Taking the Lead – Bill & Debbie Hawkins Organizers of the North Carolina MG Car Club’s Coastal Tour

by Paul Austin

I have always enjoyed the Coastal Tour, Mountain Tour, and the Vineyard Tour. What could be better than motoring along a two-lane road, top down, the sky so blue above the rolling, lush farmland, the snatches of birdsong we hear as we drive past, folks in their front yards, waving to our impromptu parade of Little British Cars?

I typically try to get near the front, because I’m chronically afraid of getting left behind, or even worse, miss a turn and lead a string of other folks off in the wrong direction. See, I have zero sense of direction, and on the tours, I never have a navigator—it’s a long story involving 40 years of blissful marriage to a curly-headed woman named Sally, who doesn’t like driving at speed with the top down, and I don’t like driving with the top up.

One summer, when I was about seven years old, our family visited our aunts and uncles in Oklahoma. One of the aunts took us to a neighborhood swimming pool—they weren’t members so we couldn’t go swimming—but she thought my brother and I would like to watch the other kids swim. True story: my aunt thought it would be fun for my brother and me to press our faces against a chain link fence, and stare at other kids splashing, laughing, doing cannonballs off the diving board. To me, that’s what driving with the top up feels like: watching someone else have fun.

But to Sally, driving with the top down, with the wind and the road-noise, feels like undeserved punishment. She’ll endure it, but not for long. Our solution? She sends me off on the NCMGCC tours alone. Truth is, she’s grateful for the peace and quiet. So, riding alone, and stubbornly enjoying the top being down, I try, as unobtrusive as possible, to get near the front so I don’t get lost. And it is such a delight once we get started, driving along, daydreaming, without a care in the world.

On the last Coastal Tour my MGB was in the shop, so I took my 1989 Dodge Dakota pickup truck. I asked Bill Hawkins if I could drive behind the sweep. My truck is not an eyesore, exactly, but I didn’t want to mar the beauty of our procession, with my old blue truck. Plus, if I got lost, I had the GPS of our final destination and could catch up later without anyone finding out what a moron I am when it comes to directions.

On the second day of the tour, Bill handed me a walkie-talkie, a responsibility I had adroitly avoided up to that point. I had thought that there would be a lot of radio traffic on the walkie-talkie, but it was mostly Bill in his calm, polite voice, asking the sweep to let him know when everyone had made it through the intersection. It felt good, knowing that someone was paying attention, and making sure we all got to where we were going. I’d expected the radio to be distracting, but the pleasant back-n-forth between Bill and the sweep was actually reassuring. I felt like a little kid, in the back seat of Mom’s 1962 Pontiac Star Chief, overhearing the grownups talking. It was then that it hit me how much this club depends on the people who are doing all the work, making all the plans so the rest of us can take the top down and cruise along without worrying about anything.

I asked Bill and Debbie if I could meet with them, to find out a little more about the Coastal Tour. Of course, since I’d been on the tour before, I already had my little yellow duck. When I brought it up, Bill and Debbie said they had all kinds of duck memorabilia that had been given to them over the years. Even have a duck in the hot tub.

But before we discussed the arcane history of ducks and the NCMGCC Coastal Tour, I wanted to get to know them a little better. Married for 52 years, their 1977 MGB was the first car they bought as a couple. The dealer in Raleigh wouldn’t budge from the asking price, so they went to Wilson, North Carolina, where a Cadillac dealership sold MGs on the side. They made a deal, bought the car, and drove it off the lot. About a mile down the road, the car stopped. Turn the key: nothing. Bill called the dealer, and explained the that he’d just bought a brand-new car there, and it had stopped, dead. “Cadillacs don’t stop,” is what the guy on the phone told him.

“It’s an MG.”

They sent a tow-truck.
At the dealership, they wiggled some wires, got it started, and he drove it home.

“Out of necessity, I learned to work on it,” Bill told me. Prior to that, he hadn’t even changed the oil in a car. Although that car is no longer their daily driver, it now has 285,000 miles on it. Original owners, they still have the dealer’s invoice.

Bill and Debbie met in school. He was learning photography, and she was studying interior design. He went on to a career in aerial photography and ended up working for the DOT making high-resolution photographs of railroad crossings, bridge replacements, shoreline erosion. Along the way, he got his pilot’s license and instrument rating. He moved on from taking pictures to piloting the plane. Debbie became the procurement officer for Southeastern Electronics, dealing with the global supply chain. After that, she became a civilian employee of the National Guard, in charge of procuring everything from toilet paper to tanks.

I asked them to tell me about the first time they went on the Coastal Tour.
It was in 1993. The day before the tour, Bill was up in the sky as the navigator. It was a twin-engine plane, 520 HP each, and the left engine started vibrating, then quit. The pilot couldn’t control pitch or power, so they turned off the second engine, and started their glide-path down. They slipped under some powerlines, buzzed across a road, clipped a road-sign, trimmed the bushes, and finally stopped—right-side-up—on the soft sand of a cold, damp field.

“Were you screaming, or praying?”

“Praying.”

“Were you mad at him, for almost killing himself?” I asked Debbie.

She leaned back and shook her head, surprised by the question: of course not.

“So, what caused the engine failure?”

“It was a confiscated drug-running plane,” Bill said. “Who knows the engine’s history?”

We were sitting in a Starbucks in Raleigh, young people working behind the counter, the hiss of steamed milk, the smell of roasted coffee. It was hard for me to imagine, one day being strapped in a plane with a dead engine, hurtling down toward the dirt of North Carolina, and then next day, buckling in to join a string of little British cars to the sand and surf of the coast. The next year, 1994, Bill and Debbie were leading the Coastal Tour, and they’ve been leading it ever since.

I thought back to the walkie-talkie on the seat beside me in my truck when I was following along behind, and how remarkably calm and pleasant Bill’s voice had been. I guess that after you’ve ditched a plane and walked away from it, leading a squadron of Little British Cars, isn’t all that scary. But I’ll tell you something: I’m grateful for all the years that Bill and Debbie have led the way, sunshine or rain, so the rest of us could relax, enjoy our cars, and enjoy each other’s company.