Summer takes me back

By Collins Doughtie CONTRIBUTOR

Though I can’t explain it, the first few days of summer always makes me think back to the time when my folks picked up all five kids and moved us to the Lowcountry. The year was 1961 and if my mind serves me correctly, we arrived just a month or so before school was ready to start. I was barely six years old and Hilton Head was nothing more than a two-lane paved highway lined with massive oak trees and deer outnumbered people fifty to one.

Even before I moved here, I was already a fishing fool so you can imagine how excited I was to see water, water everywhere. Most of the roads were dirt and other than the old William Hilton Inn, the Adventure Inn and the Seacrest Hotel, there was very little construction going on. For everyday staples there was one tiny grocery store at Coligny Plaza but for serious shopping that required piling the kids in the car and making a weekly pilgrimage to Savannah. The only other hangout, if you could call it that, was an open-air beach shop called the Arcade which was located on South Forest Beach road between where the Holiday Inn now stands and the Adventure Inn. You could walk down to the beach and look in both directions and not see a soul. So, you can imagine that for a skinny little kid like me with an imagination that was always in hyper drive, it was paradise.

The bridge, a swing bridge, had just been built and up on top of the structure was a little house where the bridge tender lived. It was customary to honk your horn as you passed under his digs and it wasn’t unusual to travel the entire length of the island and not see another car. Being the youngest of five children, only my sister Grace and I had the privilege of attending Bluffton High School while the older kids commuted to a school in Savannah. You probably think we rode ox drawn carts to school but we did actually have a regular yellow school bus but because there were so few of us, the drivers were always students at the school. As you might imagine, many of the drivers were good ol’ country folk and the ride home was almost always an adventure. I can remember when a couple of these upstanding high school senior bus drivers would disconnect the buses governor, used to keep the top speed at 45mph, and we would hit speeds meant for racetracks. They would do things like veer off the road and drive through fields bouncing our little heads off the roof, chase chickens, of which there were plenty, and pretty much break just about every rule in the book. Looking back now, these are just a few of the things that made my childhood so great.

After Bluffton High School burned to the ground during one Christmas vacation, we used the Methodist Church in downtown Bluffton as our school. After about a year of that my folks decided that it was best if I too commuted to school in Savannah. Along with the Hacks, who owned Honey Horn Plantation, and all of Joe Fraser’s kids, an old, green Checker limousine was purchased to take us to school in Savannah. Driven by an elderly black gentleman named Willy, it was quite the trek. The Talmadge Bridge was a rickety metal bridge with a tollbooth and Savannah proper pretty much stopped at around Victory Drive. Our school, Savannah Country day, was way out on Abercorn long before the malls were built so these daily rides made for a long day especially for kids my age.

I was by no means a model student solely because my mind was always thinking more about how to catch a channel bass (redfish were called that back then) than it was learning a dead language called Latin. It didn’t make any difference how late I got home, I would always hop on my bike and get in an hour or so fishing before I was made to sit down for homework. Though I didn’t realize it at the time that this inclination was no doubt why my folks sent me off to boarding school, and not a fishing school, when I reached the ninth grade.

I have to give it to my folks for making such a brash move. I can’t imagine nowadays having a brood the size of theirs and just picking up and moving to some remote corner of the world. My dad was a big shot advertising man on Madison Avenue in New York but being in advertising myself until I retired a year or so ago, I can now understand why he did what he did. He and my mom opened the very first shop on Hilton Head, The Island Shop, which was located at the William Hilton Inn where the Marriott Grand Ocean Resort currently stands. Instead of riding a train to work every day as he did before moving here, my dad sailed to work on a little sunfish from our home in Sea Pines. If nothing else, my folks taught me that quality of life trumps wealth ever time. All I can say is what a life I’ve had and Lord willing that blessing continues on for many more years.

Collins Doughtie, a 60-year resident of the Lowcountry, is a sportsman, graphic artist, and lover of nature. collinsdoughtie@icloud. com

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