By CHUCK OFFENBURGER

CENTERVILLE, Tenn., May 11, 2025 – When you get to be my age, which is 77, you know there won’t be a lot more visits with old friends who live far away.

That’s what made a trip last week to this west central Tennessee town of 3,567 such a precious one for us RicheBurgers. (That’s my wife Mary Riche and me.)

We came to visit Douglas T. Bates III, my best friend since we were freshmen at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and his wife of 50 years Molly Bates. The Bateses have had a number of health challenges in recent years. We were especially concerned about them through this last winter, and thus we asked if we could come spend three days with them.

And what a blessing! Both Bateses were in fine form. In fact, they arranged visits for all four of us with so many other great friends that Mary and I were pretty well exhausted when we started our two-day trip home on Friday.

Molly and Doug Bates III. (Photo by Mary Riche)

Doug was born and reared in Centerville. He was gone for college, combat in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, and then law school. When he got his law degree, he came back to Centerville for his career, as the sixth of seven Bates lawyers spread over five generations that have served the people of this area since 1871.

Molly McWilliams is a native of Niagara Falls, New York, but whose family was rooted here in Hickman County. She met Doug Bates when she was on a visit here after college. They fell in love and married. She has been an exceptional wife, mother of their two grown children, and now grandmother of four granddaughters. All three families live within about three blocks of each other. Molly has also served as a town council member and community volunteer.

Over the 60 years of friendship that Doug and I have treasured, I figure I’ve made about 30 trips to Centerville. He’s probably made about the same number to the places I’ve lived in Iowa.

We bicycled together on a half-dozen or more RAGBRAIs. I led 308 bicyclists on the “Iowa 150 Bike Ride: A Sesquicentennial Expedition” across America in 1995, promoting the celebration of Iowa’s 150 years of statehood which was being celebrated the following year. We made a two-day stop in Centerville on our 5,048-mile route.

We’ve shared football, basketball and experiences all over America.

Doug has written dozens of guest columns for our internet site www.Offenburger.com.

We’ve both spoken at public events where one or the other of us was being recognized for some adventure or project we’ve led.

Vanderbilt Commodores, together at the famous Beacon Light Tea Room outside Lyles TN for the restaurant’s even-more-famous country ham, biscuits, homemade jam, sweet tea, and coconut ice box pie. Front. left to right Phyllis & Rod Williamson, Chuck Offenburger, Margot Fosnes, Molly & Doug Bates; back, left to right. Steve Caldwell, Berry Brooks. Jeff Fosnes, Mary Riche, Connie Brooks, and Steve Smartt. (Photo by our Beacon Light Tea Room waitress)

So, when we were sitting around the breakfast table last Wednesday morning at the Bates home, I brought up the question that my wife Mary had asked me, as we were planning this latest trip to Tennessee: “What is the bond that started the friendship between you and Doug Bates back when you were freshmen at Vanderbilt?”

Good question! But it wasn’t a hard one for Bates.

“I came from a very middle-class family in a small town in Tennessee, and at Vanderbilt I suddenly found myself going to school and trying to compete with students from wealthy families all over the country, many of whom had excellent high school educations in private prep schools,” he said. “I was like a lost ball in the tall weeds of Vanderbilt.”

It was an answer similar to what I’d given Mary earlier, although I didn’t even come close to the brilliant simile Bates created.

He went on, saying that I showed him a few tools to use in dealing with new friends who were wealthier, more experienced and maybe smarter than we were. Because of the 4-plus years I’d already had of reporting both sports and news for the small daily newspaper in my Iowa hometown of Shenandoah, I knew how to walk up to people, introduce myself and start asking questions to learn just what their stories were and what we might have in common.

“Chuck was not afraid to do that, and he showed me how to do that with people,” Bates said. “He helped make me feel at home.”

We RicheBurgers, with Doug Bates behind us, at a visit over lunch at the very rural home of great Bates’ friends Allston Vander Horst (left) and Dana Dye (right), retired attorneys in Centerville. (Photo by Molly Bates.) We had a dinner with another couple who are also longtime Bates’ in Centerville, Steve and Wanda Turner. Steve operated the Centerville radio station for 40 years and Wanda taught school. We should have had a photo of us at that meal, but we were talking so much we forgot the snapshots!

And then the “mischief” started.

That’s what Doug’s father, Douglas T. Bates II, predicted after watching the two of us get involved together for several projects and stunts. We did that with the student newspaper, “The Vanderbilt Hustler,” the Student Government Association, and even the previously woeful Vanderbilt Commodores baseball team. Our ball team indeed started winning when Bates and I wrote stories in the Hustler promoting just how fun it was to attend college baseball games on campus, particularly if you brought a little beer with you (even if that was against campus rules)!

When “Big Doug,” as many called his dad, saw all that, he finally said in his deep, rumbling drawl: “I fear this friendship will bring much mischief.”

A few years later, as Doug’s mother Kitty Bates watched us involve our growing young families with each other, she figured out that we were essentially harmless. “You two are the most sentimental old slobs I’ve ever known!” she said of us.

Through all that life has brought our way, the bond between Doug Bates and me has stuck. And it seems to work with others we’ve brought into our families, too.

It’s proved stronger than alcoholism, cancer, hip replacements, a knee replacement, Parkinson’s disease, depression, even deaths in our families.

We RicheBurgers on the Public Square in Centerville, the seat of Hickman County in west central Tennessee. We’re shown with the sculpture of the town’s & county’s most famous native, the country music legend “Minnie Pearl.”

Oh, we both know that something is going to come along and pick off one of us, then the other.

But I think both of us agree that getting to this point in our lives, with the friendship we have shared and enjoyed, is a high point of our lives.

Even if we blow smoke at each other occasionally.

“The most consistent thing about our great friendship over all these years,” Bates told me four years ago, “is that you continue to come up with new ways for me to make an ass of myself.”

Reminds me of the question my son Andrew Offenburger asked me 30 years ago, when late in his own freshman year of college, he didn’t feel like he had yet found a new best friend. “Dad,” Andrew asked me then, “when you met Bates at Vanderbilt, did you know right away that he’d be your best friend for the rest of your lives?”

“Hell no!” I answered. “I thought he was the biggest nerd I’d ever met. And I still do!”

But I do love the guy.

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You can comment on this column below or write the columnist directly by email at chuck@offenburger.com