Greg File isn’t a club secretary or a newspaper reporter.
He never pulled a chair or a nail keg up to the potbellied stove in his Uncle Lee File’s store out on the Bringle Ferry Road and took notes on the stories he heard.
Greg was a lot more likely to be wrestling with his good friend, Jerry
Holshouser, on a pile of feed sacks back of the stove while his daddy, Oscar, jawed with the rest of the guys who gathered every evening for a Coke and talk on subjects ranging from taxes to tobacco, from planting to politics and always including more than a few laughs.
But now and again he thinks he must have had a tape recorder in his brain, silently taking it all down, as although unbeknownst even to himself, his brain was getting ready for that day about six weeks ago when the old store was loaded on a tractor-trailer and moved down the road to be part of an
old-timey community in Gold Hill.
Of course, he didn’t know that was going to happen when he decided all those old stories had to be written down or they’d be lost and worried that more than just good stories would disappear. With them would go the memory of the way life used to be, and he wanted to hang on to that for his family and for history — and for fun.
The old country store itself was history, for sure . A long, narrow, one-room emporium, built in 1906 out of forest pine by File’s wife’s uncle — oh, you didn’t follow that? Don’t worry. That’s kind of the way people get identified in and around a country store.
And other places, too.
Why, Greg File found out local artist and Post cartoonist Mark Brincefield was doing a watercolor of the store to go with this article, and thought that was great.
“He’s my brother-in-law,” he said. “We’re married to sisters.”
Then he found out James Barringer was going to take his picture, and that was great, too.
“He’s my cousin,” he said. “My mother and his father are sister and brother.”
But back to Lee File’s wife’s uncle. He was A.M. Eller.
He built the store in the community of Craven which once had a store, garage, cotton gin, post office, slaughterhouse, sawmill, doctor’s office and even some moonshine stills in the woods nearby, James Barringer wrote recently when the move was pending.
But Eller died in 1933 in a truck accident while he was on a fishing trip to the coast, and his sons wanted File to run the store, so he and his wife, Olivia, did — for 52 years. And it became
W.L. File’s store, even though they never bought the building. For the first 20 years Lee kept it open every day, even Christmas, and Greg says it always kind of catered to mill hours. People gathered at the store and carpooled to go to work, so his crowds came at shift changing times, and those who were finishing instead of starting their shifts, kind of lingered.
So did folks who needed to buy a box of salt or fishermen on their way to and from Crane Creek who wanted sardines and crackers or pork and beans or one of Lee’s famous bologna sandwiches — and those just interested in swapping stories.
Business was always good, even in Depression days. The bread truck came twice a week to keep the store stocked.
But the Files closed up in 1985, and its owner, Hazel Holder Palmer, didn’t know what to do with it, says her daughter, Sue Fisher. Then Sue’s husband, Paul, mentioned it to Darius Hedrick. Hedrick is restoring the Gold Hill village.
So Hazel Palmer gave File’s store to Darius Hedrick, who moved it to Gold Hill in November.
“And it don’t look the same around there now,” Greg says.
So he’s glad he started writing those stories down.
“My father told me a lot of the old stories,” he says “but I was there.” So he’s not sure which ones he heard from his daddy and which ones he heard at the store.
But he’s sure that he never expected to write any of them down back then or while he was in the Army during Vietnam.
When he graduated from East Rowan, his draft number was 23.
That assured him he would go to Vietnam.
“So I volunteered to go into the missile program,” he says, because that assured him that if he passed a test to work on missiles, he wouldn’t go to Vietnam. So he spent 3 1/2 years as a missile tracking radar operator at a base in Maryland — and met Janet there. They married and came back to Rowan to live on Clark Road, only about a mile and a half from File’s store and near his parents, Oscar and Louise File, and his brother, Jim. By that time, his sister, Janet, lived in Petersburg, Va.
“There’s 18 years between me and my brother,” he says, “and 14 between me and my sister. When I was in the second grade at school, my sister was teaching the first grade.”
But that didn’t bother him much. Well, maybe a little.
“I had to be a little cautious about what I was doing because she was looking over me.”
When he came home from the Army, he knew he wanted to go into construction. His dad had started a construction business after World War II, and his brother had joined him.
“And I joined the two of them,” he says.
They build houses.
“For years we did it all — masonry, roofing, cement work, framing, finishing work — the whole thing.”
But as they got older — Greg says he’s had his 40th birthday nine times now but he’s still the baby in the crowd — they started subbing out more work. They’re still busy building, taking care of the business end of things, “and we do all the mechanic work on our cars and trucks. It kind of clears my mind a little to have something different to do. My newest car is a ’67
Chevelle, and it looks better than it did new.”
“How do you spell Chevelle?” turns into a straight line for his joke.
“I use the alphabet,” he says.
His wife has a Chevelle, too. Jim has three trucks and two cars, and his dad has one car.
And Jim and his dad really use theirs.
“They go off every Sunday just seeing things, trying new roads, talking to people and drive about 200 miles. They’ve been doing that probably eight years — since Jim and me quit motorcycle riding. We’ve been all over the United States on motorcycles, just to get away away from the telephones. We put our tents on the motorcycles, and the cooler and cookstove on his and went to the Rockies, to California and all the way across Canada.
“But we got into several trips where the weather was bad all the time — and we got into a small accident in Canada. He ran into an RV when the driver slammed on brakes at the crest of a hill, and he clipped the back of it. It messed up my saddle bag just in front of my wife’s leg. I thought it could have been her leg, and that scared me.”
So that was the end of motorcycling and probably the beginning of writing.
“I just kept hearing different stories, and I thought, ‘Somebody ought to write some of this down so it won’t get lost.’ ”
Some of those stories he used to hear at the store, how it was a meeting place and his dad would go up there about every night and talk and drink a Coca-Cola. His sister, Janet, was doing home work.
And Jim was in the service. He was still a kid.
“One Coke used to do the both of us, and I’d get some peanuts and eat the peanuts. But by the time we got halfway down the bottle, there would be peanuts in there, and Daddy decided then I was old enough to get a Coca-Cola of my own. That was when people used to say. ‘When those Cokes go up to seven cents, I’m going to quit.’
“It was just about all the time men, kind of like a club. Daddy would stay for different shifts to come in, and sometimes he’d stay way up into the night. I’d be asleep a whole lot of the time by the time Daddy got through.”
Then he got a computer for the business, “and I took typing in high school, but the computer is so much easier ... ”
And one day he and Janet were going on vacation and he was doing some figuring, he says, and got so disgusted with the figuring that he started writing down one of the old, old stories.
It felt good, so he’s still writing them down.
“Just when something hits me,” he says, “or I think about it in my sleep, and I wake up thinking about it, and I have to jump up and write it down or I won’t remember it in the morning .... ”
But at night, his fingers hit the computer keys, and the voices come back true and clear.
And you can read what he writes and hear somebody talking about going up to File’s Store for a loaf of bread and to find out who’s there. It’s chilly outside.
The fire feels good. And people are laughing.
Listen up! Somebody’s telling that old story about Lum and his alarm clocks again.
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