Spending Childhood Summers in South Carolina with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

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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Munich Oktoberfest at Stammtisch in Seaside by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Munich Oktoberfest at Stammtisch in Seaside by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

I went to a beer tasting at my neighborhood Bavarian Restaurant in Seaside, California called Stammtisch in October 2000 to try my first beers from Munich, Germany.

My husband Laurent let me go alone to the private room, reserved-ticket affair to eat a Bavarian meal and do the tastings.   I am sure he was in another nearby restaurant with his buddies from work eating a similar meal and doing a beer tasting, too.

Seating place tags took the worry out of where I was going to sit.  I was seated at the end of a long table.

Soon an older man sat by me and told me he was studying culinary history now that he was retired.

Ruth Reichl had just published her food memoir, which I loved.  I wanted to record what I had learned about foreign cuisines for neighborhood history and for my family.  I liked eating out when I went on trips overseas and thought going to ethnic restaurants would be a good way to teach my daughter Florence, a graduate of Juilliard, about other cultures.

My dinner mate said his newest discovery was that boneless cuts of meat started to be sold in the U.S. during World War II.

Meat was deboned to make for lighter shipping according to my dinner mate and the trend caught on.  I love trivia like this and looked forward to picking this man’s brain all evening.

A couple joined us who did home beer brewing.  All three of them corrected me in German, which I had never studied.

The man on my right brought in his ten-month-old son to show him off to his buddies.  He told his son, “We’re all going camping soon!” as his wife scooped the baby up and went out of the dining room.

All of us discovered that we had all lived in Wisconsin at some point in our lives.  We made a Green Packers cheer and pounded our fists together in the crowded room.

Savory aromas wafted in from the kitchen making me very hungry, but the food took awhile to appear.  We had bread on the table, but I thought the goose fat set out to spread on the bread might be too rich and I did not want to be the goose girl.

I tried a hefe-weizen beer to start before the tasting actually started.  This is a wheat beer.  My dinner mates told me that “hefe” means “yeast” and that “weizen” means “wheat.”  The beer reminded me of piecrust with a little sugar added to it.

Ham hocks came out of the kitchen with a knife and fork sticking out of them.  Ham hocks are large.  I asked for a slice of pork roast with onion gravy, flour dumplings, and warm, shredded cabbage as my meal.

I thought of a sweet cookbook I read when I lived in Virginia as I ate called The Flour is Different: German Heritage Recipes and Traditions by Trudy Gilganast.

The author of this German cookbook related that she had to recreate the baking recipes of her homeland due to different wheat milling practices in our two countries.

The author of the book wrote that Germans like sweet and savory combinations.  I could tell from the book that Germans are awesome bakers.

I remembered as I ate a dumpling on my plate at Stammtisch that she said southern Germans make their dumplings from flour and those in the northern German are made from potatoes.

A German beer importer was our tasting master for the evening.  The first beer we tasted was Spaten Premium.  The importer told us that Spaten was the first beer to be tapped at the first Oktoberfest in 1397.

He continued by saying that Spaten still holds this honor at Oktoberfest.  Once it has been tapped, it receives a 21-gun salute.

“Then, we all drink like fish!” he said.

I duly noted that Spaten Premium is the number-one selling beer in Germany.  It is considered a light beer with an alcohol percentage above 4%, so it is considered a malt liquor in the U.S.

The importer went on to say that Spaten Premium is a lager beer.

It is not aged and is ready for consumption for four to five weeks.

“What does “lager” mean?” I asked.

“To lay down,” one of my dinner mates said.  I took this information in with a sip of the premium beer without really understanding what that meant at the time.

A quick glance in Michael Jackson’s Beer Companion informed me that brewers make lagers with cool temperature-fermenting yeasts, which allows the beer to mature at freezing point.  That is a pretty technical explanation for a clean-tasting wallop of beer.

Our next beer was a Spaten Pilsen.  The importer said Pilsen is a town in the Czech Republic.  When golden, clear Pilsens were developed in 1842, other beers were cloudy.

The importer took this time to point out that hops used in the beer-making give beer its flavor.

The importer said the Czechs had hit upon the ability to control malting temperatures, which gave the beer its golden color.

The Germans knew a good idea when they saw one and copied the style.  This beer is supposed to be lighter in alcohol content than other beers, but its bitter bite made me grimace.

My dinner mate said hops gave the beer its bitter taste.  I drank the Dinkel-Aker Pilsen made in Stuttgart, Germany and liked it.  I drank it when I lived there five years as well.

At home, when I was reading Michael Jackson’s Beer Companion, I discovered that malt is grains of barley, wheat, oats, or rye.  We tried Spaten Oktoberfest, which was in a blue bottle and tasted sweet.

Erdinger was our next beer, which you have to pour in a tilted glass so the foam head does not spill over the glass.

Then, we tried a Kostrikisser.  I often drank this beer in Germany when we would go bowling with Philly Sandwiches on base in Stuttgart, Germany.

Everyone laughed that I only drank about 1/2 of the glasses that were served to me.

“That’s because I am about ½ your body size,” I said.

“My husband is coming to pick me up, and I don’t want to crawl out of here,” I remarked.

The importer laughed and gave me some Oktoberfest glasses for my husband and me.

I smiled when I found out I would be going to live in Stuttgart, Germany, which is close to the Land of the Wittelsbach in Bavaria, Germany for five years.  That was another exchange student type adventure for me.

I have always thought Stammtisch, which means owner’s friends table in German, could make a lot of money by holding Oktoberfest dinners.  

This celebration in Germany is held over several weeks.  Families celebrate Oktoberfest by buying Oktoberfest beer at the store for the festival and making a festive meal at home.  (If you set up a reservation app for the restaurant, you might be able to sell out Oktoberfest dinners in advance.)

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Introducing Greek Culture to Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Introducing Greek Cuisine and Culture to Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 

Thanks to Detroit’s large Greek population, I learned about Greek culture beginning at the age of 9.

My mother and I would go to Greektown with my high school buddy on the weekends and order Greek village salads that had no lettuce – that is an authentic village salad.

The village salads in Greektown had ringlets of green, yellow, and red peppers; black, salty olives; tomato quarters; ringlets of purple onion; and feta cheese.  We ate this salad with thick slices of Greek bread. 

Greeks allow soaking up salad of dressing with a piece of bread; it is not considered bad etiquette in a restaurant as it is in France.  The Greeks use red wine vinegar, olive oil, and rigani – an herb like oregano in their salad dressing.  I think it is the purple onion, feta cheese, and rigani trio that make it taste so good.

Next, we would have pastitio (Greek pasta with ground lamb, tomatoes, and béchamel sauce), moussaka (eggplant casserole with béchamel sauce and melted grated cheese), spanakopita (spinach and onion with melted feta cheese baked in a buttered phyllo dough), and cheese (Greek halumi cheese) phyllo pies.  Of course, I ate a big piece of baklava for dessert.  I could eat like this, because I walked all the time.

In the sixth grade, my social studies project was all about Greece and the products the US could export to Greece to earn money (cars and sewage systems) and what the US could import from Greece (olives and cruise packages to the Greek Isles).

When I was in high school, I wrote about the Byzantine Empire of Greece for National History when I was at Cass Technical High School.

In a nutshell this is what I concluded in my paper, the Byzantine Empire survived for so long, because food was organized and distributed in an organized manner.

My paper placed in the top five for the Detroit Metropolitan Area, but I considered myself the winner when my peers were asking me to read it over and over at lunch in Greektown.

When I went to college at the University of Chicago, my roommate was a Greek-American, who lived in the Chicago suburbs.  In addition to my coursework at UChicago, I would go to go to my Greek roommate’s house on the weekends.   I ate Greek lemon chicken there and melamakarona cookies (butter cookies dunked with grated walnuts on top) while I drew Japanese characters over and over.

I did other Greek activities with my roommate.  I went dancing at Maids of Athena and Sons of Pericles parties at the height of Michael Jackson’s and Prince’s fame.

My roommate’s mother also ran dances for immigrants from her village in Crete.  I learned traditional Greek dances with the Greek yia-yias (grandmothers).

I went to Easter masses at the Greek Orthodox Church and the midnight dinner after that.  During spring break, I went to Greek Independence Day and was able to talk with Greek-American writer Harry Mark Petrakis about writing.  He told me to just keep writing to develop my storytelling skills.

Other “Things Greek” I have done include going to a Greek icon exhibit at the Detroit Institute of the Arts.  Icons are painted using strict outline forms.  Variation can only happen with subtle color changes, but that is it.  Also, each side of an icon’s face is either the good eye or the “evil” eye.

I studied Byzantine manuscript illumination, my senior year of college at UChicago.  Byzantine manuscripts are small and frenzied images in text.  They contain a lot of Biblical code language that is not always in the text.

When I went home to Detroit for Christmas vacation from the UChicago one year, I went to see a performance of Oedipus Rex performed in ancient Greek on a round stage.  I read the play before I went in English and like the chanting and minimal movements that convey what is happening.

This is non-verbal communication.  Non-verbal communication is not the same in all countries, but I understood what was happening in ancient Greek theatre.

Later in life, when I lived in France, we took a vacation to Greece for two weeks.  We hiked up to the Acropolis from the Plaka in Athens.  We visited the Parthenon and the Erechthyion with its caryatids of female figures holding up the roof of their temple – Hestia’s Temple?

From Athens, my husband and I went to Crete and visited the entire island.  The highlights of our time there were visits to the ruins of Heraklion and the Archaeological Museum that depict Minoan Culture with its dancers leaping over charging bulls, goddesses wielding snakes, and symmetrically designed necklaces.

In California, my husband Laurent and I took our daughter Florence to Epsilon Restaurant a few times in downtown Monterey, but mostly we do our Greek outing at the Greek Festival in downtown Monterey on the Wharf.  We buy food, participate in the Greek dances, and pretend we are on a cruise in the Greek Isles in the Pacific Northwest.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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