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When the rotor on the light-up Santa Claus helicopter stopped turning a few years back over  Holland Electric Co.,  drivers on U.S. 29 took it as a sign from above — or, from below, a half-staff salute to  Bill Holland.

It was, in fact, a coincidence.

Holland, the late, legendary lineman whose crew used to hang the downtown Christmas decorations, acquired the copter in one of his rambling RV adventures. He loved it so much that he left it up all year, along with light-up tin soldiers, a nativity, a doctor’s buggy, reindeer and a menagerie that outshone Noah’s Ark in variety, not to mention kilowatt usage.

But wind and water took their toll, and everyone knows, if one light stops blinking, it breaks the whole circuit.

As Bill’s son explained to the umpteenth  Green’s Supper Club regular calling to inquire about what was ailing the airborne landmark:

“It just quit working.”

Not so for the Hollands, a three-generation clan of master electricians who could once drive up and down the back roads of Guilford County and point out which house, in which year, went from kerosene lanterns to pull cords and outlets under rural electrification in the ’40s and ’50s.

It’s a dying breed: not the people, but the work. They wired this town, lit the ball fields from Revolution on, some two and three times, hung the stoplights, built the circuits and flipped on the pumps at  Lake Townsend, as the trout tried to wriggle free.

Above all, they built substations. That’s where a Duke Power stops and a Cone Mills or a Burlington Industries starts — dangerous, high-voltage work at the transformers, pulling wire as big around as your arm.

Bill and his wife, Dot, like both their fathers before them, were electricians, as were their brothers, their children, and in a few cases, their children’s children. No job too big.

And no job, evidently, too small. If only Dot Holland could find out which one of these lights is malfunctioning on the Santa helicopter, brought back here years ago from a camping trip in  Pigeon Forge, Tenn.

It began with the kind of phone call that made Holland’s son, Billy, shudder, more than any ice storm outage or hurricane. It was Bill Holland on vacation. Bill at the auction, Bill at the flea market. There was no telling.

For example, “Get up here to Asheville and bring all the trucks,” one such dispatch from Bill had begun. Bill had found the deal of a lifetime: a surplus of Winnebago-size seat belts, 34,000 of them, priced to sell at 111/2 cents apiece.

“I’ve never been so mad at my father in my life. We really went at it that time,” his son recalls. “Where’s the PROFIT margin in that?”

So maybe after 34,000 Winnebago seat belts, one more phone call from the Smokies over Labor Day weekend from some potpourri-smelling year-round Christmas shop would be, in comparison, a cake-walk.

Holland had made a rare find — for all he knew, one of a kind.

“Drive on up to Pigeon Forge, and bring the trailer,” Bill said. “I found a Santa Claus helicopter, and it won’t fit in the RV.”

* * *

In the fluorescent-lit back room of Holland Electric Co., the stories fly from one creaky swivel chair to the next on a dreary winter’s eve.

Yet by some sleight of hand, work and play have swapped places, like two schoolboys trading seats when the teacher has her back turned.

The Hollands keep scrapbooks and photo albums of jobs that were showcases — McMichael High School in Stone-
ville — or jobs like Hurricane Camille that linger in dreams, and not with visions of sugar plums. They take them out and pore over them, the way the next family might pass around snapshots of a trip to Disney.

Vacations, on the other hand, are mostly filed by mishap.

“Tell about the time in Daytona when Ann held the flashlight and fell in the ditch,” Dot instructs Billy, then gives a sideways wink. “It’s OK to put that in. She lives in Kernersville and doesn’t take the paper. She’ll never know the difference.”

Likewise, in the front shop of Holland Electric, work and play trade places, but in the opposite way.

The walls are covered with license plates of states the family visited, with banners from every state fair Dot and Bill ever attended back to 1950 and kitschy attractions — Frontier Days, Buffalo Bill’s Museum,  Land of Oz Beech Mountain, Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

But for Billy’s money, you could keep your tacky Wild West shows, you could believe it or not.

That’s because the week of Aug. 19, 1969, he saw the whole thing from his father’s bucket truck in  Nelson County, Va. — an event the National Weather Service wildly underestimated as a “residual storm” of a Category 5 cyclone named  Camille out of the Gulf — bringing an 8-foot crest of water, enough to knock out every bridge, kill 259 people and drown the birds in the trees.

Billy, 13, would be home in time for the first day of school. But in Holland fashion, he would work the bucket truck during the worst flash flood in Appalachian history.

* * *

The Holiday Inn was the only place in the whole valley that was serving food, and by this time they were starving.

As they waited for breakfast, they went ahead and ordered lunch to go. An exhausted Bill Holland watched his 13-year-old son like a hawk from across the linen and silverware, willing him to mind his manners in front of the big-shot joining the linemen at the table, the head of Southern Railway.

There had been only one road into Virginia — U.S. 29 — and only one lane that wasn’t washed out. A state trooper walked in front of the Hollands’ lead truck, inch by inch, to make sure the wheel didn’t go off the pavement and into the rushing, muddy river.

The trooper would put his boot down and nod back at the driver, Billy’s uncle,  Tommy Rumley. The first thing they noticed was a two-story farmhouse that had washed down the mountainside, sitting in the road. The second thing, cows, 30 or 40 feet up in the trees.

The Hollands’ job was to light the river, so that Southern Railway could rebuild, and the work could go on 24 hours. Billy’s job? To go up and down a slope on a pulley and a rope. He kept stepping on a car roof buried in mud. Finally, a rescuer realized that inside the car was a girl and her mother, three days dead, the woman’s hands still clutching the steering wheel.

The rescuer had a heart attack and died. Billy kept working, a whole week, until it was time to go home for school. Or maybe his father and his uncles had just had enough of cows in trees, and bodies being helicoptered in to a morgue the Amish set up on a main road.

The Hollands were told to drive to  Lovingston. There, like depleted troops giving their ammo to incoming replacements, they were to give all their tools and poles to the crews coming in, and send the railway a bill. Which leads us back to the linen table at the Holiday Inn, where the president of Southern Railway was picking up the tab.

Billy, unable to wait another moment for something to eat, plucked a pack of Saltines and a pat of butter from the middle of the table and made himself a sandwich, as Bill Holland watched, simmering with disapproval.

The next to reach for the butter and crackers was Uncle Tommy. And finally, Mr. Southern Railway Big Shot himself.

Billy smiled across the linen table at his stewing father. He had upended Bill Holland. This once.

* * *

 Eleven and a half cents apiece. “Where’s the profit margin in THAT?” Bill Holland would feed his words back to him. How. Many. Times.

Yes, 34,000 Winnebago seat belts turned out to be a gold mine. Every time Bill made a run west, he would take a box, and each belt fetched $5 or $6 apiece. That’s what? 21,000 percent profit? Times 34,000?

“What he did,” Billy says in defeat, “was rub my nose in it.”

One thing led to another. Bill walked into an RV manufacturing plant that was closing in the Midwest, was asked what he would pay for the contents, jotted a few numbers down, and the man laughed. Bill started to walk away.

“Whoa,” the owner protested. “We’re not done talking.”

Bill was in the RV business now, and did well, as usual, for years. Just had the knack. He didn’t live to see the rest of it go away — Cone, and then the Burlington Industries they helped build on Friendly to make room for something grand, or grander or grandest.

Who can keep track anymore?

But somewhere up the line, he gets the last laugh anyway. Dot, giving up on that Made-in-Taiwan helicopter, was on her way to Banner Elk the other week when something made her stop at a no-name roadside stand on 421. It turned out Bill’s Pigeon Forge find hadn’t been one-of-a-kind after all.

Last week, on a dreary winter’s day, passers-by on U.S. 29 beheld, for the first time in years, a fully functional Santa helicopter above Holland Electric Co.

It felt like Christmas morning, like finding 34,000 Winnebago seat belts for 11 and a half cents apiece.

It was the deal of a lifetime.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com