Bobby Carlton:

Nothing destroys like fire.

When it rips through your life it turns everything you own into ashes. It is relentless and merciless and doesn't care who you are or what you have done.

Clothes, furniture, photos, memories. It takes it all and leaves you with nothing. Nothing but the clothes on your back and a pain in your heart that never really goes away.

If you're lucky, you get out with your life.

That's the way Bobby Carlton feels after an early morning blaze swept away his dream house on the Isle of Palms a few weeks ago.

Carlton and his wife, Laura, escaped with minor injuries and major heartaches as they watched it all go up in flames. All the things that make up a career and a marriage and a life together, gone.

For Carlton, who coached football for 30 years, the room he had decorated with memorabilia was a total loss.

As he walked through the room that once held trophies and plaques and pictures of seasons and games gone by, there was nothing left to save.

Pure malice

Like a true coach, Carlton's philosophy is to do what he's told kids to do all these years. When life knocks you down, you just get back up and keep going.

That's what he plans to do. He will survive. He's insured. He's not destitute.

But memories fade without tangible evidence that you did what you did. And Carlton's life, like yours and mine, is a trail of tears and cheers that cannot be explained by words alone.

For Carlton, now 62, it all began after playing football at Newberry College. From there he coached all over the Palmetto State.

There was that first coaching job in Chester, another at Eau Claire High School in Columbia, the opportunity to coach college ball at Clemson with Red Parker, all those years in Gaffney and finally as the coach and athletic director at Goose Creek High School.

Through it all, there were team photos and trophies and plaques and pictures with friends and game balls and a hundred other trinkets and doodads that mean nothing to anybody else and everything to you.

But fire is thorough. It doesn't care. It doesn't spare feelings. It doesn't look back. It comes and goes with malice so pure it makes you respect and fear it forever.

Special things

"You will always have the memories," Carlton said this week as he stood in front of the charred remains of his home. "Sure, I would love to have those things. We had them all set up in a beautiful room with all the things you have done over thirty years of playing and coaching football.

"But you will always have the memories and they can't take the memories away from you."

Carlton said that if he could have saved one thing from his coaching career it would have been a big plaque he got for coaching in the Shrine Bowl in 1992. It was special to him because his oldest sister had been treated for polio at the Shrine Hospital in Greenville when he was a young boy.

Those are the things not easily replaced.

Fire survivors know all about those things. But they also know how disaster has a way of bringing out the best in people.

They all have stories of kindness. Strangers who came forward with photos you never knew about, big things you thought were lost and little things that remind you of what went up in smoke.

And the lesson learned is universal.

Fire can erase things you can't replace, but in its wake come friendships you never knew you had.

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Anyone who has memorabilia or pictures of Carlton's tenure here in Gaffney may call Cody Sossamon at 489-1131.)