Sea Pines worker hits 50 years on the job, still shaping the Lowcountry dream

Acie Baker started work at Sea Pines 50 years ago, and he's still on the job.

On Thursday, he helped slice a large white sheet cake with the Harbour Town Lighthouse on it as the rest of the golf course maintenance crew for the Ocean and Heron Point courses watched.

Company officials gave him a wrapped gift and praised his dependability, eye for detail and even the bacon, grits and eggs he sometimes brings everyone for breakfast.

Baker, 72, declined his opportunity to make a speech. Then he went back to work.

It's hard to imagine that anyone has ever worked longer for a single employer on Hilton Head Island.

Sea Pines was founded in 1956. In 1965, Baker started his early morning trek from Bluffton to work on the island's first golf course.

He has now worked at Sea Pines almost twice as long as its founder, the late Charles E. Fraser, who famously discovered that golf courses gave value to otherwise unsellable land, and became a magnet for vacationers and retirees.

Baker discovered that mowing and trimming greens, tees and fairways could bring a steady, year-round income. It helped him raise nine children who all found more opportunity than he did as a young man in the Lowcountry.

At Sea Pines, where 11 current employees have hit at least the 30-year mark and where the ebullient Earl "Happy" Mitchell retired in 2009 after 45 years, Baker has become a quiet marvel. He never uses his sick days, he's always on call and he's always early.

Baker blasts holes through the U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics that show the median employee tenure in America is 4.6 years.

"I like my work," he says.

Way to a dollar

Baker's work is a portrait of the new world sketched by Fraser, Fred Hack and the McIntosh family when they bought into Hilton Head for its timber in 1949.

He was born on April 24, 1942, to a midwife named Miss Florine in a hushed corner of Bluffton's Belfair Plantation.

That's where his grandfather, James Baker, and his father, also Acie Baker, lived.

Baker's father worked in the May River, picking oysters.

And that's what Baker did too, when he left Michael C. Riley School in the 10th grade.

He worked for John Samuel "Junior" Graves Jr. at the Bluffton Seafood Co., where Bluffton Oyster Co. is today at the foot of Wharf Street. He was provided a 16-foot wooden bateau built on the hill by older Gullah men Baker recalls as Clifton Gaston, Frank Kidd and "old man Colson."

Graves outfitted it with a 10-horsepower Johnson outboard motor, which Baker paid for over time.

Oystering was big business in those days. Graves had several shucking houses, along with other oystermen including Frank Toomer, Billy Toomer, S.V. "Chief" Toomer and Benny Hudson.

Baker said the shucking house he supplied could turn out 300 gallons a day.

He never really liked picking oysters, but for whites and blacks in the Lowcountry, that was about the only way to a dollar.

"I had no choice," Baker said. "You could farm, but the trouble with that was you could eat up all your money."

Local talent

Golf wasn't Baker's initial swing thought.

He worked for Whaley Construction in Savannah for a while. That's the company that would eventually build Harbour Town.

He worked on Pinckney Island when it was a private hunting preserve.

And he ended up working on the golf course at Port Royal Plantation, where he was poached by a man from Sea Pines named Al Dunning. He went to work on the Ocean Course on Jan. 15, 1965.

"I'm still here," Baker said.

He's afraid if he sits down he might not get up. So he still works, and he still goes in the river, and he still cooks for crowds on a grill someone made for him from a 120-gallon gas tank.

Baker stands for the local folks who made the Lowcountry what it has become, even though the developers have gotten most of the attention.

And in his spare time, he likes to get with co-workers who are like his brothers -- Harold "Fox" Jenkins and Leroy "Dab" Jenkins -- and play golf.

Follow columnist David Lauderdale at twitter.com/ThatsLauderdale.

This story was originally published January 17, 2015 at 5:55 PM with the headline "Sea Pines worker hits 50 years on the job, still shaping the Lowcountry dream."