'The Whole Town Is a Giddy Whirl'

NC State's 1928 team in action

© Tim Peeler, 2018

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So NC State and Clemson, two teams affected last month when Hurricane Florence moped across the Carolinas with the speedy enthusiasm of a recalcitrant teenager, are again playing a football game on the last weekend of the fair, a once proud tradition that created hours-long waits in the parking lots around Carter-Finley Stadium and the North Carolina State Fairgrounds.

That won’t be the case this weekend, because Saturday’s 3:30 p.m. game will be played at the Tigers’ Memorial Stadium, instead of Raleigh. Clemson is not a fair town.

What if I told you that the two teams, long before the advent of the Textile Bowl, twice played important football games in the middle of the fair? In Florence, South Carolina, no less, the last town of substance between the North Carolina border and, oh, Savannah, Georgia. Modern day, it’s the crossroads of Interstates 95 and 20, two extremely important exits from the land of the palmetto.

Neither of those routes existed, however, on Oct. 12, 1928, when the defending Southern Conference champion Wolfpack traveled to meet the Tigers in the middle of the Pee Dee Fair, for a canine-and-feline menagerie on the midway that attracted an overwhelming crowd of 4,000 spectators, all of whom were stuffed onto two sets of pineboard bleachers on either side of an open fairgrounds field.

At the time, the North Carolina State Fair had been out of commission for two years, as the N.C. Agricultural Society disbanded and the event was taken over by the NC Agriculture Department. It moved the state's premier agricultural exhibition its long-time home across Hillsboro Street from State’s campus to its new location two miles away to Blue Ridge Road.

I went looking for some history of this two-game series on the banks of the Pee Dee and found two gem-worthy stories written by Greenville News sports editor Carter "Scoop" Latimer, who wrote in the Prohibition-era style of Damon Runyon without the haughty New Yorkiness that Runyon’s work wore like ankle weights.

To wit: Here’s how Latimer described the pregame scene in Florence.

“Anyway, the game looms up as a big animal act to make this great Pee Dee fair something more than an exhibition of pumpkins and pigs, hogs and hens, potatoes and pies, jelly and jessamines, mares and molasses and a hoochy-koochy show in the carnival midway,” he wrote. “As time nears for the battle, people on the curb and in stores and offices have quit talking about the blue rosettes that ‘Squire Simmons’ sows won. They have even forgotten that Mrs. Pickles’ pans of pies took prizes. Their one thought seems to be of the football game, and if Clemson will win.”

(Modern translation: There’s a game tomorrow.)

The Pee Dee Fair was like most community expositions during that day, a collection of agricultural oddities, with livestock shows, farm machinery displays, cooking contests and the like. There were few attractions like carnival rides and deep-fried everything, but there were midway games and the ubiquitous burlesque shows, made famous at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, that once kept dads occupied while moms and kids went looking for blue ribbon-winning pickles and pies. (They were staples at fairs everywhere, included the one here in Raleigh, until the 1970s.)

Clemson coach Josh Cody took his team to Columbia the day before the game for a light workout, then spent the night in Darlington, site of the African American fair that ran concurrently with the all-white Pee Dee Fair. Tiger fans, dressed loudly in the school’s purple-and-gold colors of the time, descended on Florence, though without the pockets full of $2 bills made famous by future traveling Tiger fans on bowl trips.

Local schools and post offices closed early the day before the game. Florence residents decorated themselves with lapel ribbons representing the school colors of their favorite team. There was much more purple and gold than red and white.

NC State took a bus from Raleigh and stayed overnight in Florence, bringing with it a decent contingent of fans.

“Florence tonight looks like a city with the mumps,” Latimer wrote. “There’s more room in a stuffed tomato than in the hotel corridors.”

(Modern translation: It was crowded.)

While rain was in the forecast, Saturday morning broke with perfect skies and hot weather. It stayed that way until the 2:30 p.m. kickoff. The evenly matched teams, led by State’s Bob Warren and Clemson’s Johnny Justus, were scoreless for most of the game, as the 4,000 spectators squirmed on the scratchy bleachers.

“The battle raged under a blistering sun which was umbrella-ed now and then by fleecy clouds.”

(Modern translation: It was partly cloudy.)

“For three periods and well into the final session the Tigers and the Wolfpack see-sawed back and forth over a grass-splotched field in a struggle of intensity that tore at the hearts of four thousand spectators gathered here from all parts of the state. Always threatening, but snuffed out when it seemed a flame would find a crevice, the two teams appeared as a seething cauldron in burning their energies against the fire walls of two almost impenetrable lines. Johnny Justus, time and time again scorched his head, blistered his shoulders and seared his legs in crashing into the Wolfpack defense.”

(Modern translation: It was a close game.)

The great defensive struggle ended when the blonde-haired Justus finally cracked the cauldron, busting through the line for a 34-yard touchdown run for the only score of the day by either team.

“His gallop, a one-man parade, may be likened to such rare feats which are known in golf as a ‘hole-in-one,’ in baseball as a Ruthian home run, and in poker, a royal straight flush. How he managed to squirm his way through the right side of State’s line is something of a mystery. It happened so quickly the eye couldn’t follow. Standing in punt formation, he was seen to take the ball from center, dart toward the right wing, then cut back and this was the last seen of the flourishing ‘88’ numeral on his golden jersey until he reappeared out of the chaos. By this time his headgear was gone, and a sandy thatched head reared back and raced obliquely towards the sidelines. The arched his way back and out again, he tore down the field evading six crimson-jerseyed pursuers. One man lunged at his shoe tops but grabbed up only two fists full of ozone. Another dived at his shifty hips and he skidded on his nose, filling his nostrils with sand and weeds. A third tackler appeared, as if from nowhere, but again Johnny’s cunning and his skilled use of the stiff arm felled a foeman. Two men tried to scissors him with a head-on collision, but the Pickens boy was in no humor now to be tripped, not with the goal line a scant 10 yards away. Down the sidelines he sailed, perilously close to the boundary, but he kept his head high and his feet forward in sticking to fair territory.”

(Modern translation: He scored.)

Henry Asbill drop-kicked the extra point, giving the golden-jerseyed Tigers a 7-0 victory. Clemson left the game with an undefeated 4-0 record, and did not give up a point until its seventh game. The Tigers finished the 1928 season with an 8-3 mark.

State, suffering through a disappointing follow-up to the only Southern Conference championship in school history, played other games in Jacksonville, Florida, against Florida and in Greensboro against Davidson en route to a 4-5-1 record.

The game in South Carolina was deemed a wild success.

 

I think.

“Through 30 minutes of grueling combat the spectators sat in awed suspense. People were too hot and frazzled by the pitiless sun to eat peanuts and there was little else left to do, except scrounge on the pineboard seats and be as comfortable as possible while the hurdy gurdy wagons of the Pee Dee Fair carnival droned out nerve-wracking rhapsodies in jazz. No organized cheering sections fitted the air with raps to puncture eardrums. For the game was pitched two hundred miles from the college seats and students either couldn’t get a leave of absence or a pay envelope from dad to come here for the exhortation of their heroes ‘to do or die’ for old squeedunk.”

(Modern translation: None.)

The two teams met in Florence the following year, too, with Clemson rolling up a 26-0 victory. But that was the end of the great Pee Dee Fair rivalry. The fair itself eventually died, bowing to the South Carolina State Fair in popularity.

This fall, however, the Greater Pee Dee Fair was rebooted at the downtown Florence Center, an 11-day extravaganza that was supposed to be the biggest gathering of rides and carnival freaks this side of the Grand Strand.

More than half of it was canceled, however, by the arrival of Hurricane Florence.