|
||
Tony Hamilton relished his days
growing up
on Holt Lake: lots of fishing, and some fireworks
Gary Ridout has been compiling personal
memories for a number of years for a
newsletter he produces for present-day Holt
Lake residents. We're sharing selected samples
from time to time with readers of the Sun.
Here are excerpts from Gary's October 2019
interview with Tony Hamilton:
As a child, I
enjoyed swimming in front of the Pavilion at Holt
Lake. I would pay a quarter, get a basket for my
clothes, and swim all day. There were the two
platforms out in the lake, which had diving boards
on them. Every afternoon when we were swimming, an
ice-cream truck would come. For a nickel, you
could get a twin pop, a pushup, a snow cone, or an
ice-cream sandwich. On the weekends, the ice-cream
truck pulled in at five o’clock. At five o’clock
on Saturday, everyone had to get out of the water.
At six o’clock, the dance hall opened. My brothers
and I loved to go to the old dam to play and swim.
My older brothers --- Wayne, Don, and Richard ---
taught me how to swim at the old dam. Their
instructional method was to throw me in the water.
The bottom of the lake around the old dam was made
of clay, but it was not slick, which was very
nice. This soft bottom of the lake was created
when they broke the old dam in two and moved the
dam to the present location near the Highway
Patrol station. My mother did
not work in the summer because she was a teacher.
In the summers, my mother would wash clothes in
the morning and then she and I would go to the old
dam to fish. Her name was Mary Alice Blake
Hamilton. She taught eighth grade at Smithfield
School from 1958 to 1960 and then at Four Oaks for
the rest of her career. She retired from teaching
in 1987. I have great
childhood memories of Holt Lake. I remember seeing
the first fireworks show here in 1961. The
fireworks were shot off from the area where the
Brannan greenhouses were located. We sat at the
old dam and watched the fireworks. As we were
marveling at the colors and sounds, we heard
police-car sirens. All of a sudden, we could see
the police cars approaching the greenhouses, and
then the fireworks stopped. At that time,
fireworks were illegal, so that was the end of the
show. In the winter
of 1962, Holt Lake completely froze over. I
remember roller skating on the ice. For two weeks,
the daytime temperature never got out of the 30s.
At night, lows were in single digits. To test for
safety, my two older brothers would swing a cinder
block as high as it would go. If it did not break
the ice, they declared it safe to skate. During
that time, it was possible to walk across the lake
from the old dam to the Country Club. My father
starting wondering what we were doing out in the
cold, so he came down and observed our roller
skating on the ice. That was the end of the roller
skates on Holt Lake. In 1963, my
family moved to Smithfield. In 1965, we moved to
King Road outside of Four Oaks. As a 10-year-old,
I would get to Holt Lake every time I could. I had
become very good friends with Frank Skinner, who
is Berry Skinner’s grandfather. In 1966, Mr. Frank
gave me a two-man boat. I kept it at his house. I
would ride my bike from King Road to Holt Lake so
I could use that boat. I remember one day I was
fishing and I had gotten into a big bed of
shell-cracker bream. Shell-cracker bream will bed
at the full moon in May and the first full moon
after May.
One day Coy C.
and Everitte were fishing at Holt Lake. A snake
fell out of a tree and landed in the boat. Coy
shot at the snake and tore a hole in the boat. Coy
C. got his one-armed brother to a tree and went to
get help to get Everitte out of the boat.
Everything worked out, and the hole in the boat
got patched. When I was in
Obey Keene’s store one day, someone brought in a
cottonmouth moccasin that they had killed on Snake
Island. The snake had a big knot in it. The men
cut it open and found a full-grown squirrel
inside. Snake Island is at the far end of Holt
Lake. To get there, you go by Eddie Sutton’s
house, and you will see cypress trees growing out
of the water. After a few minutes, there will be
cypress trees growing on land near the center of
the lake. This is Snake Island. Our diving
tree was located 150 yards out from where Edward
Earl Sutton now lives. We would take small boats
to get near the tree. There was a small wooden
space on the tree that served as the diving
platform. It was 40 feet above the water.
Sometimes there were 10 or 12 of us on the
platform. It is about 12 feet deep at the base of
the tree. I cannot say
enough good things about Mr. Frank Skinner. He was
always looking out for us children. In the late
1960s, he said: "I got you something for your
little boat." It was a brand-new trolling motor.
He got my sister, Melanie, her first 10-speed
bicycle in the early 1970s. That was the first
10-speed bike I had ever seen. I loved to fish
with Mr. Frank’s son, Frank Berry. He knew all the
good places to catch fish, and we fished many
times together. Right after
Christmas in 1973, I was duck hunting on the lake
with Walter G. Lassiter. We got iced in on the
lake. When we left the Brannan landing, the ice
was so thin that the boat would break through it.
The temperature dropped dramatically throughout
the day. The ice got so thick that we broke the
shear pin on the boat motor. We also broke our
paddle, trying to move the boat along. To keep the
boat moving, we shot holes in the ice with our
shotguns and headed for the closest shoreline we
could find. We ended up at Red Tart landing on
Packing Plant Road. Mr. Tart gave us a ride home
to Walter G’s house. The boat stayed on the lake
for four days before the ice melted enough for us
to get it out.
When I was growing up around Holt Lake, it seemed like summers lasted forever. As long as I was on the lake, I was happy. I have always loved Holt Lake. I remember we would go to the beach for a week and I could not wait to get back to the lake. We would visit my grandparents in Troy, N.C. for a week in the summer and I was so homesick for Holt Lake I was miserable.
Previous
installments in this series may be viewed with
these links: |
||
|
|
The law in my house was that you
were home for supper by 6:30 p.m. The fishing was
so good I could not stop. Mr. Frank knew I was on
the lake. He called my mother and said, "Tony is
still out on the lake fishing. I can see him."
When I got in, I had a five-gallon bucket full of
shell-cracker bream. I think there were about 50
fish in the bucket. I was wondering how I was
going to get the full bucket of fish to King Road
in Four Oaks. When I got to shore, Mr. Frank
picked the bicycle up, put the bucket in the back
of his pickup, and took me home. My father and I
cleaned fish until late that night and then my
family had a wonderful fish dinner the following
Friday night! 
People don’t realize how large Holt
Lake is. Grover Dees's house is only the halfway
mark for the lake. The picture shows the beginning
of the shallow area where I duck-hunted as a
teenager and young adult.