an oppressive Sandhills summer they worked about as well as a fly swatter on a swarm of yellowjackets.

No matter how cold the Kool-Aid or TruAde, how juicy the watermelon or how still you could sit in the shade with a damp washcloth on the back of your neck, as the hot months continued there was a cumulative toll on the counter-measures.

Statistically, July has always been hotter than August by a little bit in Southern Pines, although the highest recorded temperature in North Carolina is 110 degrees, in Fayetteville, on August 21, 1983. By then, of course, central air wasn’t as foreign as Central America.

Growing up, given the swelter that usually had been endured since school let out, by the end of the Dog Days in early August it didn’t matter if the high was 88 instead of 91. It was still humid. Even the prettiest girls weren’t glowing, they were sweating. When he wasn’t working, Dad lived in his Bermuda shorts and white T-shirt, even if the latter didn’t have a pocket for his cigarettes.

There were the lakes (Aberdeen, Badin, White), but those were for special occasions and there could be complications. A kind but directionally challenged neighbor once allowed me to slip into the back seat with his kids for a trip to White Lake, but after several hours and what turned out to be very wrong turns in his Delta 88, we were amid the bars and pawn shops of Spring Lake nowhere close to the clear waters we were shooting for.

We eventually made it to White Lake that day for a brief swim, the whole adventure in sharp contrast to our usual water sport of running under a sprinkler in the yard, activity that was guaranteed to end with taking sand spurs out of your feet. Before my parents splurged and bought a small, aluminum-sided pool that looked like a large yellow can, my friends and I improvised. We dug a large pit and lined it with a spare plastic tarp, believing it would hold water and provide us with a private swimming hole. Fortunately, none of us later tried to become engineers.

I knew two window fans very well. One was old when I was young, its blades within a wooden housing with yardstick-like metal bars on the front, a few of which had gone missing in its lifetime. The other was more modern, a three-speeder whose high setting sounded like it could get a small plane aloft. Compared to the industrial-strength models you saw at the service station or feed store that were mounted on a tall stand and oscillated like the head of an attentive prison guard, ours were meager fans. But late at night, without a shirt or a top sheet, you’d talk yourself into believing they were doing some good.

Being in an air-conditioned space felt like a holiday. The best part of a night in a motel room on a rare summer road trip wasn’t the color television, the sani-wrapped glasses or even an honest-to-goodness pool, but an air conditioner you could crank up as much as you wanted. The food at Hoskins, our favorite place to eat on vacations to Ocean Drive, was matched by the restaurant’s chilled air that took the edge off a sunburn and made you feel, for an hour or so, that you were living large.

I remember when air conditioning came to our home in the form of a large window unit from Sears in the summer of 1974. Placed in a window on the east side of the house in the living room, it was powerful enough to cool the downstairs, although I was cautioned to keep it on low, lest the electric bill soar.

On the evening of August 8, 1974, when Richard Nixon, under so much heat, said he was resigning the presidency the next day, we watched on TV in the newly purchased cool. Summer, like a lot of things, was different.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north thirty years ago but hasn’t lost his accent or his ability to stay cool.