Remembering a Young Neighbor

This photo shows Steve Crain (front left, eyes closed) and the late Doug Dill (dressed in a blazer), sitting to Steve’s right, on Easter Sunday 1954 at Gum Springs PH Church in rural Greenville, S.C.


Some time ago I attended a meeting at the carpet company I work for and saw “Doug.”

No, the man I observed wasn’t Doug – my childhood friend Doug died years ago – but the blond-headed stranger sitting at a long, polished-wood table appeared as I imagined Doug would have as a mid-thirties man, if his life had not ended at a place called “The Devil Catcher.”

“It’s not only the blond, crew-cut hair; it’s the high cheek bones and his slightly turned-up nose that remind me of my long-ago friend,” I thought.

The well-built man at the table had traveled from the Netherlands – or as he called his home, “der Nederlands” – to present textile design software (Ned Graphics, he called it) to our company executives. Two of his coworkers accompanied him and listened as he led the business conversation. My mind drifted from his words as my eyes traced his face. I wondered if Doug’s ancestors had migrated from der Nederlands.

Doug and his family, which included his father, mother and pretty older sister, were our closest neighbors when I was eight years old on Groce Meadow Road in rural Greenville County, South Carolina. Only two plowed acres separated my family’s white-shingled one-story abode from Doug’s two-story weathered old house.

Doug, perhaps five years my senior, served as my role model. Tanned, athletic and usually shirtless in summertime, Doug rode his minus-fenders bike with abandon. My father wouldn’t let me remove fenders from my bike. Doug showed me how to attach a clothespin and a piece of cardboard to my bike so that the cardboard flapped against my tire spokes and sounded like a motorcycle, almost.

Sometimes I’d walk to Doug’s house and wait for our school bus. One rainy morning Doug took me inside his house and squirted some kind of liquid into his palm. He set fire to what he held, and though flames rose, he was not burned. I was amazed, and he offered to let me try, but I chickened out. I probably made the right decision – someone told me Doug extinguished the fire before it burned all the liter fluid he used to perform his trick; he might not have let me in on his secret before I felt the flames.

Mama said Doug was “all boy.” When a teacher read to my elementary school class, “Blessings on thee, little man, barefoot boy with cheeks of tan…,” that classic poem “The Barefoot Boy” by John Greenleaf Whittier, I thought of Doug.

Doug’s family didn’t seem to attend church much, but sometimes my family took Doug to our Pentecostal church’s summer vacation Bible school classes.

A teenage boy named Don – maybe he was a year older than Doug – moved to our neighborhood, and he and Doug fished in a backwoods pond named “The Devil Catcher.”

My father never took me to The Devil Catcher, which lay deep in the woods behind a house further down Groce Meadow Road. As our school bus passed that house, I’d peer into the forest, but the pond stayed out of sight.

Its name intrigued me, and I imagined that wilderness place as overgrown with briars. I envisioned the Devil himself down there, caught in thorns much like the ones he caused Jesus to wear during crucifixion. I could picture Lucifer standing waist-deep, eternally entangled in a watery natural net called The Devil Catcher.

One year, Doug, Don and one of their friends put a johnboat on The Devil Catcher during a duck-hunting excursion. Someone said it was dark when the teenagers headed for shore and that after Doug jumped out of the boat to help guide it to land, a shotgun dislodged from its resting place in the craft, struck against the body of the boat and discharged. The blast caught Doug in the back of his head.

Doug’s parents wanted his funeral conducted at our church. During his eulogy, our young pastor, the Rev. James H. Thompson, mentioned that Doug had raised his hand to receive Jesus as his savior during one of our church’s vacation Bible school meetings. I recall hoping Doug’s parents drew comfort from that thought.

Soon after Doug’s passing, our family moved from Groce Meadow Road to a nearby town called Greer.

One summer afternoon during my college years, I drove to Groce Meadow Road and walked to The Devil Catcher, the mystery pond I’d never seen. Briars laced its banks, but that small, shallow body of water appeared powerless to me. It seemed an unworthy opponent for Doug, a young man full of life during my childhood.