Happy Monday. Somebody switched on the heat this week. So long springtime.
In (relatively) tiny Thomasville, population 27,399, Warren King was a constant.
At high-school football games, the Tom A. Finch YMCA, baseball games featuring the Hi-Toms — the local semi-pro nine, the name a mash-up of High Point and Thomasville - Warren was there.
More often than not, Warren was smiling as if he was having the time of his life. Even in the midst of doing the most mundane of things.
Warren had some sort of cognitive impairment; the medical details don’t matter. But if he ever felt slighted, left out or different than, he never let on.
At least some of that had to do with the way the people of Thomasville embraced Warren. Everybody seemed to know him, and if you’d been there for more than a minute and a half, odds were good he knew you, too.
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Warren King, it’s safe to say, was Thomasville’s biggest booster. And the opposite was certainly true, too.
“Warren was Mr. Thomasville,” wrote Curtis Ingram, a native son.
Warren King died Wednesday. He was 82.
His obituary tells us that he passed peacefully surrounded by his family. His sisters, their husbands, nieces, a nephew and more friends than he even knew he had are left to celebrate his memory.
Cliche though it may be — cliches begin with obvious truth — Warren never met a stranger.
And as regular folk enveloped him, its leaders took pains to officially recognize his contributions to town. Over the years, Warren received such awards as the Spirit of the YMCA (2014), the Davidson County Hall of Fame Unsung Hero Award (2015), the Goodwill Ambassador of the Thomasville Chamber of Commerce (2015) and the Thomasville Senior High School Hall of Fame earlier this year.
Ingram, who shared word of Warren’s passing on Facebook, once told a co-worker the way Thomasville had embraced him. Impressed, the co-worker noted that some in his hometown probably would have made fun of someone like Warren King.
Ingram shared that his sister Sarah Sue Ingram, a trail-blazing journalist, longtime editor of The Thomasville Times and my boss in the early ‘90s, once told him that the maddest she ever saw their dad was when some high-school kids put Warren on a skateboard and that led to him breaking an arm.
Anyone who harbored malice or ill will toward Warren would surely face the wrath of more than 27,000 souls had it become apparent.
A celebration of life is scheduled for this afternoon.
“It made me proud that the people cared about Warren and he cared so much about this town,” Ingram wrote. “Rest in peace my friend.”
Search for missing man
Surry County rescue workers continued searching this morning for a 44-year-old man reported missing in the Yadkin River.
Authorities were summoned to a spot along Siloam Road in Yadkin County near where the Yadkin and the Ararat rivers meet just before 1 p.m. Sunday.
Relatives reported that the man had gone into the water to help family members who appeared to be in distress and disappeared under the water.
About a dozen agencies including the Surry County sheriff’s office, area fire departments, emergency services workers and water rescue teams worked Sunday to find the man.
“This event is tragic for all involved, especially the family,” Major Scott Hudson of the Surry County Sheriff’s office told reporters.