In 1973, Packet’s Hilton Head building was where everyone came to tell their secrets
Editor’s note: Longtime columnist David Lauderdale retired on July 31, just a few weeks after The Island Packet celebrated its 50th birthday. We are reprinting some of his best columns as a tribute to his 43-year career.
This column originally was published Nov. 2, 2008.
When the old Island Packet building off Pope Avenue was torn down Oct. 30, 2008, a beat of Hilton Head Island’s heart went with it.
This wacky building — that had no printing press, but plenty of thick carpeting, a spiral staircase and two-story windows reflecting a lagoon and golf green — served as much more than home to a thriving business.
Beginning in 1973, a decade before there was a town government, it was part town hall and part general store. People came to sit and chat and lobby for bike paths, perhaps, or a bridge to Beaufort. A number of community organizations were born in meetings upstairs. Professor Horace Fleming used it as his home base as he studied the pros and cons of the island’s incorporation.
For a long time, this building had the only public Xerox machine on the island. My secret hope was that someone from Sea Pines would leave behind the original of their trust fund. It never happened.
It was where people brought birth announcements, wedding write-ups and obituaries. They came lugging oversized dead fish, still flopping, or an eggplant that looked like Jimmy Durante. We always grabbed a camera.
They came spreading lies and floating schemes. They came with pitiful poems and better mouse traps scribbled on greasy napkins from Jody’s Fine Foods across the street.
They left us with their tears, laughs, conspiracy theories, threats, screams — and certainly their complaints. This building was the community soapbox and political stump. It’s where everyone came to tell their side of the story, their secrets, their gossip.
Almost a decade after the Packet moved out and sold the old building, we published a photo of the demolition. An orange machine ripped at the steel and glass and tabby-like siding to make way for a new branch of Ameris Bank.
All I could think was: “Oh, the humanity.”
Read all about it
When the building opened, more than 300 islanders dropped by to see such a marvel. After all, in the short time between the first edition in July 1970 and the open house in January 1973, their little tabloid-sized weekly newspaper had grown from 462 subscribers to 4,000. Its original band of 34 advertisers had grown tenfold. Its 4,200-square-foot building was cavernous compared to the 63 square feet it had been renting from Beulah DeVries in the DeVries Building on Palmetto Bay Road.
Mary Hilton wore a skirt to the open house featuring a big “Packet” boat on it. Her husband, Ralph, was the first editor and a co-founder along with businessman Tom Wamsley and retired North Carolina newspaper editor Jonathan Daniels. Alicia Hack brought Jonathan a gift of a Port Royal Plantation bluebird house, and then everybody got back to work.
The big headline of the day — “Vast Development Plans Announced For North End” — told of the vision for Hilton Head Plantation. It would have 3,000 homes and 2,000 villas, five golf courses, a fishing village and a subtropical garden bordering a recreational lake with sand beaches.
An $11 million condominium project was announced for the site of the Adventure Inn’s par-three golf course. A study was being done to resolve the affordable housing problem. A worm-eradication program reported a 70 percent decrease in infected island children. And, believe it or not, 6.4 inches of snow fell on the island a day after the high was 62. The post office had no power and no heat, but Phil Propst set up “gigging lights” attached to automobile batteries, and the mail was sorted and delivered in the “century’s record snow storm” while adults made snowmen. We ran a full page of their pictures.
Chicago Bridge & Iron was pushing its plans to build aluminum spheres 10-stories tall on the banks of the Colleton River where Colleton River Plantation is today — and a Packet story beat down the rumor that it was nuclear. At the same time, a full page was devoted to the march of fire ants. Even more space was devoted to Marguerite Williams’ “Socially Speaking” column, and the full transcript of the local magistrates’ dockets. That was the listing that our readers called “the social column.”
A love affair
It would be easier to swim with the gators in the lagoon out back than to fathom the human drama of gathering news for 26 years in that building.
It always was seen as a community effort. The paper was filled with copy produced by local contributors. They’d pull up in a baby blue Mercedes convertible, deliver a book review and seem overjoyed with a $25 check.
In that leaky building, we explained what it meant when the island’s major developers declared bankruptcy. And we fended off skinks, flies, families of raccoons, and at least two agonizing generations of computer systems. We were always a beta site — the first to get the latest and greatest and gimpiest gadgets. Adding to the sport, the printing press was located far away, at first in Walterboro and then in Beaufort. We prayed that the man who drove “the box” filled with all our precious work to the printer each night wouldn’t get drunk and drive into the Broad River.
We spent more time in that building than we did with our own children. But it always seemed to be for a reason.
While construction on the building was nearing its end, Jonathan Daniels was asked to address a convention of newspaper executives here. He told them that “we suffer like the whole island from schizophrenia. Editorially, while we sing a siren song, we also lament the change which has sometimes pushed trailers into old moss hung lanes. We sometimes shake our heads, if we do not wring our hands, at the multiplication of the condominia, the growing roar of the traffic, the lines at the doors of the more and more restaurants we enjoy.”
The heart and soul of this community wrestled like Jacob through the night, night after night, year after year, in that building that is no more.
“I do suggest that there aren’t really any differences between the old journalism and the new, or the big journalism and the small,” Jonathan told the executives of old. “The best in all does not depend on new devices or machines, methods or maneuvers. It depends upon love for the metropolises or the parishes it serves, a desire to keep them beautiful and good, an eagerness to protect, a firm faith in their potential. At best it is a love affair of a paper with its place and people.”
That’s what went on in that building. And that’s why a slice of our heart went with it.