Walk a mile in the late Jim Semple’s shoes and you would come to know how much Jim Semple came to treasure his years as youth director in the 1960s at the Fayetteville YMCA on old Fort Bragg Road.
He couldn’t wait for each day when youngsters would show up to learn about baseball, basketball, football, and the games kids like to play.
“He loved kids,” son Jim Semple Jr. says. “It didn’t matter if you were white, green, blue, brown, or whatever. He loved kids and he loved sports. One of his favorite things was the summer camps, and one was for the underprivileged inner-city kids.”
Jim Semple Sr. believed in helping young people become all they could be. He believed in helping them to believe in themselves. He wanted them to know they could depend on him along their way.
A retired XVIII Airborne paratrooper and World War II veteran, Jim Semple Sr. spent 15 years as Fort Bragg Sports Non-Commissioners Officers director, where he organized, promoted, and supervised military athletics, including football, basketball, baseball, fast-pitch softball, and boxing until his Army retirement in 1963.
“I planned for this job three years before I got out of the service,” Jim Semple Sr. once told The Fayetteville Observer. “I even had my home built two blocks from the ‘Y’ before they finished our new building. I wanted this job to work with kids, because I have some ideas about the way they act and I wanted the chance to prove them.
“I don’t believe you can buy a football or a basketball and just give it to your boy. I believe you have to show him how it’s used and then beat him at it. You don’t whip him just because you can. You beat him to show him there’s always one better and to give him incentive to rise to the occasion.
“If he learns early in life there’s a person better than he is,” he said, “and I believe he’ll be better adjusted in everything, including his schoolwork.”
Jim Semple Sr. looked forward to teaching youngsters at what today is known as the YMCA of the Sandhills, about the games they liked to play, and those young people liked learning about how to throw and catch a baseball, dribble and shoot a basketball, and run a buttonhook for a quarterback’s pass on the football field.
He believed in them.
They believed in him.
“All the kids and teenagers called him ‘Sarge,’” Jim Semple Jr., 73, said. “‘Sarge’ is what they knew him as.”
When Jim Semple Sr. wasn’t working with youngsters at the YMCA, you could find him umpiring recreation baseball games and refereeing basketball and football games at Honeycutt Recreation Center, Lamon Street Park, and surrounding counties.
“You name it,” Jim Semple Jr said, “he refereed or umpired it.”
Jim Semple Sr. left the YMCA in the 1970s to become director of the downtown USO, aka United Service Organizations, where he welcomed serving soldiers, veterans, and their families, but Semple never lost his affinity for athletics.
“When pro boxing came to Fayetteville,” Jim Semple Jr. said, “he became one of the boxing judges in the late 70s. He had a great knowledge of boxing.”
Jim Semple Sr. died at age 74 in 1999.
He is scheduled for posthumous induction as the 118th member of the Fayetteville Sports Club Hall of Fame at 6 p.m. on February 17 in the multipurpose room of the Tony Rand Student Center on the campus of Fayetteville Technical Community College.
“Jim’s name kept popping up as like a second father figure to a lot of kids,” said Greg Parks, the 73-year-old club president.
Other inductees-elect are David Culbreth, the 1987 N.C. High School Athletic Association state wrestling champion out of Seventy-First High School and later the school wrestling coach; Angela Hill, a former basketball standout for E.E. Smith High School; Buddy Martin, the Cumberland County drag strip icon who founded the Sox and Martin Racing Team with Ronnie Sox; and Bernie Poole, former Seventy-First High School girls and boys basketball coach with more than 400 coaching victories.
‘It Just Means Everything’
Jim Semple Jr. closes his eyes and sees himself with his father throwing a baseball to one another at the old homeplace on McPherson Avenue, which was less than a mile from the YMCA on old Fort Bragg Road.
“When I was a younger kid, we looked forward to him coming home,” said Jim Semple Jr., who went on in 1971 to play for the freshman baseball team at N.C. State. “We’d have our gloves, and we would play catch for about 15 minutes.”
He is grateful to know his father is being remembered.
“It means everything to me,” he said. “All the fond memories of growing up with him, and the sports and what I learned from him. It means everything. I don’t better know how to express it. He was always good with people, and especially kids. It just means everything to me. He loved kids and he loved sports. He would be pleased to see all the different opportunities for kids playing today.”
He sees himself with his father at old Griffith Stadium in the nation’s capital to see his dad’s beloved Detroit Tigers take on the old Washington Senators. He sees his father at the kitchen table “hunched over a transistor radio” following every inning of a Detroit Tigers game at old Briggs Stadium.
Epilogue
And Jim Semple Jr. sees his father walking so many days of long ago to the “Y” to teach those kids of yesteryear about the games they loved to play.
“He never had the desire to drive,” he said. “He had all his Army buddies, friends, and cab drivers.”
Walk a mile in the late Jim Semple’s shoes, and you’ll learn something about the measure of a man’s life. Some called him “Big Jim.” The kids of yesteryear called him “Sarge.”
Bill Kirby Jr. can be reached at billkirby49@gmail.com or 910-624-1961.
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