I once heard it said, "Some are doomed to failure and others have it thrust upon them."

     Although the mill village had some very bright and innovative people living there, it definitely had its fair share of rebelling types that I always think of when I hear the word Maverick. Now I'm not comparing them to the tv western and certainly not to the movie character in Top Gun. No these characters are the real Mavericks. For those of you who may not know, a maverick is a name given to any young calf that will not move along with the herd. They are constantly wandering off and getting into trouble where the cattle drive is stalled until one of the cattlemen can go find them before they are snake bit or eaten by some wild animal. Basically they are just a lot of trouble to deal with.

     There were a lot of these around when I was growing up and yes, they were always getting into some kind of mischief due to their negligent life style. Somebody was always going to get them or bail them out of jail. That's why I call them Mavericks. They are not bad people, they just live in a different world than the rest of us and just can't or won't knuckle down to the hustle and bustle of the status quo. Most of them had gotten into the situation they were in by shear neglect of responsibility. Having said that, I also have to admit that there was never a dull moment when one of them was around, which was most of the time since they where never hindered by a job or anything remotely like steady employment. In fact I had a little admiration for them being able to survive merely on their wit.

     Like I said there was never a dull moment, in fact they were a great source of entertainment if you were not one of those unfortunate people who had to actually depend on them.

     One guy that comes to mind is Toby. He used to climb to the top of the Rockingham water tank up-town. And he wouldn't come down until the Police were called in and then they had to physically remove him. It was a lot of fun for the spectators watching all the action. But why did he do it? Go figure!

     Then there was the time a wild guy named "Junebug" got on a Bulldozer, cranked it up and drove all over Pee Dee with it until the police nabbed him. I wonder how far he was going to get on a ten ton dozer.

     Later on another guy in the neighborhood cranked up a train and took it to Cheraw or somewhere down that way. Of course the best event in this category is the year all the lawn mowers began to disappear. They never would have solved that one except someone saw Michael going up Bunker St and noticed the lawn mower he was pushing belonged to a friend. So they followed him all the way to Honeytown (a small community near Five Points). He led them right up to where he had about 12 to 15 lawn mowers stashed. Now this wouldn't be so unusual but for the fact the guy was only 7 years old! The police car was going up the street with Michael's head barely visible above the side window. I couldn't help but chuckle when I heard my nephew Mitchel, who was about the same age, comment as the police car passed, "Well, there goes Michael off to jail."

     It had only been a few months before this that Dewy Pence, while on his way to work, passed Billy Robinson's store one morning and noticed something hanging in one of the windows. It was Michael! He had tried to break in and got his head caught in the bars. He had been hanging there all night until the next morning when Dewy happened to see him.

     Now I don't want you to believe all these oddballs were all into criminal acts. The large majority of them were not. But they were all alike in that they were bold enough to take roads in life that the rest of us would be much too afraid to travel. They valued the freedom much more than they feared the risk, and always put a positive face on any shananigans they were involved in.

     I remember the time Speedball came by to find my brother-in-law Rooter Lee. Well, Speedball was as humble as a church parson at Sunday dinner. He asked in the most passive voice, "Does Rooter Lee live here?" "Yes," I answered. Then just as humble, "Would it be all right if I speak to him?" "Well," I said, "It would be ok but he's gone to Chicago." Well, at hearing he was gone far away Speedball suddenly became much bolder in front of the friends he had with him. I mean, he took on a metamorphic Barney Fife change so fast I thought I was talking to someone else. "Well," he said in a deeper louder voice, "You tell him he's one lucky SOB!" and stomped off, his chest all puffed out.

     Then about an hour or so later I heard someone yelling frantically, "Get his license number!" "Get his license number!" The voice was from just across the street and none other than Bill Wallace, Speedball and his car load of drunks had just crashed thru Bill's chain link fence and was frantically trying to back out and get away. But when Bill's family started poring out of every corner of the property and converging on Speedball, his Buddies started getting real panicky and yelling at him, "Let's get outta here!"

     Speedball, being the most scared of the lot and by far the most to lose, just pulled forward and drove to the other side of the lot and with the boldness of James Bond drove right on thru the fence again and escaped. But not for very long, because they did in fact, "Get his license number!"

     Another really humorous character in my neighborhood was Pat Boone. No resemblance to the singer. This one weighed in at about three hundred pounds and wore the same type of clothing year round. That being Bib overhalls cut off at the knees and he wore this winter and summer, rain or shine. Now ole Pat was tough, he could bend sixteen penny nails with his teeth - saw him do it several times. He sometimes whipped his older brother Bill and his younger brother George at the same time. He would take off his belt and "whuppem" as he used to say, like they were his kids.

     Of course one day I almost killed Pat in a freak accident. I had a little volkswagon. Some of you I'm sure remember those little VW Beetles. Well anyway I had one, it was a good little car except the back floorboard was rusted out. Well anybody who knows me will tell you I have always made do with what I had. So I made a back floorboard with plywood. This worked just fine under normal circumstances. But picking up a 300lb hitchhiker is not a normal circumstance. I knew it was Pat a long ways off because of the cut off bibs. I had some things in the front so I told Pat to get in the back seat.

     We came barreling down North Lee Street and just as we hit the bottom I heard a loud crack and as I whipped around the curve I felt the whole left side of the car lift up with a loud thump. When I looked into my rear view mirror I saw Pat rolling across the road behind me!

     But Pat even had a closer call than that about a year after that. To the folks reading this: Have you ever drove up Hamer Road that runs up past Pee Dee Baptist Church? If you have you surely noticed that high cliff across where they cut the new right-away. Now try to imagine riding by there just as a 300lb man comes sliding head first down that cliff! Yep, it was Pat. He never knew who pushed him but I always thought it was Bill and George. Well, Pat got a nice bed to sleep in that night, at Richmond Memorial.

     About a week later I was at a store when a policeman was there filling out a complaint about a shop-lifter.  The shop-lifter had taken two steaks from the refrigerator and ran out the door into the woods. I didn't let them see me laughing as I quietly put my item back on the shelf and eased out the door. The clerk described the alleged thief as weighing about 300 lbs, wearing cut off bib overhauls. "Anything else?" I heard the cop ask. "Yes," said the clerk. "The guy had two black eyes!" Left over from the cliff incident, no doubt.

     Then there was the time someone broke into a local store in the neighborhood. They had taken all kinds of things including some of the owners' personal items. They rounded up a few suspects, Dale Scott being one of them. While he was at the police station he was asked what was written on his tennis shoes. Dale told them that he didn't know. They looked a little closer and read Sam Snotty on the shoes. Dale asked what did that have to do with anything. So they told him nothing particular except the store manager's name was "Sam Snotty!"

     As interesting as these guys were, they were not near as eccentric as the ones I called "THE FREE SPIRITS." These guys were a source of constant entertainment. They weren't much for hard work but boy did they make me laugh.

     All the Free Spirits had a taste for spirits also. Every government check they got had two names endorsed on it, their name and Lefty's Tavern. One was known as just "Dob." He was a constant at Lefty's. He managed to keep his unshaven face at a permanent half inch in length and to this day I don't know how he managed that but it was never longer and never shorter. I never went to Lefty's that Dob wasn't in there hustling a beer from somebody. Another regular was Bennett. Bennett was extremely intelligent. No telling what his IQ was, but wild and righteous living had made him legally blind. But he was not always that way. I once saw a picture of a younger, handsome man standing between two U.S. Senators. It was Bennett. And I wish you could have seen him playing that piano. He had the same style as Jimmy Swaggart. By that he would trail the length of the piano the way Jimmy did. But Bennett had a good reason for that style. He always had a beer on that end of the piano so he would finish every number trailing down to that end so he would be close to that beer when he finished.

     George Moody was another very colorful character that frequented Lefty's a lot. I remember he had this very distinct laugh. The best way to describe it was it was just like Cheetah,Tarzan's chimp, loud and crackly. When you heard it at Lefty's it usually meant he scored a triple jump in checkers. Or you might hear another loud response when Purcell, his checker partner, would move two checkers at once. He would do this by spreading his two fingers wide and pushing two checkers at once. This used to confound George to no end, but the move was too fast for him to catch it.

     The other place that you were sure to see George Moody was at the Little Theater every Saturday morning. He could be heard all through the movie. He always found it neccessary to verbally warn his cowboy hero just before the villian jumped him. You would hear that loud, brassy voice "Look up in the tree Hoot!!" or something very similar.

     But I couldn't tell this story without mentioning Ebb Hudson. Ebb was the epitamy of what I call "THE FREE SPIRIT." I'm sure some of you reading this have seen an old man walking down the railroad track behind the depot carrying an old worn out suitcase. He would always be wearing an old out of date coat and bowtie. Nobody ever knew where he was coming from or where he was going. He would just be seen coming down the track with his suit case every few months. They say he was a good painter, but very undependable in that he would just vanish right in the middle of a paint job. All you would find would be the open can of paint and the paint brush lying next to it. He just drifted in and drifted out like the morning mist.

     People always took him back and frankly seemed to be glad to see him. He reminded me so much of the character in that poem by Robert Frost, "The Hired Hand." I remember the last time I saw Ebb. I was on my way to work one pleasant fall morning. I was dreading so much to being couped up in that stuffy office on such a beautiful fall day. And there he was sitting there under a walnut tree, his old coat and that ever present suitcase. He was just sitting there cracking walnuts with a rock, not a care in the world. I have to say I felt a lttle envious of him and just pondered the thought. Instead of chasing after that almighty dollar day after day after day, how would it feel to be that free.   Watching him cracking those walnuts made me recall my favorite line in Robert Frost's poem The Hired Hand, where it was asked, "Where is home?" referring to the hired hand always coming back after leaving them with undone work. The farmer said, "Home is where when you go there, they have to take you in!"