HIGH POINT, NC—The call came in shortly after 8 p.m.
Fifteen-year-old Terri Gay, the daughter of a High Point firefighter, heard a brief news flash on WMFR — an anomaly, considering her family rarely listened to the radio in the evenings — but she didn't give the report a second thought. Her daddy — Capt. Roy Gay of the High Point Fire Department — had been to countless fires, and he had always returned home. Always.
Terri's mother, Betty Gay, normally didn't worry when her husband went to fire calls, either. She understood the dangers of his job, of course, but she knew he was smart and experienced. Brave, but not recklessly so. Roy's father, Elliott Gay, had been a High Point fireman, too, so Roy had the calling in his blood.
This night, though, was different for Betty. The Country Furniture Store on Idol Drive was going up in flames — it was a three-alarm fire, according to the radio — and Betty had a knot in her stomach.
"Something's really wrong," she told Terri.
"What are you talking about?" Terri replied.
"The fire — something's really wrong."
"Mom, don't worry about it," Terri said. "He's fine."
Within an hour, though, a car pulled into the family's driveway on Pine Valley Drive. A moment later, the doorbell rang.
Betty knew.
"Terri," she said, "your daddy's dead."
Terri pauses as she recalls her mother's words.
"She said that before they had even told her," Terri says.
Several decades later, it's Terri who gets a knot in her stomach, every time the calendar turns to November.
"I tried remembering Daddy's birthday rather than the day of his death," she says softly, "but that day is just burned into my soul."
That day was Nov. 1, 1970.
Capt. Roy Gay joined a remarkably small, undesirable fraternity that night, becoming only the third High Point firefighter to die in the line of duty.
"That was a sad, sad night for the High Point Fire Department," recalls retired firefighter Jackie Baker, 82, who was at the Country Furniture Store fire that night. "He was the first fatality we'd had in years and years and years."
Thirty-four years, to be exact. In 1936, veteran fireman Oscar M. "Oss" Hayworth had died when he was trying to repair a fire alarm and accidentally touched a high-voltage wire that caused him to fall 30 feet from a ladder to his death.
It had been even longer since a High Point fireman had died actually fighting a fire. In 1925, Capt. T.W. Stoner had died of severe burns suffered while battling a blaze at the Pickett Cotton Mill.
Even during High Point's infamous "million-dollar fire" of July 1954 — which burned out three of the city's industrial areas and caused approximately $1 million in damage — 16 city firefighters were injured, but none died.
That's why Gay's death in 1970 stunned the department so dramatically. High Point firefighters weren't supposed to die, and especially steely veterans like the 40-year-old Gay, a former Marine and a well-respected fire captain. Amazingly, 50 years after Gay's death, he's still the last High Point firefighter to have died in the line of duty.
The irony, though, is that the department very nearly lost two firefighters that night.
Country Furniture was closed that evening, a Sunday, but the store's owner — Coolidge Murrow, a state senator from High Point who was seeking to win another term in the following Tuesday's election — was at the store working on a campaign speech.
According to newspaper accounts, Murrow said he heard a car drive up in front of the building around 7:45, then drive away a few minutes later. Cars often did this, he said, so he thought nothing of it.
About 15 or 20 minutes later, though, Murrow heard "a loud whoosh, like an explosion," and he hurried toward the front of the store to investigate, he told The High Point Enterprise.
"The entire front of the building was blazing," he said. "Smoke was billowing back through the door. I rushed back into the office, grabbed my coat, and got out of the building."
Murrow escaped through a side door and ran to the front of the building, which he found engulfed in flames.
Firefighters began arriving shortly thereafter — a neighbor apparently had called in the alarm — and the unit made quick work of the blaze out front. Inside the 25,000-square-foot structure, however, they would have a ferocious fight on their hands.
"It was a terrible fire," Baker remembers. "The whole room was consumed in fire. It took the whole night to fully extinguish it."
Almost from the beginning, investigators believed the fire had been deliberately set — and rumors of a suspect ran rampant throughout the city — but no arrest would ever be made.
"Arson is one of the hardest crimes to try to convict somebody on," Baker explains. "You've about got to see the guy strike the match, or it's very hard to prove it."
And on this particular night, short of Murrow saying he'd heard a car out front, no witnesses ever came forward.
As the crews battled the blaze inside the showroom, Gay and another firefighter — Lt. Arthur Davidson — relieved two firemen who'd been operating a hose in the intense heat. Gay's station, No. 3, had been one of the later units to arrive at the fire, and he was eager to do his part.
"Even though he was a captain, Daddy was the sort of guy that was gonna get in there," Terri says. "They needed someone to go in and relieve the others, and he volunteered."
According to The Enterprise's account of the fire, a sudden backdraft triggered an explosion — so violent it jarred Gay's helmet from his head — and a scorching wall of flames trapped the two firemen. Davidson escaped by crawling through the inferno until he collapsed near an outside door. When firefighters dragged him out, he was more dead than alive, with permanently disfigured hands and severe burns that covered nearly half his body.
"I felt heat building up," Davidson would later tell Fire Chief H.L. Thompson from his hospital bed, where he lay in critical condition. "All of a sudden, flames were all around me. I remember being dragged by firemen. I don't know how I got out of there."
Years later, Davidson would tell an Enterprise reporter the fire was what he imagined hell was like.
After Davidson's rescue, another 20 minutes passed before firefighters could get that area of the building cool enough to enter and look for Gay. They found him sprawled on the floor about 15 feet inside the door, long since dead.
"That was a terrible, terrible night for the High Point Fire Department," Baker says. "A terrible night."
That was also a terrible, terrible night for Terri Gay, the fireman's teenage daughter and only child.
Fifty years later, she still gets that same knot in her stomach as Nov. 1 approaches, a reminder of the scars she still bears from that fateful night so long ago.
"To this day, I don't talk about Daddy a lot, and I think it's because that pain is still just awful if I go back to it," she says. "My world just fell apart, because I really was a Daddy's girl."
Sixty-five and living in Virginia Beach, Virginia, she's Terri Hutchinson now — a widow, mother and grandmother.
But she's also still a daughter — a grieving daughter who will always look up to the father she lost, the man who took her fishing, took her to doctor appointments, and even let her tag along when he went to make estimates on house-painting jobs, his side career.
"To this day, I just miss him so much," Terri says, "and I always think about how my life would've been different if he hadn't died."
When she thinks back to 1970, Terri remembers the day her father was laid to rest at Floral Garden Park Cemetery. Flags flew at half-staff across the city, and The Enterprise eulogized Capt. Roy Gay as a fallen hero.
"He exemplified the best in a firefighter," The Enterprise wrote, "and he was engaged in the performance of his duty, directing his men in the fight against the fire, even going before them into the danger, when he lost his life."
As the somber funeral procession passed Station No. 3 on Rotary Drive — her father's station — Terri remembers noticing a firetruck had been pulled out into the driveway, a white wreath adorning its grill. A row of firemen stood by the truck, sharply attired in their blue dress uniforms and white gloves, solemnly saluting their captain.
"That just hit me really hard," she says softly. "I remember thinking, oh my god, it's not just my dad that we lost — the fire department has lost somebody. The whole city has lost somebody."
And 50 years later, the memories — and the scars — remain.
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