A kid on Hilton Head, the heyday of Sea Pines, and that trip to Palmas Del Mar

With this pandemic still around, I am still hesitant about mingling with the masses. Knowing that my column was due and I still practicing staying at home, this free time led me to pull out a box of old photos, most of which were taken during the earlier days of Hilton Head. Island’s modern development.

Thumbing through photo after photo, I hoped to come across an image that might spark the subject for this week’s column. I know fishing and the great outdoors is my usual content but this time around a couple of photos jogged memories that were cleverly hidden somewhere in this old orb sitting on top of my shoulders.

I have told many stories about just how wonderfully different things were back then for a boy like me. Dirt roads, deserted beaches and wildlife galore, it was the best childhood any kid could hope for.

But among all those tales, I don’t recall ever writing about the period when the world began discovering the island.

Like most new developments, money flowed like water during this period, especially in Sea Pines.

I was in boarding school in Charleston when I started my summer job making all the wood signs in Sea Pines. I would sit in front of a huge router from dawn till dusk, cutting out directional signs made from redwood for the development.

Working alongside two of Sea Pines’ former security police, Herb Perkins and Bob McCall, it was bittersweet because for years they were the only reason I didn’t travel to the dark side.

Other than an occasional state trooper and one Beaufort County deputy, to us young ‘uns, Herb and Bob were the men in green (Sea Pine’s corporate color), wore badges and were to be avoided at all costs.

Obviously, they knew every kid since there so few of us. They were overall pretty cool for law enforcement officers on what we did mischief-wise, letting us off with nothing but a stern warning or worse, threaten to call our folks.

After two years of sign making while Sea Pines was firing on all cylinders and starting new developments in Virginia, Georgia, Florida and Puerto Rico, I was called into the office one day and asked if I would like to move to their Puerto Rican development, called Palmas Del Mar to teach their Spanish-speaking employees my craft.

I was pretty fluent in Spanish and, being in my late teens, it didn’t take me but a second to blurt out, “Yes!” In the offer was an outrageous pay raise, a flight to Palmas aboard a Sea Pines’ corporate plane, a brand new El Camino and house complete with a housekeeper by the name of Mario Piñero. Talking about hitting the jackpot, I was in hog heaven.

Palmas, then just beginning construction, was on the far side of Puerto Rico and the site was magnificent. Sure, I took my fishing rod because oceanside there was an amazing reef and in the span of a hundred or so yards the water dropped off to over a thousand feet.

Leaving the airstrip upon my arrival in my kick butt El Camino I see blue lights in my rearview mirror. I hadn’t gone a mile when this happened. As I was pulling over, the cop drives past me and never stops. A bit later I learned that the police there drove around with blue lights flashing all the time. Between blue lights flashing and the sound of jingles on ice cream trucks winding through the hills, I decided this was my kind of place.

Every morning, my housekeeper Mario would bring me fresh eggs and would go on and on about a hen of his that never grew. I realized it was a bantam hen but my Spanish was not good enough to explain what he had.

Going to work was a trip because the sign shop was on top of a steep mountain and the work truck only had first and fourth gears. Needless to say, it took a running start to get up that hill while half the time we would have to back all the way down and try again.

My only encounter with la policia was late one night after drinking a bottle of rum. They caught me riding buck naked on a cow that had broken loose. I guess they thought it was funny because they let me go if I got off the cow. They never once said anything about my state of dress.

As for Mario, the week before I headed back to the States I searched half of Puerto Rico to find a bantam rooster, which I presented to him. He said it was the happiest day of his life.

What a period that was, one that I will never forget.