BY ED DUPREE
SALISBURY POST

It was back in February of 1996 that I wrote a column suggesting Salisbury-Rowan have a Sports Hall of Fame.

I couldn’t understand why Stanly County and other counties and cities in North Carolina had Hall of Fames and we did not, especially with the rich tradition of sports in Salisbury and Rowan.

Former sports editor Horace Billings, who had been in Salisbury 18 years longer than I had, also was talking up the Hall of Fame idea, hoping to see it take place.

Billings and I got together and came up with a list of 30 names aged 50 and over that we thought should be considered when and if a Hall of Fame became reality.

Five years and a couple of months later, the Salisbury
Rowan Sports Hall of Fame has become a reality. Seven inductees will be honored Friday evening when an induction ceremony and dinner is held at the City Hall Council Chambers.

Inductees and their family members, city and county officials, and members of the Salisbury Rowan Sports Hall of Fame Committee will attend the 6:30 p.m. event, which is by invitation only.

Four of those inductees were on my first list, and two more were on my second list of those younger than 50.

Those six are Billy Ray Barnes, Jerry Barger, Joe Ferebee, Spencer Lancaster, Cristy Earnhardt McKinney and Robert Pulliam.

The deserving seventh honoree who has written about local athletes and coaches since 1948 is the recently retired Billings, who was sports editor of the Post for 40 years. Although retired, he is still contributing stories.

As a sportswriter, I have written a lot about Ferebee, Earnhardt and Pulliam.

Ferebee gave me a baseball education once when I drove us to Greenville, N.C., at least an eight-hour round trip, to scout an American Legion baseball playoff opponent. He has a tremendous knowledge of the game and an amazing recall of past games in which he has played and coached.

He put Salisbury on the Legion map in 1955 with a state and regional champion and a third-place national finish. He had three more state championships with Rowan County and has won an amazing 1,438 Legion, high school and college games.

Earnhardt was one of the first local great female basketball players after I came to Salisbury. The East Rowan High star helped me realize that female athletes wanted to get fair recognition in the Post. There was a time that girls basketball would get just a few paragraphs. Earnhardt helped change that.

Ironically, about 20 years later, my daughter Allison would be a star athlete at East, where Earnhardt was a great basketball player. Allison and her teammates, like Cristy, enjoyed the respect they got in the media. They can thank Cristy.

Earnhardt went on to make all-state in college at N.C. State and was the first local female to play in the Women’s Professional Basketball League. Now she’s a successful basketball coach at Rice.

Pulliam was a star athlete in three sports, football, wrestling and track, at Salisbury High.

The big lineman earned a scholarship to the University of Tennessee, where I once traveled to see Pulliam and Johnny Yarbrough play a freshman team home football game against Notre Dame.

Pulliam went on to be a college football coach and high school administrator.

I didn’t cover the exploits of Landis High three-sport star Barnes, but I saw him play in football and basketball against China Grove High.

Then, after his freshman year at Wake Forest, I was his batboy on a China Grove semi-pro baseball team. I’ve still got his autograph from that summer.

Three years later, in 1955, I sat in the rain at Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem watching my first college football game. Barnes became the Atlantic Coast Conference’s first 1,000-yard rusher in that game.

Barger graduated from Boyden High, where he was an All-American, before I could see him play, but I pulled for him and the Blue Devils while watching him on TV in the 1954 Orange Bowl. He quarterbacked Duke to a 34-7 victory over Nebraska.

I met him for the first time after coming to the Post, where I worked with his late father, Charles.Jerry is owner of Corbin Hills Golf Club, and I’ve had many enjoyable sports discussions with him over the years.

I sat with teen-ager Wilson Cherry while watching a great Price High basketball team play in the late 1960s, but I didn’t get to see the late “Prof”Lancaster coach.

However, his coaching record speaks for itself: two state championships,one undefeated, untied and unscored-upon team and a record of 183-50-15.

I have been fortunate in my 35 years with the Post, five as sports editor, to have worked side by side with Billings, who understood what the Post’s readers wanted to see in the newspaper. He made sure everything got covered fairly, even minor sports.He was thorough in his job.

He’s probably covered more Masters golf tournaments and more NASCAR races than any living sportswriter.

Billings, like myself, may not have written in the mode of many of the younger breed of sportswriters, but he knew more about more sports than anybody in the area. He was one of the best of an era.

Billings, Cherry and myself have had the pleasure of serving on the 12-member Salisbury Rowan Sports Hall of Fame Committee, co-chaired by Cherry and Scott Maddox.

Friday’s ceremony will honor seven deserving inductees and lay the groundwork for the local Hall of Fame to grow through the years.

Local sports fans can now take pride in having their own Hall of Fame, and they will have the opportunity this year to nominate their favorites for 2002.

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Ed Dupree is senior sports writer of the Post.