By Bill Rauch
If you have driven into Beaufort in the morning from across the Whale Branch, you have seen him. He’s the man who with a million-dollar smile and a hearty wave welcomes you. If you have been making that drive for some time, then you have noticed his routine has changed, and that his winning smile has survived the changes.
Tom Allen is Beaufort’s greeter, and he has been spreading joy along the Trask Parkway now for 17 years. From 2009 to 2016 he walked every weekday morning from his home on Stuart Point Road behind the Whale Branch Middle School to the Marine Corps Air Station gate and back, a round trip of about 14 miles, and in those years he smiled and waved and made eye contact with the occupants of every car that passed him along the way.
In 2017, after a fall wrenched his knee, because of the pain he gave up the long walk and instead stationed himself on the Hwy. 21 shoulder opposite the entrance to Stuart Point Road where these days he can be seen every Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 6 to 8:30 a.m., … smiling, calling out, and waving to the folks, of every creed and color, who go speeding by. It is the thing in his life he cherishes the most.
Why does he do it?
Nearly 65,000 people live north of the Broad River these days, but there is only one Tom Allen who is called to bring joy to all the people who go by, who gives for nothing a moment’s reprieve from the vicissitudes they face to those who pass his way.
Having attended the Dale Elementary School and Robert Smalls High School, and having learned a trade at Job Corps, Tom was a successful, self-employed mechanic and sheet rocker who on his own time was a kind of fitness nut. In 1999, for example, at the age of 48 he ran from Stuart Point Road to Yemassee and back just because he felt like it. But in 2007, out riding his bicycle, Tom was hit by a car. The crash injured him in several ways, but the worst was the knock on the head. After it, he could no longer work.
Disconsolate, this most athletic of men took to his bed.
“If this is all you’ve got for me,” he told God, he remembers saying from the depths of his despondency, “then either call my spirit to rest, or put my mind, my body and my spirit to work for You.”
Tom doesn’t have a local church home. When I asked him about that, he chuckled and muttered something about “too much gossip.” But his faith is as solid as any deacon’s.
It wasn’t immediate. It wasn’t a voice. It was a passion that Tom says God made rise in his heart. God told Tom, “Go out to the road.” So, he did. And he smiled and waved and made eye contact with the occupants of a passing car. Something stirred in him then, and so he did it again, and again … and again …. Then he went out to the road the next day, and the next day … and the next day ….
It took him several more months to know just what his heart was telling him, but that’s when he started walking to the Air Station, greeting with his million-dollar smile and joyful wave all those who passed him by.
That was 17 years ago. And Tom’s been bringing joy ever since.
Bill Rauch was the Mayor of Beaufort from 1999 to 2008 and has won multiple awards from the S.C. Press Association for his Island News columns. He can be reached at TheRauchReport@gmail.com.
