Had (Hopalong Cassidy) guns, traveled (many miles since this Melville Street porch in Graham), now retired in Fountain
Grew up in Graham. Earned AB in journalism/English from UNC-CH, MFA from UNC-Greensboro. Worked in public relations (Rocky Mount) and retail books (Greensboro, Winston-Salem, Gastonia, Athens, Ga.) before embarking on 38-year career as educator, in Louisiana and North Carolina.
Retired from public work, living in Fountain, with wife, Elizabeth, and son Silas, who’s for now staying in the gorgeous apartment Billy Crace engineered above our Smith-Yelverton building.
William Boyd had retired as Hopalong Cassidy when he became spokesperson for Producers Dairy in 1956. Photo courtesy of Producers Dairy.
Retirement days are full of finding forgotten things in boxes, and among other lost things, I’m still searching for the 8×10 photo of me (shot by a previously known Burlington Times News photographer) pulling those Hoppy guns on Hoppy himself, who’s mainly got eyes for Miss North Carolina in that moment captured just after the Burlington Christmas parade, 1956.
The Scott Family Collection, scottcollection.org
Hopalong Cassidy was a spokesperson for Melville Dairies (and others), for which my dad worked, in Burlington. We kids earned points towards our Hoppy gear by collecting the coin-like cardboard inserts that helped seal our glass bottles of milk, home-delivered, of course. We drank a lot of milk.
I’ve lost my guns (I had first a single shooter holster, then the double-guns one), hat, bullet belt and vest but still have a Hoppy bedspread that Elizabeth has for the most part restored and, somewhere, awaiting a re-discovery, that 8×10–likely hiding with the 8×10 photo of himself that Roger Miller signed & sent to me in 1966, when he had his own t.v. show.
Hoppy’s papers are the University of Wyoming; I wish I’d live long enough to see what’s in the one box of the 241 in that collection that’s restricted until 2058.
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My hometown was “designed for living–and not cmmerce–because its founders in 1849 insisted that no nasty train would ever come within two miles of Graham’s city limits; hence, Company Shops, which morphed into Burlington, once the center of the textile universe. But over time, the true mill outlets disappeared as Burlington Mills became Burlington Industries before moving to Greensboro, though keeping in the process its Burlington name.
Square Milers grew up within the square mile that surrounds the Alamance County Courthouse. Our home, where my sister Jane lives, is about an inch off to the right of this photo. Her bookstore, Things Above, is on the lower right part of the Square, next door to where our grandfather, James M. Bucker, kept his Justice of the Peace office. Our county’s embattled Confederate soldier is on the hidden front of that courthouse. Wyatt Outlaw was lynched from a long-gone tree that stood near where that soldier would be erected in 1914. Growing up, we White kids heard a lot about that soldier but nothing about Outlaw.
Graham Red Devils vs. Southern Rebels: upon integration, in 1968, they became the Patriots. At Graham, we changed the name of our student newspaper from the Graham Cracker to Tale-o-Gram.
