By Carroll Leggett
Originally printed in the December 2002 issue of Metro Magazine
Used with permission
 
I read Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory again.  It's lying on the coffee table in the living room now, thinking I might get inspired to write the great Christmas column you deserve.
 
Between you and me, Capote's account of gathering pecans and making fruitcakes did stir up some memories.  It reminded me of a fellow named Jefferson Woodrow Upchurch, and I was surprised, but honestly, very pleased, that I thought of him.  He was our next-door neighbor in Buies Creek for a couple of years and a lifelong friend of my family.
 
In 1935 and 1936, Woodrow pitched for the Philadelphia Athletics and the legendary manager Connie Mack.  The first year, he wore number 9 for the As.  The next year, 21. Years later, when the Athletics played an exhibition game at Devereux Meadow, Woodrow loaded some of us crew-cut boys into his pickup truck, drove us to Raleigh and introduced a bunch of bug-eyed country kids to the aged, silver-haired baseball great, Connie Mack.
 
As they say, I remember it to this day…
 
What impressed us most was that Woodrow, our friend Woodrow from Buies Creek with the battered pickup truck, knew Connie Mack, and that Connie Mack (for the record, Cornelius McGillicutty) broke into a big smile when he saw Woodrow, greeted him halfway and gathered us around him with his long arms like we were a bunch of dear grandchildren he hadn't seen in years.
 
And why in the world would a story about gathering pecans remind me of Woodrow?  Because at Christmas when I was a boy, he picked up pecans from his trees and brought them to Mother for her Christmas baking – cakes, cookies and pies – sweets made special by the fact that Mother made them only once a year and each contained a dash of love.  If the weather was good, she and Woodrow would sit on the front steps and visit awhile.
 
Mother made applesauce and German chocolate cakes.  The German chocolate cakes ended when someone in the family – can't remember who – gorged himself and got sick in front of company.  It was an ugly sight.  Nobody at our house had much of a stomach for German chocolate cake after that, and Mother never made another one.  She would tell you exactly why if you asked.  Then there were chocolate cakes she made down in Bertie that brother Don remembers with whole pecans on the top.
 
There were tall, four-layer cakes with frothy icing made with fresh coconut from shells filled with coconut milk, cloyingly sweet coconut milk, shells that you emptied by punching two holes in the end with an ice pick, one for pouring and one for air so the juice would come out.  A coconut has three eyes on the little end – the only place you can pierce the shell – and that is where you have to make the holes.  Guess that extra eye is for good measure.
 
There is a science to cracking a coconut shell.  The uninitiated pound away with a hammer, and the hammer jumps back as if it has springs.  But, ah, just one carefully directed, solid blow by someone who knows what he is doing and holds the coconut right can split the shaggy shell a dozen ways.
 
Mother would grate fresh coconut by hand, nicking a finger occasionally, fussing a bit, and then when the piece was too small to work with, she would select a mouth and stick the nubbin in.  There were never enough nubbins to suit us, and I vowed Christmas after Christmas that when I got grown, I would buy me a coconut and eat the whole thing at one sitting.  I guess I am about grown now, but I still haven't done it.
 
There were plantation sweet potato pies – my favorite – with nuts and coconut and meringue that was three inches high and wept sticky, syrupy drops.  And cookies with funny names Mother had given them that, regretfully, neither my brothers nor I can remember – each with its special container that, once emptied, was not filled again for a year.
 
Mother was a widow, you know, and she had a bunch of boys to feed.  My stepfather had grown up with Woodrow, and they were friends.  When I think about it, I believe bringing us pecans was something Woodrow, who had to scramble to make a living himself, could do to say he remembered Worth and that he cared about his widow and her boys.
 
Widows were remembered at Christmas time.  On more than one Christmas Eve, a knock signaled that a member of the local volunteer fire department – still a source of great pride and community involvement in Buies Creek – was at the front door with a fruit basket for Mother.  It seemed strange to me then that Mother's face would brighten so at the receipt of such a simple gift.  Fact was, we had fruit and nuts and grapes aplenty.
 
There was a lot I didn't understand.
 
A widow's life Downeast was pretty lonely.  She didn't wear the black, widow's weeds shown in the photograph of my great grandmother Henrietta Ariabella Harden, who was a girl in Plymouth during the Civil War battles there, but I remember that men sitting around the store sometimes would refer to my mother, not by her given name, Ruby, but respectfully as Worth Lanier's widow, implying that her life was inextricably tied to his and that when he died, something of her died with him.
 
Downeast there was no funeral pyre for a widow to throw herself upon, but when a woman's life was largely defined by that of her husband, many felt her life had ended when the last shovel of dirt was tossed upon her husband's grave.  When at Christmas she was remembered, even in the smallest way like my mother, she smiled.
 
One lesson I learned early on was not to expect life to be fair.  I might have learned it from knowing Woodrow, because some might say life wasn't fair to Woodrow Upchurch.
 
Woodrow was a 6-foot, 180-pound southpaw who had what Connie Mack once called a million-dollar arm.  And that was when a million dollars meant something.  He pitched in the heyday of players like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and, I understand, he faced them on the mound.
 
Woodrow was the only major league pitcher our hamlet ever produced.  Don't guess we can rightly claim the Perry brothers – Gaylord and Jim – who attended Campbell College, but were raised in Martin County, or Calvin Koonce, my classmate and friend from Route 3, Fayetteville, who pitched for the Cubs, or at least one other who attended Campbell and whose name I don't remember.  Calvin was also co-captain of the basketball team, and his brother Charles attended Campbell at the same time.
 
Gaylord – famous for throwing an illegal spitball at blistering speeds – pitched for several teams, including the Giants, and of course, has long since retired and is back home in Martin County farming.  He and his pickup truck are a familiar sight down around Williamston.  Jim pitched for the Indians and the Twins.  I think he and his wife Daphne Snell, also my classmate at Campbell, live in Minneapolis where Jim pitched for the Twins.  Calvin, a great guy who later coached baseball at Campbell, died of cancer while still a young man.
 
Jim and Gaylord both won the Cy Young award.  Don't know whether they were the only brothers ever to do that or not.  I do know that the folks at home and in Martin County were mighty proud of them.
 
Like I said, life dealt Woodrow a bad hand.  Just two years after joining the As, he was critically injured in an auto accident, and his pitching arm was ruined.  He lost his career, but he never lost his love for baseball.  On spring afternoons you would find him at the high school baseball field helping kids perfect their pitching.  He taught brother Don, whose natural style was sidearm, to throw straight overhand so the ball came right by his ear before he released the pitch.
 
Those days, most small towns Downeast had baseball teams.  Buies Creek had one, and I was the bat boy.  Guys who had come home from the war (the Big War) and already were local heroes added to that status by donning uniforms on the weekend and taking on the boys from the next town.  For some reason, Pea Ridge, a rural community near Angier, was a great rival and, if I remember correctly, had the best ballpark.  Woodrow always called the balls and strikes when we played at Buies Creek.
 
He loved my brothers and our kind of adopted brother, Bill Henshaw, now a dentist in Shelby, and after they moved away and I was left at home, he always asked after them, as we say Downeast.  It was never just a casual, "How're your brothers doing?"  He would stop, look at me intently and ask about each of them individually.  Then he would ask how my mother was doing.
 
I almost forgot to tell you about old Toot.  Toot was Woodrow's bulldog – dingy white with a few spots here and there – and the town mascot.  Toot generally slept on the sidewalk in front of Mr. Leland Stewart's store.
 
Mr. Leland's wife, Miss Rosa, was Woodrow's sister and Toot spent a lot of time around the store or in the street.  There wasn't much traffic, and folks knew to watch for Toot and either drive around him or wait for him grudgingly to get up and amble on his short legs over to the sidewalk.

Toot had a gentle spirit when dealing with humans, but a propensity to fight, and fight savagely, with other dogs.  Like most folks, Toot did most of his rambling and fussing and fighting under the cover of darkness.  He would show up of a morning cut up and chewed up.  Toot's condition often would be the main topic of conversation around the store and beauty parlor.
 
I was living in Raleigh when Woodrow died in 1971.  He was only 60.  I remembered what Mother had said about Buies Creek.  This town has more widows than any place I have ever seen.  A man doesn't stand a chance here.  She would count on her fingers the number of widows living within sight of her house and shake her head.  Another widow in Buies Creek, I thought.
 
I wrote Woodrow's widow a note and told her how much I appreciated his small acts of kindness and the interest he always had shown in my brothers and me.  I haven't lived in Buies Creek since then, so I can't tell you that each Christmas I have delivered a fruit basket to her door.  Would make a good story, though.  But I hope someone has and that for the moment it has brought a smile to her face.  Merry Christmas, Agnes.  And Woody.
 
Carroll Leggett '63 is a graduate of Campbell University and the Wake Forest Law School.  After a notable career in law, politics and public relations, he began freelance writing about the American South, its people, its food and foodways.  For 13 years, he wrote a column "Between You and Me" for Metro Magazine, Raleigh's magazine of food, culture, arts and good living.  His Facebook page is a food blog enjoyed by enthusiasts in the Triad as well as a diverse network of friends and culinary professionals across the state and nation.
 
Editor's note – Babe Ruth's final season in the major leagues was 1935, which he spent with the Boston Braves of the National League.  Woodrow Upchurch pitched in the American League, and while he did once strike out Lou Gehrig, never faced "The Babe" in a regular season game.