The Parable of the Dugout Roof

Years ago, when I got out of the Army, I'd been conditionally accepted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The condition was that I had to earn a foreign language credit before I'd be formally accepted at UNC.

So I enrolled at Belmont Abbey College for one semester to take a French course. I decided to take a full academic load, so I also took courses in American literature, Southern literature, and astronomy.

There were several reasons why I enrolled at Belmont Abbey. First, the college actively sought veterans and gave a small tuition discount to vets. And it had a good academic reputation, and that was an inducement.

But Belmont Abbey also is a Catholic college, and like many Protestants, I was curious about Catholicism. I grew up in a small Methodist church, but, to borrow a phrase from my late friend, Jim Shumaker, I like to spread myself around ecumenically.

So I did a semester among the Benedictine monks at The Abbey. At that time, about 40 percent of the faculty was monastic. So even though the college is in Belmont, an old mill town in the heart of the Piedmont textile country, the presence of the Catholic monastery and the monks made The Abbey -- at least in my mind -- an unusual and even exotic place.

I remember a spring night when the weather suddenly changed from cold to warm, and fog rolled across the campus. I was walking back to my dorm room. In the near distance I saw two monks in their dark robes, hoods covering their heads, seeming to glide through the fog, moving from the light into the foggy darkness. It struck me that what I was seeing was something straight out of the Middle Ages. It was eerie and fascinating.

Three of my four instructors were priests, and two of those priests -- Father John Oetgen and Father Matthew McSorley -- lived in the monastery.

Father John was from Savannah and had studied at Oxford University and UNC-Chapel Hill. He taught Southern Literature, or, as he sometimes called it, "Grit Lit." He introduced me to author W.J. Cash's seminal work, The Mind of the South, a perceptive examination of Southern culture and thought that has become a classic since it was published in 1940. And Father John also introduced me to the works of Flannery O'Connor, a master of Southern gothic literature.

His command of his subject was remarkable. I recall him standing at a lectern in the classroom and giving hour-long lectures without once faltering or consulting notes.

Father Matthew, who'd earned a graduate degree in literature from Villanova University, taught the American lit course. He liked the essays I wrote in his class and encouraged me to develop my writing skills.

But I also greatly enjoyed talking to Father Matthew and the other priests about many topics. I was greatly impressed that the priests seemed to me to use reason and intellect to make their points and avoid emotion.

One spring afternoon I went for an ambling walk around the Belmont Abbey campus with Father Matthew. My experience in the Army had had a dramatic effect on how I perceived the world, and at the time I'd only been a civilian for a few months and was struggling to readjust. I wanted to get Father Matthew's take on what author Douglas Adams referred to as "life, the universe and everything" and how I fitted into this big picture.

Father Matthew listened to me talk about my doubts, uncertainties, hopes and plans as we walked along a gravel road. As we approached the college baseball field, we both fell silent for a few moments, and Father Matthew clearly was thinking about something.

He stopped along the first base side of the ballpark, which was surrounded by a low chain-link fence. "Pick up three stones," he told me. For some reason, the fact that he called them "stones" instead of "rocks" impressed me. So I picked up three stones from the gravel road. They were slightly smaller than the palm of my hand. He did the same.

"I'll bet you that you can't hit that dugout roof in three tries with those stones," he said.

I looked at him like he was crazy. The dugout was maybe a hundred feet away. The roof was a large, flat surface. I'd played baseball all my life. I didn't think I could possibly miss.

"Go ahead," he said. "I'll bet you can't do it."

He was, of course, right. Three tries, three misses. After my third throw had sailed over the dugout, Father Matthew made a clumsy, lunging, underhand toss and dropped a stone smack in the middle of the roof.

"OK," I said. "I assume there's a lesson here. What am I supposed to learn from this?"

"Well, I've done this many times with many young men," he said. "So I have the advantage of having had a lot of practice and you were trying it for the first time."

"But you were clearly concerned about how you looked when you threw those stones," Father Matthew said. "You showed beautiful form, but you missed every time. On the other hand, my technique was awkward and clumsy and not at all pretty to watch. But I hit my target.

"So the lesson here is that you should be more concerned about results and less concerned about image and appearances."

Father Matthew died two months ago at the age of 91. More than 35 years have passed since he taught me what I've come to call "The Parable of the Dugout Roof." I don't think a week has gone by since then that I haven't recalled that moment. Yet I still struggle sometimes to live up to that lesson Father Matthew taught me.

The photo at the top of this post was taken from an online posting of the 1970 edition of The Spire, the yearbook of Belmont Abbey College. It shows Father Matthew McSorley, at the far right of the photo, teaching a class at Belmont Abbey. The photographer is not identified.

Andy Griffith and the Pleasing Myth of Mayberry

I have an old friend I've known forever who, like me, is a late-middle-aged North Carolina native. He says when his time comes and he's standing at the Pearly Gates, he hopes Saint Peter says to him "Come on in. We've got two dozen black-and-white episodes of 'The Andy Griffith Show' that you've never seen."

That's the kind of impact that the late Andy Griffith had on North Carolina's psyche. Many of us aging Tar Heel Baby Boomers are hoping that the afterlife is an eternity of watching Andy, Opie, Barney, Aunt Bee and the good townsfolk of Mayberry, and never getting tired of them.

The fictional town Griffith created for his show presumably was based on his hometown of Mount Airy, a small town north of Winston-Salem near the Virginia border.  Mayberry supposedly was about 60 miles from Raleigh. In truth, however, Mayberry could have been -- and probably was intended to be -- any one of dozens of drowsy little county seats, mill towns, mountain hamlets and fishing villages across the state.

Before the state's remarkable population growth of the 1980s, North Carolina basically was one big small town. When one Tar Heel encountered another Tar Heel in another state, a conversation likely would ensue. It happened to me in Atlanta in late September1984, when I attended the Braves' last home game of the season with a friend from Chapel Hill. My friend was a transplanted Yankee from Massachusetts married to a North Carolina girl who was in law school at UNC.

It was a chilly night, and I was wearing a UNC sweatshirt as my friend and I stood in a concourse chatting before the game. A 60-ish man and his wife saw my sweatshirt. They were total strangers, but they smiled and walked over to me like they'd spotted an old friend in a crowd of strangers. The man told me where he was from and we struck up a conversation. My Massachusetts friend watched in bemused fascination. When the conversation broke up and we went to our seats, my friend was smiling and shaking his head in disbelief. "You good old Tar Heels," he said. "Never met a stranger."

And that was how Andy Griffith touched North Carolina. He tapped into that small town, back-home familiarity that was such a part of living in the state before its burgeoning growth spurt.

Anyone who grew up in Williamston, or Roxboro, or Mount Gilead, or Yadkinville or Windsor or Burgaw or Buxton or Bryson City or Albemarle knew Mayberry's colorful but ordinary residents. They were the same people who operated barber shops, gas stations and moonshine stills in our hometowns. They sang in the church choirs and coached the Little League baseball teams. They led Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops. They had similar hobbies and enjoyed similar entertainment. They canned pickles and sat on front porches playing guitars. They took pride in their skills, and even if they weren't quite as good at something as they thought they were, their neighbors didn't spoil it for them by telling them the truth. Once in a while they got drunk on a Saturday night, but they were in church, with their hangover, the next day.

They were gentle people. If they sometimes were clannish and suspicious of outsiders, they were as a rule friendly and welcoming to visitors--sometimes to their own disadvantage. They were generally well-behaved and respectful of their neighbors, though not above some occasional gossiping about them. If Mayberry residents did step out of line, government authority was represented by Sheriff Andy Taylor, an affable, joshing lawman who was a little bit smarter than he let on. He was willing to play the Southern rube when necessary, but in the end he was always there with handcuffs and a big grin after he'd outsmarted the bad guys, who usually were from out of town and often from somewhere Up North. Andy refused to carry a gun because he'd known the people he was policing all his life, and rather than use force, he wanted Mayberry residents to behave themselves because they respected the law and knew he'd treat them fairly. And Andy always seemed to know instinctively when to strictly enforce the law and when to bend the rules to be a little more accommodating of common sense and human nature.

With Andy's guidance, the people of Mayberry always figured out the right thing to do when they were confronted with one of life's moral quandaries. When Andy was wrong, he admitted it and made amends. And while Andy went to church every Sunday and often applied Biblical teachings to his law enforcement, he did not wear his religion on his sleeve. The show's religious values were in the background, always implied but seldom stated and certainly never forced on others.

 So Mayberry became North Carolina's pleasing myth, a flattering fun-house mirror whose distorted reflection made us look a little better than we really were. The state felt so good about the image crafted by Andy Griffith that a statue of Sheriff Taylor and his son Opie walking to the fishin' hole was erected on public grounds in downtown Raleigh. It was an honor usually reserved for war heroes and beloved statesmen.

Like all myths, this one is truthful enough to endure. But a myth ultimately is false, and there are holes in the Mayberry myth if you care to look for them.

"The Andy Griffith Show" first aired on CBS in 1960 at the beginning of a decade that became more tumultuous with each passing year. But the dramatic changes wrought by assassinations, the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War didn't touch Mayberry. Edgier, topical new comedies such as "All In The Family" reflected the tensions of the early days of the culture wars.

"The Andy Griffith Show" ended in 1968 as the turbulent decade was reaching its crescendo. By this time the show was being broadcast in color, but it was a pale imitation of its black-and-white glory. Don Knotts -- the brilliant but troubled actor who played the officious, bumbling Deputy Barney Fife -- left the cast after the fifth season. Without Barney to stir the pot with his good-intentions-gone-bad, the show's stories and characters settled into a saccharine blandness. Hence my old friend's hope that the episodes he sees in the afterlife will be in black-and-white and include Barney.

Still, if the show's later episodes aren't as memorable as those first five black-and-white seasons, I don't think Andy Griffith's legacy is in any danger of fading. A few days ago, my cousin Judy and I rode up to Mount Airy to get a pork chop sandwich at the Snappy Lunch -- mentioned in at least one episode -- and soak up the Mount Airy/Mayberry ambience.

Mount Airy ignored their famous hometown son for decades. The town could afford that while its economic base was still healthy. But textile mills and furniture factories closed and jobs dried up. And Mount Airy finally realized that it was ignoring a gold mine.

So the town's Main Street has become essentially a Mayberry theme park that is pulling in a steady stream of visitors. As Judy and I were leaving the Snappy Lunch, a tour bus began unloading passengers who gathered outside the restaurant's entrance. Meanwhile, dozens of tourists browsed the Main Street shops, most of which had displays related to "The Andy Griffith Show."

So it's clear that people in North Carolina and beyond still want to believe the myth of Mayberry. They want to believe that somewhere there's a charming little town where people solve their problems by using a few simple rules, some common sense, and a loyal and abiding affection for their neighbors.

So what if there's no such thing as Mayberry? "The Andy Griffith Show" wasn't a documentary about life in small town America. I'm not the first person to say this, but I think it was a classic morality play gently urging us to try to be a little better in our daily lives. Mayberry is what we could be if we'd just try a little harder.

The photo at the top of this post shows Deputy Barney Fife (Don Knotts), town drunk Otis Campbell (Hal Smith), and Sheriff Andy Taylor (Andy Griffith) in a scene from "The Rehabilitation of Otis," which aired on 'The Andy Griffith Show' in 1964.

On Memorial Day, Remembering An Ironic Wartime Tragedy

Lieutenant Harold Winecoff with other U.S. Navy fighter pilots during World War II. Winecoff is third from the left in the second row. The photo probably was made in Vero Beach, Florida in 1944.

On September 27, 1944 U.S. Navy Lieutenant Wade Harold Winecoff, a farm boy who grew up near Rockwell, North Carolina, climbed into the cockpit of his Grumman F6F-5 "Hellcat" fighter plane. He and three other pilots aboard the aircraft carrier USS Franklin were beginning their shift of combat air patrol, an airborne version of guard duty.

The Franklin was supporting the U.S. invasion of the Palau Islands east of the Philippines. Winecoff and the other pilots in his squadron had been in the thick of the fighting against Japanese forces since American troops had gone ashore on September 15.

On this day, they would stay aloft for several hours patrolling the skies over the U.S. invasion force. Since all Japanese aircraft on the islands had been destroyed before the invasion, the likelihood of getting into a fight was low. But long-range Japanese patrol planes were scouring the seas for the American task force, and so a constant alert had to be maintained.

The Franklin fighters didn't encounter any enemy aircraft that day. Still, something went terribly wrong for Winecoff. He did not return from the patrol. His death was one of those tragic ironies of war that happen simply because a serviceman has to follow orders.

I came across the odd story of Winecoff's death in 1970 when I was visiting Winecoff's nephew, who was living in his grandmother's house near Rockwell, a small town about 45 miles northeast of Charlotte. It was the same house where Winecoff had grown up, and my friend's grandmother was Winecoff's mother. She had moved to Florida, and was allowing her grandson to live in the house while he attended nearby Pfeiffer College.

Winecoff's grief-stricken mother had kept boxes of letters, photos, and other possessions belonging to her son that the Navy had sent to her after his death. My friend said I was welcome to look through them. I took home a couple boxes of the mementos, and spent a few days poring over them. The contents told the story of Harold Winecoff's life.

Harold Winecoff at his home near Rockwell, N.C.
sometime before his death in September 1944.

After graduating from what was then Appalachian State Teachers College in 1937, Winecoff had taught and coached basketball at Waco High School, between Salisbury and Shelby. He enlisted in the Navy in November 1941 and earned his pilot's wings in May 1942.

In mid-September 1942, Winecoff came home for a 15-day leave. Among the friends he saw was Nadine Ellis, a talented musician who taught at Shelby High School. After his visit, Ellis had some time on her hands when her students were excused from classes to pick cotton. She wrote a note to Winecoff encouraging him to visit again before he had to return to duty. "After all when you go back you can never tell when you might get home again--and back to Waco and Shelby," she wrote.

Jack Hoyle, who'd been one of Winecoff's students at Waco, wrote to tell him how much he'd enjoyed seeing him. "I know you look good in your Navy uniform and I sure would like to see you," Hoyle wrote.

Winecoff's experience as a teacher served him well in the Navy. He was a flight instructor at Pensacola Naval Air Station, and the boxes contained letters from friends he'd known in Brewton, Alabama, a small town about 60 miles north of Pensacola. The affable Winecoff had a group of friends in Brewton who nicknamed him "Ace."

He also corresponded with young women in West Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Alabama. All of them longed to see him soon. A few hinted that they'd be amenable to a permanent postwar relationship with him. But he made it clear, in deeds if not words, that he wasn't interested at the moment in long-term plans.

By July 1944, Winecoff had been sent to Pearl Harbor to be assigned to a combat fighter squadron. Around the same time, Bootsie Durant, whom he'd dated when he was in Pensacola, told Winecoff in a letter that things hadn't been the same for her since he'd left town.

"I have had some dates since you have been gone," she said. "Still they don't make me feel happy at all. The boys I've been with are either childish or a bunch of wolves. I guess after you have gone out with a swell person it's hard to get used to someone else."

Winecoff was assigned to Fighter Squadron VF-13 aboard the USS Franklin, designated CV-13 by the Navy. The pilots called themselves the "Black Cats."

The boxes also contained a letter written in 1946 by Hubert Weidman of Los Angeles, one of Winecoff's shipmates, to his sister explaining how her brother had died.

While Winecoff and the other three pilots were on patrol, Weidman wrote, they were ordered to investigate an unidentified aircraft that had appeared on the Franklin's radar. Navy commanders couldn't take the chance that this was an enemy search plane that might discover the American task force. So Winecoff and the three other fighter pilots were ordered to climb and go after this airplane at top speed.

But a towering thundercloud that topped out at about 14,000 feet above the ocean lay between the Navy pilots and the suspicious airplane.

"It was one of those huge white billowy clouds, that usually look so fine, but are really dangerous to get into," Weidman wrote in his letter to Winecoff's sister.

Weidman, the group leader, knew it was dangerous to fly through the thunderhead because such clouds often contain powerful, turbulent wind and hail that could wreck the planes. It would take time to fly around the cloud, however, and the delay would allow the unknown plane to get closer to the American fleet.

So Weidman decided that he had no choice but to take his flight through the top of the thunderhead. The four Hellcats disappeared into the big cloud. But only three emerged. Winecoff's plane was missing. But Weidman couldn't delay the mission to search for Winecoff.

"We were still receiving orders from the base, and the urgency demanded that we continue our search for the bogie," Weidman wrote.

The Hellcats sped on to find the intruder.

The mystery airplane turned out to be an American B-24 bomber. After identifying the plane, Weidman and the two other pilots hastily returned to where Winecoff had disappeared.

Other planes from the Franklin joined the search. But no sign of Harold Winecoff or his plane was found, Weidman wrote.

I put aside the boxes of letters and mementos with the intention of returning them to my friend in Rockwell. Not long after I brought the boxes home, however, his grandmother's house burned down.

I stuffed the boxes into a closet and forgot about them. I came across them years later. By this time my friend had moved away and I'd lost touch with him. I took the stuff with me when my wife and I moved to Florida in late 1991.

Soon after our move, I met Sam Rhodes, who'd served aboard the USS Franklin and later retired in Jensen Beach. With his help, I contacted Ted Engdahl, who'd been a fighter pilot on the Franklin and was one of Harold Winecoff's best friends. Engdahl, a Michigan native and retired school teacher, was living near Winter Haven, Florida.

Engdahl said Harold Winecoff was a quiet man with a dry wit and a "sneaky" sense of humor. "You get little chuckles from it, instead of hilarious laughter," he said.

Winecoff enjoyed smoking good cigars and reading. He was 29 years old in 1944--older than the other pilots in his squadron. So the younger pilots nicknamed him "Pappy."

A few days before Winecoff's fateful flight into eternity, he'd sat on the flight deck of the Franklin with Engdahl and another pilot in his squadron, Ken McQuady. The three young men were best pals and called themselves the "Three Musketeers." They talked about what they hoped to do after the war.

Engdahl played volleyball with Winecoff on the Franklin's hangar deck on the morning of September 27, 1944. Around noon, he'd watched when his friend took off from the Franklin on the patrol. The Franklin's log notes that the three remaining planes of Wiedman's flight returned and landed aboard the carrier at 3:23 p.m.

"Recovered planes of the patrol minus one fighter of the CAP which was last seen in formation as it entered a cloud," the log says. "A search was made and the entire Task Group passed over the area twice. There was no indication at any time on the radar and no trace of any crash observed. The pilot is reported as missing."

The ship's regimental history, Big Ben the Flattop: The Story of the USS Franklin, includes a few paragraphs about Winecoff's disappearance. The patrol flew into a "heavy squall," the history says, and one fighter didn't emerge. "Hopelessly the search planes scoured the area, but no trace of Lt. Wade H. Winecoff, a country boy from North Carolina, was ever found."

Engdahl had had the sad task of packing up Winecoff's belongings and sending them to his family in Rockwell. He was the only one of the "Three Musketeers" to survive the war.

I visited Engdahl several times during the next two years and played some golf with him. I also interviewed him for a story that was published in the Salisbury (N.C.) Post on the 50th anniversary of Winecoff's death on September 27, 1994.

"Maybe we got along pretty well because I like athletics and I kind of worshiped the guy because I became a basketball coach too, and a teacher," Engdahl said. "Maybe he was my idol and I never realized it. He was just a super guy."

With Engdahl's help, I contacted Vernon Osborne of Clarkston, Georgia, who'd been one of the pilots flying with Winecoff the day he disappeared. Osborne remembered flying into that squall. The turbulent winds nearly destroyed all four Hellcats, he said.

"It almost threw all of us into the ocean," Osborne recalled. "You can't fly in those things. You can't see anything in there. It's like flying into a hurricane."

Engdahl thought that the turbulence had thrown Winecoff's plane into a spin. While the Hellcat was one of the best Navy fighter planes of World War II, he recalled that it could be a death trap if it went into a spin. "You get into a spin and you're probably done for," he said. "You're never going to come out of it."

Weidman's 1946 letter supported this theory.

"It was the opinion of most of the boys, that he got slow in the cloud and went into a spin," Weidman wrote. "Because he was in a cloud and had no outside reference point, he could have become excited and gone into a progressive spin."

"I think the explanation lies in the fact that he lost altitude in the cloud and the rough air in the middle gave him a hard time," Weidman continued. "Bad weather and the turbulence in the middle of some cumulonimbus clouds is often too much for the best of pilots."

If Winecoff's plane did go into an uncontrollable spin, Engdahl said, it would have crashed into the ocean and could have been traveling at 500 or 600 mph, killing Winecoff instantly.

The fact that Harold Winecoff died because of an unidentified American B-24 adds a cruel twist of irony to his death. But such events are part of war. There was no way to know if the plane was a friend or an enemy, and it had to be identified, Engdahl said.

In 1994, Harold Winecoff's brother, John, was still living near Rockwell and saw my story in the Salisbury Post. During the Thanksgiving holiday of 1994, I returned Harold Winecoff's possessions to his brother.

The Golden Anniversary of Maris's Remarkable Season is Being Forgotten

No one seems to be noticing that 50 years ago this month, Roger Maris was closing in on one of Major League Baseball's most revered records.

By September 12, 1961, Maris had hit 56 home runs and was within sight of the legendary Babe Ruth's single-season record of 60, which Ruth set in 1927.

But Maris's phenomenal home run production had suddenly tailed off as the 1961 season was drawing to a close. On September 12, he went homer-less against the Chicago White Sox and was in the middle of a seven-game dry spell. He wouldn't hit home run number 57 until September 16 against the Detroit Tigers.

Maris was feeling the pressure of his run on Ruth's record. Teammate Mickey Mantle also was in the chase for the record with 53 home runs, and he'd become the sentimental favorite among fans and sportswriters to break the record. But an injury would shorten Mantle's season, and he'd finish with 54 home runs.

Maris, 26 at the time, was a quiet, no-nonsense man who'd grown up in Fargo, North Dakota. (Click here to see an essay about a family connection to Maris.) He was unaccustomed to the intense public scrutiny that came with playing baseball in New York City and was annoyed by the constant presence of reporters. He'd been labeled by reporters as surly and uncooperative during post-game interviews. He was losing sleep, and was in such a state of anxiety that his hair was falling out.

And although there were still 16 games remaining on the Yankees' 1961 schedule after the game of September 12, Major League Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick announced that same day that unless Maris or Mantle hit 61 home runs by the 154th game of the season, it would not count as a new single-season record.

The reason for Frick's ruling was because in 1961, the American League had added two new teams and extended its season to 162 games. So Mantle and Maris would play eight more games that season than Ruth's Yankees had played in 1927.

What Frick did not announce with his ruling was that he'd been a good friend of Ruth's and did not want to see the Babe's record eclipsed.

Maris had raised his home run total to 58 when the Yankees took the field in Baltimore September 19 for a double-header against the Orioles that would be games 153 and 154. He went hitless in the first game and managed only a single in the second game. So in the eyes of Ford Frick, Ruth's single-season record was still intact.

Maris hit homer number 59 the following day against Baltimore, and he hit number 60 when the Orioles came to Yankee Stadium on September 26.

Maris's final home run of the 1961 season came on October 1 against pitcher Tracy Stallard of the Boston Red Sox. In the fourth inning, Maris took two pitches outside the strike zone. But he connected on Stallard's third pitch, a knee-high fastball on the outside corner.

"There it is," announcer Red Barber said the moment the ball left Maris's bat and sailed into the right-field stands. "Sixty-one."

Maris rounded the bases with his head down and went straight to the Yankees' dugout after touching home plate. He seemed surprised at the lengthy ovation from about 23,000 fans who attended the game, and, with a big smile on his face, stepped out of the dugout twice to acknowledge the cheers.

No one would approach Maris's accomplishment until the steroid-riddled seasons of the late 1990s. (Click here for a Drye Goods essay about that.) Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds all shattered Maris's single-season record, but all of them later were linked to using performance-enhancing steroids when they were piling up their astronomical home run totals.

In my mind, that makes Maris's feat all the more remarkable. Even though he had eight more games than Ruth, he did it without cheating. I've watched a lot of baseball games this season, and I don't recall hearing any mention of the golden anniversary of this achievement. And that seems wrong. Why isn't Major League Baseball officially observing this milestone? Could it be that they don't want anything that might remind fans of the absurd number of home runs hit during the steroid era?