Ann Hatcher Snuggs recalls with fond memories growing up in Fayetteville as a teenager, and one of those memories is her late father’s Hatcher’s Office Supply along Hay Street downtown in the 1950s and 1960s.
Snuggs remembers the business at 234 Hay, where Tom Hatcher sold just about everything from office furniture, books, stationery, stamp pads, staplers, business cards, pens and pencils.
But what she remembers most is that iconic and gigantic replica of a yellow pencil, which was the marketing calling card for the business.
“I thought it was just wonderful,” Snuggs said. “I think my dad was way ahead of his time.”
She’s been wondering of late whatever happened to the yellow pencil replica, which was replete with an eraser and the lead point at the bottom.
“It was a three-story building,” said Snuggs, 82, who lives in Albemarle. “As a kid, I thought it (the marketing pencil) was pretty cool.”
Snuggs says her longtime Fayetteville friend Ann Newberry suggested that I might have an idea of just what happened to that colossal pencil. There is some truth that I’ve located some lost treasures. I did track down the old cupola from the Alexander Graham Junior High School on Robeson Street; the old Liberty Bell at Eutaw Village Shopping Center; and the 1976 photographs of Elvis performing at the Crown Complex Arena.
Some folks describe me as Columbo when it comes to solving a mystery.
But whatever happened to the Hatcher’s Office Supply pencil is tall order for Lt. Columbo and Dick Tracy, and me.
“I just think when it was sold, somebody took it down and dumped it somewhere,” Snuggs said. “I don’t know why I need to know.”
Her brother, Tom Hatcher III, doesn’t know, either.
“We just didn’t know what happened,” said Hatcher, 77, who now resides in Forsyth County and says he helped out at the business as a youngster, standing behind the counter on a Coca-Cola crate. “I just know it was a freaking big pencil. It was unique at the time for sure.”
Growing up in Fayetteville
Ann Snuggs and Tom Hatcher III and their sister, Patricia Weaver Hatcher, grew up as the children of Tom Hatcher, Jr. and Ann Lamb Carpenter Hatcher in the flat-top family home along Raeford Road near Branson Creek, and where Ann Snuggs loved hanging out with girlfriends Ann Hambright, Linda Kelly, Carolyn Averitte, Cornelia Johnson, Sandy Iuliucci, Sandra Autry and Ann Newberry. She graduated from old Fayetteville High School in 1961. Brother Tom hung out with friends Franklin Clark, who would become a thoracic surgeon after starring for the University of North Carolina basketball teams from 1967-1969, and the late Chip Haige. Tom Hatcher III became a helicopter pilot in Vietnam and later went into construction.
Ann Snuggs remembers her father and mother as creative-minded people. Her grandfather, Tom Durant Hatcher, and her uncle, Weaver Hatcher, owned Hatcher’s Jewelry Store near the Market House. Her aunt, Isabel Lamb, owned Sunnyside Florist off Morganton Road in Haymount.
“I left Fayetteville when I was 19,” Snuggs said, but her memories of growing up in Fayetteville are fond, and you can hear it in her voice. “I could walk downtown. I knew people (merchants) at the stores.”
She remembers Sunday mornings at Highland Presbyterian Church.
Tom Hatcher, Jr., who owned the office supply business, died at age 72 on July 1, 1987.
“We lost him too soon,” Tom Hatcher III said.
Ann Lamb Carpenter Hatcher died at age 100 on Sept. 2, 2023, at Scotia Village in Laurinburg.
Epilogue
Back to Ann Snuggs and her curiosity about whatever happened to that huge replica of a yellow pencil on what once was her daddy’s Hatcher’s Office Supply?
“I don’t have a clue,” she said. “I just think when it was sold, somebody took it down and dumped it somewhere. I would just like to know what happened to it.”
J.E. Parker Jr., who was my late uncle, purchased the business from Tom Hatcher, Jr., and it became Parker School and Office Supply. The larger-than-life yellow pencil was there for a while, and that’s about all I know. My cousin, Julian Parker III, who lives in Charleston, South Carolina, knows the rest of the story about the missing pencil.
“I certainly do,” he said Monday. “When (my father) closed that location and moved to Winslow Street, he took the ‘pencil’ with him. The last time I remember seeing the pencil was in one of the storage areas in the office supply building” on Winslow Street. “When Karen (wife of J.E. Parker Jr.) died, a number of items disappeared, the pencil among them.”
Perhaps you may know what became of the gigantic pencil at the building that once towered over the business now adjacent to Antonella’s Italian Ristorante. And if you do know, Ann Hatcher Snuggs surely would like to hear from you, and me, too.
Bill Kirby Jr. can be reached at billkirby49@gmail.com or 910-624-1961
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