Hilton Head’s great escape: How Jody’s greasy spoon helped save us

Jody was more than “fine food.”

She was an oasis of real life on an island of make-believe.

Jody Caskey, who ran Jody’s Fine Food restaurant off Pope Avenue with her former husband, Eric, for 20 years, died Friday, to an outpouring of Hilton Head Island love.

While Hilton Head promoted itself as world-class, upscale and exclusive, Jody was famous for sloppy hamburgers, tater tots and sweet tea.

Hilton Head needed her oasis in those years, 1976 to 1996.

We working blokes longed for reminders that we mattered. And we all mattered at Jody’s.

We were scrambling every day, and well into the night, trying to keep pace with paradise as tens of thousands of new people came to call it home. Most, it seemed, came with a new world-class opportunity to throw into a crowded marketplace.

Jody’s Fine Food was a place we could escape the press releases and sales pitches. We could crowd into its cramped quarters, put up with Jody’s sass at the cash register, wait for our grease-stained white bag or wobbly plastic tray of food — and not give a rip about what the rich people were doing. Unless it involved Sheetrock or cement, or maybe a sheriff’s deputy.

Jody’s was located across the street from the old Island Packet office.

Our editor, Terry Plumb, would have died at a young age without those regular jolts of mid-afternoon Coke on crushed ice.

And I’m pretty sure our publisher, Ben Banks, joined the chase the day someone stole Jody’s pocketbook from her car parked out front. A waitress fired a shot in the air, and a world-class fracas erupted.

Even on ordinary days, if you didn’t come out of Jody’s with a news story, you were deaf, dumb and blind.

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But that’s not what endeared us to Jody.

Neither was it her famous hamburger, which the Lowcountry Backyard Restaurant and Pool Bar Jim’s recently honored by putting “Jody’s Garbage Burger” on the menu: Half-pound paddy, homemade chili, diced onions, mustard, cole slaw and American cheese.

Jody endeared herself to us by knowing us.

And we knew her.

We watched her daughter, Jamie, grow up and become a karate black belt in sixth grade, and then a pharmacist living in Hawaii.

We knew Jody’s parents, restaurateurs in Hendersonville, North Carolina, who actually opened Jody’s here.

We knew about Eric drag-racing.

We knew Jody when she took her game to David Martin’s Piggly Wiggly, where she worked a cash register, and later drove David’s father, Gene Martin, around when his eyesight failed.

We knew her when she left for “home” in North Carolina for the sake of love, and when she soon came back home.

We knew her when she struggled financially and friends helped support her.

And most recently we knew her with recurring serious medical troubles.

What we didn’t know was that Jody for many years dealt with depression, Jamie Caskey told me.

Or that Jody and former husband, Eric, and Eric’s wife, Delia, were close friends. Jamie said Eric and Delia were at the Coastal Carolina Hospital the night Jody died.

We kept up with Jody through her Facebook posts from the Ridgeland Nursing Center, where she lived for the past five years.

She liked to post memes, like this one: “I wasn’t raised like y’all. My mama whooped me. She even killed me one time.”

Jody’s last posts were shares of reposts, like the time Gene Baldwin found the original “Jody’s Fine Food” sign beneath a sign for The Sea Shack restaurant that he runs in the same building now.

Jody wrote: “The Good Years!”

She was right.

HILTON HEAD’S HEART

Jody’s wasn’t the first great escape for the working class.

Katie McElveen (“Miz Mac”) opened her Roadside Rest restaurant before there was a bridge to the island. We workers loved her “meat-and-three.”

Her family sat around a table in the late afternoon, a grandchild telling about school that day, son-in-law Sgt. Earl Adams saying little about his work at the sheriff’s office, Miz Mack shelling butter beans, and others tuning in the soaps.

Jody and Miz Mack were important because they didn’t try to be important, didn’t remind you how important they were, and didn’t treat the “important” people any different from the rest of us.

Hilton Head, of all places, needed that, and still does.

In return, Hilton Head opened its heart — proving to doubters that it has a heart beneath all the gates and guards.

People felt they could tell Jody anything and everything — long before that kind of thing was common on social media.

People knew they could tease her and they’d get a whammo right back.

And that she wasn’t going to necessarily say what she was “supposed” to say.

High school kids had her ear, as well as her cheeseburgers, after school.

When Jamie was a little girl, she asked her mother why she had so many friends.

“She said something like, ‘They like my burgers, baby.’

“But then she said, ‘I have a lot of children.’ ”

That puzzled little Jamie. “Do I have brothers and sisters?”

“You don’t,” Jody told her, “but I have a lot of people I care about who are like my children.”

David Lauderdale may be reached at LauderdaleColumn@gmail.com.