By Miles Layton

BETHEL – After posting a photo of the sign at Bethel’s famous bend in the road, readers pointed me to Bill Simmons, the artist or sign painter known for his pithy political slogans. The interview did not disappoint – trigger warning to those folks who may have different opinions than Simmons, a salty sort who is unafraid to share his truths with the world in an effort to get people thinking. 

God loves everyone and each person has a story to tell.

Going in, I knew this probably wasn’t a story the mainstream media would cover because it runs counter to their preferred narrative — “nothing to see here…” — that distracts us from questioning authority. Simmons said today’s media produces nothing more than propaganda that’s similar to Nazi Germany.

As I greet Simmons, his Labrador, Otto, takes easy steps across the gravel at the bend in the road, before Simmons calls him off with the easy authority of a man who has been giving orders since he was 19 years old, on a Coast Guard cutter. 

“Arlo — Otto, go lay down. Now,” Simmons says, correcting himself, and the dog obeys. “He’s a big dog. He’s about half the size his daddy was.”

It is a quiet start to a conversation that, within a few sentences, turns to Covid vaccines, immigration, socialism and the death of a wife of 51 years — all subjects Simmons, 78, has weighed in on from a plywood sign nailed up outside the old gas station next to his home, at a sharp curve in the road in Bethel, in Perquimans County.

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For 23 years, Simmons has lived in the house next to the shuttered station, which closed in 1978 when its owner, Mr. Phillips, died. Simmons and his late wife, Laura, bought the property and turned the old store into a workshop, where he now spends his mornings restoring a wooden boat that sat in a barn down the road for three decades before he got his hands on it.

But it is the sign out front — repainted every seven to ten days, weather permitting — that has made Simmons a known figure to anyone who drives the route regularly.

“I’m gonna say it’s been a while. I’ve been here 23 years,” Simmons said. “And I’m probably gonna say 17 or 18 of them” have carried a sign.

The first one went up after a conversation at a local hardware store, where a customer newly arrived from New York told him the area needed to change to be more like where she came from.

“She says, ‘We need to change everything.’ This is nothing like the way New York is,” Simmons recalled. “And the first sign I put up, I said, ‘Want change? Take US 17 North.’ And after that I just went on a roll with signs.”

What began as a retort has become something closer to a mission. Simmons said he is not interested in telling people what to believe so much as making them stop and question what they already do.

“Now it’s more of a — get people to think,” he said. “It’s amazing how the people just take, okay, that’s it, whatever. There’s no thought process in a lot of these people. And they believe whatever they hear. They don’t investigate anymore.”

He measures the present against a childhood spent in front of the evening news on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where his father worked as a terminal agent for a steamboat company running between the mainland and the islands.

“The news isn’t like it was when I was a kid — Walter Cronkite, Huntley-Brinkley — where they just gave the facts and you sat in front of the TV, and you made your own mind up,” Simmons said.

His sign topics draw on what he reads online, he said, sifted for what he considers verifiable. “Mostly I try to get the people that on the internet, they just state the facts, and I make my own opinion off of that.”

That process has led him to some sharply held, and sharply contested, positions. Simmons said he never took a COVID-19 vaccine, even as his wife — undergoing chemotherapy and radiation at the time — was told she needed to. Laura Simmons died a little over four years ago, after a long illness that included cancer, heart attacks and diabetes, following 51 years of marriage.

During the pandemic, as his wife’s health was failing, doctors told him to take the COVID shot, Simmons said, “I don’t have to have anything. I’m not taking the shot. I says, ‘you’ll find out that this shot is a backfire.’ Well, well, well — guess I was right.”

Anthony Fauci being in the news, we talked about COVID’s impact on our country.

As we talked, Simmons said his skepticism was aimed less at elected officials than at federal health agencies, and he has connected that distrust to broader doubts about how the pandemic’s origins were explained to the public.

Those views, echoed by a portion of the public, remain disputed by public health officials such as Fauci – I plead the Fifth – and researchers, who point to internationally reviewed evidence about vaccine safety and the outbreak’s origins – of course, they are the same folks who lied to us about the virus’ origins from a bat at a wet market in China rather than a lab in Wuhan that our own government funded because of the need to offshore gain-of-function research to produce more lethal viruses that could wipe out humanity. 

Moving onto other topics — Simmons has also used his sign to weigh in on immigration, arguing that people who fit into a community should be welcomed and those who arrive illegally should not be accommodated.

“Illegal is illegal,” he said. “You come in this country, assimilate to what this country is. Don’t bring your — you have radical beliefs here and expect the whole United States to change to you.”

Asked directly whether he worries his messages might upset people — he has fielded complaints, including about a sign referencing Muslims — Simmons didn’t hesitate.

“I personally don’t care if I offend anybody. I really don’t,” he said. “It’s a fact — I’ve been offending people my whole life. But people need to understand what’s going on in the world more so than what’s going on around” the neighborhood.

The reaction, in his telling, runs mostly one way. “It’s probably 95% positive as per the 5% that disagree,” Simmons said. “I’ve had people stop and offer to buy paint and everything else.” The other five percent, he said, generally isn’t interested in talking. “They’d rather drive by, blow the horn, give me the finger and roll on… I just wave at them and say, ‘Hey, have a good day.’ It don’t bother me.” He said the sign has drawn vandalism on occasion but that it “don’t faze me.”

After the Coast Guard, Simmons married, worked in a boatyard, then took a job with a diesel engine company before buying his own truck and driving it for twelve or fourteen years. A move to Florida followed, where he worked on boats and taught truck driving at a trade school, before he and Laura relocated to Bethel in 2003 — just after Hurricane Isabel — so she could be closer to a milder climate during her illness.

“Up here, I just tinkered here, tinkered there,” Simmons said of settling into the old gas station property. He worked cleanup for a local contractor before picking up more of the trade himself. These days, he still helps a neighboring farmer during harvest season, driving a truck during corn, wheat and soybean season. “I do a little extra, you know. And they stop, I stop. We get together, go to the church.”

Since Northeast NC is seeing enormous growth — housing developments are taking over cropland — Simmons weighed in on the people migrating more and more to our neck of the woods.

Having lived in five different states before settling in Perquimans County, Simmons said newcomers do themselves a favor by adapting to where they’ve landed rather than trying to remake it.

“What people need to realize when they move to a new area — and I learned it from other places that I’ve lived — is that you fit in,” Simmons said. “You don’t come here and say, well, we did it up north, or we did it down in Florida. Who cares what you did there? Fit in and you’ll get along just fine.” He said that approach has earned him friendships up and down the road he lives on.

Growth is reaching Bethel, too, Simmons said, as retirees sell homes up North for hundreds of thousands of dollars and relocate to Perquimans County with money to spare, driving up costs for longtime residents. “It just raises the level of everything around here, where the average guy is sort of stuck,” he said.

Still, Simmons said he has noticed one thing many local landowning families do to counter it: parceling off land to their own children so they can afford to stay in the county.

“They do parcel up the land to the kids, so the kids can stay in the county so that the kids aren’t priced out,” Simmons said. “They give them a couple acres they can build their house. And the kids can stay and work in the county.”

For all the friction his sign has stirred, Simmons said his goal has never changed since that first plywood board went up outside the old gas station.

“I’m just scared that we’re going to lose the country with these young kids… this democratic socialist party that they popped up with, which is nothing but communism or socialism, whichever way you want to put it. Every country that has tried socialism has failed.”

Simmons continued, “A lot of what I paint on the signs is my views. I won’t deny that,” he said. “But I feel very strong for this country. In fact, I love this country very much.”