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.

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.