Charles Perry, Hilton Head’s booming voice for public recreation, community service, dies

Wonder if you can do U-turns on the streets paved with gold.

Charles Perry is finding out.

His U-turn long ago on the Beltway after sitting in Washington, D.C., traffic for two hours ended up being a godsend for Hilton Head Island.

He ramped his car through the median, skipped his important sales meeting that day, went home and told his wife Patsy, “Honey, I’m done. We’re moving to Hilton Head.”

Perry, who died at home Tuesday night at age 87, was a champion for public recreation almost as soon as he arrived in 1972 with four children, ages 16 to 10.

He was president of the private, nonprofit Island Youth Center, created with the backing of the Hilton Head Rotary Club to give kids something to do after school.

His was the booming voice behind the hard sell to expand it from its 3,000-square foot building on Cordillo Parkway to a larger campus with pool and gymnasium.

It became the Island Rec Center when many were clinging to the idea that a “limited services” town government had no role to play in such things.

“We believe the island needs a public park and community recreation center-type facility that can serve as the focal point for public recreation activities,” he told a fledgling town government and skeptical community in 1984.

Perry headed the Town of Hilton Head Island’s first Parks and Recreation Commission, which produced the island’s first parks master plan.

He and Brian Carmines and Col. Bob Selton and Gen. Howard Davis and many others were fighting, sometimes almost literally, for parks and fields and tennis courts before there were parks or a Boys and Girls Club or a Rec Center.

Perry did battle with then-Mayor Frank Chapman when the mayor famously told parents demanding more ball fields that the kids could learn to sail.

And despite being told by doctors 14 years ago that he had a 25% chance to live five more years, Perry lived to see the town’s $13.3 million investment in an enlarged and improved Rec Center that opened two years ago.

His life shows that the magic of Hilton Head did not happen by magic.

“If anything got done, it was service organizations and leaders in the community who did it,” Perry said.

HILTON HEAD

Charles Reid Perry III was larger than life in many ways.

He was big in stature, with oversized glasses and hair as big as Tammy Wynette’s above his trademark goatee and smile.

He had a big laugh and even bigger voice, which he had used since 1986 to chair and organize the cadre of announcers at the 9th and 18th holes during the RBC Heritage Presented by Boeing golf tournament in Sea Pines.

His family of four children, 13 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren (with little Charles Perry VI on the way) called him “Big Daddy.”

He was a big deal at his church, as a charter member and original elder at Providence Presbyterian, where he will be laid to rest in the columbarium.

He was a big businessman in a small community, owning and operating Perry Printing for 35 years, probably doing too much gratis work for charities.

One time his pressman walked out, and he had to teach himself how to operate a press.

His community honored him as grand marshal of the Hilton Head Island St. Patrick’s Day Parade in 2010, and a field is named for him at Crossings Park.

But the big man who oozed confidence was at many points in his life least likely to succeed.

CANCER

As a child in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Perry and his siblings were placed in an orphanage for two years due to his father’s mental health issues.

Perry tried to run away, but the 6-year-old got a pretty quick U-turn.

He could go to college only on scholarship. His Sunday School teacher trained him, and he got a swimming scholarship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He married the girl he first dated in eighth grade. He and Patsy, who was a second mom to the many island kids who called her “Ma P,” had been married 58 years when she died in 2012.

Perry was in sales for a company producing college and high school yearbooks when they loaded the kids into the station wagon and headed for a Hilton Head vacation.

“Honey, one day we’re going to live here,” he told Patsy.

He had invested in a gift shop and office supply business called the Bamboo Cage at Coligny Plaza before his abrupt Beltway U-turn brought the whole gang here earlier than expected.

He quickly realized the Bamboo Cage was a failed business. He had to start over, actually in the hole this time.

But he recalls his mother’s mantra that “Christ takes care of everything.”

He recalled it again when he got the news in 2007 that he had Stage 3B lung cancer.

Beating cancer wasn’t any easier than anything else in his life.

He went through lung surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. He battled depression, low white blood cell counts, a violent reaction to chemotherapy that almost killed him, dizziness, a brain scan, loss of hearing, loss of energy, steroids, an endoscopy, a colonoscopy, hallucinations, anxiety attacks and enough side effects to fill a book of small print.

He wrote a small book about his experience with lung cancer, saying he hoped it would make a statement for faith, and encourage others do what he did cold turkey: quit smoking.

Then came the COPD. But he was doing well overall. He played his last round of golf a month ago.

His son Reid said he took a turn for the worse last Friday, and died in his sleep on Tuesday.

“Other than God and his children, he loved Hilton Head more than anything,” Reid said.

Perry talked honestly about his stare-down with death 14 years ago.

“I have a good, positive attitude,” he said. “It’s not depressing, generally, because of the eternal life we’ve been promised.”

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

This story was originally published July 1, 2021 at 11:31 AM.