Summer 1948
There were four of us who went to Tybee that summer day in 1948.
We were tired of the river, wanted the beach, the ocean, something different from what we had in Bluffton. There was Becky from Atlanta on her annual visit to her Cubbedge kinfolk, Clare from Charleston who was staying over at High Bluff with the Keating clan, Bobbie Ann who had come all the way from Fort Smith, Arkansas to stay with Pop and Mom Gabriel at Angel’s Roost on Crystal Beach and me, who was happily spending this summer of my 16th birthday on Myrtle Island.
We played that summer as we did every year - simple games. The Cubbedge family had a badminton court set up in their yard, and we played many a vicious game, swatting that birdie over the net and arguing so politely about whether it was “in,” or “out.”
Like everything else in life, you had to do something first before you could actually play the game. In badminton, this meant convincing someone to get out the chalk and mark out the court lines. For some reason, the net always seemed to sag and needed a bit of tightening, and then, being near pine trees, there were cones that had wandered over onto the court and needed to be cleared away. At least, we didn’t have to sweep like we did when we drove over and played on Mr. T. O. Lawton’s paved tennis court. It was normal for us to drag along a broom or two with our rackets when we went off to use his court, which was almost forever full of twigs and leaves. Croquet was a game we could play almost anywhere. All we needed was an open area without too many bushes. And yes, it was a competitive game.
Every man for himself.
We were not exactly kind to one another when we dragged the croquet set out of the pump house and put it up on the bluff overlooking the Maye River. You wouldn’t believe nice girls could be so wicked with a croquet mallet, but threatening to smack your opponent’s ball over the bluff into the river offers a certain righteous satisfaction. Croquet is a comfortable summer afternoon sport with just enough activity to prevent boredom and not enough to expend a great deal of energy. We knew that ladies didn’t sweat or perspire in the heat of the day. Of course, we might glow a little.
Afternoons, when it was just too hot to move, when the tide was dead low, everything still, the Spanish moss hanging motionless from the trees, with not even the land breeze from the West whispering, the air so humid, it felt as though there was a wet pillowcase over your head. We read, flopping on studio couches draped in faded cotton Bates bedspreads, hogging as much of the air the electric fan, which whirred and stuttered over in the corner where it sat on a table, could put out. Forget cross ventilation, it didn’t matter if all the windows were open, nothing stirred. We lay around limp, occasionally taking a sip from a bottle of Coca Cola we had chilled in the icebox. It might have been a half degree cooler on the screened porch, but there weren’t many places there where you could stretch out full length.
No matter where you were between the hours of one and three on a miserably hot summer afternoon, everything was an effort. We waited impatiently for the tide to change and start to come in so we could go swimming down on the beach in front of our house. There were no docks on our side of the island. When the tide was out we could walk from one end of Myrtle Island to the other on what was then a hard sandy beach. No one ever wanted to swim off the drop off where the water was murky and deep and hid so many unknown creatures.
For a couple of hours, we would simply lie around and read. These were the days of movie magazines, Photoplay, Silver Screen, when we knew each and every one of the stars in Hollywood and kept up with their lives or what their agents published. These were the days of Ingrid Bergman and her love affair with Rossellini, of Esther Williams, who swam underwater with flowers in her hair and whose makeup never washed off. We read gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and her archrival, Louella Parsons, and believed every word they wrote. We weren’t above reading funny books. This was summer and school days spent researching in the big library on Bull Street, of borrowing a copy of the Lincoln Library from Edwina, whose mother was a librarian, and writing papers for Mr. Langford, the history teacher, were over for a little while.
We spent hours on the river riding up and down in my wooden bateau with its three-horse-powered motor. I loved my bateau. Daddy had it built with a cypress bottom so it would last, but even so, every spring, he would put it up on sawhorses and scrape off the barnacles. Then would come new caulking and red lead paint, which lasted for the summer.
You could recognize everyone’s boat on the river; all had different colors. Mine was grey with a soft blue stripe and had two wide seats, not including the triangular one up front where I usually put the anchor and the one across the back where I sat holding onto the outboard motor handle. For a while, I used a one-and-a-half-horsepower motor. It was tiny, and I named it Timothy. I could easily carry it down the steps to the beach and put it on my bateau, which suited me just fine. It also didn’t take much gas to run it.
Sometimes, we went all the way across the river, what my friend Hank calls the Bay of Bluffton, to the public dock on Calhoun Street. It wasn’t near as fancy in those days, but we’d tie up with no worries that anyone would bother our faithful bateau. If we had forgotten to bring along a pair of sandals, we walked barefooted ever so carefully on the oyster shell road past the Church of the Cross and Seven Oaks up to the Post Office on the corner of Bridge and Calhoun Streets to see if we had any mail that might have come General Delivery. After all, we were gone for the entire summer, and we corresponded with friends in Savannah.
We had no telephone. Stamps were three cents, and penny postcards were still a penny unless you bought a picture postcard. They were a nickel apiece, but the only place to buy them was at Goodman’s, which was usually our destination and where we knew we could get a 5-cent banana popsicle, and there was the possibility of buying a new movie magazine or funny book. Just watching Mr. Goodman behind the counter adding up everyone’s groceries in his head filled me with awe. He was that quick. He had an abacus, the first I had ever seen. Didn’t need it, he said.
Sometimes, especially when we had on a new outfit, matching shorts and tee shirt, we’d get in the bateau and go visiting at All Joy Beach and Estill Beach and all the way across to Potato Island where Lane Whitman had the first aluminum boat on the river and we were green with envy.
Visiting is something we had a right good bit of. Not that we did a lot when we got to somebody’s house. We’d sit on the porch on a rocking chair or in a swing and talk about - not much. Maybe we’d be offered something cool to drink. Maybe we’d even decide to play a game or two of cards, but mostly, we sat. It was a comfortable kind of sitting. No need to impress.
At home, we churned ice cream and ate watermelon spitting the seeds with gusto. One afternoon at the Cubbedges, we pulled taffy, a truly messy business. We swam until our fingers looked like prunes and rode an aquaplane when we could find someone with a boat and motor fast enough to pull us
It wasn’t like we didn’t have anything to do.
But, we had done it all. We wanted Tybee, the white sand beach, the cotton candy, the corn dogs, the noise and excitement of the boardwalk, the ocean with waves we could body surf.
So armed with beach towels and those horrible finger pinching wooded folding chairs with striped canvas seats, we set off.
Just in case we got thirsty on the way we had a thermos jug of freshly squeezed lemonade chilled with cracked ice. Wearing bathing suits under our shorts and tee shirts, we had beach bags stuffed with Aquamarine lotion and Noxzema, baby oil and bathing cap, one towel to dry with and another to lie on the sand.
In no time, we had driven through Pritchardville and were past the pig farm. At Limehouse we got on the main road, U.S. Highway 17 and followed it south over the many bridges in the Savannah Conservancy past the Rice Mill ruins where there used to be a notorious honkytonk, over the Houlihan Bridge, a creaky swing bridge that had the habit of opening just when you were in a hurry, through Port Wentworth and Garden City with its multiple railroad crossings, over the Bay Street viaduct into Savannah. Straight on Bay Street across the edge of town, south on Price Street, east on Victory Drive, which turned into U.S. Highway 80. We drove ever eastward past Thunderbolt, Whitemarsh, and Wilmington Islands, past Fort Pulaski, and finally over Lazaretto Creek onto Tybee Island.
And all this in our speedy two-door sedan with windows rolled down and hot air blowing in as we tore down the road at a wild 45 miles per hour.
Ah, but we had a grand time.
