You know about Charles Fraser. But Sea Pines wouldn’t be Sea Pines without Joe

The 50th RBC Heritage Presented by Boeing is like the tale of the tortoise and the hare.

Think of energetic tournament founder Charles E. Fraser, who transformed Hilton Head Island beginning 60 years ago with his ideas and storylines that constantly flew like hummingbirds from his brilliant mind.

He would be the hare, always out front attracting attention.

But his baby — Sea Pines and Harbour Town — would never have reached this milestone without the tortoise-like consistency of his brother, the late Joseph B. "Joe" Fraser Jr.

It's just like the old fable. Without both contrasting personalities — and their remarkable parents, Joseph Bacon Fraser, a lieutenant general in the Georgia National Guard, and Pearl Collins Fraser of Liberty County, Ga. — there would be no "Cheers to 50 years!" resounding over the Harbour Town Golf Links this week.

Joe Fraser was chairman of the tournament's sponsor for 19 years after Sea Pines had to give it up. He was succeeded by his son Simon Fraser after the 2006 event.

But Joe Fraser's chapter in Hilton Head history is much thicker and more complex than that.

He often was the glue holding things together behind the scenes in Sea Pines as the island lurched from a sparsely populated forest into a busy hometown.

He arrived with his young family from Hinesville, Ga., in 1964 to pitch in with the family's daring venture on land purchased for its timber.

Joe Fraser was a home builder and a corporate officer in charge of day-to-day operations for the Sea Pines Plantation Co. that sprang from the Fraser Lumber Co. He also designed buildings and whole communities. The plans for Hilton Head Plantation — initially a Sea Pines project — were developed on his dining room table with a crew that included Wes Wilhelm and David Ames.

But his most valuable contribution was much different.

He acted as the ballast for his flamboyant, outspoken younger brother, Charles.

The family

The Frasers took a big gamble with the tortoise and the hare.

Charles was fresh out of Yale Law School when he talked his father into letting him develop the land after the timbering was done. Better looking offers — with real dollars attached — were on the table.

Charles’ master plan showing people of all ages frolicking in tune with nature was widely seen as folly when the real world around him looked more like a mosquito pond. But the father let his younger son give it a whirl, perhaps assured that Joe would be close by.

People who worked with him say Charles could toss out 100 ideas a day. Joe helped his brother’s celebrated staff of Harvard MBAs pull off the good ideas — and some bad ones — without going totally mad, or killing Charles.

Everyone could vent with Joe, a trusted ally for both the ground forces and the dreamer.

“I tell people my role was to fire the boiler, not make the speeches,” Joe Fraser told me.

He died in 2014 at age 88, after his brother Charles was killed in a boat explosion in 2002 at age 73.

And now we can look back and see that each of the three Fraser men and their wives contributed different ingredients to make the Lowcountry boil.

Joe, who recovered from childhood polio to become a champion sprinter, was more like his mother.

"Miss Pearl" was a strong but soft-spoken, analytical woman. She had clear directives, but she polished off what she was doing with the human feel, said longtime Sea Pines executive Thomas Norby, who practically was raised by the Frasers in Hinesville.

Miss Pearl had the prettiest flower garden in the region, and she wrote a detailed gardening manual for Sea Pines. Plants from her garden made up the landscaping at the company’s new William Hilton Inn in 1959, and she personally supervised the job.

Charles was more like his father, the quick-thinking, hard-charging general. He served his nation in World War I and World War II and was called to the Korean War just as Hilton Head development began along with the Fred C. Hack and Olin T. McIntosh families.

Joe’s first wife, the late Becky Fraser, acted as a “company mom” to young families moving to an island so remote her own children were driven to school in Savannah in an old Checker cab limousine. Charles’ wife, Mary, founded the Sea Pines Montessori School, a first for South Carolina.

Together, the Frasers — staunch Presbyterians — donated land for all the earliest south-island churches.

The plan

Joe Fraser was the “people person” whose carefully measured words helped make sense of all the high-wire acts going on around him.

Those skills would be desperately needed in the late 1980s after the Frasers had sold Sea Pines.

When Sea Pines and most of the island’s other large developments became ensnared in bankruptcy, Joe Fraser headed a community liaison committee. He worked on the street level, talking to creditors and property owners during extremely stressful times. He was a voice of reason in a community that seemed suddenly to have lost its mind.

And then Joe Fraser was called on to help save the Heritage golf tournament.

By 1986, the Harbour Town Golf Links had been allowed to get ragged, and the tournament sponsor was bouncing checks.

But in a community saturated with gung-ho types, it was always the sleepy-looking Joe Fraser in the important chair when banks were asked to promise hundreds of thousands of dollars for the tournament prize money — or when locals rebuffed an outside attempt to buy the golf course and tournament.

It was all very personal for Joe Fraser.

He helped lay new sod by the ninth green two weeks before the tournament in 1986, in an effort to meet PGA Tour demands the company could not afford. He also was laying sod in the same place on the morning of the first round of the first tournament on Thanksgiving weekend 1969.

Joe Fraser knew all about getting things done on a wing and a prayer — and Hilton Head grew to recognize him as an answer to prayer himself.

In 1987, Joe Fraser emerged as the founding chairman of a new nonprofit that would take over sponsorship of the tournament — the Heritage Classic Foundation.

That same year, the upstart telecommunications giant MCI stepped to the table as title sponsor. Through MCI and successors WorldCom and Verizon, that relationship, and stability, carried the tournament for the better part of a quarter century.

Now at 50, the tournament works under new contracts with title sponsor RBC and presenting sponsor Boeing. And the Heritage Classic Foundation has given $38 million to charities and local scholarships. The tournament's economic benefit to the community is immeasurable really, with all the television time worldwide, but it is said to be in the range of $90 million per year.

Joe Fraser told me he knew Sea Pines was his brother’s baby, and he played a small role while Charles saw the big picture. He said he simply went all-in on the plan.

“It was a good plan,” Joe said, needing only five syllables to size up five raucous decades.

This story was originally published April 13, 2018 at 12:00 AM with the headline "You know about Charles Fraser. But Sea Pines wouldn’t be Sea Pines without Joe."