CityView Magazine

30 June 2023 City, Saint-Avold, France. "We decided to have a pig-picking," Parfitt says. "e French had no idea what a pig- picking was. ey thought we had to put on rubber boots and run around a bloody pig pen. "It was the best North Carolina barbecue I had ever had, cooked over an open pit by some private guys that did it on their own at 3 in the morning. e French were just overwhelmed." Even more so when Daws provided dessert. "He had a sense of humor. Toward the end of the night, Bruce broke out his own supply of moonshine," Parfitt says. "I don't know where he got it, but it had a real kick to it. It must have been 99% alcohol. "He got a real kick out of that, and so did the French. ey got a real taste of the South." Daws lobbied the North Carolina Historic Preservation Office to have Cross Creek Cemetery listed on the National Register of Historic Places. that were prominent in the community are buried in that cemetery." Not all work and no play "e man in the hat," as Bleazey calls Daws because he wears a hat almost every day, is not consumed with old buildings. He's no relic. "I trust Bruce Daws," says McMillan, his immediate supervisor when he worked for the city. "Bruce is an all-business/ no-nonsense type of operator but in the appropriate environment is a fun-loving, charismatic individual." Daws began a new journey in his life when he remarried; he and his wife, Gail, wed in 1998. And his sense of public service rubbed off on his son, Bruce Daws II, who works for the North Carolina Department of Transportation. Bleazey has seen Daws' fun side oen. "Bruce loved the adventure," she says. "One of the things that we would do when we were working on something on Mondays when we were closed was that kind of an adventure day. He would pop out of his office or pop up the stairs from having been somewhere, and he would say, 'Are you ready to ride?' and we would hop into that. "Whether I was in a skirt and little sandals or no matter what, he would take us to places and we'd tromp through the woods. Or we would go down to places I'd never been down before and, poof, there would be an historic story of a grave marker or something he would get to. I miss the opportunities to go on those little adventures." Hank Parfitt recalls that Daws helped plan a function for the Lafayette Society with representatives of Fayetteville's Sister

• Cover