Day 16 – Greenville was a sleepy little town…

When I say that Greenville was a “sleepy little town” I am not being disrespectful. We had a lot of things going for us. Tobacco was king and we had one of the largest tobacco warehouses in the state if not the country. I don’t smoke but the smell of cured tobacco in a barn or on the warehouse floor is something pretty special.

Tobacco brought a lot of money into Greenville and generations later, there is still a lot of “old money” in that town. We never started school until after Labor Day because most of the rural kids were in the tobacco fields until then, so what was the point?

We were also a college town. Originally East Carolina Teachers College or ECTC as they called it. Mostly females until 1932 when they had male graduates…according to historical records. Later it became East Carolina College as it grew. Then in 1967, it became East Carolina University. I went there in the fall of 1968 to play football, which I’ll talk about some other time.

Being a college town, we had great clothing stores, and kids dressed up in those days. We also had great bars, although they could only serve 3.2 beer (that’s 3.2% alcohol), no liquor because we were still in the “religious” south. You had to buy your liquor at the ABC Store (Alcohol Beverage Control) run by the State. While it sounds like a lot of rules, gas stations would sell me beer by the time I was 16 no questions asked. Access to moonshine or “white lightening” really wasn’t that hard. Imagine this, Daddy used to send Debby and me to Batts Groceries, a local store around the corner, for cigarettes at 23 cents a pack, and I was only 9 or 10 at the time and they never asked any questions just sold them to me…so it wasn’t THAT strict.

On Friday nights in the fall, everyone would come to our football games, which we played in Ficklen Stadium which now is Dowdy–Ficklen Stadium, the on-campus football facility at East Carolina University for the East Carolina Pirates in Greenville, North Carolina. The official capacity of the stadium is 51,000, making it the second largest college stadium in North Carolina. It wasn’t that big back then, but can you imagine High School kids playing in the local college stadium each week, it was special.

Our football games were the only thing happening on Friday nights so everyone (or at least it seemed like it) came to the game. Now on Saturday, the entire town turned Purple and Gold, the ECU colors, and once again the stadium was full and the town was rocking.

So, when I say Greenville was a sleepy little town, I am using a comparison to what life is like today. We had no cell phones, no movie channels, no computers, no devices, 24-hour TV. The pace was slower, and the local radio station was very personal taking dedications from one sweetheart to another all the time. The local DJ’s knew a lot of us football players by name and wish us well. I got banged up in a Homecoming Game and I received “on-air” best wishes for a quick recovery…you don’t see that in a big town.

We would drive around town listening to the radio and just hang out. At some point, we would end us at the Original Hardees Fast Food burger place down the hill from the High School. As the story goes, after visiting the first McDonald’s fast-food restaurant in North Carolina, Wilbur Hardee realized that a business centered on modestly priced hamburgers and French Fries could generate a substantial income. In 1960, Wilbur opened the first Hardee’s restaurant in Greenville that offered “charco-broiled hamburgers, a drive-through window and quick service and the rest is history, as they say, but we had the first. Hardees was the local hangout, you could cruise through several times a night and see anyone you wanted to see, it was the place to be to meet up with friends.

If you wanted to, you could also drive out to the corn fields, tobacco fields, or any number of places with your girlfriend and park. Listen to the music on the radio, talk, make out, and just enjoy the quiet of the evening. Time slowed down in those days without so many distractions. Life was simpler, and sweeter in many ways and friendships meant a lot.

Even though I’ve moved all over this wonderful country since I graduated from East Carolina University, I still have friends I love and valued deeply who I grew up with and I’m very thankful for that sleepy little town of Greenville.