Hometown

Beach Time

Skee-Ball, rafts and sandy feet

By Bill Fields

During a Southern childhood, “the beach” can be one syllable, just as “milk” can be two, the former taking its pronunciation from attitude, not accent.

In my case, I hurried to say it because I couldn’t wait to get there. Once the races — in Charlotte and Indianapolis — were over on Memorial Day weekend, the countdown would begin to whatever summer week or extended weekend had been designated for vacation.

Years before Bruce Springsteen sang of his Highway 9, we traveled South Carolina’s version through the rural coastal plain, the little towns we passed en route — Lake View, Nichols, Green Sea, Loris and Longs — populating the two-lane road like charms on a dime-store bracelet.

A few hours after setting out from Moore County, following hot dog and bathroom pit stops, we would near the coastline. We made a sport of who could see the water first, usually after cresting a gentle hill into Ocean Drive, the sighting a prelude of fun to come.

Ocean Drive was our go-to destination many summers. Some of the best weeks were spent at a cottage a couple of blocks inland, a gentle walk to the strand even with an inflatable raft on my back. The house, which we rented from another Southern Pines family, had a screened-in porch between the kitchen/den on one side and bedrooms on the other. It got bonus points for also being a short stroll from Hoskins Restaurant, whose fried seafood and hushpuppies defined the category.

If not the Daniels’s rental house, we stayed in one of Ocean Drive’s beachfront family-owned motels, falling asleep to the sound of surf or the whir of a window air conditioner, the manufactured cool a blessing on days we stayed in the sun too long and needed something to augment a generous application of Noxzema.

Looking for a bargain, Dad twice failed badly with our lodging arrangements, locating us in a tired and musty trailer in Windy Hill once and another time in a forlorn Carolina Beach cottage whose beds were sized for elves. He made up nicely for those mistakes, though, arranging the last several trips of my teenage years for us to stay at the Christina, a tidy motel across the street from the Cherry Grove Pier.

Wherever we stayed — the motels sadly all long since razed for condo construction — other  vacation ingredients were as constant as a bottle of Coppertone and its scent of leisure. We played Putt-Putt, Bingo and Skee-Ball, ate Painter’s ice cream and Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and rode a Ferris wheel whose safety bar never seemed that safe.

We used beach chairs that marked our thighs with the imprint of the nylon webbing if we sat too long. Cherry snow cones purchased from a strand vendor were refreshment in the heat. Dad invariably floated too far out in the surf for Mom’s comfort, distracting her from a Family Circle as she intently watched him bob beyond the breakers. But he loved the ocean as much as I did, the salt water soothing to a skin condition on his left foot contracted during the war that flared up every so often.

I didn’t have to twist Dad’s arm to get him to fish at the beach — each of us equipped with lightweight Zebcos better suited for a farm pond — but he didn’t yield easily to buying bloodworms over shrimp for bait, despite their effectiveness in attracting spot, croaker or whiting. Regardless of what we were casting off a pier, Dad and I were minor players compared with the serious fishermen at the far end going for king mackerel or shark with rigs out of The American Sportsman.

I loved it when I got old enough to be allowed to go out on a pier at night, alone, whether or not I had my fishing gear. Sitting on a bench away from the glare of a pole-mounted light wondering about the folks who carved their initials in the worn wood, there was a mystery that made it seem I wasn’t just in another state but another world.

Way too soon, in a sandy, sad car, with some trinkets purchased at the Gay Dolphin and won at the arcade, we would head home, vacation over until next time. Dad didn’t usually dawdle on the road, but on those return trips it seemed he worked in an extra stop, intent on making the beach last a little longer.  PS

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

Hometown

A Sweet Ride

On the road to the big 6-0

By Bill Fields

During a hectic season of business travel — I’ve been to Florida so much I think convenience stores everywhere stock flip-flops — it hasn’t hit me yet but I’m sure it will.

My birthday will arrive and I’ll feel like one of those fast cars in a 1970s commercial — zero to 60 before you can believe it.

It shouldn’t feel like a surprise, because what they tell you is true: The older you get, the more the calendar seems like it’s on speed.

I remember the friends, balloons and food from 50. I can give you the birdies and bogeys from a round of golf on my 40th birthday. Even the festivities of number 18 are clear, despite a couple too many newly legal beverages.

Veteran tip: Do not accept the offer of late-night Champagne from a well-meaning classmate celebrating a milestone of her own with friends — who came into the world on a May day at St. Joseph’s while I was being born at Moore Memorial — after draining the beer taps in the 28387. Happy Birthday, Beth Huntley, wherever you are. I forgive you.

I also forgive author Fred Kaplan for omitting my birth in his book, 1959: The Year Everything Changed, published a decade ago. After all, there was a lot going on — the Space Race was on the first lap, and the Cold War was getting hot. Two months before I was born, Texas Instruments introduced the solid integrated circuit, the microchip. When I was four months old, International Business Machines unveiled the modern computer.

As Kaplan writes, lots of wheels in different parts of society began turning rapidly in 1959, setting the stage for dramatic shifts in the 1960s and beyond. My arrival was upheaval aplenty for my family, a big deal even though I weighed in at canned-ham size, a shade over 5 pounds, when Dr. Michael Pishko delivered me into a changing world. The attending nurse was Mrs. Luna Black, mother of sons Clyde and Marcus with whom I went through school.

Mom saved my hospital baby ID bracelet that kept me from going home to Robbins or Raeford. It looks like a crafts project created by a patient someone who likes tiny things, with itty-bitty blue beads and my last name in white beads, on a short string that will just circle my ring finger now.

My sisters were 12 1/2 and 14 1/2 years old at the time, with Johnny Mathis and Bobby Darin 45s to spin and wool skirts to sew. But from the moment my father came into the Southern Pines school cafeteria to give them the big news after my 10:42 a.m. birth on May 25, Sadie and Dianne loved me and cared for me, even when they would have rather been downtown with their pals having a fountain Coke at the drug store on Broad Street.

I might have gotten to 60 without the support of my family and friends, but it would have been a harder ride with less joy, a journey I don’t wish to contemplate. I’m lucky to have my mother still, even though seeing her diminished is hard. Yet I miss my dad, who didn’t quite make it to 60, and wonder what more years would have given him — and us.

Would he have ever talked about the war? What would he have thought about New York City? Would he have liked craft beer? Late in his life, when they were finally empty nesters, Mom told me, Dad talked of an RV in retirement, of seeing more of the country. When I’ve ventured to a new state — 48 now, lacking only North Dakota and Alaska — each trip has been at least a little bit for him, the man who finally got a son.

On this birthday, more than most, he will be a candle that can’t be blown out. PS

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

Hometown

Tasty Days

A sweet trip down cola lane

By Bill Fields

Like many people, I’m trying not to drink many soft drinks these days. I have an occasional Coke Zero at a Sunday matinee. Earlier this year, while on the mend from a stomach bug, I don’t think I’ve had any ginger ale that tasted better. On a recent business trip south of the border, I sampled a Mexican soda of the variety I’ve observed in coolers, but not consumed, from my favorite neighborhood haunt that has the world’s best breakfast burritos.

These are diversions from the water norm, tap or sparkling, but it wasn’t always that way.

I saw a social media post recently about “113 Things ’60s Kids Did That Would Horrify Us Now.” OK, it wasn’t quite that many, but you get the point: We’re basically lucky to have survived childhood because we played unsupervised, rode without being seat-belted or helmeted, and walked to school alone. 

Among the things we also did was drink soft drinks, and I was among the guilty. A pie chart of my childhood beverages would be sweet — and not only because of the iced tea and orange juice that augmented all the milk I drank at supper.

Certainly, drinks were smaller back then. It didn’t make much sense to guzzle a 6 1/2-ounce Coke, because it wouldn’t last very long. A 10-ounce bottle of Pepsi seemed big. Splurging for a 12-ounce fountain drink at the drug store was an event. When quart-size colas with resealable caps started appearing on the Big Star shelves, they marked a massive step in carbonation evolution, a hint of Big Gulps to come.

I was a cola kid raised without strong allegiance to either of the behemoth bottlers. It was as if Carolina and Duke are both good schools, and Democrats and Republicans are both good people. I occasionally joined the RC Cola camp, that flavor being a favorite on comic-book runs to the Ideal Market on May Street.

For a succession of beach vacations, to the justifiable annoyance of other family members, I was obsessed with a brand called Topp Cola sold at the grocery store on Ocean Drive that was not available in the Sandhills. There are pictures of me posing on the Strand with a Topp can looking as happy as if I’d just hit for the cycle in a Little League game.

I moved on from my Topp phase, with other tastes taking its place. If Dad was in the mood for something stronger than beer during the holidays and had stocked some Collins Mixer, I pestered him until he let me have some of the bubbly lemon-juice soda. Wink was like an explosion of grapefruit flavor, and when he kept that around as a mixer I’d sneak a sip of that too.

Yoo-hoo always seemed like a poor imitation of chocolate milk, but I’d get one from a drink machine on a gas station bathroom stop. I was equally indifferent about Cheerwine, despite its North Carolina roots. It tried its hardest as a cherry soda, but if I was going that flavor route, I preferred a fountain cherry Coke or a cherry Sno-Cone.

TruAde was the best, though. Trademarked 80 years ago, the orange soft drink stood out from everything else because it was pasteurized and non-carbonated. It tasted so smooth and so good because it contained orange juice concentrate, which was the reason for the special processing. The temptation was to chug a 7-ounce bottle. But I savored every sip when I got one when Dad took me fishing at a local pond or ordered me a TruAde when he stopped for a late-afternoon beer at a tavern downtown on Connecticut Avenue and let me tag along once in a while.

Five years ago, driving through Cheraw, South Carolina, en route to Southern Pines, I stopped at a convenience store for something to drink. In the beverage cooler was a name I hadn’t seen for decades — TruAde. It felt like coming upon a Topp Cola at the beach in 1968.

This TruAde was in a 20-ounce plastic bottle, and unfortunately the packaging wasn’t the only thing that had changed from the TruAde of my youth. I drank about a fourth of it and threw the rest away, realizing I would have to be content with a sweet memory.  PS

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

Hometown

Roses are Red, Violets are Blue

Here’s a cheesy Valentine just for you

By Bill Fields

Best guess, they’re from third grade, half a century ago, when my loves were basketball, hamburgers and lightning bugs.

The envelope of Valentine’s cards wasn’t dated, but the greetings contain clues. Most telling is that a few of my classmates wrote their names or mine in cursive. It was a skill we were just learning. And you can sense the effort — intent look, pursed lips, tilted head at the kitchen table the night before — that went into every loop whether the writing was in pencil, pen or felt tip.

In some cases the penmanship, however labored, was better than the spelling. “To Bill Fills,” wrote one friend. Because I was someone who for the longest time thought people were saying “up and atom” when it was really “up and at ’em,” I should cast no stones. (But we were still ducking and covering, and there was an ominous bomb shelter sign at the cafeteria entrance.)

It was a very good time for puns, as indicated by my couple of dozen surviving cards, on which various creatures were utilized in the messaging.

“Valentine, you’re a Honey. Please BEE Mine.”

“I’d really Hoot and H’Owl if you’d be MY VALENTINE.”

“Ostrich your heart — to Include Me!”

“BeCows I Like You, Be Mine!”

Even if animals weren’t part of a pun they often were part of a card.

“You’re my Candidate for a perfect Valentine!” proclaimed a mouse.

“Wanted: Your Heart!” shouted a skunk.

“VALENTINE, I’m NUTS about you!” pledged a squirrel.

A number of the cards weren’t signed but others were. I received greetings from Becky, Bess, Billy, Bobby, Christine, Don, Eddie, Jeff, Jo, Katy, Lynn, Mark, Pat and Randy.

Some, I see on Facebook. Some, I know have passed away. Some, I have no idea.

Their names make me think of water fountains and blackboards, tetherball and teeter-totter, milk cartons and lunch boxes. I wonder if the unsigned cards were from other classmates or my leftovers.

We were very young, 9 years old or soon to be, on Valentine’s Day 1968, doing our best to absorb the lessons from our teacher, Peggy Blue, in reading, arithmetic, spelling and social studies.

For me, it’s possible it has been all downhill since the third grading period of third grade, when Miss Blue commented on my report card, “A fine student in all areas. Good thinker. Splendid manners.” Or, perhaps I merely threw no spitballs and banged the erasers against a pine tree at the end of the day when Miss Blue asked me. I will take credit for showing up regularly — only one day absent and no tardies.

Back then, there weren’t many burdens on a third-grader. Whatever happened in the classroom, there was ball to play after school and television to watch after homework: Family Affair, Bewitched, Lost in Space and Batman.

Not that Valentine’s Day wasn’t without pressure or consequences, because there were clearly choices to be made about the bag of cards each of us had bought at the dime store to distribute to our classmates.

There simply was no way that a tiny cat-head card that said “You’re Nice!” ranked with a larger card of a scuba diver and two inscribed hearts, the top saying “Deep in My Heart I Want You,” the bottom reading “To Be My Valentine!” amid a backdrop of blue water and sea life — plus another tiny heart stuck by his air tank.

Likewise, receiving a 6-inch-tall, violin-playing clown saying “You Play on the Strings of my heart Valentine! Be Mine” pretty much meant that kid liked you. And can there be any doubt about the affection expressed in this card: a skydiver floating to Earth on a heart-shaped parachute asking, “May I Land on Your Heart?”

Jo won the day if not the boy. PS

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

Hometown

Pa and the Fish

Reaching back to the 19th century

By Bill Fields

I love to ask people what year my maternal grandfather was born. It is a straightforward question, but no one has ever come within 25 years of a correct answer.

People often say 1900, 1910 or 1920. I’ve gotten responses ranging from 1890 to 1930, the latter making me think the respondent is worse than I am at math. As a clue, I’ll tell them when I came into the world. That doesn’t help either. 

No one has come close to pegging his birth year, 1861. 

B.L. Henderson was born a couple of weeks before the Civil War began that spring. He lived nearly half of his life in the 19th century, when gold was being mined in his native Montgomery County.

To be fair, I used to get his history wrong too — but in a different way. “Pa,” as his children and grandchildren called him, was said to have been born March 28, 1860. His simple gravestone in Jackson Springs, where he lived the last third of his life, says so. So does his obituary from the summer of 1954, five years before my birth.

But my grandfather and his twin sister aren’t listed in the 1860 U.S. Census conducted in the summer of that year. They show up in later surveys done every decade with ages indicating they were born in 1861. 

People have a hard time believing it. I did as well, even though I knew B.L. was in his 40s and my grandmother, Daisy, was in her teens when they married in 1908, and that he was 62 when my mother was born. 

A man born when my grandfather was had a life expectancy of about 40 years, but if someone could avoid the diseases that took people young, you could live a long life like he did. He was lucky. 

Growing up, I knew him as the man with the big fish. There was an 8×10 picture on my mother’s wall of a white-haired gentleman holding a largemouth bass, pipe in his mouth and cane pole over his shoulder. One of Mom’s memories is going fishing with him and being nervous when he stood up in the rowboat, but there was never a man overboard. 

When I got older, I was less fascinated by the lunker bass he had caught than the hair — white yet plentiful — he still had as an old man given what they say about heredity and hair loss. As I near my grandfather’s age at the time my Mom was born, so far, so good. 

The photo of Pa as an elderly fisherman is one of the few fragments of information I know about him. He worked on his family’s farm and later owned a sawmill, which would have made him a “catch” for Ma-Ma. He eventually owned a filling station down the hill from his home. (I don’t know for sure, but suspect he also might have spent some time at the Henderson gold mine in his home community of Eldorado.)

I have a couple of his possessions: a railroad pocket watch I’d bet he was carrying when he proudly posed with that bass; a token for one dollar in merchandise from his business in Ellerbe (though the town name is missing an “l” on the half-dollar sized coin); a tin shaving cup with a dirigible painted on the side. 

The items are as close to him as I will get. My older sisters were alive for Pa’s last years but have scant memories. Dianne recalls being in his home after his death, Pa’s body in the parlor for viewing as was still custom in those days. 

“Touch his forehead so you won’t have dreams about him,” an adult advised her.

She didn’t touch him, and I don’t dream about him. Yet I think about him often. And the older I get, I can see a bit of myself in the fisherman with a pipe.  PS

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

Hometown

Citizen’s Arrest, Citizen’s Arrest

Finding a key to the past

By Bill Fields

After a lifetime of watching Barney Fife — and more to the point, laughing at his foibles — I was beyond due.

Not too long ago, I think the lovable but bumbling deputy left Mayberry and drove the squad car to Southern Pines. And once he arrived, he was intent on making me pay up.

I should have been viewing a rerun of The Andy Griffith Show instead of having the channel on MSNBC and Lawrence O’Donnell, but Barney still had the last word.

It had been a long day — sweaty and muscle-achy tiring — of lifting and sorting, saving this and tossing that as my sisters and I emptied the old homestead. We combed through stuff at the house that had been tucked away for many years.

Some of the items had belonged to our father, who passed away in 1980 after a work life of various pursuits but that, in his last decade, had been in law enforcement. As a policeman and deputy sheriff in the 1970s, Dad accordingly had the tools of the trade.

Arriving home at the end of a shift, he would remove his duty belt just like the Cartwrights did when they stepped inside the front door of the Ponderosa. Off came his service revolver in its holster, a case with extra .38 caliber bullets, lead-filled leather sap and handcuffs.

I hadn’t seen any of those items in nearly 40 years but there, in a drawer undisturbed for nearly as long — along with a desk caddy containing pictures of his grandchildren, cufflinks, tie clips and loose change — something shiny glinted from the bottom.

At first I thought it might be one of his PaperMate ballpoint pens — he always carried two in his shirt pocket when setting out on an eight-hour shift — a shoehorn, cigarette lighter or stray metal golf spike. Then I got a closer look: handcuffs.

The restraints, like the rest of Dad’s police accessories, had been off limits way back when. It was a thrill to discover them.

“Hey, look what I found,” I said, loud enough for my sisters to hear in another room. “Handcuffs.”

They were heavy and scratched. A six-digit number was etched on the top of each. My father’s initials were on one ring, his name on the other.

It was a busy day, about noontime. I set the handcuffs aside.

Ten hours later, in the living room looking at the TV — I think I was too weary to really watch — I recalled the handcuffs, retrieved them from a banker’s box and came back to my chair to give them a closer look. I hadn’t expected to find them among all the stuff and I was curious.

One cuff appeared broken, disabled by age or intent when my father was forced to retire because of illness, its half-ring swinging back and forth freely like a mini Ferris wheel. The other metal ring, though, was functional and lockable, its teeth clicking audibly as I held it and clasped it closed several times just to hear the sound, which got my sisters’ attention as they went through photo albums at the other end of the room.

The working cuff was the one I put on my right wrist.

All I needed was Gomer Pyle’s wrist in the other metal ring and it would have been full Barney, because there was no key to go with the cuffs.

There was laughter, the way there had been laughter when Dad got a drive-in cheese dog in Archdale that came sans dog, or when my cap had been snagged by the treble hook of a lure and cast off my head and into Badin Lake.

Then there was a bit of panic. I do not have a dainty wrist, and it was being pinched pretty hard.

I decided to drive to the Southern Pines police station, steering with my free hand and resting the other on my leg. I was grateful the car was not a stick-shift model, and as I set out, I thought: Do not speed. It being late at night, the station door was locked. I pushed the intercom button and got a dispatcher.

I explained. She laughed.

Once inside, I heard the dispatcher reach an officer on the radio. Within 10 minutes, she had entered the building and was walking down the hall. I stood up and held out my right arm.

She laughed. I explained.

I can report that a handcuff key circa 2018 will unlock a handcuff circa 1978. Unshackled, I drove home and went to bed.  PS

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

Hometown

43

Lessons from a stock car legend

By Bill Fields

I would be hard pressed to name five stock car drivers currently making left turns for a living, but this was not always the case.

Could someone who grew up in North Carolina in the 1960s and ’70s and loved sports not have been fascinated by NASCAR? Possible, yes, but not very likely.

My NASCAR love existed even though I wasn’t really a car nut. My dad had managed a gas station before I was born, but automobiles weren’t his passion later on. He never taught me how to change the oil. We bonded on Sunday afternoons sitting in one of our high-mileage sedans in our driveway. Doors open, AM radio on, the races came to us — Darlington, Charlotte, Richmond, Daytona.

As a spectator warning in a program of a race we attended at North Carolina Motor Speedway stated, “Stock car races are thrilling, dangerous and spectacular.”

That first trip to Rockingham, for the American 500 in late October of 1966, put a picture to the sounds coming out of our car’s Philco. Dad and I rode south on U.S. 1 with a friend of his who had a pickup and had gotten the tickets. I don’t remember his name, but he resembled Hank Kimball on Green Acres.

I was 7, in the second grade. It was a cool day, when a Coke didn’t get warm before you finished it. The sky was the shade of Larry Miller’s away jersey. Everything at the track seemed as if it had been drawn with the brightest crayons in a box of 64, whether Marlboro red or Union 76 orange and blue. The cars were freshly painted, like glistening, just-completed models.

They were all there — the brothers Allison, Bobby and Donnie, and Yarborough, Cale and Lee Roy. Junior Johnson. David Pearson. Buddy Baker. Curtis Turner. Pole-sitter Fred Lorenzen. Way back in Row 18 was local favorite J.D. McDuffie of Sanford. When I saw that he was driving a ’64 Ford, a car two years older than what the stars had, it made sense why he struggled to run with the leaders most weeks.

Most important to me was the presence of Car 43 driven by Richard Petty. I was already a fan of the man from Level Cross, and seeing his Plymouth streak by 40 yards below me was a thrill. Lorenzen held him off to win that afternoon, which was disappointing. As I was getting in bed that evening, the roar of the car engines was still in my ears. Besides colorful, the race was loud.

Three years later, on an August Friday night at the quarter-mile track of Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem, I got to see a Petty victory as he came from trailing Bobby Issac most of the 62.5-mile race to win.

I attended one other NASCAR race, the Carolina 500 at Rockingham, in the spring of 1972. Issac took the checkered flag that afternoon. For Christmas that year, I got Petty’s autobiography, relishing what I could learn about the slender, smiling man in sunglasses who seemed to win more than everybody else.

When I started covering sports, I asked a couple of writers who had covered Petty’s prime what made him so good other than having the best cars and top crew to keep them humming. One sportswriter, Harold Martin of Columbia, S.C., told me Petty’s car sounded different going into the corners, which I took to mean that The King was bolder and braver than the rest.

About a decade ago, while covering a PGA Tour Champions event in California, I was invited to a reception for kids from The First Tee who were playing in the tournament. Speakers had been invited to talk to the junior golfers about The First Tee’s nine core values.

I’m pretty certain the young people had no idea who the man talking about confidence was, but I was pleased to hear what Richard Petty had to say. And, at the end of evening, I made like No. 43 on the backstretch somewhere to make sure I could meet him and say hello.

Petty kindly indulged a childhood memory or two after I shook his hand and seemed amused that it was the tiny track in Winston-Salem where I’d seen him win. It was a quiet Pebble Beach night when I stepped outside, but in my mind I heard sounds of a big engine and bygone time.  PS

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

Hometown

Up and Away

Revisiting the first rung of a long climb

By Bill Fields

Someone asked me not long ago the number of states I had visited, and my answer got me thinking.

For work or pleasure, I have at least set foot in 48 of the 50. Alaska and North Dakota are the places I haven’t gone, my travels having been much broader than I could have imagined growing up as the youngest child of parents who had stayed put in their home county.

But well before I ventured out of state — before I ever consulted one of those road maps that seemed impossible to fold up neatly once you had opened it — I went up to get away.

It was a dogwood located within a boy’s best forward pass from our house, yet climbing up to sit on its lowest branch was my first adventure.

I was back at that tree recently, during a season of change that had me thinking. The limb still looks like an arm bending toward the sky, its distinctively textured bark peeling from age. My old perch is at eye level now, still only 6 feet or so from the ground, a height that allowed me to touch it without strain.

Decades ago, when I was close to 6 instead of 60, it took real effort to reach. But it sure was worth it. 

That crook was sanctuary and observatory, but mostly it was mine. It was a place to think, laugh or pout, a vantage point from which I could look down upon our cats, the occasional passing car, neighbors raking leaves. It gave me a different perspective on our horseshoe pit, basketball goal and swimming pool, which sat upon the yard like a large yellow can that had been sawed in half.

My getaway place was neither secret nor far away, although it felt as if it was both of those things, particularly the latter the one time I chickened out on my descent and summoned help to get down. Hattie, who cared for me while my parents were at work, could only laugh as she came to my rescue but kindly coaxed me back to Earth.

That day notwithstanding, I came to feel quite comfortable in that dogwood, my tree house without walls. Traveling to that space, even though a very short journey, made me feel like I was part of a larger world that, with effort, might be within reach.

I never explored the heights of another tree. About the time I had gotten old enough to consider climbing higher, a friend and neighbor much more adventuresome than I was took an awful tumble from a large sycamore and broke her leg. It was a severe injury that had her in a cast and on crutches for a long time. But given how far she fell, the outcome might well have been much worse. Even so, her mishap was a cautionary tale.

When I studied my old climbing tree recently, I considered who I had been when I sat in that spot — how much I didn’t know and how many places I hadn’t been, that the borders of my world then were school, church, the grocery store and my grandmother’s house on Sunday afternoons.

In those hot summer days when I retreated to my space in that tree, my world wasn’t much bigger than the globe on my desk. I hadn’t yet ridden on a train or flown in a jet.

I stood by that dogwood this August and touched the limb that used to be my summit and wondered how many times I have been tens of thousands of feet in the air on the way to somewhere and, as we all have, taken it for granted. I thought of the paper airplanes I tossed from that branch all those years ago, their journeys as uncertain as my own.   PS

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

A Whole New World

It was a marvel when the pros came to town

By Bill Fields

Seeing the U.S. Open played at Pinehurst No. 2 three times in the last 20 years — and the U.S. Women’s Open, too, in 2014 — has been wonderful. For many years the prospect of holding the national Open here was as unlikely as landing an NFL franchise. The negative chorus was loud: too small, too remote, too you-name-it. But the championships went off without hitches, and a fourth Open is already penciled in for 2024.

My best memories of elite competition on No. 2, though, pre-date the majors and are of a time when people didn’t go to golf tournaments to shop or drink, when “corporate hospitality” was not yet a glint in a marketer’s eye, when knuckleheads weren’t shouting inanities after someone’s shot. 

I didn’t know then, more than four decades ago, that Donald Ross’ masterpiece design had lost its way architecturally, with acres of Bermuda rough, soft putting surfaces and love-to-hate grass planted in all the wrong places. If you were a young, aspiring golfer — and there weren’t a lot of us around in those days, Mecca of the game or not — it seemed just shy of magical that the PGA Tour came to town.

Arnie. Jack. Lee. Raymond. Chi Chi. Even Sam, more than 30 years since the first of his three victories in the North and South Open on No. 2, the golf gods having given him not only glorious tempo but the gift of time.

And there were the tour rabbits that came out of the Monday qualifying hat to fill the field in a given season, players such as George Cadle, Bunky Henry, Lyn Lott, Ed Sabo, Curtis Sifford and Alan Tapie.

All ours for a week — or two, in the case of the inaugural World Open in 1973, which copied the State Fair without the cotton candy and candy apples. But to a local golf-loving teenager who knew the difference between Terry Diehl and Terry Dill, even though their surnames sounded the same in our accent, the tournament was plenty sweet.

Watching the pros in the flesh, particularly while carrying a scoring standard on weekends at the World Open from 1974-76, was inspiring but also sobering, like seeing my swing for the first time on our Super 8 movie camera. What they (best in the world) and I (decent high school golfer) were capable of seemed galaxies apart. Everything looked orderly, coordinated, purposeful. Putting a cabretta glove in a back pocket before putting was origami. No one got grass stains, even on dewy mornings. The sound of their spikes on a hard concrete path even played a different tune.

Tom Watson was a decade older than me, but he and caddie Bruce Edwards looked impossibly young the several times I drew a grouping that included the rising star who fearlessly made his way around No. 2. Stray tee shot? No problem. Missed green? No worries. Almost every time I thought I was going to have to denote a dropped shot on my standard, he holed a putt. That this par-saving machine went on to win at Pinehurst in consecutive years (1978-79) was no surprise.

Before or after my volunteer shifts inside the ropes, or after school on Thursday or Friday, it was never hard to see the action in the low-key atmosphere so different from the gallery choke points during the Opens when so many spectators made roomy No. 2 seem claustrophic in places. In 1975, late on Sunday afternoon, I hustled back to the 15th hole for the start of a playoff between eventual winner Johnny Miller, Frank Beard, Bob Murphy and Jack Nicklaus. I was sitting so close to the players I felt like I could reach out and grab Murph’s long iron when he made his signature pause at the top.

Some of my friends picked up work with ABC Sports when the Pinehurst stop got televised, one of them dispatched to a drug store to buy hair spray for Jim McKay. My paying gig was limited to the Mondays after the World Open when our golf coach would get us out of school.

For $20 and a sandwich apiece, a handful of us would collect the gallery stakes and ropes, somehow managing to avoid hurting ourselves and invariably pausing on a couple of tees to make air swings, the only times I never missed a fairway.   PS

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

My Type of Machine

The clackety-clack of communication

By Bill Fields

An acquaintance took his family to the Newseum in Washington, D.C., recently. He reported that when one of his children saw a typewriter on display, the machine might as well have been an artifact from an ancient pyramid. The child had never seen a typewriter. Ribbons were for hair and home keys were for locks.

About the time I heard this story earlier this year, I read that Laura Cagle, one of the teachers in the business department at Pinecrest when I was a student there, had passed away. It got me thinking about my own typing history.

“My fingers are too big for the keys,” I would complain to my mother as I approached high school, wary about enrolling in a typing class. An old manual on our bookshelf, 20th Century Typewriting, a leftover from someone’s typing education, was intimidating with its commands about “reach-stroke practice” and “control of the tabulator and carriage return.” And “timed writings” sounded about as much fun as having to go on the pommel horse during gym.

But my fingers weren’t too big after all, and I did learn to type. If you wanted to be a reporter, you had to acquire this skill whether by the book or trial and error. Speedy hunt-and-peck artists seemed to be of another planet, so rapidly did their index fingers depress the keys, so I figured that learning to use all my digits was the way to go.

When I managed not to choke on the end-of-semester timed writing junior year, I even got an A. My mother was proud and I was pleased. I might not have known how to put all the words in order yet, but I knew how to type the words. It wasn’t long before we were on the road to Fayetteville to buy a typewriter to take to college. I settled on a portable electric in a faux leather zippered case for $129.95.

I was surprised how many arriving freshmen got to Carolina and didn’t know how to type. Over the course of my first year I more than covered the cost of my first machine by typing papers for classmates, not to mention handling my own assignments in English, political science or history.

My harvest gold Smith-Corona made it through my UNC days, although it balked during a marathon of term papers for several classes over Thanksgiving weekend senior year when a case of major league procrastination resulted in a couple of all-nighters and more than 40 pages total.

By then I had augmented the Smith-Corona with an Underwood manual portable with a clamshell cover for sports writing road trips for The Daily Tar Heel — a purchase that truly made me feel part of the fraternity. At the DTH offices, we typed on sturdy desk model Royals and Remingtons on paper that had one margin for pica type and another for elite, the sound of keys on platen loud and comforting regardless of font size.

Compared to the first wave of portable computers — finicky and unreliable — for which journalists were guinea pigs in the late 1970s and early 1980s, typewriters did their tasks well. They might not have had spell check or word count, but they didn’t give you the spinning wheel of freeze-up frustration either.

“There is something I find reassuring, comforting, dazzling in that here is a very specific apparatus that is meant to do one thing, and it does it perfectly,” actor, filmmaker and typewriter aficionado Tom Hanks told NPR last year. “And that one thing is to translate the thoughts in your head down to paper. Now that means everything from a shopping list to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Short of carving words into stone with a hammer and chisel, not much is more permanent than a paragraph or a sentence or a love letter or a story typed on paper.”  PS

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