Spending Childhood Summers in South Carolina with Savvy Mom
Ruth Paget
I spent my childhood summers
with my sister K. in Murrels Inlet, South Carolina. My sister had an apartment on the property of
one of our distant cousins’ summer homes on the inlet. She worked as a printer during the week and
on the sport fishing boats on the weekend as a licensed small boat captain,
skipper, and mate.
My favorite part of summer
was going out marlin fishing on the weekends.
My sister took care of a boat for a couple from Charleston, South
Carolina, who rented it out for sport fishing.
She was the skipper on these
boats, and I was able to go out as a mate-in- training while one of our friends
captained the boat. At the time,
children could work in well-supervised capacities in family businesses. Chinese restaurants have known this for
years.
I sat up with the captain and
learned the buoy system for how to get in and out of Murrels Inlet into the
Atlantic Ocean. The captain taught me
how to read a tide table and run the sonar equipment to find pools of fish in
the water below.
I also learned how to read a
compass (“Point the boat west in an emergency,” he said). I called the tackle shop in port on the
short-wave radio. They told me how to
alert the Coast Guard, but only to do that in an emergency.
I was not allowed to touch
the steering wheel, but I was shown other important equipment like the fire
extinguishers, first aid kits, and the orange sea rescue donuts. The captain told me, “If someone is drowning
or thrown overboard, you have to throw the orange donuts out to them and pull
them in. A drowning person can pull you
under with them in a state of panic.”
We set up the marlin fishing
lines, which arch over the water.
Marlins are flying fish when they are caught and incredibly dangerous
when they are brought on board a boat.
Marlins thrash around and
flail their fins in and out when they land on a boat deck after reeling them
in. I had to sit in the captain’s chair
when a marlin was caught. People stuff
marlins and put them on their walls as sport fishing trophies. They stop fishing for them when they get one.
Once the marlin was caught
for the sport fisherman, who had rented the boat that day, we would fish for
our lunch or early dinner.
The fish off the South
Carolina coast are very tasty – red snapper, grouper, and schools of
shrimp. We would grill these and make a
cream sauce for them with sautéed peppers and tomatoes over Carolina rice.
K. would make some corn bread
for me, because I did not like rice. She
also made me green beans and a salad of tomato and cucumber. We had warm peach cobbler for dessert and
vanilla ice cream.
During the week, I would go
out on mid-size fishing boats (80 people) and larger boats (81 – 120 people). These boats were rented out by corporations
for what would be called “team building” decades later.
The passengers were almost
all men. I was allowed out there,
because I had marlin mate training. All
of the boat captains and owners were our relatives somehow, too.
When I would go out on the
boats, I would go around the boat and ask, if I could help bait hooks or string
caught fish on lines to take to the scaling and freezing shops in port.
I told the passengers the
names of several places they could go and get their fish prepared to take
home. The men caught sea bass. Sea bass is a white fish that tastes good
with the same sauce that you make for red snapper.
When the men would eat, I had
to go up to the bridge and get cleaned up for lunch. I got to eat my lunch sitting in the
skipper’s chair on a tray.
Corporate teams always eat
well, so I got to eat crab cakes; shrimp etoufée; steak and kidney pie (which I thought was just
great); mashed potatoes with sour cream, butter, and chives; cheddar buns; and
warm, peach cobbler with vanilla ice cream.
I drank sweet iced tea with this nice lunch.
I know I had to go up on the
bridge, because the corporate teams might have been bonding with beer and
bourbon.
I also went out on the
mid-size deep sea fishing boats. These
were roly-poly affairs. The boats tilted
to one side or another with the waves.
I helped with the baiting of
hooks and taking fish off of hooks on this boat, too. On one occasion, a shark that was just as
long as the boat came alongside the boat and began hitting it, because we had
fish lines going.
This was the era of the film Jaws
so, I went below deck “right now” and put on a life preserver. I sat next to the emergency exit by the
lifeboats and put on a life jacket.
The captain shot the shark
several times before it floated away from the boat. Sharks swim in groups, too, so we quietly
made our way back to port. I took out a
book and started reading it. The mates
told the team building guys to put on a life jacket like Ruthie and read
something quietly. They watched Jacques
Cousteau growing up, too, and knew about sharks traveling in packs.
I considered those mid-size
boats to be roller coaster rides. You
really should locate lifeboats and know where life jackets are when you go out
in the open ocean.
I also went out on the
tourism boats in Murrel’s Inlet and told ghost stories. I loved reading ghost stories. I would tell people, “If you see a gray man
walking on the beach, a hurricane is coming, but you will be saved.”
I continued to regale
passengers with this spooky tale, “We have lots of dog ghosts barking for their
dead owners on plantations. And, we have
just tons of clanging bells announcing supper.”
The real tour operator would tell other stories, and I got to sit with
the millionaires paddling around the South Carolina seashore islands.
During the week, I would
spend most of my time swimming with our neighbor’s children and their mother
supervising, who made comments as needed.
We would dive off the covered dock and eat bologna sandwiches down there
and get nice tans.
When it was 4 o’clock, I
would go to the restaurant next door and pick up dinner. My sister would order dinner, and I would
pick it up.
The restaurant was named
Pittypat’s Porch. It had Gullah owners. (African-Americans who maintain African
languages and customs and live on the sea islands off South Carolina and
Georgia.)
My contact to pick up dinner
was named Rooster. We usually had simple
food during the week like the following:
-shrimp étoufée, which we called shrimp
Creole.
-fried sea bass
-deep-fried hush puppies
(savory donut holes with scallions and red pepper) that we dunked in melted
butter
-freshly made coleslaw
-lemonade
-small pieces of key lime pie
or peach cobbler
I tried to read, but Big
Sister would tell me to go swimming and get out of the house.
My sister had a wire crab
trap down at the dock that I would check before I got dinner at Pittypat’s
Porch. If there were a crab or two in
the trap, we would add that to what we would eat for dinner.
I was the one who would empty
the crab trap. I used ice cube tongs
(alternative use of a Southern kitchen implement) to capture the crab and take
it to the house. I would chase my sister
around with the crab snapping its claws while we were waiting for water to boil
to cook the crab.
My sister would tell me,
“Stop! You little varmint!” and chase me
around with an eggbeater.
When the salted water came to
a rolling boil, we would drop in the blue-skinned crabs, watch them swim around,
turn coral-red, and fish them out of the pot.
My Big Sister would make homemade mayonnaise to eat with them on toast.
I loved it when we got 3 or 4
crabs caught on one day. My sister would
make all of them and go out to her garden and harvest some stuff for
dinner. (I was not allowed in the summer
pantry. You can save a lot of money, if
you know how to cook and can what grows in a garden.) These were some of the items we could make
out of the summer pantry:
-boiled corn on the cob
-coleslaw
-tomatoes and seeded
cucumbers in mayonnaise
-sauteed zucchini or Italian
squash
-lemonade
-banana bread or zucchini
bread
-small pieces of peach
cobbler or key lime pie
My big sister took me on some
lovely excursions around Murrels Inlet.
One of the most famous places we went to is the Hermitage, a former
plantation with lots of dangling, gray Spanish moss over its entry gate and
lane leading up to the mansion.
The Hermitage Plantation,
owned by the Flagg family, has a slightly spooky story associated with it.
There was once a young Flagg
daughter named Alice, who married a man that her family did not approve
of. Her brother broke off her marriage
and threw her wedding ring into the oyster beds with reeds in the inlet. Alice died of heartbreak.
Alice’s ghost comes back at
night and hunts for her wedding ring among the reeds in the oyster beds to this
day. (See the Hermitage website for more
information.)
My Big Sister K. took me to
Brookgreen Gardens after going swimming and sunbathing at the beach. Four former plantations made up this
garden. One of the plantations was named
Brookgreen.
There are sculptures of
twisting, bucking horses worthy of Bernini all around the garden.
My sister bought a membership
at Brookgreen Gardens, so we could go there after beach outings all the
time. The gardens are French style.
When our mother came down to
South Carolina for her vacation, my mom, my big sister, and I would visit
Charleston, South Carolina for a very touristy vacation.
Charleston was founded in 1670. It has a French Protestant (Calvinist –
Huguenot) Cathedral and the only Huguenot Congregation in the United
States. Other Huguenots went to London,
Berlin, Switzerland, and the Southeastern United States when Louis XIV revoked
the Edict of Nantes, which guaranteed religious freedom in France.
There is a French quarter in
Charleston, South Carolina, too. We went
to a restaurant called Porgy ‘N’ Bess.
The play Porgy ‘N’ Bess was the first African-American play.
The Charleston theatre crowd
went to this theatre for pre-dinner meals before going to the Dock Street Theatre:
the first theatre in the US with theatrical productions. The French Quarter got its name from all the
merchants located there.
There is an Episcopal Church
in the French Quarter of Charleston, South Carolina, too, called St.
Phillips. The graveyard for this church
is the final resting place for Edward Rutledge, the youngest signer of the
Declaration of Independence. Another
politician whose tomb is in the graveyard is US Senator John C. Calhoun.
The streets of Charleston are
paved with cobblestones. The oceanfront,
two-storey homes are painted in pastel colors.
There are horse-drawn
carriages. When mom is on vacation, both
my big sister and I got to go one the full tour of Charleston in a horse-drawn
carriage. The streets stay clean,
because the horses wear leather diapers that are regularly cleaned between
rides.
We stayed at a
bed-and-breakfast run by an English lady in the French quarter. We had a substantial English breakfast and
did an afternoon tea complete with the three-tiered tea stand that the English
use.
“Walking tourism today,” mom
said after tea. We took a ferry out to
Fort Sumter, which is where the first shots of the Civil War started. My Big Sister K. has books about Civil War
battles, which I was allowed to read on Sunday with her. We had one with us and walked around the fort
identifying things.
Fort Sumter is a
pentagon-shaped fort well inside the Charleston Bay. There are four forts located around the
island that are well hidden – Moultrie, Johnson, Castle, and Pinckney. Any ship that attacks Fort Sumter should, in
theory, not be able to escape from the fire of those forts.
The only reason that Fort
Sumter was lost to the North I think is that not every commander was loyal to
the Confederacy.
Louis XIV wanted a similar
fort island defense built in Poitou (home of many Huguenots) to protect against
English invasion. His chief engineer
Vauban advised him against it. The kind
of fort Louis XIV wanted was built eventually – Fort Boyard of French
television fame.
Back in South Carolina, mom
drove K. and I to Pawley’s Island where Alice Flagg’s grave was. K. told me that if you walk around Alice’s
grave 13 times backward at midnight, Alice will come out and grant your wishes.
Then, we drove down the
Atlantic Coast to visit the sea islands.
Gullah women sell hand-woven baskets, textiles, hats, and food products
along the seacoast highway. Our mom
stopped and bought baskets and hats for K. and me. (2018 note: There are now Gullah-owned
restaurants along the coast.)
When our mom left, K. and I
would go back to regular time. I went to
Vacation Bible School and studied the life of Old Testament Joseph. I won a Bible for doing all the work.
Murrels Inlet is also close
to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. K.
would drive me up and down the Strand with music blaring, so I could wave at
people walking along the street and yell out to them, “Cool shirt! Cool hat!
Cool sunglasses!” I went on the
roller coaster several times with K., who showed me how to hold my arms up on
the way down on the roller coasters and just yell away the fear.
As summer wound down, I was
allowed to read some of Big Sister’s books:
-1984
-Animal Farm
-Clockwork Orange
-Cybernetics (I actually brought
this book with me from home. We have
three generations of female, newspaper printers in the family, so we keep up
with all new technology.)
Since I had been a good kid,
I got to visit one of our rich cousins who lived in Hilton Head, South
Carolina. I think my Myrtle Beach antics
helped him sell some real estate there.
This relative played golf and
loved Hilton Head for this reason. There
really was nothing to do on Hilton Head except buy merchandise and play golf. I emptied the golf kingdom of sand dollars
while K. and our cousin talked on the beach front terrace of his home.
K. told hime, “Ruthie wants
you to sell sand dollars and make money.”
Sand dollars are red and
hairy, fresh out of the water. You have
to dry them in the sun and then scour them to get the hair off. Finally, you soak them in bleach to turn them
white.
You can charge $5 for them at
beachfront stores in places like Myrtle Beach.
Our rich cousin looked at the hairy, red sand dollars lying on his fancy
terrace and was not sold on the idea.
Kathy took out some pristine
white sand dollars and some that had been spray painted gold to illustrate what
they looked like as a final product.
They were both laughing about what people would buy in Myrtle Beach.
Our rich cousin shared his
wealth. We ate fillet mignon, Duchesse
potatoes, coleslaw (I asked for it), and German chocolate cake for dessert.
My good-bye to my South
Carolina summer vacation was always a restaurant outing to Pittypat’s
Porch. Rooster would dress up in a crisply,
ironed shirt with a bowtie and be our waiter.
The food was the same as what
I go out the backdoor everyday, but I got to rock on the front porch and look
out over the oyster beds with the reeds while we waited for our table with its
red-and-white checked tablecloth.
I loved shrimp Creole. They gave me a lot, because they knew I was going
home to Detroit, Michigan where even frozen shrimp is expensive.
All the cooks, busboys,
waitresses, and hostesses came to see me and give me hugs. The fishing boat
captains, who were eating dinner at different tables, came over to us and told
me, “Study everything and especially learn math and science, mate.”
They gave me a little compass
as a going away gift to always be able to find True North for directions
without a map.
By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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