“Dear Sean,” the email began—people are always calling me that. “Who were your role models growing up? My father died last week… I am 14 and I don’t know who my role model will be.”
Dear friend, my role model was born the same year Ty Cobb retired. The same era The Bambino was selling Old Gold cigarettes in the back pages of “The Saturday Evening Post.”
It was a period in American history when cowboy movies were silent, radios were loud, and Charles Lindebergh was still considered to be a little off.
The boy was born to Carl and Geneva, two average North Carolinians in an average house in an average town. They lived modest lives. They lived beneath the water tower, for crying out loud.
He was their only child. He got all their attention.
“I loved my father,” he once said. “He lived to be eighty. He smoked cigarettes every minute of his life.”
His father had a notoriously wet sense of humor. He was the kind of guy who
tended to be popular in places like barbershops, feed stores and any place where old geezers play checkers.
Years later, when the boy started performing his one-man comic routine before Rotary Clubs, civic leagues, and Elks Lodges, the boy admitted that his brand of hayseed humor came from simply impersonating his old man.
His mother, Geneva, was known by her friends to be sugar sweet. She was born just over the North Carolina state line in Old Virginny.
To get to her hometown you’d have to hop on the Blue Ridge Parkway and head north from the Carolinas. After about an hour you’d arrive in the meadows of Patrick County.
If you veer onto County Highway 602 and follow it into the sticks, eventually you will find the remnants of a tiny mountain hamlet so remote they have to mail-order sunshine from the Montgomery Ward catalog.
It…