Not that he was in the Guinness Book of World Records or anything official like that.

But Friday, as word of the death of the former Salisbury mayor who made Cheerwine a household word spread quickly through town, records just kept popping up.

Did you know, people said to each other, that Clifford Peeler was a Catawba College trustee and trustee emeritus from 1938 until his death Friday? That’s 62 years — years longer than anyone else. That’s a record.

Did you know he was an advisor to seven of the eight presidents Catawba has had since it moved to Salisbury? Or the oldest Civitan Club member in the world? And a Civitan longer than anyone else in the world?

And he was the only Salisbury Civitan who could — and would — stand up and recite the Civitan Creed from memory instantly upon request.

Did you know he was without a doubt the only golfer who helped three much younger members of their four-man team win the annual Civitan golf tournament — and a big trophy — with his well-honed skill as a putter when he was 92 years old?

“I think he made something like a 40-foot putt,” his grandson, Mark Ritchie, said during an interview five years ago, but his self-effacing grandfather waved it away.

But everybody who knew him knew golf was his game.

“On the golf course, he was known as Pee Wee,” says Dave Clay, a long-time friend and Clifford Peeler’s insurance man, “I remember in the ’50s and ’60s, if I wanted to see certain people in town, I didn’t go on a Wednesday afternoon. They always took Wednesday afternoons off and played golf. If you were in Clifford Peeler’s office in the middle of the day, you had to cut it short. He always had an appointment — at the starting tee at the Country Club.

“Why Pee Wee? He was the little one in the crowd —in stature,” Clay says. “He was tall in everything else.” Tall enough to make a giant impact on his hometown in many ways and far beyond with Cheerwine.

Not only has it spread to states throughout the South, but company files are full of letters from people who moved away or passed through and sick children in hospitals far from home who want Cheerwine.

Hardly a week passes that an envelope doesn’t pop up with a check from someone who wants a case or two sent to someone far away.

Politician for years

Clifford Peeler had served three terms on the city council as mayor and vice mayor when Clay got to know him.

“John Riley and I had started buying out the old Freeman Insurance agency,” he says, “and he (Peeler) came up and asked John if it would be OK for him to ask me to run for city council.”

That was in 1957.

Peeler, Ernest Hardin and Holmes Plexico, all former mayors, and probably a few others in town who weren’t former mayors but were concerned citizens, quietly urged people to run for the council, Clay says, “because they were interested in city government.”

Clay ran. And won.

But even though Clifford Peeler put the thought in his mind, Clay says, “he never asked anyone for a favor.” His interest was always purely for the community.

John Isenhour, long time president of Isenhour Brick and Tile, and Paul Bernhardt, owner of Bernhardt’s Hardware, both former Salisbury mayors, also recall his impact on his hometown.

“He was a very thoughtful mayor,” Isenhour says, “but he had so many good things he wanted the city to do.”

Not, he says, that the council or the city always passed everything he suggested.

“The city was in need of so many things” at that time, Isenhour says. “Water and sewer hadn’t been increased in a long time, and the city had to float bonds to make a difference, but Clifford Peeler did a good job from a business standpoint. He was a very conservative person, a saving person. He didn’t spend any more money than he had to, and he made an impact on the town.”

People who went before him at a city council meeting, he says, “felt like he was interested in their problems because he was.”

Bernhardt also remembers Clifford Peeler in the ’50s.

He was one of the leaders of a group of leading business and community people, Bernhardt says, who got Salisbury on a very sound economic footing in the years right after the Depression and World War II when the town was having economic problems.

“They got Salisbury on an extremely good financial footing that lasted for many years,” Bernhardt says. “He was a business leader with his own business, and he came out of the Civitan Club, which was responsible for getting Salisbury the city manager type of government.”

And with all that ability, Bernhardt adds, “he was a delightful person to talk to, an eternal optimist and a perfect gentleman.”

Clay, also a Civitan during the post-WWII days when Salisbury’s civic clubs played a major role in the community, says Clifford Peeler “supported every good thing that the Civitans and the community did. He was just one of those quiet men who gave of himself and never really expected or looked for a lot in his own direction.”

Catawba College President Fred Corriher says Clifford Peeler was such a monumental figure in this community that he’s reminded of what a speaker of the House of Representatives said when John Kennedy died.

“He said a giant tree has fallen, and there’s a large vacant spot in the sky. He was a person of character and humility who never sought to advance himself, but only to advance the community.”

He always came away feeling uplifted and informed after visited Peeler, Corriher says — and a college president often visits a man who has been treasurer of the board of trustees and chairman of the finance committee for more than 30 years.

“He was the fiscal conscious of the college for many years ... the person we turned to in fiscal matters, even when he was a trustee emeritus.”

And he was a wonderful friend, says Elizabeth Stanback, whose friendship goes back many years.

When she and her husband, Fred, moved to Salisbury, Clifford and his wife, Lillian, were their neighbors on Mitchell Avenue. They immediately became close friends, even, she says, “before our children were born.”

Her husband, she says, used to say, “If ever I was in need, Clifford Peeler would be the person I would go to, and I know I would get help. ... Certainly it’s a loss to Salisbury to lose a citizen like he is, but he’s left some good children behind who will continue to do a good job here ... ”

Family life

In an interview for the Post in 1995, when he finally agreed to be grand marshal for the Salisbury Christmas parade after saying no twice, he talked about his life and his business and his family.

People had wondered out loud how many of his contemporaries could turn businesses they’d nurtured for well over half a century over to grandsons — and then keep their own hands off.

They need to make their own mistakes, he said then. “I made mine.”

So he let those grandsons, Cliff and Mark Ritchie, make theirs.

“You always knew he was going to be there if you needed him,” Mark said, “but he didn’t come running unless you asked.”

He went to work five days a week — in the same office with the same furniture he’d always had — in case he was needed, until three years ago when his car was hit on Jake Alexander Boulevard when he was driving home from work one day.

But even if that accident had a permanent effect on his sight and he no longer made it to the office daily, he was always available, always cared, was always a man who had filled a litany of roles for most of the 20th century, who quietly and modestly created a legend.

And he was always a man who set records.

A golden age leader

He was the only person from Salisbury who was president of the oldest student organization in the state — the Dialectic and Philanthropic Society — when he was a student at the University of North Carolina. Founded in 1795, the society was a forerunner of fraternities, a mixture of fraternity, debating society and literary magazine.

And, its members like to say, it’s the oldest student organization in the South, if you don’t count Phi Beta Kappa, which is purely an academic honor.

And to this day, because Clifford Peeler was its president, says Kevin Cherry, who headed Rowan Public Library’s history room until he resigned to become the state library’s consultant for local history, “the Society always serves Cheerwine punch at big formal events — in his honor.

“He was one of the leaders during the Society’s Golden Age,” Cherry says, “when it was turning out people like Thomas Wolfe and Gov. Luther Hodges, who founded the Research Triangle Park, and Paul Green, Pulitzer Prize winning dramatist and author of ‘The Lost Colony,’ and Senator Sam Erwin.”

Cherry, also a member of the Society, knew what questions to ask about things like that when he spent an afternoon with Clifford Peeler in his apartment at Trinity Oaks interviewing him for the library’s oral history program.

But he found out how practical and down-to-earth — and fun — a record-setting legend can be before he left that afternoon.

“The interview went so long,” he says, “and I was there, and Mr. Peeler said, ‘Don’t you want to eat supper?’ ”

Well, of course, he did, so they went to the Trinity Oaks dining room for dinner.