Class of 2018
Tony Leroy McConnell
The day President John F. Kennedy was shot – Friday, November 22, 1963 – Tony McConnell was in Mrs. Miller’s geometry class at Mount Holly High School when news drifted down the hallway. “We were absolutely shocked,” he says. It also was the day of the state championship football game and McConnell, the team’s offensive guard, wasn’t sure how the afternoon itinerary should go. “But North Davidson, who we were playing for the championship, was already on the bus on the way to Mount Holly when he was shot, so they decided to go ahead and play.
“We played through the shock and the sadness and the pain, and we made it. People stuck together, and there was tremendous attendance that day at a football game, despite the tragedy on a national level. People were able to muster the energy to support a football team.”
Sports are like that sometimes. A Band-Aid to cover the outside world for a few fleeting hours.
For athletes, McConnell knows, the most important thing about sports often is the camaraderie and daily sweat that bonds teammates who don’t always care about win-loss records but play because they truly love the game.
“You get to know people really well. And you get to the point where you don’t really want praise; you have mixed feelings about it,” he says. “To be part of something with a group of people can be unifying and gratifying. I’m glad to be able to be associated with the ballplayers and the town and the people who just came out and supported us by watching us play. It was a good time, the ‘60s, the time when we grew up.”
These are some of McConnell’s favorite stories, about the games that led to his spot in the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame as a standout pitcher for the 1965 and 1966 baseball teams. The ’65 team went 10-0 in league play and finished 12-2; the ’66 team went 12-1 and advanced to the Western NC tournament final.
About a baseball game with Asheville’s Clyde Erwin High, when he pitched a no-hitter, struck out 11 and walked two in the first round of the state playoffs:
“During batting practice, we were watching them hit, and they were good ol’ mountain boys, and they were hitting the ball out of the ballpark, and we thought we were probably going to have a tough game. Either their first or second batter, I threw a curve ball and he hit the ball about a mile, but he hit it about a foot foul. The catcher, Larry Hartsell, called time out and he comes to the mound and says, ‘Leroy, your curve ball looks like a grapefruit. It’s fat, it’s slow, and it’s hanging. If you throw any more of those, they’ll kill you. But your fastball is really strong, so I’m not even going to give you a signal. Just keep throwing a fastball until they hit it.’ They never hit it. They couldn’t get the ball out of the infield the rest of the game.”
About playing for Mount Holly Hall of Fame member Delmer Wiles, who coached football and baseball. Wiles played football at Wofford College before joining the Marine Corps. He coached baseball 12 years at MHHS, going 104-48 with six conference titles:
“Baseball was spring training for football, because we had to run sprints and he got us in shape in the spring for that fall’s football season. He used to do a lot of endurance things with us, for example we’d do a fireman’s carry where you throw somebody across your shoulders and carry them all the way around the football field, and in front of the stands, so it was larger than the football field. I hated to be carried. Then you had to swap and carry your buddy all the way around.”
Did Wiles’ conditioning regimen help?
“Yeah, it did. We were in such good shape that football was a cakewalk. We liked him. He brought winning ways to Mount Holly. As long as you’re winning, people are happy.”
About his best memory, and what it’s like to look really, really small:
“I guess the best is when you’re in a really critical situation and you strike a batter out, or in football when you get a good block and somebody gets a first down or has a good run. In a South Stanley game, when we got beat, I was about 165 pounds, not too big, and here was a guy in front of me that was 6-foot-4, 240. And he wasn’t fat. He looked at me on the first down we played and said, ‘Hey, boy, I’m gonna kill you.’ And that’s what he tried to do, and I tried everything to block him. But there was a play called where we double-teamed him, and I set him up and the other guy cleaned his clock. I got up and laughed at him.”
About growing up with his best friend/ cousin/ high school and college teammate Phil White:
“We lived close together and played together, and we were closer than brothers, really. We stayed together all the way through our first three years of college, and roomed together, and finally went our separate ways.”
McConnell was given the award for Most Desire at a MHHS football banquet, presented by Wiles, and the yearbook staff named him Most Likely to Succeed. He graduated from engineering school at the University of Tulsa, then worked at nuclear plants in North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas. In his last eight years with the McGuire Nuclear Plant, he was station manager. He retired in 2002 from Duke Energy.
“I worked at one plant for 18 years, and we kept it safe. I used to say you have to have a focus that out-trumps everything else. You can’t make mistakes.
“Like that foul ball that was almost in, you can’t make a mistake.”
William Phillip White
There were two Phil Whites at Mount Holly High in the 1960s.
One excelled at football and baseball – played center field and batted lead-off because he was lightning-bolt quick at stealing bases, and was football defensive player of the year as a senior for his work at cornerback and safety.
The other Phil White was asked by his English Literature teacher if he’d rather wait in the library during class, instead of study about poets and death, since White, 16 years old in March of 1965, had just been diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma and the prognosis was cruel.
White, the athlete, excelled on the field despite a chronic knee injury and breaking his left collarbone. Twice.
White, the student, chose to stay in English class. He also chose to live.
For White’s efforts to beat other teams as an athlete, and his ability to beat cancer as a man, he gained a place in the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame.
“I was one of those kids who could take two steps and be at full speed, so they would hope I got on,” he says of his baseball success. “I don’t know how many bases I stole. I remained the first hitter, and was always surprised the four years I played. It was like, ‘Wow! I hit the ball.’
“In football, I think the most fun was just playing together and surviving the practices and wind sprints that (2007 HOF inductee) Coach Delmer Wiles put us through. He was a retired drill instructor from the Marines.
“But I have a very checkered history with illness and injury throughout high school. I was that guy who always had the illness or injury.”
White, 70, played for MHHS from 1962 through 1966. The baseball team was conference champs his sophomore, junior and senior seasons and the 1964-67 teams are Hall of Fame inductees for their four consecutive conference championships, 40-10 overall record and 4-3 record in the state playoffs.
White and his cousin, Tony Leroy McConnell, the pitcher, were born about 40 hours apart, he says, and were like twins, “But he’s the twin who got the brains. I think what I valued most was just the relationships and the brotherhood on those teams.”
White’s cancer diagnosis was terminal.
“They sent me home to die, and I didn’t. So they gave me six months, and I lived, which obviously was a surprise to the doctors,” he says.
McConnell got a ride to Oral Roberts University, and White followed with a scholarship, too. It was the era of the Vietnam War. “You could get a college deferment if you went and maintained a 2.0. You wouldn’t get drafted until you got out of college,” White says.
He left Oral Roberts after two years, but when his draft number was called, he was politely told “no thanks.”
“I went for the preliminary physical and testing and was given a 4-F, not physically capable of serving in the military because of my knee, and the cancer I contracted when I was 16 still was in the red zone, the danger zone, at 19, so I went back to college,” he says.
The path led to Tulsa.
“When you’re a kid in America growing up, your dream is not to end up in Oklahoma, most likely, but I came out here for school, for baseball on scholarship, and thought I’d never come back,” he says, “but I came back for two weeks in 1984, and this is the longest stay-cation in my life.”
White went to grad school at the University of Oklahoma to become a clinical therapist.
“When you come to see me, it’s about being insane and becoming more sane. We can at least aspire to sanity, whether we get it or not,” he says. “That’s my crazy work in life. And I worked with the chronically and mentally ill for many years, then went into private practice, and now I’m currently working with people coming out of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. It’s all been fascinating the whole time, from the mentally ill to people who are felons. It’s quite a population.”
He keeps in touch, some, with the guys from Mount Holly.
“I just really enjoyed making it through the ups and downs. My most special memory on the teams was in the spring, we were playing ball or doing our spring training, and I was diagnosed and the guys all rallied around me,” he says. “They signed a baseball that I’ve kept with me through the years, and for me personally, that was the most special experience, from their visiting me and being considerate to me, and to sign that baseball and give it to me.
“Since I was a kid, I’ve moved so many times, but I’ve made it a point to never get rid of that ball.”
Sue Carlton Whitley
On a vacant lot off Old Highway 27 in Stanley, in an era when girls didn’t have equal opportunity, Sue Carlton Whitley learned to play the games boys played, and excel. A decade before Title IX showed up in school gymnasiums, she already was becoming a master of the games.
“Everyone came down to our house to play ball, and I played with the boys. We had several kids who lived on that road, and there was a vacant lot and I played football, basketball and baseball with them growing up,” she says. “I had an older brother, and he played Little League, and I would go watch, because girls couldn’t play.”
Her freshman year at Stanley High – 1972, the year Title IX was born – girls’ options were limited: “All they had was basketball. They were a smaller school, and that’s all they had.”
So Whitley, 61, played. She played all through high school, after Stanley merged with Mount Holly High to form East Gaston. As an EG senior, she played softball in the fall, basketball in winter and threw shot and discus for the track team in spring. “I also ran one lap in the 440 or mile relay, but I wasn’t a sprinter. If it involved throwing, I could do it,” she says.
If it involved dribbling, shooting or hitting, she could do it, too. And it landed her in the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame.
Whitley – whose one-year-older brother Frank played football, basketball and baseball in high school – was on East Gaston’s first girls basketball team, when the school opened her sophomore year. The team was undefeated in conference play, went 15-1 in 1973-74 and Whitley was named Female Athlete of the Year, All-Conference and tournament MVP. She also was the first girl to score 1,000 points.
“It was my senior year, and they stopped the game and gave me the game ball. Then I took it over and gave it to my mother,” she says. At 5-foot-7 she played shooting guard and small forward, depending. True positions were different then, too. “We had a point guard, then two wings. We pretty much played an offense where we had one point guard, or three outside and two under the basket. So on offense, I played outside, and then on defense I played underneath.”
She also played second base and shortstop as a junior and senior on East Gaston’s first softball team, a team that won the first Gaston County championship. “I don’t think we officially added the team until I was a senior. We may have had a team, but it was more of a pick-up team,” she says. “We were 3A, and as a matter of fact, some of the 4A schools didn’t have teams.”
Her basketball skills were mentioned when she went college-hunting, but girls still were forging their way in such areas. Whitley went to college on an academic ride.
She chose UNC-Greensboro for its math program – a high school teacher had attended there – and she was awarded a Catherine Smith Reynolds Scholarship, “the best that UNCG offers. It was a merit-based scholarship. It could have been a full thing, but it was based on what your parents made.”
A success in the classroom – she also has a Master’s degree from UNCG – she also was a successful gym rat. “Everyone down at the gym thought I was a P.E. major, except the instructors, because I wasn’t in their classes. I played field hockey, basketball and softball. I met the basketball coach when I was there on my scholarship interview, and she also coached the field hockey team, and they had volleyball in the fall, and I’d never played either one,” she says.
But, so what?
“They had field hockey tryouts the week before volleyball, and I loved it. I played center/forward on the freshman team, then the goalie graduated, so I played goalie on the varsity team. I didn’t start on the basketball team until my senior year. When you’re 5-7, you’re not real tall in college. Softball was my best sport,” she says. “I played at shortstop two years and second base two years and started all four years.”
Her best memory, though, comes from basketball.
Whitley’s freshman year at UNCG, the team was playing a tournament at Winthrop. The opponent was Tennessee, coached by legendary Pat Head (later, Summit). “We tied up the game, and our point guard had fouled out in the second half, so I was playing when it went into overtime,” she says. “We beat them in overtime, and I scored the basket that beat Tennessee. I just happened to get a rebound and put it back in, right at the buzzer.”
Whitley moved to Rock Hill in 1988 because of her husband David’s job. She teaches eighth-grade math at Sullivan Middle School and coaches girls basketball. She has three married children and two grandchildren. And just when she thought she knew all of her academic and athletic accomplishments, she recently discovered another. Back in 1975, when she graduated from East Gaston, computers were not in the vocabulary. Stuff got recorded by hand.
“I found out I graduated No. 1 in my class in high school,” she says. “Because East Gaston was a combination of Stanley and Mount Holly, they didn’t have a valedictorian. But I was No. 1.”
John Logan
If there were a teammate the guys wanted on their side, it was John Logan.
A big guy – 6-foot and 270 pounds – he was the tackling machine on East Gaston football’s defensive line, the heavyweight wrestler who won the majority of his matches with quick pins, the track team standout who could hurl a 12-pound shot put 58 feet, easily, and sail a discus into oblivion.
“I threw discus one year, but the guy who always won it was John Logan,” says former East Gaston teammate Jeff Lee. “Big John threw it about 170 feet.”
Logan, who took his talents to Johnson C. Smith University and graduated in 1987 with a bachelor’s in Business Administration, joins the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame for his list of accomplishments at both schools. He casually recalls some of the details, when asked, but his attention now is focused on family and his job at Federal Express, where he’s worked for 24 years.
“Everybody said, ‘You ought to play football,’ and I had a lot of speed for my size, but once I started I really enjoyed it, I had a passion for it,” Logan says. “I wasn’t all that great. I had my moments, but I really loved the game and I think more than anything, I loved the team concept. I enjoyed being around those guys and made a lot of friends.”
Logan, who turns 54 in August, started for East Gaston’s football as a junior and senior and was voted All-Gazetteland as a senior in 1982, an award given by the Gaston Gazette. “I think I averaged something like eight tackles a game and five sacks a year,” he says. “My senior year we played against Kings Mountain, and I made 11 tackles that game.”
He was the Southwest 3A Conference heavyweight wrestling champion in 1981-82 and broke a record to receive an award for fastest pin in the Albemarle Invitational. “I think I was Most Valuable in wrestling that year. Most of my wins were by pins,” he says. “I pretty much dominated the conference, but once you go beyond that and go to the State level, the competition gets a lot tougher. But I made State, and made All-State in wrestling at the 1982 tournament at Parkland High School in Winston-Salem.”
During track and field season, Logan was the Warriors’ shot put and discus power, winning the Southwest 3A shot title in 1980, ’81 and ’82 and setting a school record of 58 feet. He also owned the Gaston County record.
Logan was recruited by J.C. Smith, Western Carolina and Southern University, in Louisiana, but wanted to stay close to home. Like in high school, Logan was a multi-sport athlete for the Golden Bulls.
He played football all four years and started every game. “There were a few games I shouldn’t have started because I was injured, but I played anyway,” he says.
He was the CIAA conference Defensive Player of the Year in 1983 and All-CIAA in 1983 and ’84 in football, and was CIAA conference champion three years – 1984, ’85 and ’86 – in shot put, indoor and outdoor. And, as in high school, he broke the school record. In college, the shot weighs 16 pounds. Logan launched it 54 feet. The old record had stood for a decade.
But for all his winnings and titles, Logan says a scenario he remembers most is about not finishing first. It’s that never-give-up mindset that great athletes have.
“I think the best thing that happened to me as an athlete is this guy that I wrestled who went to Hunter Huss, I think it was in the ninth grade, he beat me. And we met again my senior year, and he beat me again. And we met again in Charlotte in the semifinals of the Sectionals, and I beat him 9-1, and that was the best moment,” he says. “The whole time, ninth grade all the way through high school, I had him on my mind, that he was better than me, and I was able to beat him.”
He says his Hall of Fame induction was somewhat of a surprise. “I’m just thankful someone thought enough of me to nominate me and put me in,” he says. “I had my moments, but I never felt like I was on that level. But I’m thankful someone thought that much of me.”
Jeff Lee
It was a good era to be in Greenville, S.C.
The Furman University football team, Division 1-AA in the 1980s, was beating bigger teams, doing big things and making sure Coach Dick Sheraton, who had coached the Paladins since 1978, had a proper send-off before joining North Carolina State after the 1985 season.
Jeff Lee, who had played for East Gaston, was at Furman on a football scholarship in 1985, the year the team advanced to the National Championship.
“It was the first time Furman had ever been to a Nationals, and was the last time to play for Coach Sheraton,” Lee says. “We went to Tacoma, Wash., and played in the Tacoma Dome, which was exciting, to go that far away. Our competition usually was very regional, except when we played Marshall, so we usually took a bus. So to get on the airplane was really nice. It was an exciting week, with all the fanfare that goes with it.”
Furman lost 44-42 to Georgia Southern in a back-and-forth game to finish the season 12-2. But Lee’s story didn’t end there.
He was named to Furman’s Greatest Modern Era All-Time Team and was named to the All-Southern Conference team in a coaches’ poll. The Greenville News described the 6-foot-3, 216 pound Lee’s college career and his team selections: “One of the best blocking tight ends ever in Furman’s run-oriented offense. In addition to his powerful build, had good hands with the big-play ability, as over a quarter of his receptions went for touchdowns. Had 39 career receptions, but 10 of those were for touchdowns.”
His success at Furman and East Gaston landed him in the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame.
Lee, 54, remembers other big games at Furman, starting with his freshman year in 1982.
“Probably our biggest upset was when we beat the University of South Carolina,” he says. “And we beat N.C. State twice and we beat Georgia Tech once. The USC game was my freshman year and was the first game I started. You play in front of 60,000 fans, and I’d never done that before.”
He finished his college career with 36 catches for an average of 16.4 yards per catch, 590 yards and 10 touchdowns. He was voted All-South Carolina second team in 1984 and 1985, and All-Southern Conference in 1985, as chosen by the media.
Lee graduated in 1986 with a B.A. in Business Administration.
Football had been in Lee’s life since Little League age. At East Gaston, his work at tight end and linebacker got him noticed by a few college scouts. He was a four-year starter on offense, and on defense as a junior and senior. “My junior year was our best year,” he says. “We were vying for the playoffs but were one game short, and my senior year we were at about .500.”
He was a three-time letterman and was voted All-Conference and All-Area as a senior. He made The Charlotte Observer’s All-Piedmont first team on defense.
He also was All-Conference in track his senior year in high school, in discus.
After college, Lee became a Navy SEAL and was stationed six in years in Virginia Beach.
Today, he lives in Virginia a few miles out of Washington D.C., where he works in private security.
He keeps a few newspaper clippings about his time at Furman, but he doesn’t dwell too much on statistics.
“I just know we had a really good coach, and a really good team,” he says, “and I liked the school.”
Hawks Baseball 1964-1967
Time-travel backward to the mid-1960s…
To the time when the Beatles were changing America’s music scene.
When the Vietnam War was in full force, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, the first Chevy Camaro and Ford Mustang hit the streets, Ozzie & Harriet were on TV and Roberto Clemente was showing the world how to play right field and win a dozen Golden Gloves.
In Mount Holly in the mid-1960s, 47 kids – 44 players and three managers – took that era and made it their own.
They played baseball for Coach Delmer Wiles, a Marine Corp. veteran, and formed unbreakable friendships while showing that nobody owned a baseball diamond like the Mount Holly High School Hawks.
The boys of 1964 through 1967 won 40 of 50 games, four consecutive Little 6 Conference championships, four-of-seven state tournament games and a roster spot in the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame. They continued the work of the 1950s teams, who were conference champs in 1954, 1955, 1957 and 1958. MHHS also won in 1971 and 1972.
“They set the bar high and expected every player to give his best every day,” says Eddie Wilson, a three-year starter from 1966-68. “The ’66 team was by far the best group of guys you could ask to play with.”
In 1964, with Buddy Guin on the mound and strong bats from shortstop Bruce Bolick, catcher Larry Hartsell, infielders Steve McCotter, Tommy McConnell and Buddy Hart, and outfielders Dean Auten, Phil White and Mike Shelby, the Hawks went 8-2 in the regular season and beat T.C. Robertson 8-6 in the playoffs’ first round. They lost 6-5 in the second round to East Wilkes after leading 5-1.
Tony Leroy McConnell (he goes by either name) and Dewayne Moore were the top pitchers in 1965 as the team went 10-0 in league play behind hitting from Jimmy Cook, Jimmy Blackmon, Tommy Foster, Hartsell, McCotter, Shelby, Auten and White and split two non-conference games with Hunter Huss. McConnell pitched a no-hit 2-0 victory over Clyde Erwin High in the first round of the playoffs, relying on his signature fastball. “I had no idea how fast I could throw. They didn’t clock it back then,” he says, “but I was fast enough to be slightly ahead of most high school baseball players. There was an article written about me and Dewayne Moore; they called us the Hawks’ M&M boys. We were a good combination.”
After the Erwin win, he says, “Coach Wiles thought I was the greatest thing since sliced bread, so he pitched me in the next game with only two days’ rest, and the ball felt like a grapefruit and we lost. He took me out about the fourth inning and Dewayne shut them out the rest of the way, but were already too far behind.”
“We knew how to get ‘em out,” Hartsell says, of catching McConnell. “I would make a target, and he would hit it. We played against these guys regular until we got to the playoffs, so we knew these guys in the regular season and he knew how to pitch them. I didn’t have to do anything but give him a target. Tony had the hard stuff, and Dewayne had the big curve.”
With McConnell and Moore handling pitching, and Bill Neely, Steve Hansel and Eddie Wilson joining the seniors as team leaders, Mount Holly had another 10-0 regular season in 1966 and won its first two post-season games. They lost 2-0 to North Davidson to end their season 12-1 after advancing to the Western NC finals, the furthest a MHHS team had gone since 1954, when the school was 1A state runners-up.
“The seniors were great, unselfish, team-first players. Most of the seniors also were on the football team,” Wilson says. “Many of them (Shelby, Hartsell, McConnell, Moore and White) got scholarships and went on to play college ball.”
“A favorite memory is winning the conference championship a number of years, and having that brotherhood as I went through my illness,” says Phil White, who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins Lymphona at age 16. “Them being considerate and kind is what I valued the most. It was a good group of kids.”
White is 70 now and works as a clinical therapist in Oklahoma. “I was just honored to go through school and play sports with them,” he says.
Eddie Womack took over as top pitcher in 1967 and helped the team of Blackmon, Hansel, Neely, Wilson, Mike Manes, Mike Henderson, Danny White and WG Clayton share a conference title with Lowell Holbrook with 7-3 records. Lowell beat the Hawks in a play-in game to advance to the playoffs.
“I was a huge fan of all of these teams. I hardly ever missed a game at Costner Field and I remember listening to WCGC and Eb Gantt cover one of the playoff games, and heard it live when Jimmy Blackmon knocked a homer over the left field fence in Swannanoa in a survival and advance game,” says Gary Neely. “You can imagine my excitement when, as a freshman in 1967, I was inserted into a big game against Lowell and Whistle Howard when one of our regulars got ejected after a fight broke out at second base in the bottom of the first inning. That helped me to earn a letter on the last of this series of champions, in a conference that was always competitive, and in which the Hawks usually came out on top.”
Hartsell, who went on to play for Belmont Abbey, recalls a story about Wiles, at the end of Hartsell’s senior year: “God knows, the first year you hated him, and by the last year you loved him. I was by Delmer’s side in all kinds of baseball, being the catcher. When I was a senior, Delmer got in to take a few swings, and it was the last time I was going to be playing for him, and Delmer was chatting that he would have made the big leagues if it weren’t for the curve. I got Leroy in there and got Delmer to take a couple of swings, and we didn’t do signals in batting practice but this time I signaled for the curve, and he threw that thing, and it curved beautifully and Delmer took a big swing and missed it. And he looked at me and said, “You knot head!” I knew he couldn’t run me but a few more wind sprints, and that was the end of my career in Mount Holly baseball.”
Today, the players are scattered but many keep in touch.
McConnell lives in Denver and is passing his knowledge to his sister’s 5-year-old grandson.
“My arm, it hurts too bad to throw now,” he says, “but I did throw the other day with my sister’s grandkids, and I was surprised I could still throw and play catch.”
Hartsell 70, is a retired CPA and lives in Myrtle Beach. He keeps a scrapbook of those 1960s teams – all the photos, newspaper clippings, scores and statistics.
“When I look at this stuff,” he says, “and how successful we were, it was amazing. We had good coaching, a good work ethic, and somebody had talent. You know? Every Friday night, there must have been 4,000 or 5,000 at the football field, and every spring night, two games a week, baseball was always crowded. That’s the way people were. It’s the way it was. It really was the way to grow up, and I’m so thankful for the people I had relationships with in school and in playing ball. It was all about team, not individual stuff. It was a blessing.”
Community Spirit Award Henry Massey
Henry Massey grew up in Waxhaw, went to high school there.
He graduated from college in Davidson, got a degree in economics.
He chose Atlanta over New York to begin his career and start a family.
He lives in Gastonia, in a retirement cottage with his wife, Emily.
But his heart, his community pride, is in Mount Holly.
Massey, 83, moved to Mount Holly in 1959 when his Uncle Bo gave him a job at his store, down on Main Street near the railroad tracks. “His primary business was sales and distribution of products, mill supplies and retail hardware at Massey Hardware. He didn’t have any children, so he gave me the opportunity to work with him,” Massey says. “It was a little different from banking!”
Banking is what Massey did in Atlanta. But his schedule, and the fact that Atlanta is perpetually on fast-forward, wasn’t the ticket for a guy with a wife and little baby.
Mount Holly won.
His new job initiated a life-long bond with the city and a commitment to provide for its athletes, schools and community parks. That devotion led to his induction in the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame as recipient of the Community Spirit award.
“I’m very humbled about it. We’ve had a lot of people who have worked hard for our young people,” he says.
But let’s back up.
Spending his childhood in Waxhaw gave Massey an affection for small towns. “My parents were from there, but it’s grown up a whole lot since I’ve been there. When I graduated from high school, there were only 23 students in my graduating class,” he says. “Now they have three high schools servicing Waxhaw students. But that’s from being on the end of Providence Road, and all that Charlotte has pushed down there.”
He played first base for the baseball team and center on the basketball team, and added a little American Legion ball and something called semi-pro, though he says no one ever got paid.
He received his degree from Davidson in 1957 and went to work. “I got my first job right off the Davidson campus. Back in those days, they were recruiting pretty heavy on campus. I went to New York to look at something in banking, but I went to Atlanta,” he says. “At that time, I thought I wanted to be a banker. We’d go all over town, and they’d put you in the banks in their training programs.”
His children were born in 1958, 1961, 1963 and 1964.With Mount Holly being called home by the time his second child was born, he began to invest in his surroundings, becoming involved with the Chamber of Commerce, Junior Civitans and his church, which he still attends. He became chairman of the Mount Holly School Board in the mid-60s, before Gaston County, Gastonia and Cherryville’s boards became one.
And Massey made himself a to-do list to help local schools.
He helped raise money for high school band uniforms, when Mount Holly High and Stanley High were ready to merge and become East Gaston.
He helped raise money to build East Gaston High School a football stadium. “That’s a big drive we had in the city, and it was a time frame when everyone pitched in really well on that,” he says. “Some of us went to see some really good prospects, and we received good money from people who had businesses in Mount Holly.”
He became chairman of Mount Holly Parks and Recreation, to improve opportunities for citizens to enjoy the city’s facilities. “It’s like being a Sunday School teacher. You get in there, and you’re in for life,” he says. “We’ve got a real good group that’s grown together and worked together to bring Tuck Park (Tuckaseegee) up to the level it is now. At one time it was a ‘field of dreams,’ that’s all it was. Then we bought some adjoining property, and everything’s worked out real well.”
Massey was an integral part of the city receiving a $500,000 grant from the State of North Carolina, and the city providing a matching grant for the park. “Some of us had worked really hard contacting people,” he says.
He says his Hall of Fame selection came as a surprise.
“I feel like a lot of these people who have been selected, not just the athletes but the stand-bys like we are, we just want to help people in the community and help the young people,” he says. “Somewhere down the line, someone paid for a place for them to play.”
