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Members of the former Hilton Head Ad Club will gather for a reunion at 6 p.m. Saturday at the Skull Creek Boathouse on Squire Pope Road.
"We were the ones who filled the beds, marketed the dirt and packaged Hilton Head and its many entrepreneurs and developers," said Karen Cerrati, who helped organize the reunion, along with Lynne Hummell, Ann Graham and Jane Stouffer.
"We communicated the dream to the other side of the bridge," she said. "Quite successfully."
They banged on typewriters, made cold calls in 100-degree heat, sucked fingers sliced with X-Acto knives, staged "news," breathed chemicals in the red light of darkrooms, met clients for lunch at The Treasure Cove and friends for late nights at Remy's, where two of their own, David and Fred Warren, sometimes moonlighted in their rocking Chilly Willy Band.
Bill Cornelia captured the Lowcountry's beauty in his camera, and Stu Silver and Bill Robinson filmed it with a voice-over that always sounded like Moses himself inviting Ohio to the promised land.
The big plans, big ideas and big visions came with big budgets in those days, and a new vocabulary.
Ditches were ponds and ponds were lagoons. Apartments were villas, and rooms overlooking a parking lot offered the "sunset view." They pranced out "patio lots" and the "interval ownership" that made Hilton Head ground zero for Marriott's timeshare empire.
Harbor became "harbour" and shops were "shoppes." They even told us Hilton Head was "a continent all its own."
New developments were always "nestled" by something "world-class." Everything was "unique." A single hole at a new golf course was worth a full-page ad in our newspaper, which was so thick the composing room couldn't hold all the pages. So what if a beach photo was sometimes not actually Hilton Head? Who could be perfect in a frantic world without a cell phone, Blackberry, fax machine, e-mail, digital camera or Google?
They had a few mentors who left Madison Avenue for Pope Avenue, like Dick von Glahn in his red socks. They created their own legends, like Tim Doughtie, Marsha Smelkinson, Tom Gardo, John David Rose, David Anderson and John Gettys Smith, who somehow tricked the world into thinking Charles Fraser walked alligators on a leash in his land of magic pluff mud.
Gardo said, "Hilton Head and the promotion of Hilton Head broke a lot of ground. It changed America's perception of a resort destination."
About 40 are expected at the reunion Saturday night. Their expense accounts may be gone, but they can be sure of one thing. They tried to make us all look world-class.
