LUMBERTON – Tre Pone was eager to bring laughter to Lumberton.

Instead, he cried.

Pone, a 2007 graduate of Lumberton High School and military veteran, was nine months into work on renovating a former television repair shop into a comedy club in the downtown district of the city.

The scheduled grand opening was 22 days away.

The vacant building, at 218 N. Chesnut St. and located across from the Dick Taylor Plaza, was being restored to house PeeWee’s Comedy Club – the moniker borrowed from Pone’s late father’s nickname.

Already, he had begun distributing fliers to the public on the upcoming grand opening in local barbershops, nail salons, beauty salons, service stations, the Pinecrest County Club and during Lumberton’s Alive After 5 concerts.

“The city has been through a lot,” Pone said. “Through the levee breaking in 2018. Hurricane Matthew came through and did major damage. People have to travel so far to Fayetteville or Raleigh or Charlotte to enjoy a good time. Time to just laugh. I don’t think we’ve ever had a comedy club here.”

But heartbreak – for this 33-year-old who has two daughters, Avani, 10, and Valon, 2 – was just around the corner.

In the early morning of June 15, Poe received a phone call from a neighboring salon business that informed him that smoke could be seen coming from the building where he had sweat and toiled on a personal endeavor.

His dream – PeeWee’s Comedy Club in his beloved hometown – was on fire.

He was feeling the burn of emotional pain.

“Nine months, I spent in that place. Almost like having a baby,” he said on Thursday, a week after the fire. “Inspection was next. That was literally next. It was finishing touches. A little paint here, a little paint there. I had already put up all the lights that I needed to put up. Just hanging up pictures of the comedians. My curtains.

“Yeah, it was finishing touches, man.”

Good grades

While busy with the renovation, Pone had thought of the work as a project for school.

“I mean, what kind of grade do I want to get on this project?” he said from the computer room of the Robeson County Public Library, where he agreed to sit for an interview.

“That kept me going,” he added of the school project thinking. “I want an ‘A’, so I do ‘A’ things.”

The Lumberton Fire Department has not commented on the structure fire since the N.C. Office of the State Fire Marshal was assisting the fire department and the Lumberton Police Department on the case.

“It does appear to be suspicious in nature,” Lumberton Attorney Holt Moore said a day after the building burned.

According to Moore, the damage to the building – which is owned by the Beasley family of Lumberton – was fairly substantial.

The building front has since been boarded up.

Citing the ongoing investigation, city officials have not talked about the fire in recent days. The Lumberton Fire Department did not reply to a phone message left Friday.

As for Pone, he said he didn’t do it.

The crime, he said, wasn’t on his hands.

“I have no quarrels with anybody. I’m not sleeping with anybody’s wife,” he joked. “I have no idea who did it.”

He said authorities have told him that someone had pried open the lock to the place.

“I cried twice over this building,” he said from the library, which stands close to what would have been his club. “When I was told I couldn’t do it and when the fire happened.”

Pone said when he first proposed his plans to the city, he was initially told a comedy club would not be allowed in the area because of zoning restrictions. But according to Pone, there was a mix-up that prompted that initial response.

The building lies in the retail district at 218 N. Chesnut St. But there also is a house located in a residential district at 218 S. Chesnut St.

That, he said, caused the confusion.

The project was back on course, and there was work to be done.

Funny bones

Poe said his mother has been a huge influence on his own comedy leanings.

When he talks about his mom, Carol Goodman, who works at the Southeastern Family Violence Center in Lumberton, he speaks of someone who thoroughly enjoys a good laugh.

His father, William Harris Pone, was not funny, he said sort of sheepishly.

“My mom – whatever she says or thinks is funny – she’s committing all the way to the funny,” he said with a burst of laughter. “Not funny to nobody, it just tickles her. She’s going to commit to her laughter. Everytime she laughs, she always laughs to the point where she cries because to her it be that funny..

“I know I got my funny from my Mom.”

Pone said he was always the class clown at Lumberton High School. But, he added, he was always smart, too.

He attended Virginia State University for a year before joining the military. He would spend four years active-duty in the Army and another four years in the Army National Guard.

He would later return to Lumberton to study at Robeson Community College.

To take care of his family, he held a number of technical support jobs and worked for various wireless phone companies. Among other jobs, he cleaned tiles for Sonic Drive-In.

Comedy was a favorite pastime, and he loved the humor of such comedians as Bernie Mac, Mike Epps, J. Anthony Brown and Jeff Dunham.

“I’ve always been funny,” said Pone. “When we moved from here to Virginia, I took humor with me. That’s how I made friends; that’s how I made connections. That’s how people looked to me to make the situation better: to have a good time.”

Rogh start

Pone recalled his first attempt at standup comedy.

It was a disaster, coming at the Jack Sprat Cafe on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill some 11 years ago. He was about 21, 22 at the time.

He signed up for the open-mic.

“I stole some jokes. Unfortunately, everybody knew the jokes,” he said with a loud guffaw. “I stole Chris Tucker jokes. I stole Lavell Crawford’s jokes. Marcus Combs’. All the jokes I thought were funniest I had seen on TV.

“I got booed. I got booed pretty bad. I thought going to a comedy club was going to save my life. Once I got booed, man, I went in the car, and I cried,” Pone added. “My girlfriend at the time, she was there. I think I saw her booing me once or twice with them.”

He didn’t let that initial failure derail his pursuit of a comedy career. He persevered. He would go on to perform comedy at clubs along the East coast: in the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Maryland, Washington, D.C., New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts. He said he appeared on the quiz show “The Weakest Link.”

Working at the Comedy Zone’ in Charlotte was a big help to him, as well as the Laughing Gas Comedy Club in Winston-Salem.

Back in Lumberton, he opened a few shows at the Pinecrest Country Club and the Inner Peace Center for the Arts.

Soon enough, he came up with the idea of opening up a comedy venue.

A cousin, Jack Carter, found the location on Chesnut Street, which had originally housed a garage.

For his comedy enterprise, the building would hold 60 to 70 people, which Pone said would have suited his plans.

“That was my dream anyway – to come back and put on a show here. To open a comedy club here,” said Pone. “I wouldn’t do it nowhere else unless it was a chain. Other than that, this is where I live. This is where I’m from.”

When he was pulling up to the building, he first saw the fire truck lights from a reflection off a building.

He couldn’t catch his breath when he saw his dream in flames on that early Thursday morning around 1:30 or 2. He remembered trying to keep it together.

Eventually, he had to walk off for a second to regain his composure.

“You can ask the neighbors. You can ask anybody,” he said. “You’d see me going in that building. When you did see me, I got drywall dust, all types of stuff on me because I had been working. It was a whole process for nine months. Like being locked in.”

He’ll continue, he said, this pursuit of sharing laughter.

According to Pone, a tentative stand-up show will be staged at the Carolina Civic Center on Aug. 26. And before that, on July 8, he plans to hold a fundraising event at the Pinecrest Country Club.

This past week, Pone set up a GoFundMe page to help continue the project.

“The show must go on,” Pone said. “I know I took a hit. As far as a business person, I still have responsibilities that need to be done. Just because we had a fire and things burned down, don’t mean that we still can’t have a show or still bring people laughter through our pain.

“I ain’t gonna quit.”