What happened in football this year? Any big surprises or changes? Who knows for sure? Only the guys who don’t read much but head for a local fast-food pleasure palace at noon, sit with three or four buddies and, in no time, start bearing on the table, almost shouting, “Anybody could have told Coach Bigley a pass wasn’t gonner work!”

Bob Gillespie, former Orangeburg guy, doesn’t shout and beat at these male sessions even though he’s been watching, studying and writing about the sport for 35 years. He’s a good man to ask: “What do you think about the season, Bob? See anything you didn’t expect among our teams, like S.C., N.C., Georgia, etc.?”

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If you don’t think you know anybody important in New York, leave your hotel about 8 a.m., make your way to the heart of the Big Town and carefully watch everybody who dodges into the revolving doors at the corner of 7th Avenue and 39th Street.

Hold your eyes there and soon you’ll see a beautiful girl with long, glassy, black hair dodge in. If you’re close enough and yell, she’ll turn and smile. Tell her, “I’m from Orangeburg.” She’ll call back, “I am too.”

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Why are the Yankees, Europeans and a lot of the world still oblivious to sweet potatoes? Is it that many Northerners still believe the South has only a modicum of culture?

This may be a silent thought.

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Along with football fracases and the cotton crop, autumn brings two more annuals – a deluge of red, yellow and green gift catalogs displaying some of the wildest, craziest and prettiest gifts for the season. Also, from the mailman – one, two or more good cause “send money” letters every day.

In South Carolina, the Association of Nonprofit Organizations lists 8,000 registered organizations, hundreds of which send out letters asking help to wipe out a disease or support for the poor. Also, to give aid to lost or sick animals. No statistics seem available as to the amazing number of mail order booklets. In the weeks before Christmas, they fill up mailboxes every day.

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If a good hunt for you requires these: waking up at 5:30 a.m., shivering through a pick-up breakfast and hurrying countryside to meet your gang by six-thirty, a pheasant shoot may not be your ticket.

The place is Aberdeen, South Dakota; the time, 10 a.m. Eighteen Orangeburg-connected men have had a late, quiet sleep, then chewed through breakfast abundance from fresh fruit to second coffees. Among them are Braxton Wannamaker, who organized the trip, Bert Gue, Frances Faulling, Jimmie Terry, Thomas Richardson, Jim Wells, Rick Williamson and Wayne Chestnut. They have flown to Chicago, then to Fargo, N.D. and driven to an Aberdeen motel.

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“Times have changed. The odds have shifted. Today, if you don’t have a diploma, your chances of a well paying job with good benefits aren’t good. With every year our economy shifts more toward knowledge,” says Dr. Garrison Walters, executive director of the South Carolina Commission on Higher Education.

The unemployment rate in Orangeburg and environs, he says, is 16.1 percent as compared to only 10 percent in the U.S. Our rate for workers with a bachelor’s degrees or higher is only 3.7 percent, but even that’s a full one percent lower than the national percentage.

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In Orangeburg, city and county, garbage is still big. Piling one day’s collection in one place might create a traffic jam and a fly, gnat, ant, cockroach, buzzard, yellow jacket, rabbit and skunk zoo, too.

Durwood Bowden, director of Orangeburg’s Public Works, says there are 450 steel “dumpsters” placed around the city, ranging in size from two to eight cubic yards. Most are at commercial places like restaurants, factories, discount stores, etc. Some use as many as three.

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It’s feeding time, 4 p.m. on Bill O’Cain’s 30 acres out on North Road. He drives a pick-up from his brick, hilltop house through green grass fields back to a picnic-sized gazebo. There, he lifts in sacks of mixed grains, loaves of people-bread and other animal food. Then he drives through another green pasture to a warehouse where he stacks it all in the small trailer of a flat-bed golf cart.

The donkeys eat first. They are nine Sicilian asses, three-foot high adults and two white youngsters. All have been grazing in their own fenced-off pasture all day. No matter. With true donkey gluttony, they crowd against the fence to yank a slice of bread and chew greedily. The male, taller than his females, pushes the others out of the way to get more while Bill fills two large grain buckets and pours the corn, wheat, etc. mixture into two grassless places down the fence.

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“Sugar Mountain” is a great name, isn’t it? Lines of Carolina, Georgia and especially Florida vacationers have been driving the 100 to 500 miles up into the Blue Ridge all summer and the “village,” which is adjacent to Banker Elk, N.C., still has three autumn festivals to go. Then begin preparations for the winter fun.

If for nothing else, the delicious mountain air is worth traveling up for. Many tourists visited its forest-covered mountainsides cut with narrow, bolder dotted streams long before skiing began in the winters, then golf came right on its heels.

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Charlie McCain, Orangeburg High class of 1973, has written an acclaimed book called “An Honorable German.” It’s about a German submarine captain’s WWII exploits. Old friends of McCain’s like Marion Moore and James Guthrie say it’s exciting reading.

From his home in Washington, Charlie says, “I was born in Mobile, Ala. and grew up in my mother’s (Lurline Livingston McCain) hometown. During childhood, my grandmother (Big Lurline) would tell me stories about our family who had lived there many, many years.

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