Independent voice: The Island Packet marks 50 years of telling Hilton Head’s story
They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,
In a Sieve they went to sea ...
And when the Sieve turned round and round,
And every one cried, “You’ll all be drowned!”
They called aloud, “Our Sieve ain’t big,
But we don’t care a button! we don’t care a fig!
In a Sieve we’ll go to sea!”
Fifty years ago today, The Island Packet set sail with that solid sendoff.
Co-founder Jonathan Daniels used “The Jumblies” by Edward Lear to introduce his first column in that first edition for 362 subscribers.
Readers of that funny-looking tabloid produced in an 8-by-11-foot rented office space on Palmetto Bay Road were told that Hilton Head Island’s population had exceeded 3,000.
And that the island’s first newspaper since a city of soldiers occupied the island during the Civil War would be a voice for all.
“We certainly do not mean to be concerned merely with those decorative people who constitute the chorus of rising decibels on what has been impertinently called Cirrhosis Shores,” Daniels wrote.
“A land of milk and honey cannot be one of cocktails and canapes for some and ‘pone and popskull for the rest. A magic isle must be concerned with the cockleburr as well as the camelia, the serpent as well as the apple.”
Many thought there was no need for a newspaper.
The bulletin board at the old Bank of Beaufort building near Coligny Circle had all the news, including this hot item, as recorded later in a Packet column by Corrine Van Landingham:
“Shirley — PLEASE call Stephen! This is important.”
“We often wondered whether he received that call from her,” Van Landingham wrote.
Daniels wrote half a century ago today that he’d recently gotten a big dose of island news from a neighbor. He asked for the source. His neighbor had been to the dentist.
“Undoubtedly, Dr. Joe List may provide a good news service and fill the cavity of information while he packs in the amalgam,” Daniels wrote.
“But it ought not to be necessary to have a mouthful of instruments to find out what is going on.”
So when Jonathan and Lucy Daniels were dining at the Port Royal Inn after church, Jonathan asked the man seated at the next table how his idea for a newspaper was coming along.
Ralph Hilton, a retired Foreign Service officer who had worked with newspapers, said he lacked investors. Apparently, local elites had laughed at his suggestion.
Lucy Daniels offered to invest a few thousand dollars. Jonathan Daniels, retired editor of his family’s News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, offered to write a weekly column. Businessman Tom Wamsley chipped in, and the Sieve was ready to launch.
Hilton was the editor. He came up with the name and found the silhouetted image of a smoke-belching packet boat for the logo. It wobbled atop the front page beside the stacked words, “The Island Packet” set in a type that someone said looked like it was leaning into a sea breeze.
Jonathan Daniels is credited with the large quotation that dominated the top of the front page. The first one read:
“I heard or seemed to hear the chiding Sea
Say, Pilgrim, why so late and slow to come?”
— Emerson.
From the beginning, the Packet was different.
And from the beginning it was successful.
At one time, a readership survey showed that 91 percent of islanders had read The Packet in the past week. That’s unheard of.
Today, The Packet has about 15,000 print subscribers and an additional 7,000 digital subscribers. More than 1.1 million visitors came to the Packet website in June alone.
A wild time
The Packet had two social columns — Margaret Greer covering the party scene and original staffer Marguerite Williams telling who visited whom, and all the bridge news.
But readers referred to something else as the “social column”: the magistrate’s docket listing every case, from those who failed to yield to those accused of driving drunk.
The Packet arrived in a community where postmaster Mary Scheider had just increased the number of mail carriers to seven; the Quarterdeck Lounge was the first commercial establishment to open in Harbour Town; the Hilton Head Company announced plans to develop 2,500 acres called Shipyard; a $10,000 ambulance was a first for the Rescue Squad, mostly members of the Jaycees; and Allan Palmer had opened the Red Piano Art Gallery.
Arnold Palmer won the first Heritage golf tournament the previous Thanksgiving.
The public schools were being integrated for the first time.
A whistle-blowing local doctor, Donald Gatch, and “Hunger Tours” by U.S. Sen. Fritz Hollings, showed the world the chronic poverty of the Lowcountry, with children’s stomachs filled with worms.
The Hilton Head Fishing Cooperative was born, giving Gullah shrimpers a bigger piece of the commercial seafood pie.
And a $100 million BASF petrochemical plant was being pushed by the state for Victoria Bluff on the pristine Colleton River in Bluffton.
Those early Packets were not the most professional things in the world, especially to tackle such mammoth issues.
But they came with a special birthright.
Parade of characters
The Packet’s first building in 1973 opened at about the same time the paper was sold to the News and Observer Publishing Co. for about $900,000.
That building sat off Pope Avenue on the site where Wheelz of Hilton Head rents bikes and golf carts today. It was also different.
It had thick pile carpeting, glass walls overlooking a lagoon and golf hole, a tight spiral staircase to a meeting room upstairs — and not the first whiff of ink. The paper was printed at The Beaufort Gazette.
The office had the only working Xerox machine open to the public, and a steady stream of former executives in shorts and tall socks came to use it, and make themselves at home.
They could easily outnumber a staff of three reporters in the late 1970s. Reporters, by the way, who carefully documented for a front-page story the annual first sighting of a painted bunting.
Also coming and going was an army of stringers. It grew to as many as 50 locals writing regularly on an array of topics to fill a rapidly growing newshole, years before wire copy was added in 1985.
Evelyn and Gus Wavpotich wrote about food, and ran a cooking school. They were followed by Dotti Trivison, who co-wrote an island cookbook, and Ervena Faulkner of Port Royal.
Jane Shaw reviewed the performing arts.
Bob Bender wrote about fishing. He wore a hat shaped like a fish in his newspaper photo.
Betsy Jukofsky covered gardening so well and for so long the Town of Hilton Head Island would later name a xeriscape garden at Town Hall in her honor.
Bill Hill, retired managing editor of the Washington Star, wrote book reviews.
Don Grush, retired from the FBI, covered Audubon meetings. He would handwrite three legal-pad pages on every speaker’s topic, even if it was the mating habits of right whales.
Carl Wellard wrote with passion about nature. His wife, Nancy K. Wellard, now writes about the arts.
Corrine Van Landingham’s column, “Sand Dollars,” ran for 20 years, and she published a collection as a book.
Katie Callahan also wrote a column for 20 years, covering a bit of everything.
She told what women were wearing, from the underpants out, on a day it was too cold to play a big golf tournament.
And she told Town Hall, when the island finally got one, that it was shilly shallying while it should be approving a tree-protection ordinance. She once was co-leader of a Save Our Trees march down Pope Avenue.
But even that parade of characters wasn’t the oddest thing in that old Packet office.
Independent
Jonathan Daniels was press secretary to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the day FDR died in Warm Springs, Georgia.
That evening, he had to find a Bible in the White House so Harry S. Truman could be sworn in as president.
Daniels would grow to admire the unknown former vice president, becoming a Truman campaign consultant and biographer.
Daniels wrote more than a dozen books, with one in 1966 revealing the affair between FDR and Lucy Mercer Rutherferd.
And so that is how photographs of world leaders found their way to the walls of The Island Packet, just as island fishermen always found their way to the door to be photographed holding their catch.
Staring from the walls were Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin and a terribly sick-looking FDR at the Yalta Conference in 1945.
Do you think that the retired editor, the Packet’s “representative at-large,” was frightened by the saber-rattling of Hilton Head developers?
No.
The man described by W.J. Cash in “The Mind of the South” as “sometimes waxing almost too uncritical in his eagerness to champion the underdog,” instead gave his little newspaper its greatest asset:
An independent voice.
