BillLindau

40 years in the Sandhills

40 years of life in the Sandhills
The best of all possible small-town worlds
Unpublished, written Sepember 2006
SPECIAL TO THE INDEPENDENT
Can you imagine living someplace where you can walk to school, work, church, the grocery store, the doctor's office and even the movies?
When I was 14, I moved to a place like that.
It was called Southern Pines.
My family moved there from Winston-Salem, when my father took a job with one of the newspapers in Moore County. I had spent the whole summer reading my parents' hardbound issues of American Heritage, and the first time I set foot in downtown Southern Pines, I felt as if I had gone back in time -- to the 1920s.
Last month I celebrated a unique anniversary, folks. Forty years ago in August, I came to Moore County.
I'm sure about half of our readers were either not born before August 1966, or they weren't living here. That's father time for you. Still, it's too bad so many people will never know exactly what it was like back then.
My family lived on Ashe Street, a block up from downtown Southern Pines. The fire station was around the corner from us. We lived:
* a block from a Colonial grocery store (anybody remember that chain, with its Gold Bond stamps?) and St. Anthony of Padua's Catholic Church (if we were Catholics, we'd have really loved that!)
* a block and a trip across the railroad tracks from the Sunrise Theater (it closed down during the 1980s, but now it's become a popular entertainment venue)
* about three blocks from The Pilot, where my father worked for the first two years we lived in Moore County. We also lived about that far from the Chamber of Commerce, where my mother later went to work
* about four blocks from our doctor's office. The late Roy McMillan had his office next to what is now the municipal building.
* four to five blocks from East Southern Pines School, which comprised all 12 grades until the fall of 1969, when all the schools in the county became consolidated and
* a bicycle ride from both a quality men's clothing store and our family dentist's office (Dr. Robert Bruce Warlick, now retired).
That's not all. Even though none of us played golf, my parents loved this place. They had gotten tired of living in a city the size of Winston-Salem, and the quiet, rural yet highly classy towns of Pinehurst and Southern Pines tugged at their heartstrings.
I have a confession to make: When they made the announcement that we were leaving our home of nearly the past five years, they had a very upset young son to deal with.
I was about to start eighth grade at Dalton Junior High School. The year before that, I had to undergo the stress of a new school, when my class went from sixth grade to junior high school. We had lived in two other places in Winston-Salem several years back, after moving from Asheville. I was getting awfully sick of moving from one home to another and one school to another, and now it was going to happen all over again.
As seventh-graders, my classmates and I got picked on a lot by the eighth- and ninth-graders, but that summer had a lot of promises to it. I was taking judo lessons at the YMCA as well as a clinic where one of Dad's friends was the instructor. I was looking forward to taking classes such as creative writing and shop as eighth grade drew near. Not to mention the fact that now that I was a big eighth-grader, nobody was going to pick on me. The incoming seventh-graders were going to have to put up with the same thing we did, and by the grace of God, none of us were in those particular shoes anymore.
I'm afraid I was a bit too young to appreciate the same things my mom and dad saw in Southern Pines in the fall of 1966. On the other hand, I had good reason not to like the move. For one thing, the Winston-Salem city schools were a lot more advanced than the schools in Moore County, which were under the control of the towns until the fall of 1969, when the schools were consolidated and Pinecrest opened.
The southern area of Moore County had five different high schools, including two in Southern Pines. We had East Southern Pines, and West Southern Pines in the predominantly black section of town. The towns of Aberdeen, Pinehurst and West End all had their own schools. And the fights that took place after the football games between East Southern Pines and Aberdeen were legendary. If you can find one of the baby boomers, or anybody older, who lived in this county back then, please get him or her to tell you what life was like as a teenager in this county.
At first I hated Southern Pines because, while I liked the countryside and the quiet, Winston-Salem had a lot of places Southern Pines did not. That included a Y, a beautiful, new and very large public swimming pool and a wider selection of courses in the junior high and high schools at East Southern Pines. In seventh and eighth grades, East Southern Pines did not have French, Spanish or Latin, and no advanced math or accelerated English courses. Each of these grades had four teachers, teaching only four different subjects and one of them teaching phys ed: English, math, science and social studies. Each class consisted of four groups, rotating among the four classrooms.
When I started eighth grade at East Southern Pines Junior High School, I felt as if some vengeful principal had bumped me back into the sixth grade.
Oh, man, I hated it down here.
But then I started making friends, and my class consisted of at least five other kids in the same boat I was, moving from larger towns early in the school year. In fact, the first two people who made friends with me were transplanted Yankees: Tommy Chaltas, a native New Yorker, and Jonathan Lyerly, who came from Indiana, I believe.
And none of the kids I knew really liked living in Moore County. We had that much in common. Throughout our teen years, many of us sat around the town park, by the tennis courts -- this was the town park on Ashe Street and New York Avenue, folks, not the one adjacent to the U.S. 1 bypass -- and talk about how one day we would all go to New York and make it big and never come back to this little hick burg again. As far as we were concerned, Southern Pines and Pinehurst could draw all the rich Yankee golfers they wanted and still be redneck towns.
But that was when we were young and full of spit and vinegar. Many of us did leave Moore County after we graduated from high school, either going to college or joining the military. But so many of those bored-stiff teens have come back to Moore County, to do their lives' work and raise their children in the very place they called hicksville. And our class reunions draw a lot of local alumni who live in other towns and states.
One of my oldest friends came back after making it big in the big city, like so many of us Moore countians used to dream about. Bobby Levy skipped a grade and became an attorney. He moved to Los Angeles, where he practiced law for 27 years.
But Bobby could not get Southern Pines out of his blood. He planned to come back for a long time, opening a toy store here, and entrusting it to the care of two of his parents' friends.
Ten years later, he, his wife and the youngest of their three daughters made the move back east. Bobby phased himself out of the West coast law field and took over the management of The Little Toy Shop. This was last year.
One of his biggest reasons: "I wanted my daughter to go to the same school I went to, and to enjoy the same atmosphere I did when I was her age."
In seventh grade, I took half a semester of French and typing. Eighth grade had the courses I mentioned, and students who were good enough in math could take algebra in eighth grade.
I don't live too far from Moore County: A half-hour drive away, in Hamlet. I have not resided in Moore County since late 1987, but I have, over the years, grown to love the so-called hick burg where I grew up and spent a great deal of my adult life. Recently I even enjoyed a homecoming, when I took some courses at Sandhills Community College. I received an Associate in Arts degree there in 1975, and last year I took a course under an instructor who was there back then. She was in her 20s when she joined the faculty, and I never met her in person until just last year. When I talked to her recently, she remembered many of my old classmates.
I still keep in touch with one of my former teachers, from the first year at Pinecrest. She left that school after a year, but came back in the 1980s, remarried and moved to Pinehurst. She continues to be one of my biggest supporters and one of my oldest friends. She and so many other people I have known and loved in the four decades I have spent in the Sandhills are the main reason I'd rather stay here than live any other place in the world.
I still bump into another old classmate every couple of months or so: K.C. Cathcart. He came here from Greensboro the month after I did, and he and Jonathan Lyerly were pretty good friends, too.
Then this summer, something amazing happened: Jonathan came back to town.
He lives in California. He came here to visit his mother and three siblings. He also plays in a bluegrass band and they did a gig in town. Unfortunately, I could not get away to see them the night they played. That was the first time I'd seen Jonathan since 1974.
Hamlet's a nice little place with a lower cost of living than Moore County, but I'll call Southern Pines home until the day I die.
I could be a filthy rich millionaire, living in a villa in Europe, but if I couldn't get back to Southern Pines every once in awhile I'd be totally miserable.
The Sandhills is where my friends are. It's where my home is.
As the Tremeloes sang in the British invasion hit "Tobacco Road," "'cause it's home."
That was a Top-40 tune when I came to Southern Pines. I'm glad I eventually took those lyrics to heart.
I wouldn't live anywhere outside of this area for anything on God's Green Earth.
True Blue. As blue as East Southern Pines's Blue Knight mascot.

posted by Bill Lindau @ 10:27 AM