Voit Gilmore’s Death Leaves Us All Poorer

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with kings — nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;

If all men count with you, but none too much,

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And — which is more — you’ll be a Man, my son!

— Rudyard Kipling

Who ever lived up to those words better than Voit Gilmore? His death represents the loss of a treasured, irreplaceable asset — not just to his beloved Sandhills but also to the global community at large.

The areas in which Gilmore distinguished himself over the course of a long and unusually fulfilling life are too many and varied to detail — or even to summarize adequately — in this space. Successful businessman, world traveler, scholar, military aviator, statesman, mayor, environmentalist, skilled writer and journalist, land developer, promoter of peaceful racial integration, devoted family man — the list goes on and on.

But all those are just hollow descriptives that fail to capture the splendid man that so many thousands of Moore Countians have known and respected over several generations. Whether it was as friend or father or honest politician or consensus-builder for countless social causes, Voit always personified the ideal of the considerate Southern Gentleman.

Voit was always a special friend to us here at The Pilot. His Travel Talk column was a popular feature for a quarter-century, right up until last January.

He seemed to know everybody in town and could be minutely attentive to the most routine of local concerns. But he was also truly a citizen of the world whose boundless curiosity and sense of adventure led him to the farthest corners of all seven continents — including Antarctica — and gave him a perspective and wisdom that are all too rare today.