The day Ross Perot left Hilton Head because he didn’t want to be an ‘animal in a zoo’

Way back in the dark ages when I was a child, the gorilla in the zoo lived a tortured life.

It didn’t take an advanced degree for me to see that Willie B., the superstar at Zoo Atlanta, wasn’t real happy living in a glass-and-bar cage with only a television and a tire swing.

Eventually, the zoo changed course and Willie B. got to roam a more natural habitat outside. He even met girl gorillas.

Perhaps it was similar to the gorilla habitat that a 4-year-old child managed to enter last week at the Cincinnati Zoo. When the gorilla started yanking the child around, it was shot and killed, stirring up a big stink in America.

Nobody wants to be a monkey in the zoo.

I remember the day billionaire H. Ross Perot sold his oceanfront vacation home on Hilton Head Island without ever spending a night in it because of publicity about it.

“Unfortunately, I can’t return to Hilton Head,” Perot told our reporter after selling the home on Surf Scoter in Sea Pines in 1987 for $1.2 million.

“Unless I want to be an animal in a zoo with people driving by my house all the time.”

I’ve often wondered if people living in the fine old homes of Beaufort ever feel like they’re in a zoo, with so many tour groups passing by. I’ve imagined a couple sitting on the verandah and musing after a tour group stops and then ambles on: “Honey, did you know that Scarlett O’Hara made her prom dress from our kitchen curtains?”

Perot knew all about publicity before he got to our zoo. This was when “On Wings of Eagles” by Ken Follett was a best-seller and TV mini-series. It was the incredible story of Perot organizing and sponsoring a private rescue team to get two of his computer firm’s employees out of jail in Iran.

But it was before Perot ran for president, gaining 19 percent of the popular vote as a third-party outsider in 1992. Perot pointed at little charts to show why we must balance the federal budget. And he decried the North American Free Trade Agreement, saying it would cause so many American jobs to move south we would all hear “a giant sucking sound.”

Well, the giant sucking at The Packet came the same day we reported Perot didn’t want to live in Sea Pines like an animal in the zoo.

That was the day we used the wrong masthead. It had been created as a joke on a fake front page to honor a departing editor. But on this day, every single Packet came out with “The Island Racket” emblazoned atop the front page.

Reader reaction was something like: “You call that news?”

In-house reaction was more somber. We learned to take our jobs seriously, but not ourselves. We learned we were very much human. And maybe we got a taste of what it is like to be gawked at like a monkey in the zoo.

Thinking back on the dark ages of my childhood trips to the zoo, it seems that things have come full circle. Now the monkeys are outside and we’re the ones sitting in cages watching television.

This story was originally published June 2, 2016 at 12:34 PM with the headline "The day Ross Perot left Hilton Head because he didn’t want to be an ‘animal in a zoo’."