Lauderdale: Brantley Harvey marks milestones in new memoir
Brantley Harvey looks over the table full of men he meets for breakfast every Wednesday morning -- a couple of them in his Beaufort High School class of 1947 -- and says he sees potential pall bearers.
But Robert Deloach corrects him.
"Honorary pall bearers," Deloach said. "We don't tote anything."
At 85, Harvey now totes a walking cane. But sharing grits and scrambled eggs with a dozen men he calls the "good old boys club" is the first of his three appointments for the day. He'll have lunch with the Rotary Club that once gave him and his late wife, Helen Coggeshall Harvey, its highest honor for community service, the Beaufort Rotary Bowl. And then he'll have supper at First Presbyterian Church.
The men chatter about an abomination of a new private dock that stalks across the marsh downtown. They say it also steps on the sensibilities of the old boys who scurried like fiddler crabs through those creeks as children.
Some expressed doubt about a leading headline of the day: the Hilton Head Island mayor telling a citizen he could not talk at a public meeting.
Between bites of biscuits and jelly, they invited me to their upcoming oyster roast. They told me that Harvey, best known as former South Carolina lieutenant governor, makes the best fig preserves in Beaufort.
And several of the men around the table observe with a laugh that everybody's talking, but nobody's listening.
Harvey hopes that people will listen to the stories his life has to tell. His memoir -- "Palmetto Patriot" -- as told to Cheryl Lopanik Paschal has just come out.
The 270-page paperback started as a story he wanted his grandchildren to know.
They should know that their family was well educated generations before Harvey left Beaufort for The Citadel, then military service and law school. W. Brantley Harvey Jr. was an only child who followed in his father's footsteps as an attorney and public servant. His father served in the state legislature from 1928 to 1952 and Harvey served from 1958 to 1974. Harvey Jr. was then elected lieutenant governor, but lost his bid for governor in the 1978 Democratic primary runoff to Richard Riley.
Harvey said he wanted to tell about that race in his book. He also tells about his law practice, faith, music, travel, education, public service, and life today with a large family produced by his five children.
He tells about new love that came after losing Helen following 58 years of marriage. He married Alice Deforest Klatt in 2012 and they have made some renovations to his historic home in Beaufort called Marshlands, circa 1814.
As the breakfast buddies chatter and laugh, Harvey tells me that the biggest local milestone of his era was Beaufort County losing the BASF chemical plant proposed in 1969 for the Colleton River in Bluffton. A small band of Hilton Head Islanders fought it off as being detrimental to Port Royal Sound, commercial fishing, and the budding tourism industry and real estate market pulling in retirees.
That was the game-changer, Harvey said. It split the county back then, and Harvey still believes the "good-paying jobs and benefits (of industry) would have greatly benefited the average working family."
Before the men shove off into another Beaufort day, former Beaufort County Council Chairman W.R. "Skeet" Von Harten raises a question. He asks if I know how many problems have been solved and how many lies have been told around that breakfast table over the past decade.
"It's incalculable," he said, getting a big laugh from those who were listening.
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This story was originally published December 17, 2015 at 11:06 PM with the headline "Lauderdale: Brantley Harvey marks milestones in new memoir."