I am a huge sports fan. College sports, that is. My team is Wake Forest and it has been ever since 1979 when my family moved from West Orange, NJ to Winston-Salem. That first summer we met Benny McCaig who was a Wake Forest basketball player living in our apartment complex. We befriended him at the pool and he was great with kids. My parents were huge college sports fans so they started taking us to the Wake Forest football and basketball games.
Benny played with some WFU "greats": Alvis Rogers, Frank Johnson, Guy Morgan, but he was a regular guy who hung out with us. My sister Kathy and I have birthday 12 days apart so we often had a party together. Because we were kids, we invited Benny to our birthday party at Mayberry's Ice Cream shop on Reynolda Road (long gone). Benny showed up about 20 minutes later for the beginning of the party but he brought the entire basketball team with him. Everyone was amazed by the size of the players, as they dwarfed the third and fourth graders. All were very nice and I found it very cool that they would give up an hour of their time to attend a kid's birthday party.
Thirty years later, I am still a huge fan. Go Deacs!
Sounds like your birthday parties were Serious Happenings around town. I'm sure that if Smitty was around, the parties would have been duly Noted.
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