Class of 2014
Lois Herring Parker
The ball had magic in it.
Lois Herring Parker never touched a basketball, never considered playing the game, until she tried out for her school team as an eighth-grader.
It was the 1940s. Her dad, a textile worker, had moved the family from Lakeview, S.C., when she was 2, because of work, and Parker had developed a deep affection for Mount Holly.
She wanted to represent the school and her community.
The moment she picked up that basketball, in an old un-air-conditioned gym, her life changed; she began a six-decade ride that brought trophies, a professional contract, a gold medal and not one, but two, inductions into the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame.
“When I went out and made the first team, I’d never played. God just gave me talent. And when I went out on the court and tried out, I loved the game,” Parker, 85, said from her home in Raleigh, where she lives with her husband, Eddie. “I didn’t even know they kept how many points were scored during a game. You know, when you love the sport and love your teammates, you wanted to win for them and for Mount Holly High School.”
Parker was a 5-foot-9 forward, and always team captain.
She was MVP of the Little Eight Conference tournament in 1947, her senior year.
She was the second-highest scorer in the conference as a senior.
Her Hawkettes teams of 1944-45, 1945-46 and 1946-47 had a combined record of 40-9-4 and tied for the conference title in 1946.
She was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2013 with her teams – the Hawkettes of the 1940s.
This year, she is being inducted as an individual.
It wasn’t just basketball that occupied her at school – Parker squeezed in time for cheerleading, during football season. “And at that time, we could go downtown at 1 o’clock and they’d block off the streets, and we’d cheer down there. Then we’d cheer on the steps of the high school,” she said. “It was so different back then.”
After graduation, Parker played professionally for the Hanes Hosiery team in Winston-Salem, then for Queen City Trailways and, later, Paw Creek American Legion.
At age 66, as the oldest member of her North Carolina Senior Olympics team – after a 46-year layoff from the sport – she won a gold medal.
“I don’t know what my life would have been like without basketball,” she said. “Living in Mount Holly was such a privilege and such a blessing.”
A favorite memory is the 1947 conference final. Parker was on the foul line in the final minute. The title depended on her; the crowd noise was deafening.
“The referee took the ball out of my hands, placed the ball on the floor, put his foot on the ball and placed his finger on his mouth and looked at the spectators,” she said. “It got so quiet you could hear a pin drop. I made the two shots, and we won the game.
“They gave me a little silver basketball that said ‘MVP 1947,’ but my mother and daddy’s home burned, so I lost that.”
It wasn’t all she lost.
“The house that we lived in for over 15 years, we were flooded three times in 15 months and they had to tear our house down. So, I’ve been through three floods, four car wrecks – they hit us – but I’m still laughing,” she said.
“God is good.”
She can tell those stories calmly, without bitterness. And that is where the profile of Lois Parker the athlete expands to include Lois Parker the Christian.
“With the grace of God,” she said. “Everything is possible.”
Pro ball with the Hanes Hosiery team gave Parker’s life story a chapter of experience away from her beloved Mount Holly. But it did not give her any desire to venture farther away for long.
“They gave you a job; I worked back then with computers coming on the market. We always had a nurse that went on our trips. We were very well-protected,” she said. “They were so good to me.
“I got a letter from (baseball legend) Ted Williams – said he was going to start a girls basketball team. He got my name from the paper. I didn’t want to travel like that – I’d never been anywhere, except Myrtle Beach with my parents, and I was only 17 years old. I didn’t answer that letter.”
One day, Hanes Hosiery was playing a team from Pittsburgh when Parker went for a loose ball and her knee went sideways. Decades later, she had knee replacement surgery. “It sounded like a gun going off. The doctor said he didn’t know how I even put my foot on the floor – that’s how bad it was. I did the whole ball of wax,” she said. “But God is good to me.”
She came home to a job at First State Bank & Trust Co., in downtown Mount Holly, across the street from Charlie’s drug store.
She was there 12 years.
“I loved my customers, and I cried when we had to move to Raleigh, because Mount Holly is a special place,” she said.
She and her husband owned Parker’s Engraving, which manufactured and engraved stationery – one of only 200 companies in the country to do hand-engraving. They bought the company building in 1985 – the former Raleigh Nehi Bottling Company on Hillsborough Street – which is designated an historic landmark by the Wake County Historic Preservation Commission.
Life in Raleigh gave Parker opportunities to work with her faith, to help others. She taught Sunday School at Emmanuel Baptist Church. Her daughter married a minister. Her son is a deacon in his church and a Sunday School teacher.
And Anne Graham Lotz, daughter of Rev. Billy Graham, chose Parker to lead one of her Bible study programs. “You start in Genesis and go through Revelation. Each lady has 15 in her group, and you go through the whole year,” she said.
Mostly now, though, Parker is a full-time grandma – she has four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. “And they’re all a blessing,” she said. “They all go to church. They all love the Lord.
“All we do now is go to church, and go see our great-grandchildren play ball: one plays soccer, one plays baseball, one plays coach-pitch and the other, she swims.
“In fact, when I got the call about the (Hall of Fame) banquet this year, I told them, ‘Can you hold a minute? My grandson’s up to bat…’”
She is fond of the saying “what goes around, comes around.”
And it all began with a basketball, and team try-out in eighth grade.
“By my playing basketball all those years, it got me playing professionally,” she said. “And my having Christian parents, that led to me being a leader in Bible study.
“God is good to me.”
A.C. Hollar
A.C. Hollar played football when many young athletes’ resumes already listed military service. A time when long-distance relationships involved hitch-hiking and stamped love letters, and game schedules were typed as “here” and “there,” not “home” and “away.”
Hollar’s skills with Mount Holly High School, Belmont Abbey, the University of South Carolina and semi-pro Gastonia Volunteers have landed him a 2014 induction into the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame.
“He was a fierce ballplayer. He really liked to get with it,” said Ted Reece, 85, who played quarterback at Belmont Abbey when Hollar was a 190-pound defensive end, the last year the school had a football program. “He was a good, upstanding young man. He had high morals, and we respected him very much.”
Frank Auten, 82, of Boone, played left tackle at South Carolina to Hollar’s right tackle.
“He was about as rough as you’d ever seen in college football. He was fast, and he was rough,” Auten said. “He was one of the finest, and he married a fine girl.”
That girl, Jane, said “I do” to Hollar in 1953 in her hometown of High Point, before he enlisted in the Army later that year. (When he was at South Carolina, she was in college in Greensboro, and he would hitch back and forth, to visit). The marriage lasted just shy of 40 years: A.C. died of lung cancer in 1991.
Hollar was a menace on the football field, but a gentler, family man away from it.
“I have 250 love letters that I still have in a box. About once every five years, I go through the whole thing again,” said Jane Hollar, 82, who lives across Highway 16 in Charlotte, not far from Mount Holly. “He was an MP in the Army, so he had to be kinda tough, but he didn’t have to keep the persona up after that.”
The 1947 Mount Holly Hawks went 6-1-1, with Hollar playing end and wearing No. 20. He already was dating 14-year-old Jane, and the relationship accompanied their stages of growing up – graduations, the Army, attending different colleges. “My cousin was dating his best friend, so we dated so we could all go out. We dated off and on for five years before we got engaged,” she said.
When Hollar played for Belmont Abbey, the media took notice.
He received a varsity letter from the Athletic Council in 1948, and on Sept. 14, 1949, a Charlotte Observer article said: “After a wartime layoff, the return to the top flight by Belmont Abbey has been slow. … Coach Howard (Humpy) Wheeler put his boys to work this week for the October 1 opener with Gardner-Webb and will work them fast. … Things are not too gloomy, with 18 lettermen returning. These boys will form the nucleus of a big, hard-hitting line and a fast, versatile backfield.”
It would be Wheeler’s last year coaching, and the last year the Abbey had a team.
A newspaper article about that season’s opening victory over Gardner-Webb said the first touchdown occurred “behind the beautiful blocking of A.C. Hollar.”
From a loss to Western Carolina: “Instrumental in holding the Baby Cats’ score down was… the stubborn defensive playing of A.C. Hollar.”
An article bylined Bernie Curren, who seemed to enjoy giving people nicknames, said, “At the flanking positions, throttling any ideas of running around Abbey’s ends, are camped Aubrey C. Hollar and ‘Please be careful, hon’ (Pinky) Loehr.”
Hollar’s semi-pro days came next, and the media followed.
Gastonia Volunteers coach Mason Blanton, in a newspaper article about playing Fort Bragg’s service team, said: “Along with A.C. Hollar, who is highly dependable as a good, all-around end, I don’t have much to worry about in that part of the line.”
And from a story about a 58-6 victory over visiting Pembroke: “Bill Fletcher then fired a pass to A.C. Hollar for the touchdown. … Hollar scored on an end-around play for the first of three TDs in the fourth quarter.”
Hollar returned to Belmont Abbey after his football career and got a business degree. He had a two-year-old son by then – and he focused on work and family.
He joined a farm equipment company, moved the trio to Americus, Ga., for three years, and returned to Charlotte, where his second son was born, to work for the Charlotte Ford Tractor Company. His title was Zone Manager – “He had a manager job for about 14 tractor dealerships,” Jane Hollar said. “That’s when we moved to Myrtle Beach and lived 27 years.
“He had more friends than anyone I’d ever known. He never met anyone he didn’t like. He had lots of people who would do anything for him.”
Ted Reece, the teammate from Belmont Abbey, said if Hollar were to be present to accept his Hall of Fame award, “He would be overjoyed. Oh, he would be delighted that what he’d done had been recognized.”
Frank Auten, from the South Carolina teams, said the induction is “a long time coming.”
What would Hollar say in his acceptance speech?
“He’d just say, ‘Thank you,’” Auten said. “Just, ‘Thank you.’ That covers a lot of territory, I think, don’t you?”
Larry Lawing
Some people are born with musical talent. They can play anything with strings or keys by ear, and read music as easily as reading a menu.
Some people, however, have trouble playing anything more difficult than a radio.
Thinking back, Larry Lawing is glad to be in the second category.
“I went out for band, and I could not play one note, so I decided I’d go out for football. I played baseball and basketball, too, but I played football the best,” Lawing, 72, said from his home in Greensboro. He was talking about his induction into the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame, and how it wouldn’t have happened – how his whole athletic career might not have happened – if he’d had a talent for music:
“They tried me on three or four instruments, but none of them worked out. I could play a juke box, though, if I had a dime or a quarter. Let’s just say I was not musically inclined.”
What Lawing was inclined to do was run with a football.
His size – about 5-foot-11, 170 pounds – added to his agility and speed, and it brought him a collection of all-conference, all-district and honorable mention all-state awards. “Wherever they are, they’re stored. I don’t display them,” he said of his plaques and trophies. “But I have a scrapbook, with stories from the Greensboro paper, Winston-Salem Journal, the Gaston Gazette, the Mount Holly News. Back then, there were some write-ups.”
Lawing’s “back then” started in about 1957, at Mount Holly High School. He played a little defense, but mostly offense at running back, and returning punts and kickoffs. In 1960, he was the football team’s co-captain and won the all-conference scoring title.
“They had this thing that, whoever scored the most touchdowns got recognition for that. I had 12, which is nothing these days. But back then, 12 was good,” he said. “I’m not complaining.”
Lawing dabbled in baseball, too, and played three years in high school and for the Mount Holly-Paw Creek American Legion team at left field, short stop and second base. “Pretty much wherever they needed. I was a good fielder,” he said, “but I didn’t have much of a batting average. I enjoyed it, and I had good friends that played, and that’s what made it special.”
He went up to Boone, to Appalachian State University, but didn’t initially try out for football. College players, it seemed, were a whole new breed from the kids who suited up around Gaston County.
“These guys were bigger, older … that was my opinion. Seems like you got bigger guys, more experienced guys,” he said. “I felt rather small.”
But at the end of his freshman year, Lawing went out for spring practice. He made the team. His sophomore year, he contracted mononucleosis, lost a lot of weight, and decided to give up the game.
“But then came the end of my sophomore year, and I went out for spring practice again, and that led to my junior year, and that’s when I started playing,” he said. “I played defensive corner(back). Back then, they gave you five years to get four years of playing in, so I was a five-year man at App, so to speak. But I was small. We had one back who was 225 (pounds), one at 230. I was 170 tops, but I was pretty quick. I’m not bragging, but that’s what I relied on pretty much was speed.”
He was awarded Most Athletic for his play in 1964 and honorable mention all-state.
He graduated in 1965 with a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, a minor in Physical Education and an appointment with the U.S. Army. From 1966 to 1968, he was a personnel specialist, stationed at Fort Jackson, S.C.
He moved to Greensboro, where he lives now with his wife Bobbi. His son Lane, 34, is in Greensboro and another son, Lyle, 44, lives in California.
Lawing worked for an insurance company in the late 1960s, then for a textile company and in personnel/ human resources for a while before getting into the car business – in sales and financing – from 1977 to 2009.
Looking back, he said, his greatest accomplishment as an athlete was, simply, “just getting to play. I mean, I loved, I enjoyed it… especially the camaraderie you had with your teammates.”
He said he doesn’t feel old, at 72. “I work part-time. I don’t sit around too much,” he said. “I got tired of just going to Wal-mart and Home Depot and Lowe’s all the time, so I said I was going to find me a job.”
He’s a driver for O’Reilly Auto Parts. He works about 28 hours a week.
It’s the perfect set-up.
Lawing can combine work with what he really enjoys – playing music.
But like before, it’s only on the radio.
Eddie Wilson
Eddie Wilson has always been in the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame – as its founder, and as president, treasurer and secretary. So, when Wilson and the nominating committee were sorting through names last spring for the 2014 ceremony, the process was predictably routine – until the others asked him to leave the room.
“We went through the names and I told them it sounded like a great slate, then they said, ‘We have one more name…’ and I had to walk out, then they threw my name out and voted on it,” Wilson said. “And I said, ‘No!’ I couldn’t believe it.”
Wilson is inducted not only for his role with the Hall of Fame, but for his athletic performance – mainly with the Mount Holly High School football team, which won the Western state championship game in 1967, 26-20 over Glen Alpine.
“Eddie Wilson was the heart of the championship team in 1967. He was a leader in every way,” said Hall of Fame president Gary Neely. “Depending on the situation, he could be an encourager, or he could get in your face and issue a challenge. Eddie was the vocal leader that every team needs.”
Wilson, 64, grew up watching ballgames, or playing sandlot ball at his family’s country home. He took up summer baseball with the Mount Holly recreation program, when he was old enough.
As a seventh-grader in 1962, he tried football, playing left guard on a 13-and-under midget program team of eighth-graders.
It was his first introduction to football, and it ended with a national title.
“It was the first organized program I ever participated in, the YBMC – Young Business Man’s Club – sponsored by Flint-Groves Mills out of Gastonia. Earl Groves, out of his pocket, had started a football team (in the 1950s), and I got the privilege to be part of it,” he said. “They sent a driver around to the little towns in Gaston County to pick up football players, and you tried out for the team.”
The sanctioned program was part of a national organization, and Wilson’s team, the Little Orangemen, won the county and state titles, then traveled to Valley Stream, N.Y., on the west end of Long Island, to play in the Liberty Bowl – the national championship for Pop Warner football.
They won.
“They put so much emphasis on discipline, respect, honor and determination – all the principles you would expect a young man to display. Plus, they emphasized academics, and no one on the team could play if you had less than a B average,” Wilson said. “So you not only had to play the sport, but you had to play the books as well. It taught you that there’s more to athletics than just playing the game.
“They taught us there was more to life than livin’ on a mill hill and runnin’ wild and quittin’ school.”
Wilson grew into a defensive back role in eighth grade, and made his high school team as a freshman. By his sophomore year, he was starting – a role usually saved for seniors.
“I started on offense and defense, as a blocking back on offense and as a linebacker and nose guard on defense. I was probably only about 150 pounds, but I was the lead blocker for the tailback and fullback,” he said. “My junior year, I continued to play blocking back, and it was a 5-4 defense, so I played like a cornerback.”
As a senior, and a little bigger at about 175 pounds, Wilson said he moved to safety on defense, continued to play offense, and added some punt returns.
“Your objective was, you wanted to play every minute of every ballgame,” he said. “Coach (Delmer) Wiles, he was such a great coach. He was a drill instructor in the Marines, and he demanded respect. And you couldn’t help but respect him. The example he gave you with his life was impeccable.
“You worked as hard as you knew how to work for him, to prove yourself not only to yourself, but to him. It was about giving 110 percent.”
In 1967, as a senior, Wilson set a Mount Holly High School record for points scored – 118 – and also led all scoring in Gaston County. He was named Gaston County’s football Back of the Year. And he was Most Valuable Player of the state championship game.
“That ’67 team, we had the best coaching staff, and we were in shape,” Wilson said. “Synergy is when the sum is greater than the whole, and even though we didn’t look like we were that strong, when you put us together, we were stronger than you could imagine.
“It was all because of Coach Wiles and Joe Spears, who was the assistant coach. We were just strong.”
“Coach Wiles had named Eddie to be one of the captains,” Neely said, “a role that Eddie worked hard to fulfill. He also led by example in the way he ran his sprints, and in the way he blocked, tackled and carried the ball. … That ’67 team had a slew of outstanding players, but Eddie Wilson was the one teammate that we could not have won the championship without.”
Wilson played three years of high school baseball and two years of Legion ball for Belmont Post 144. He received scholarship offers to play baseball at Belmont Abbey and football for Gardner-Webb and Lenoir-Rhyne, but decided to follow some friends to Western Carolina and try for football.
“Later in the summer, my tuition was due at Western and I sold my car to pay my tuition,” he said. “After that, I got a full scholarship. I won the Veterans Affairs Scholarship, and I was a walk-on at Western and played freshman ball.”
The problem with Western, however, was that Cullowhee was too far from Wilson’s high school sweetheart. He left after a year and came home. He and Sheila were married in January, 1970 – they’ll celebrate their 45th anniversary next year. Their son, Brian, was born in 1974.
Wilson switched to Gaston College, played some pro ball with the Gaston Patriots, and went to work for Duke Power in Charlotte as a junior engineering assistant. He moved up through the company and spent the last 15 of his 32 years with Duke at the Allen Steam Station in Belmont, before retiring as superintendent in December 2001.
“I just want to thank the Good Lord for giving me the life that He has. It’s been a great ride up to now, and I give Him the praise and glory for it,” he said. “I was one of seven children, and I was brought up in a Christian home. We had all the necessities – a Christian environment, and love. I give my mom (Margie) all the credit.”
Tracy Black
When Tracy Black was in junior high and high school, people could tell what season it was by the shape of ball he held.
Black played football, basketball and baseball, though he admits basketball was “something to fill in. It wasn’t my passion.” More like something to do, to get from the end of football to the first pitch of spring.
“I was always the kid who had to be playing something,” he said.
The other two sports – especially baseball – have put Black, 52, of Lowell, in the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame.
Black played all three sports for Mount Holly Junior High and East Gaston High School, and has a trophy for being awarded school Athlete of the Year.
He played both sides of the ball, as a free safety and tailback, on the 1978 football team that won East Gaston’s first Southwest Conference title and was state Class 3A runners-up. “Everything just came together that year,” he said. “Going into my sophomore year, we had the same group of guys that won the junior high championship at Mount Holly, so when we got to East Gaston, they weren’t doing so well in sports but when we were in 10th grade, we started to turn things around as far as winning. Everything just clicked. We weren’t one of the biggest teams, but as far as talent, ability and speed, everything fell into place. We had the right guys in the right spot, and it was just a bunch of guys who loved to play.”
(He cites fellow MHSHOF inductee Richard Dill, a member of the 1978 team, as “one of the best athletes I every placed with – a standout type of talent.”)
But when Black graduated in 1979, football was put on hold.
“Baseball won out,” he said. “When I was growing up, I loved playing baseball. Every day at home, I would hit the ball up against the wall, drive my dad nuts. I was always in the backyard, swinging a bat.”
He was recruited by several colleges – Western Carolina, Davidson, Gardner-Webb, the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and Clemson. They sent letters and forms, phoned his house.
But it was North Carolina State that won the center-fielder’s signature.
“I had always been, for whatever reason, an N.C. State fan,” he said. “I’d fallen in love with the school and watching David Thompson and them play basketball, and from then on, I just wanted to go there and play. So it was a dream come true.”
During a high school playoff game, the N.C. State coach, Sam Esposito, was in the stands to watch a player from Stanley. “And it just happened that, that game, I couldn’t have played any better. So right after the game, he offered me a scholarship,” Black said.
Black red-shirted his senior year in college, then came back for a fifth season. The Pittsburgh Pirates had been watching, as had the Minnesota Twins, who had him on their radar while he was East Gaston. “They even had a mini tryout with me after practice one day. They said they’d definitely be watching through the years,” he said.
The Twins signed Black as a free agent and sent him to Class A Visalia Oaks of the California League, where he played three years. He moved from center field to right, then to first base. A collision with a runner caused a career-ending injury – a separated right shoulder – to his throwing arm. “It tore it up, and it never recuperated – not in their time frame, anyway,” he said.
But the minors were not without rewards.
Center-fielder Kirby Puckett, who played his entire 12-year career with the Twins, had left California, but set Black up with a host family – the grandparents of a bat boy. “They were a wonderful retired couple. He (Puckett) lived there right before I got there. Most other guys were living four or five to an apartment, so this was pretty good,” he said.
During spring training in Melbourne, Fla., Black injured a knee and was sent to the major league training facility in Orlando, for treatment. While there, he got to play with Puckett and first baseman Kent Hrbek.
“Kirby was the nicest, most humble, honest man,” Black said. “He was already a superstar, but he was just laid back, easy-going. He’d talk with me and give me pointers, things to do and not to do. He was just a humble, very appreciative man.”
Black retired in 1986 and returned to Mount Holly, where he went to work for a bread company as a production supervisor before joining Duke Energy as a systems operator. He left there in 2010 and works from home as a currency trader.
He is married to Damienne and has raised four boys – Aaron and Bryan, who are older, then Austin and Hayden. The boys are athletes, too: Aaron played baseball at East Gaston and shortstop for Belmont Abbey, on scholarship. Bryan played tight end for South Point, and Hayden was a linebacker there.
Black said he was surprised by the Hall of Fame nomination. “Shocked, really, but definitely humbled that they would pick me,” he said. “I loved playing, but not for any kind of accolades. (Coach) Wayne Bolick (a 2011 inductee) was one of the biggest influences on my life, and someone who helped shape my life.
“Just that they (the committee) felt me worthy is truly an honor. I’m definitely thankful.”
Richard Dill
Richard Dill could run fast.
As a football player at East Gaston High School in the late 1970s, he rushed for 3,681 yards in three seasons, a county record.
As a track team member, he anchored the 400-yard relay team and made all-state.
At East Tennessee State University, he ran fast enough to go through school on a full football scholarship, and was clocked, he said, at about 9.6 for 100 yards. The track coaches noticed, and put him on that team, too, where he said he was timed at about a 4.3 for 40 yards.
And after college, his speed earned him a look-see from the Houston Oilers, for whom he tried out in 1983 before being cut in the last round.
“I guess it started in about sixth grade, when I found out I was athletic when we used to have field day over at Ida Rankin (Elementary) in Mount Holly,” he said. “I played pee-wee ball, and it just took off from there.”
Dill, whose accomplishments have placed him in the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame, spent his athletic career running toward goal posts, running through defenses, and running away from competitors in track.
But ask which of those was his best move – which life merit means the most – and the answer doesn’t have anything to do with a playbook and cleats.
“None of this would be possible without God. I mean, none of it,” Dill, 54, said recently from his home in Charlotte. “Giving my life to the Lord Jesus Christ was the best thing I ever did. Without that, I wouldn’t have been able to obtain my scholarship. The talent I have is God-given. He’s allowed me to enhance it, but it’s a God-given ability. You can’t teach someone to run that fast.”
Former East Gaston wrestling coach Doug Smith, who started at the school in 1978, remembers the quickness.
“I think my first year coaching there, he was one of the star running backs, then he got that full ride to ETSU,” Smith said. “He was one of the school’s first super running backs.”
A Gaston Gazette article reported that Dill’s county-record 3,681 yards remains first in school history, and his 1,646 yards in 1978 as a junior – including 296 yards against East Rutherford – were school records that lasted until 2006 and 1997, respectively.
“I really didn’t know how fast I was until they started timing me. In that era, when I played football, I was, like, 158 pounds. But when I left college, I was about 185, 190,” he said. “When you got a full ride and the football team has their own training table, their own trainers, you’re gonna put that weight on, but in the right places. Most colleges, they treat their athletes pretty good. I couldn’t have asked for any better.
“You have to keep your grades up, though. It’s a job, really. But I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”
Dill also got recruiting interest from North Carolina State, Clemson and Kansas. “But when East Tennessee came down and talked to my parents, I think my mom pretty much made the decision, and it was the right decision, looking back on it,” he said. “I went to Carolina (in Chapel Hill) on a visit, but it was like taking a little, small town Mount Holly boy and dropping him off in New York.”
It was in college that Dill met a woman named Renee, who, Dill said, “was just in love with God.”
“I started going to church with her, and I started going on a regular basis. My parents had introduced me to it, but it became easier when you had a peer who was so sold on God. It just kept growing and growing and growing.”
After sports, Dill worked as a private investigator. For the past 21 years, though, he’s been employed with United Parcel Service. He has two daughters – Alisha, a graduate of Coastal Carolina, and Desiree, who attends Norfolk State. He met his wife, Pam, at church.
Dill is one of six children – three boys, three girls – of James and Betty Dill.
To young kids today, he has these words: “Do right by your parents. Know how to control yourself. There’s always someone who will give you an opportunity to do something wrong, but that’s when your training comes in with your parents.”
To his fellow adults: “When you get to a point in your life when you can, you help somebody. God has placed people here on Earth to help someone else. We tend to get too caught up in ourselves at times. But you have to do right in this life; you have to put other people before yourself. The greatest thing in life is helping other people.”
On his induction into the Hall of Fame: “I think it’s a great honor for me, a tremendous honor, because someone thinks that much about you to put you among all those elite people.
“One other thing that really impressed me – the mayor of Mount Holly knew all about me, all this stuff, how many yards I ran. He said, ‘When I was a little boy, I used to sit in the stands and watch you.’ That just blew me away.
“I kinda felt like Michael Jordan or something…”
2014 Community Spirit award Buddie Hodges
Sometimes, if a man grows up in deprivation, he dedicates his life to assuring others don’t experience the same fate.
Buddie Hodges knows that McDowell County, West Virginia, is 535 square miles of Appalachia where the war on poverty is a battle cry with little ammunition.
“We lived in the coal-mining camps of West Virginia, west of Bluefield, where it was rated as the poorest county not just in West Virginia, but in the whole USA. Daddy worked in the mines. The community was the worst of the worst,” he said. “You sorta had to pipe in daylight. I went back up there a few years ago, and my wife literally got sick. I’d told her she probably shouldn’t go.”
Hodges and his nine siblings lived in a too-small house. No one played sports, or had access to such things. During his visit, he noticed many of the houses were crumbling, as were the churches and schoolhouse. The county is so poor, that it is devoid of street signs. “The only people still living there are the people who can’t get out,” he said.
Hodges’ daddy moved the family to Mount Holly in 1958, for a promise of construction work with Duke Power, raising power plants. Hodges was in 11th grade. “I’d never been around any organized sports before,” he said. “But halfway through my junior year, the football coach asked me to play, and I got to play some before the end of the year. You learn in practice and by scrimmaging. We went to the state playoffs.
“I was the other side of the first-string offense, and you got to block the starting players, so you learn pretty quick. It was physical stuff. I wish I’d had the opportunity to play a little more.
Hodges took his newfound passion for sports and cultivated it so others could benefit. He studied the game. He studied other sports. Because he devoted so much of his life to helping others play, he is the recipient of the 2014 Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame Community Spirit Award.
After high school, Hodges married the former Becky Cannon, moved to Stanley, and joined the Optimist Club. He coached football and basketball, and ran the concession stand at football games.
Hodges went to Gaston College, then the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and took an engineering job with Bell Telephone Laboratories in Greensboro, working on anti-ballistic missile systems and military projects during the era of the S.A.L.T. talks.
While in Greensboro, he met a guy who coached Little League baseball and got involved with officiating. Bell Labs transferred him to Charlotte, then Atlanta, working the engineering switch to fiber-optics. He moved back to Mount Holly in 1973 and filled his days with the Optimist Club.
“I was umpiring, and I coached some football, soccer and t-ball, but I ended up doing more officiating back in that era,” he said. “I was Man of the Year one time, so I guess I evolved into officiating pretty well. The Optimists had a basketball program before the city had anything, and I officiated for them a good many years.”
By the time he was 48, he said, he was umpiring high school and American Legion games. “Hundreds of games a year, on weekends, basically,” he said.
He coached Mount Holly’s t-ball teams and helped start the program. He officiated basketball games for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Parks and Rec, and was voted one of the league’s top two officials.
He officiated women’s sports, too, including professional softball and did the women’s pro baseball world series. He also did high school regular-season softball and playoffs.
In all, Hodges, 72, is credited with devoting more than 30 years to youth sports.
“You learn by doing,” he said. “I’m a very detailed person, and I believe in knowing the rules to the ‘nth’ degree. Most people, when it comes to officiating stuff, they say they wouldn’t think about doing it. But I didn’t feel that way. I actually enjoyed it.
“I was able to be involved with the sport without playing the sport.”
He wanted the youth of Mount Holly to have what he did not, back in McDowell County, W.Va.
“I just enjoyed seeing them play and having the opportunity to play. I know where I was at, nothing like that existed,” he said. “Now, around Mount Holly, it’s more common than it was 20 or 30 years ago.”
With time, comes change. Hodges is a believer in playing the game for the competitive comradeship of it being merely a game. That doesn’t always happen now. “I sometimes see parents fuss at their kids because they didn’t play well. I mean, most kids are not going to become professional athletes. And sometimes coaches lose track of that, and parents lose track of that,” he said. “And at the professional level, some of the acts you see from time to time turn me off. Peoples’ priorities seem to make it a life or death matter on how some team does, or how a particular player plays. There’s more to life than that.”
Hodges said he’s thankful to receive the Hall of Fame award. “But I wasn’t in it for any kind of recognition. I really enjoyed doing it.
“It cost me money out of pocket, getting from point A to point B, and I bought the equipment sometimes, but I enjoyed 99.999 percent of anything I ever did. You owe it to people to do the best you can.”
