By Scott Graber
It is Friday and I’m in the lobby of Aloft Wilmington. This sleek, minimalist hotel emerges (from the back) of what was the red-bricked, three-storied freight terminal of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad — a building once known to my grandfather.
Susan and I drove up from Beaufort yesterday, taking a brief detour into Murrell’s Inlet. The detour was an effort to locate some trace of Oliver’s Lodge — a rambling, unpainted restaurant opened in 1910 by Captain Billy Oliver.
Susan and I were married in the late 60s while I was still a law student in Washington, DC. After graduation we moved to Ocean Drive Beach (now called North Myrtle Beach) where we operated the “Sunshine Inn” four blocks from the Ocean. This two-storied cottage — four bedrooms and a bunkhouse — had been built in the 1920s by my grandfather.
Every night Sheriff Merlin Bellamy and his deputies would sweep through the still-warm dunes looking for vagrants and “hipsters.” Sheriff Bellamy would “suggest” (to those found sleeping) local, low cost lodging that sometimes included the “Sunshine Inn.” We would receive these guests right around midnight.
The rate was $10 and usually included a cot in the bunkhouse. But if the “Taj” was full we would make a pallet in the kitchen — sometimes under the sink.
Susan had grown up in Darien, Conn., just north of Manhattan, the issue of a successful advertising executive. She was familiar with the grandeur of the Waldorf, the small-scaled quirkiness of the Algonguin, but new to the linoleum, oil-clothed, screened-porched ambiance of the “Sunshine Inn.”
To complicate matters I was spending my work week in Columbia, preparing for the bar examination. And so Susan had to operate the Inn alone, sometimes trading personal items (boxing gloves) for a night on the floor of the kitchen.
In an effort to make this hospitality experience more attractive, I promised Susan we would eat, at least once every weekend, in a fashionable, table-clothed, heavy silvered restaurant. You must realize I made this promise to a young woman who knew how to pronounce Bouillabaisse, Vichyssoise and Moules-frites.
We began this project in the huge dining room at the Ocean Forest Hotel, followed by the Sea Captain’s House, the Rice Planters Inn and then the Whistling Pig in Georgetown. I made an effort to get her hooked on Calabash-made hush puppies but she was not deceived or amused by this detour into the realm of the deep fat fryer. In desperation I suggested an afternoon hike through Brookgreen Gardens followed by dinner at a place called Oliver’s Lodge.
In those early days of our marriage (and to this day) I was stunned that this elegant, Connecticut girl would be interested in me on any level. Her father had told me, in his Darien study, that I was not worthy of his daughter.
Nor could I believe that she had followed me to Ocean Drive Beach and had happily engaged in the toilet-scrubbing, linen-changing, sand-removing routine irrevocably attached to beachside hospitality in 1969. And so yesterday — as we stood in the vacant parking lot viewing the remains of Oliver’s Lodge — I asked her how she endured me and the daily indignities of our minimalist lodgings four blocks from the Atlantic Ocean.
“You were going to be a lawyer,” she replied. “And yes I assumed you were going to work in Washington, or New York, and the “Sunshine Inn” was a real surprise.”
“I don’t doubt it,” I said.
“But there was the Atlantic Ocean,” she said. “After we swept the sand out of the bedrooms, stuffed our towels and sheets into the coin-operated washers, we would swim out beyond the breakers. Sometimes we would swim together for two hours.”
“And then there were your hikes.”
“Hikes?”
“We would walk down the strand to Cherry Grove, sometimes silent, sometimes talking, trying to get to know each other better.”
Yesterday, as we stood where thousands of hungry customers once waited for their flounder, whiting and shrimp, I remembered those five mile-long hikes and the intermittent conversation we had walking among the jelly balls, burrowing shells and bleached white crabs.
I also remembered my expectation — the excitement of being attached to this beautiful Connecticut girl who, apparently, was going to stick around. And I do remember thinking we just might have a good, full, interesting life notwithstanding the fact we were from different cultures; different geographies; totally different solar systems.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
