Pennies From Heaven

{Prompt: Has anyone ever been a hero to you?}

I’m not sure when I met T.C. Pate exactly. At first, he was just a guy.

He was just another guy — a newspaper carrier — at the distribution point, picking up papers to deliver, at 4 or 5 in the morning. He got there and threw his bundles in his car. We got there and threw our bundles in our car (Mom and me). And we went off to do our respective routes.

Occasionally the distribution truck was late. Then we were all there waiting — waiting for the newspaper bundles, together. That’s probably when we met and talked, speculating on the causes for the delay. Or talking about the weather. Or talking about the newspaper delivery business. We all got to know one another, a little bit more.

Once, Mom’s car broke down at the Phillips 66 — the gas station where the papers were distributed. We didn’t have a backup plan — no one to call at 5 in the morning. No way to deliver the papers. No way to get home. Mr. Pate came to our rescue. He helped us finish the route. He took us home. He helped us get our car fixed.

After that, he became a friend of the family.

Mr. Pate — dressed for delivering papers — circa 1979.

His Backstory

Here is a little bit of his backstory. Mr. Pate was born about 50 miles from Raleigh, in Falcon, NC. Falcon is just south of Dunn, which is a “major center for producing cotton, tobacco, and turpentine,” and just west of Spivey’s Corner, where the National Hollerin’ contest is held each year. That tells you everything you need to know about Falcon. You could say it’s in the middle of nowhere.

He was christened Theron Carl Pate by his mother, but he always preferred to go by “T.C.,” for short. He must have gotten some guff for his first name—Theron— but it’s actually a pretty interesting name. It means “hunter” in Greek.

I don’t know what T.C. did during his childhood, but he was born in 1913 just before World War I, and he lived through the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression as a young adult. He attended Randolph-Macon Academy in Front Royal, Virginia, in the early 1930s.

His mother died in a car accident in 1936, when he was only 23 years old. She was driving back to Falcon — back home from Raleigh, with her nephew, when their car swerved into an oncoming truck. The collision was so severe that both of them were thrown from the car and died from the trauma.

Mr. Pate never talked about this. I only know about it now from the news articles.

1936 Article about T. C. Pate’s mother and cousin

I found out from T. C. himself that he served in World War II, and he was stationed in the Aleutian Islands, way up in Alaska, trying to avoid sniper fire from the Japanese. I interviewed him for an assignment when I was still in middle school and found out about his military service. Ultimately he was discharged from the military with a 100% disability (PTSD perhaps), meaning that he was eligible for VA medical benefits for the rest of his life.

An early portrait of T. C. Pate.

He was married in 1939, before WWII, and he had five sons: Thomas R., Andrew C., David R., Robert F., and Charles A. Pate. (Now, they live in Tampa, Florida; Kennesaw, Georgia; Raleigh, NC; Atlanta, Georgia; and Lorton, Virginia.) I never met his sons, because they were all grown up and moved away when I knew him. But I knew that he was especially proud of his youngest son, Charlie, who was enrolled at West Point at the time.

Mr. Pate and his wife were in the midst of a separation when he and I and my mom became acquainted back in 1978. It was complicated.

All I knew was that he worked delivering papers to make ends meet; but his real passion was being a salesman — selling massage chairs and other gadgets. He once told me that the secret to salesmanship is to really believe in the product that you’re selling. Once or twice he pointed out a gumball machine full of Chiclets, and he mentioned that it was one of his side hustles. The Ford gumball machines used to sell gumballs for a penny apiece. Civic clubs, like the Lions Club, used the machines to raise money for charity. Apparently, T. C. was a salesman or a distributor for these machines, because he shared in the profits.

He said, half-jokingly, that his favorite song was Pennies from Heaven.

A Ford gumball machine - gum for a penny.

Newspaper Delivery

At some point he took up morning newspaper-delivery to supplement his income. His morning route was about twice as big as ours, but he had been doing it for a while. He had all the houses memorized. He knew who liked their paper on the driveway, and who liked their paper on the grass. And he knew who wanted their paper in the box beneath the mailbox.

His route went down most of Blue Ridge Road, and the side streets nearby. Incidentally, Blue Ridge Road was one of the first roads in Raleigh to have a bicycle lane, but a lot of people used the lane for jogging too. Jogging was a brand new trend at the time. Not many people in Raleigh had even heard of jogging before 1972. (Frank Shorter is credited with inspiring a running boom when he won the marathon in the 1972 Summer Olympics.)

Mr. Pate’s route had a lot of cul-de-sacs. And I should know, because for a while I helped Mr. Pate with his route, folding and banding papers in the back seat. Every time he made a sharp turn, I had to brace the paper stacks to keep them from falling over (on me!)

T.C. would often throw the paper over the car roof, using his left hand, as he went around the cul-de-sac in a counter-clockwise direction. Sometimes, on the back roads, we just drove on the left-hand side of the road so he could throw the paper directly out of the window on his left. No one else was driving at that time of the morning. Still, we never did that on Blue Ridge Road.

After the route, we used to go to the Your House breakfast restaurant, on Capital Boulevard. It was close to where the Triangle Town Shopping Center is now. I’m not sure why he preferred to go to Your House. The Waffle House at the corner of Hillsborough and Method Street was certainly closer. But he seemed to know a lot of the patrons and the staff at Your House. And they knew him. I guess it was a tradition.

I think I told him once that I didn’t have any money, to buy breakfast with. He bought it for me, and said, “Never turn down free food,” with a smile and a sparkle in his eye. And since that day, I never have.

Quintessential diner counter like the one at Your House

A Generous Person.

Over the years he got to know my mother, me, and my brother. He let us drive his blue and white Skylark, and let us use his boat-sized, big, black Oldsmobile. We ended up driving those two cars into the ground, as he bought new cars for himself.

I’m pretty sure I was driving one of them when another driver on Hillsborough started waving me down, and pointing at one of my wheels. I pulled into the Arby’s parking lot to see what was wrong, and it looked like the tire was about to fall off! I have no idea why it was in such a state, but youthful neglect was probably a factor. I called for a tow truck, and when the tow-truck driver started to hoist the car onto the flatbed, the tire actually did fall off, much to his alarm. I’m pretty sure I sold it for junk to pay for the tow to the junkyard.

A 1971 Buick Skylark in fine condition.

Mr. Pate liked to buy a new (American-made) car every five or six years. I wonder if he gave the old ones to each of his five boys. It sure would take a lot of gum and newspapers to pay for a new car so often.

He must have been pretty frugal in other respects. He lived in a small one-story house, with a basement, at 729 Kimbrough Street, just off of Whitaker Mill Road. My mother stayed in his house for a little while after she sold our family home in 1986 or 1987. I would swear it was in the summer of 1986, because I was out of the country when I found out that she had accepted an offer on our family home. (When I returned from England I stayed with my friend Srini for a while.)

A lot of our childhood toys and school records went into Mr. Pate’s basement, or the shed in his backyard, before we could make room for them in a place of our own, eventually.

Mr. Pate also informally adopted our pet dog, Lindy — a beagle mix. Lindy stayed with him at his house, spent some time in a fenced-in area in his backyard, and probably had the run of the first floor.

Mr. Pate at his home in 1988

Sometime, in 1979 or 1980, Mr. Pate wrote a recommendation for me for the School of Science and Math. And he might have written another recommendation for me for medical school. Some of those recommendations had to be written by someone who was “not a family member”. In the time between high school and medical school, he had become as good as a family member to me; but still, technically, he was just a friend.

Moving On

My mother left Raleigh in 1988, when my grandmother, up in Virginia, suffered a broken hip. She moved out of the house on Kimbrough Street and into an even smaller house, up in Stanley, Virginia. She took care of my grandfather, Willard, until he died in August of 1991. And she took care of my grandmother, Mary, until she died in November of 1993. And then she stayed in Stanley.

Mr. Pate was a guest at my wedding in 1991 and was an honorary best man for my brother’s wedding in 1995. But he and my mother saw less and less of one another, given their distance apart; and she married Ivan Purdham, from Stanley, in 1997.

Margaret Gallup and T.C. Pate at my wedding in 1991

I saw less of Mr. Pate, myself, when I went to medical school in 1987, and even less when I went through residency (in Pittsburgh, PA, and Columbia, SC) starting in 1992. And then Dianne and I had twins in 1994, and I didn’t really see him at all.

He entered a Veteran’s Administration rest home sometime in the late 1990s and he passed away on August 9, 2002, with hardly any fanfare at all. He was buried at the Antioch Baptist Church cemetery in Falcon, North Carolina, with a military grave marker. (His wife was buried separately in a cemetery in Raleigh.)

T.C. Pate’s grave marker in Falcon.

What He Meant

Although he was just another guy at the newspaper stop when I met him, he became an incredibly important part of my life — a role model and a mentor — for a decade, starting in 1978, when I was only fourteen years old.

He taught me to “Really believe in whatever you’re selling”, “Never turn down free food”, and “Give your mama a break — she’s doing the best that she can”. He had five grownup children of his own, but he had the audacity to take on two more who needed support.

His life started out tough, but he made it through tragedy and hard times, just like me.

He had a life full of adventures, big and small.

I hope I do too.

He was never camera shy.