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Imagine it without clean waterways.
Imagine it without the Verizon Heritage professional golf tournament, or the benefits that pour in from the accommodations tax on overnight lodging.
Imagine Hilton Head Island without a town government.
Imagine this community without activists challenging Town Hall.
Imagine it without Hilton Head Plantation.
Imagine it as a place where children forced to deal with terminal illness don't show hope and resolve, and their friends don't show support.
What if nobody had seen a port site where others saw mounds of dredge spoil?
Impossible?
Maybe not.
If not for a group of special people who all passed away during 2008, these institutions, ideas, passions and visions would not have had the nurture they needed.
Our community lost some giants this year.
They each brought resolve and drive -- but lacked in one area. They didn't seem to be able to say "no" ortake "no" for an answer.
Some were high-profile, like John Curry, Gen. Howard A. Davis Sr., Charles E. Taylor and Bill Marscher.
Some were elected, like Harvey Ewing, the Town of Hilton Head Island's fifth mayor, elected in 1991. He died this month and was cited for supporting the real estate transfer fee and beach preservation fees that help the island limit growth and preserve the beach.
Some were quiet leaders. If it weren't for Helen Cork, who also died in December, there would be no Coastal Discovery Museum. She moved to the island in the 1960s with her outgoing husband, the late state Rep. Bill Cork. She kept the idea of a museum afloat, and today, we have a museum that occupies the town-owned Honey Horn tract, the closest thing we'll ever have to a Central Park.
We also lost Dick von Glahn this month. He was the heart and soul -- and a significant benefactor -- of local theater for three decades. He played more than 70 roles onstage, often the crowd favorite. But his behind-the-scenes support of both the artists and the business plan is credited with keeping theater here alive. He supported the new Arts Center of Coastal Carolina. He later received its top award for lifelong achievement. After his death, at 81, friends wore his signature red socks to a gathering in his honor at Remy's.
Then there was the blunt and crusty former Jasper County administrator, Henry Moss of Ridgeland, who for 18 years told anyone willing to listen, and many who were not all that willing, that a port could be built on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River. His idea still promises to transform the Lowcountry. When he died in May, the dream had not come true, but it was off his kitchen table and in the hands of two state governments.
Also this year, we were moved by the death of 12-year-old Henry Cermak, whose attitude in a two-year battle against brain cancer was told through newspaper articles and the gripping "Henry's Blog" (http://henryscott.blogspot.com). Henry especially touched his classmates at Hilton Head Island Middle School and Hilton Head Island International Baccalaureate Elementary School. They did what they could to help, paying to wear "Hats for Henry" to school, or contributing coins. And at the arts center, where his father, Terry, works, a stage full of performers put on a benefit show.
Henry touched a lot of lives.
We also saw the passing this year of Helen Fairchild, a Red Cross leader who sewed quilts, built doll houses and the tiny furniture to fill them, and organized Communion service at her church; Bernice Lewin, a League of Women Voters stalwart whose leadership helped shape the Congregation Beth Yam, the island's first synagogue; Judith Agnes Mills, the wife of the Rev. Gerald Mills, founding pastor of Providence Presbyterian Church; Marion Dietrich, who used his skills as an international marketing executive to help First Presbyterian Church, and who became a volunteer national spokesman and fundraiser for bone marrow transplants after a member of his family needed one.
Island native Lillian Miller, the "Mother of the Church" at Mount Calvary Missionary Baptist on Squire Pope Road, died this fall. She went to her grave in Talbird Cemetery just as she lived -- dressed to the nines. Miss Lillian always made a good impression and had high expectations, traits that were appreciated by the more than 800 people who attended her funeral.
When Evelyn Mitchell died at age 90 in September, she had been contributing to island organizations for 40 years. She was a volunteer ambulance driver for the island's old Rescue Squad. She chaired the Bargain Box thrift store board and was a leader in hospice and her church.
Among other contributors to die this year were Josephine Kilhour, who along with her late husband, Bill, was part of the founding group of All Saints Episcopal Church; Dr. Lewis Puckett, who pioneered chiropractic service at the Volunteers in Medicine Clinic; and Grant G. Simmons Jr., the longtime chief executive of his family's famous mattress company who turned his energy into growth-control activism on Hilton Head, vociferously challenging Town Hall on the Cross Island Parkway.
Some who died this year changed the course of local history.
JOHN CURRY
For 35 years, John Curry, who died in September after suffering a brain aneurysm, had a singular impact on the development of Hilton Head Island's tourism industry and the island's place in the world.
He left a leadership role in bringing Walt Disney World to life in Florida to become vice president of a small resort in the Lowcountry woods -- Charles Fraser's Sea Pines Co.
His wife, Valerie Curry, said he made the unusual switch because he felt he could make a difference here. That he did.
His business advice was sought here and statewide as he guided the island toward becoming a year-round resort community. He played a leading role in creating the Town of Hilton Head Island. He helped negotiate and get through the legislature the state accommodations tax, which has provided millions of dollars in marketing money for the local tourism industry, as well as funding for arts and cultural groups here.
In 1986, he was tapped to bring the island back from financial crisis. He took the reins of Hilton Head's largest employer when it sank into bankruptcy. The bankruptcy threatened not only individual livelihoods, but the reputation of Hilton Head as a first-class resort and the future of the island's premier sporting event, the Heritage Classic golf tournament. Curry walked a fine and sometimes controversial line, but in the end, he was credited with getting money to creditors while keeping the island's major properties from being splintered. He personally negotiated with the PGA Tour commissioner to save the golf tournament.
Insiders say that without Curry the island would not have a commercially viable airport that also attracts the benefits that private aircraft bring.
Curry was a lightning rod for the anti-growth, anti-tourism, anti-town government factions, but in many ways he helped bring people together. He certainly helped anyone who ever earned a paycheck on Hilton Head.
At his passing, Bill Miles, president and CEO of the Hilton Head Island-Bluffton Chamber of Commerce, said, "The Hilton Head Island we know today is in part due to the tireless efforts of John, with his wonderful obsession to get it right and make this the unique destination it has become. He created a lasting legacy for us all, with courage, true grit, determination and with a real grace and style that was all his own."
HOWARD DAVIS
When Howard A. Davis Sr. took over as president of the Hilton Head Plantation Co. in 1976, the retired Air Force general counted 34 residents in the 4,000-acre development on the north end of Hilton Head Island. When he resigned 10 years later, there were 3,500 property owners.
He changed development plans to make it a community of single-family homes, with few condominiums or commercial establishments, and no resorts or hotels.
Davis was a World War II hero who piloted 51 bomber missions, then rose to become deputy chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force. He was instrumental in the creation and deployment of the F-15 fighter jet.
But on Hilton Head, where he died in November at age 92, Davis was better known for community leadership and tireless charitable work. His focus was on youth, perhaps because he lost his mother when he was 12 days old. He organized a volunteer tutoring program to help elementary school students learn to read. He was a leader of the forerunner to the Island Recreation Center and the island Boys & Girls Club. He was a United Way leader and was proud of helping get the Whooping Crane Conservancy dedicated within Hilton Head Plantation.
CHARLES TAYLOR
Charles E. Taylor moved to Hilton Head from Ohio in 1981 when his appliance store went out of business. He was $100,000 in debt, but refused to declare bankruptcy. He and his wife, Ellen, invested her inheritance in a condominium at South Beach, starting what would become one of the island's most successful vacation-rental companies, which they sold to ResortQuest in 1999.
Few knew that story when Taylor, 73, died in March of an unusually aggressive prostate cancer. By his generous contributions to First Presbyterian Church and his beloved Hilton Head Symphony Orchestra, nobody would've ever guessed Taylor once saw it as manna from heaven when a vacationer left behind frozen fish in a rental unit.
The Taylors were high school sweethearts described by the Rev. John M. Miller as "the most stellar Christian stewards I have ever known in terms of their generosity to the
church."
Taylor was a quiet man with a soothing, musical voice who kept the orchestra in one piece as president for three terms. He was credited with improving both its quality and financial footing. Taylor also served on the board of the Arts Center of Coastal Carolina.
He set high standards for the quality of life here. "Charles was a person who always looked beyond space and other limitations for ways to connect to the people of the community," said arts center president and CEO Kathleen Bateson.
In the last two years of his life, despite cancer treatment and a weakening body, Taylor tackled his own tormentor. He dedicated his family foundation to the Charles and Ellen Taylor Prostate Cancer Partners of the Lowcountry, which targets education and testing throughout the area to see that all men are checked regularly. His own cancer occurred between routine checkups, and Taylor worked until he couldn't get out of bed to see that it didn't have to happen to anyone else.
BILL MARSCHER
William F. "Bill" Marscher II was a Beaufort native who went north to become a rocket scientist, then came home to become one of the most dogged defenders of natural resources this community has ever seen. He died in January at age
78.
As a child, Marscher learned the joys of "going down the river," but not until leaving NASA-related work at MIT to join Fraser's Sea Pines Co. on Hilton Head in 1970 did he learn about environmental protection, or the lack of it. He also learned the power of citizen activism. Marscher was assigned to coordinate the company's efforts to thwart a proposed $400 million BASF chemical plant on the banks of the Colleton River near Bluffton. Against astronomical odds, a small cadre of island businesses, commercial fishermen and riled-up retirees prevailed over the international corporation.
Marscher never quit working to protect the Lowcountry quality of life. He was elected mayor pro tem of the Town of Hilton Head Island shortly after it was incorporated, helping enact the Land Management Ordinance to regulate growth and codify environmental and aesthetic standards.
When 500 acres of shellfish waters in southern Beaufort County were closed due to pollution in 1995, Marscher became the de-facto chairman of the Clean Water Task Force. Its landmark 1997 "Blueprint for Clean Water" resulted in a number of scientific, regulatory and private moves to protect the
rivers.
He also had a lifelong interest in the hurricane of 1893 that destroyed many lives and the economy on the Sea Islands. That resulted in two books co-written with his wife, Fran Heyward Marscher of Bluffton: "The Great Island Storm of 1893" and "Living in the Danger Zone: Realities About
Hurricanes."
