Daddy Bill's mother was born at the end of the War Between the States, in 1864. I recall visiting her on the North Carolina farm where he grew up, which had been an English land grant to his ancestors. Daddy Bill's father specialized in growing seed corn, and he was able to put all five of his children through four years of college.
Daddy Bill has always represented for me a gold standard for how a man should live his life. A portrait of him hangs in my home office, and I have studied it often when faced with decisions with ethical considerations. He was graduated in 1909 with a degree in civil engineering, and won the honors prize in mathematics, from Trinity College in Durham, North Carolina (which later changed its name to Duke University). His bride-to-be, my grandmother, Blannie Emmie Berry, was graduated magna cum laude in the same class, with honors in Latin and English. He and one of his brothers, Paul, played on what is now recognized as Duke's first basketball team. Daddy Bill received retroactively a Duke varsity letter "D" for the years 1907, 1908, and 1909. (When my son heard about that, he asked me, "Dad, whatever happened to the athletic genes in the family?")
Early in Daddy Bill's career, in the time of Pancho Villa, he worked as an engineer in Mexico on railway construction. He worked also on the construction of the Florida East Coast Railway across the Florida Keys. In 1918, he moved to the little town of Reidsville, North Carolina. In the early 1920s, he organized his own construction company, subsequently building roads, bridges, and airports. He also was an entrepreneur and an investor. Among other things, he and two partners operated a highly successful ferry across the Peedee River, and he owned several farms and a small chain of furniture stores. During World War II, he constructed military facilities.
During the war, my father closed his architecture practice in Jacksonville, Florida, to work for the Army Corps of Engineers. Subsequently, and he and my mother moved to Reidsville, where he joined Daddy Bill's construction firm, which was building military facilities. I was born on February 6, 1943, in Greensboro, North Carolina, which had the nearest hospital maternity ward.
Daddy Bill was a true philanthropist. Not only did he give generously to institutions, such as Duke University, but also he gave directly to needy individuals at all levels of society, including food handouts to hobos at the kitchen door. Always a sports fan, when the local high school needed a sports stadium, he built and donated it. He helped to start the local hospital, which he subsequently served as chairman. A civic leader and pillar of the local Methodist Church, he served as a member of the city council and the county board of education. He was a charter member of the local Rotary Club, and he took a year off from his business interests to serve as regional governor of his Rotary Club district.
What I remember personally was Daddy Bill's charismatic warmth, humor, integrity, wisdom, and kindness. He always wanted to be present for the birthdays of my older brother and me. We would travel out of Jacksonville's July heat to North Carolina for my brother Bill's birthday, and Daddy Bill and my grandmother would come down to Florida in February for mine. There were a lot of kids in our neighborhood in Jacksonville, and they would trail after him as he went on his daily walks. He delighted in children, and he would enthrall us with his observations on our wooded Florida neighborhood's fauna and flora and on the constellations in the sky. When he came to Florida in warmer months, he loved to swim in the ocean-- never in pools, which he considered unsanitary. He would swim far offshore, beyond the waves. In North Carolina, we would sit on his large screened porch at night and watch the fireflies, which were much more abundant then than now.
Daddy Bill and my grandmother took me and a woman, Mary, who had worked for them for many years as a domestic, on a visit to New York City. I had never been there, and, as Daddy Bill said, "Mary had never a chance to go anywhere." When we went to have dinner at the restaurant at the top of the Empire State Building, the restaurant would not seat us because Mary was black. We went elsewhere for dinner. I remember once in North Carolina being in a car he was driving down a dirt road through woods at night. Suddenly, he stopped the car and got out. He had seen a figure beside the road. He helped the drunken black man into the car with us and drove him to the hospital.
Nothing has ever made me prouder than walking along the sidewalks of Reidsville's main commercial street with Daddy Bill on a Saturday, when the farmers came to town. It seemed that everyone-- bankers, merchants, farmers-- knew him and came out to greet him, with obvious affection and respect; and he always introduced them to his grandson. I never had more fun at sporting events than I had going with him to the class D, minor league games of the Reidsville Luckies (Reidsville's major employer was the American Tobacco Company, manufacturer of Lucky Strike Cigarettes).
I have always known that I was lucky to have had such a role model. But I have never felt that I could live up to Daddy Bill's standards. Two days after he died, the local newspaper, The Reidsville Review, included in an editorial on his life the following words: "He developed notable ability in managing and directing business affairs, achieving conspicuous success. Much more important was his unselfishness, for as his business enterprises increased in importance and magnitude, he committed responsibility and authority to young men who under his wise guidance learned how to manage and direct important ventures. He was wise in counsel, loyal in friendship and exemplified the qualities of good citizenship." The editorial concluded: "Although curtailed in his customary activity for the past two years or more, his affability and cheerfulness did not diminish. A good, useful citizen has departed from us but the memory of his kindness, generosity and countless deeds of helpfulness will ever be cherished."
