The Times-News, Hendersonville, N.C., Sat., December 8, 1978

Mr. Fitz — Henderson County’s Master Storyteller

By BOB WHITMIRE

Frank L. FitzSimons Sr. is more than the author of three volumes of local lore and tall tales. He is also a schoolteacher, soldier, banker, football coach, broadcast journalist and winner of the Navy Cross during World War I.

But more than those things, Frank FitzSimons is a storyteller — one in the tradition of storytellers who have occupied a position of eminence around the supper fires of 50 thousand generations.

“As a child I spent my summers walking these mountains, talking to people and gathering their stories and legends,” FitzSimons said during a recent interview.

He moved to Hendersonville permanently in 1921, and as a history teacher at Hendersonville High Shool [sic] FitzSimons continued to walk the ridges and coves, picking up bits and pieces of local lore.

Then in the 1950s, while he was an executive with the old State Trust Co. (now Northwestern Bank), he was talked into going on WHKP Radio to replace a music program that the bank had been sponsoring. “They told me I could talk about anything I wanted to — you know, editorialize and such,” FitzSimons said.

"Several times I was getting pretty well fed up with it. I’d leave here and go down to the broadcast station and wouldn’t know what I was going to talk about.

“One afternoon I was desperate … I suddenly thought ‘I’m going to tell them about the first subdivision in Hendersonville — out at Highland Lake, around 1910.’ And I just started talking about it on the program that night; much to my surprise I got more comments and telephone calls from people who enjoyed hearing about it. From then on my programs altogether were about people and things that happened that were of interest — and at the time that they happened, were important to the people at that period, but so many people had forgotten about them.”

For more than 5,000 evenings at 6 p.m. FitzSimons went on the air to tell stories about people and events in the past that have shaped our times today.

The stories have been bound into the three volumes of “From the Banks of the Okiawaha.” The first two volumes have not satisfied the appetite of folks around here for their past. Volume III is due from the publisher today.

FitzSimons speaks modestly about the circumstances surrounding the writing of his books, but to the observer there is a note of pride in his voice, and a twinkle in his eye.

"After I retired, Kermit Edney and my son and several of my friends kept after me. They said so much of this stuff was going to be forgotten and lost after I died. They kept pressuring me to write it.

“So I agreed to write the first one under protest. It was so well received, and I had so much material — and I wasn’t doing anything — so I thought I might as well write the second one, and that led to the third one …”

Then FitzSimons leans [closer] to the interviewer and whispers in a conspiratorial voice, “And I still wish to hell I hadn’t done it…”

But the storyteller has a story on his own. He has lived with his wife, Maggie, in the same house for the past 56 years. As a child he spent his summers here; his family was from South Carolina.

“My grandfather was killed during the Civil War,” he said, "and when Sherman marched up through South Carolina, my widowed grandmother and her seven children were refugeed out in Mills River. They all went back to South Carolina after they grew up, but my part of the family brought me up here summers.

“After I graduated from Wofford College after World War I, I moved up here and took a job teaching history at the high school.”

In addition to teaching at the high school, FitzSimons also taught at Blue Ridge School for Boys, Carolina Military and Naval Academy, Dana school, Mt. Vernon (Dry Hill), East Flat Rock Elementary School, and Edneyville. Throughout his years of teaching in the various parts of Henderson County, FitzSimons continued to walk the mountains talking to the people, gathering the material and information that would find its way onto the radio and into the pages of his books.

He says it was easy. “The area has always had a lot of characters, for as far back as I can remember — and that’s nearly 1900; but, they’ve always been rather colorful…”

“It’s surprising how you’ll get one good story, and that will lead someone to remember another one, and they’ll call and tell you about it.”

A good story has life of its own in the hands of the master storyteller. Books are fine, television is fine, motion pictures are fine, but none of those storytelling methods can compare to oral tradition, to the man or woman who sits by the fire, or on a stone by a river, or in a rocking chair on a wide porch at the family farm to tell the new generations about what has happened in the past.

“The pace, the tempo of life then was very much slower — well, you thought nothing if you wanted to go to town, you just start out from here (Howard Gap Road) and walk to town … walk from Hendersonville to Saluda to spend the day, things like that. Now you can’t get anybody to walk from here up to the corner,” FitzSimons said.

We have no trouble, as we sit in Frank FitzSimons’ living room listening to his slow, steady drawl, imagining the old wooden wagon bridge over Mud Creek at the south end of town. We can see small boys under the bridge cowering as an ox cart passes overhead. We can see them standing there, looking at the twin ruts leading south out of town through field and forest to lands unknown to small boys on the creek bank.

And we can see the young [FitzSimons …]

FitzSimons will not talk about the circumstances that surrounded the incident for which he was decorated.

“You get those things because the right officer is there when it happens. There were plenty of men that did more than me — there just wasn’t anyone there at the time to see them…”

“I saw the last big cavalry charge in modern warfare,” FitzSimons said, "Ten-thousand French troops mounted on beautiful Arabian horses. Actually they were Algerians and Morrocans, but they were fighting for the French.

"It was at Soissons — and what a sight it was! The American First and Second Divisions were to hit the German lines. If we drove them back, the cavalry was behind us. They were going to leapfrog us and start a general rout of the German armies.

“They took over, all right, but the Germans slaughtered them — and those beautiful horses. It was terrible, laying there in a shell crater, watching that slaughter…”

"We were on the banks of the Meuse River when the Armistice was signed. We were putting a pontoon bridge across the river; the Germans were throwing in artillery.

“I couldn’t understand it — we knew the Armistice was going into effect and yet both sides kept shooting right up until the last second…”

Frank FitzSimons has been a soldier, a schoolteacher in two-teacher schools, a bank executive and a radio star, but with a twinkle in his eye he confesses that the thing he is most proud of has little to do with telling stories or writing books or teaching school.

“You know that the proudest thing I am — that I coached the first football team at the high school (HHS) that ever won a game.”

That was in the fall of 1921. “Prather (the first coach) never won a game. I think I won four or five that year.”

Future generations will remember Frank L. FitzSimons Sr. for his three volumes of stories, folklore, and tall tales. They are a treasury of the kind of information that can give people an insight into the past.

But those of us who lived here in the 1950s and 1960s will remember him on the radio breathing life into his stories with a soft, steady cadence.

He is one of the special people who through the times since mankind was young have come forth to gather the stories and pass them on.

Photograph caption (center)

Frank FitzSimons

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