‘Three simple questions’
By: G. Page Singletary, Jr.
Sawyers Creek Baptist Church; Camden, NC (Dec. 13, 2014)
By: G. Page Singletary, Jr.
Sawyers Creek Baptist Church; Camden, NC (Dec. 13, 2014)
January 7, 1932 - December 10, 2014
It is my great privilege, and perhaps my most difficult challenge, to stand before you today and try, to the best of my ability, and if God will hold me up, to answer three questions, with support from Sally, Emily and Lucy who will read three verses of scripture in honor of their Grandfather.
The three questions are:
- Who was this Gene Page Singletary?
- What do you say at a time like this?
- And what would my daddy want me to say to you, his loved ones and his friends?
Emily: Philippians 4: 6-7
6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 7 And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Who was this Gene Page Singletary?
Born in Robeson County, North Carolina the first son of Garland Mazie and Jessie Blackmon Singletary. His father was a Baptist Minister, his mother a homemaker and later in life a schoolteacher. He had two brothers, Max and Jerry. He loved his brothers and they had a lot of fun together, as children and throughout their lives. “Preacher’s kids” growing up in rural Northeastern North Carolina towns, occasionally moving from one small town to another, a theme that would continue throughout Gene’s life.
There was the time, as a young boy, when little Gene thought it would be funny if he removed all of the hymnbooks from the pews of the church prior to the 11:00 AM service. Gene sat on the front row and waited anxiously, as Reverend Singletary invited the church to stand and sing the opening praise hymn. Kevin, I thought we could pay tribute to dad today, and get revenge for my Grandfather, if I had Matthew and Perry help me remove the hymnals before we sang daddy’s favorite, What a Friend We Have in Jesus, but I decided that was not fair to you.
There was more than one broken stain glass window from baseballs, or rocks thrown or hit askew. There was the time when he first got his driver’s license and while running an errand for his father, he drove the old Buick by the front of the house at a very high rate of speed. He was wearing a red hat, and his father and Max were on the front porch. Max confirms that his father looked at him and said, “If he didn’t have that red hat on, I don’t think we would have known who that was.” To make matters worse he was late picking up a suit from the cleaners for his father. He was supposed to pick up the suit several hours earlier, and the cleaners had caught fire that afternoon, and burned to the ground. His brothers call that the ‘Red Hat Story’.
So this Gene Singletary had a certain mischievous way about him even at a young age. It was an ability to not take things too seriously and to enjoy life to the fullest, perhaps sometimes too much so. This curiosity and sometimes-troublesome behavior eventually attributed to his parents making the decision to send Gene away to a boy’s boarding school for his final two years of high school. He went to what is now Campbell College in Bowies Creek, North Carolina where he first met his dear friend Robbie Owen, as they were on the same hall in the dorm.
I learned yesterday that my Grandfather was on the Board of Directors at Campbell during that time and I am sure that helped make this possible. I’m afraid this might have been a little bit like throwing Brer Rabbit to the briar patch, based on some intel I picked up recently.
There is a story about a cow that ended up on the second floor of the Library Building, and my understanding is Gene and Robbie were perhaps among the group of boys that engineered that feat.
At Campbell, they had an English teacher by the name of Ms. Mable Brown. All of the boys were allowed to call her Ms. Mable, and she was an older women at the time and she was crotchety and mean and very serious about a little spelling notebook that every boy had to bring to class with carefully written and correctly spelled words. Many years later, dad got a small envelope in the mail. Inside was a cutout newspaper obituary and a short note from Robbie:“You can throw that darn spelling book away, Ms Mable is dead!” I love that story and would often bring up Robbie Owen just to hear my dad tell it.
After graduating from high school, Gene spent a few weeks at Chowan College before calling his father to come and get him. He returned to Elizabeth City and joined the US Coast Guard, where he was a gunman on a ship and traveled the world. Those years are a little sketchy for me, but I have found some pictures that clearly show he was making friends and having fun.
After his Coast Guard service, he attended East Carolina University where he put himself through school and studied business. He was proud of his football team this year, and took pride in catching up with me and perhaps my sister Gay, on the day they put a whipping on our Tar Heels.
After returning from the Coast Guard, he met the love of his life, Billy Gay McDowell. He fell in love with her on the very first date and I imagine he put a serious full-court press on from there, eventually leading to a marriage that would last 49.5 years, until my mother’s death seven years ago this week. There were times in my life when I most realized that my dad loved my mom. One of those times was on the day Billy Gay passed away, standing bed-side, watching my father hold her hand and tell her good-bye. There was also the Christmas, a year or so after moving to Camden, when daddy got mamma a boat. And the birthday soon after, when he got her a trolling motor.
After mom and dad were first married, Gene spent a short time as a school teacher in Elizabeth City, before he moved to Pelham, GA and went to work for Columbian Peanut Company, learning how to process peanuts. I was born in Pelham, though we only stayed for a few weeks, before daddy was transferred to another peanut mill in Elizabethtown, NC. My sister Gay was born in Elizabethtown. Six years later, we moved to Wakefield, where there was yet another peanut mill and a cold storage facility that was newly built that my father was to manage.
The three-dimensional art to my left was a gift to dad at the time of his retirement, hand painted by our special friend (the late) Kitty Nettles from Wakefield. It is a birds-eye view of the Columbian Peanut Company in Wakefield. By the time we got to Wakefield, daddy had decided that he would always work in the peanut business.
He loved his work and took it very seriously. On Tuesday afternoon of this week, he was looking around the hospital room at all of the equipment and wires and such and I asked him what he was looking at? He said, I’m making sure all of this stuff is working correctly. And then he looked at me and started moving his hands in a most unusual manner and discussing the intricacies of milling peanuts. The jumbo nuts go through the jumbo shoots, the extra larges through the extra large shoots, the mediums come down the medium elevator belt, and so forth and so on. And of course I knew exactly what he was talking about for reasons I will explain in a minute.
My sister Cornelia was born in Wakefield, where we spend six or seven special years, before moving to Ahoskie, where my sister Suzanne would complete our family.
Each place we lived, mom and dad filled their life by faithfully attending a church, by always knowing and interacting with their neighbors, and by having fish fries and parties. Uncle Jerry told me last night that he learned to time his trips through Ahoskie to make sure he would get there in time for fish. Dad would be under his shed with his buddies enjoying frying the fish, and the hush puppies, and perhaps a cold beverage or two. Most of the fish were a nice size, but dad would always find the smallest fish in the pan and hold it up and tell his friends that Jerry caught this one.
What do you say at a time like this?
I think for most men, your dad is your first hero in life. I was lucky in that he remained my hero throughout my life. My dad taught me how to throw a knuckle ball at age seven. He also taught me how to bait a hook and how to take a fish off a hook. Fishing was his passion throughout his life, a sport I never completely embraced as a young man. I occasionally regret that I did not spend more time with him in a boat and I eventually learned to appreciate a day on the water with a good friend. Daddy often talked about how he returned to this part of North Carolina when he retired, so he could fish in the same rivers and creeks that he fished with his father as a boy. I think that brought him great peace.
He loved both of his parents very much. The sudden loss of his father at a very young age left a huge void in daddy’s heart and I am sure the hearts of his brothers and our dear Grandma Jessie. Dad would always say to me, “I wish you could have known my father, you would have really loved him, he was a bunch of fun!” I imagine he has already been fishing a time or two in heaven with his daddy and that is a boat I look forward to joining one day.
Sally: John 14: 1-4
“Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God[a]; believe also in me. 2 My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. 4 You know the way to the place where I am going.”
I suppose this second question I asked myself, ‘What do you say at a time like this?’ would not be complete without telling a tough love story. I know all of my family members and close friends have heard this before. I know my dad loved to hear me tell the story, though at the time it was not all that funny. I feel I should tell it one more time for him.
As I mentioned earlier, I attended the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, as did my sister Gay. Gay made the Dean’s List every semester. I made top marks in social life. My college friends, some of whom are here, remember the December day they looked out the window of our TV room, and someone said, “Page, I think that is your dad’s truck?” I was a junior and evidently I had dropped three of the five classes I was supposed to be taking that semester, and I was failing one of the two remaining classes, and according to my father’s version of the story the class I was failing was a tennis class.
We loaded all of my stuff up into the truck and with very few words spoken; I learned that I had a new job that would start after the Christmas break in Ahoskie. It was a cold morning on January 2nd, when the wake up call came at 5:00 AM and I began my work as a Commodity Control Engineer at the Columbian Peanut Company. I sat in the small room on the plant floor, overlooking the bottom floor of the processing plant.
Every 30 minutes, the job of the Commodity Control Engineer was to walk out on the dusty, noisy plant floor, with these small tin cups. I would have to hold the cups under these peanut shoots and I would collect samples of the different types of nuts – the jumbos, the extra larges, the mediums and so forth. Then I would return to the little over-heated room, where state inspectors smoked cigarettes and told dirty jokes all day long, and I would have to dump the peanuts out onto a wooden table and separate the bad nuts from the good nuts and then record my results.
I returned to UNC nice long months later with a renewed interest in my studies and managed to earn a degree and eventually go to graduate school.
Tough love.
Question number three: What would dad want me to say to you; his loved ones and his friends?
Dad had an expression that he used many times throughout his life, but especially after Mama died. He would often say, “Page, I have some good friends!”
Daddy had a story like the Robbie Owen / Ms. Mable story about nearly everyone he knew. He had a special way of finding something funny or unique about each of his friends and he loved to tell little stories. I would just name someone from his past, pick any of his special friends, and he would take it from there.
Ed Carter and Kitty . . . Ray Peck . . . Vernon Baker and Mary . . . Ed and Peggy Nye . . . Ray and Marty Callaway . . . Spencer and Deloris Matthews . . . Butch and Sandra Hassell . . . Tommy and Ann Tucker . . . Bill and Ruth Overman . . . Tony and Jean Ray . . . Joe and Jean Morris . . . Ray and Ann Ashworth . . . Julian and Margaret Freeman . . . Julian and Nan Sealy . . . Wilson and Lake Leggett . . . and more recently Bill and Louis and Al and Judy and Mike and Joyce on and on it goes. Webb and Sylvia. Beans and Faye Ellen. Cary. And Kevin . . . my daddy absolutely loved you and you came into his life at just the right time!
Al Blount, you are literally the picture beside the word friend in the Webster’s Dictionary. I know you visited my dad every day, at exactly the same time and sat in that little blue chair and cheered him on, throughout his battle with cancer. And when I was there, every time you walked out the door, he would look at me and say, “Page, I have some good friends and that one right there is as good as they come!”
Mike and Joyce, you two are just plain solid. Mom and Dad loved reuniting with you during their years in Camden. Bill, you were a true gift from the heavens. Right there on Marla’s Way – a fishing buddy for the ages. Carrie, thank you for being his friend. He really enjoyed your company, and he just lit up on Monday night when you brought him the turtle.
Dianne, he called you his rock. You got him through the toughest time of his life, when he lost Billy Gay. He loved you like a sister and he especially loved eating liver and onions with you on your lunch dates!
I could go on and on but it’s time to conclude . . .
Gay, Cornelia, Suzanne, Carroll, Cathy, Sally, Emily, Lucy, Mattie, Perry, and yet-to-be-named baby girl, this is not easy. Nobody left behind is a total winner today. We are hurting and we will continue to hurt. Cornelia, thank you for being his daddy’s-girl and for carrying so much of the load over his final months.
Lastly, Daddy loved his Lord and he loved his Bible and he loved his church. Thank you church and thank you ‘Angel’ Choir for a magical send off on Tuesday night. I suppose that is one way we find comfort, as we know that he is now in a better place.
So I’ve tried to answer three questions:
- Who was this Gene Page Singletary?
- What do you say at a time like this?
- And what would he want to me to say to you, his loved-one and good friends?
16 Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. 17 For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. 18 So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
