Recreation and Leisure

A morning newspaper, daily and Sunday, published in the city of Beaufort.

South Carolina has beauty pageants to celebrate almost every possible age, special interest, location, and agricultural product. The most famous of these is the Miss South Carolina pageant. Among the more well known of local contests are the Miss Sun Fun and Miss Bikini Wahine pageants, held during Myrtle Beach’s Sun Fun Festival.

Members conducted experiments in all phases of agriculture and animal husbandry, attempted various industrial pursuits, and were particularly concerned with slavery.

The town was named in honor of Judge John Belton O’Neall, president of the Greenville and Columbia Railroad.

His first and most famous work, Master Skylark, appeared in book form in 1897. A tale of Shakespeare’s time, it is considered one of the best American historical novels for children. In 1898 ill health drove him to Charleston, where he renewed his acquaintance with the Smythe family, whom he had met a few years before at Salt Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Bennett’s second book, Barnaby Lee, was published in 1902.

Benton will be remembered for some of the songs he wrote and for his stylish delivery. Opinions differ about the lush strings that often accompanied him—roughly the R&B equivalent of the “Nashville Sound”—but his rich, gospel-inflected baritone recalled predecessors such as Billy Eckstine and set the stage for the explosion of “soul music” in the 1960s.

The Big Apple dance was popularized nationally when it was taken to Manhattan by University of South Carolina students. A combination of the square dance and various jazz routines of the 1920s, the Big Apple caught the attention of white college students who, encouraged by nightclub owner Fat Sam, paid 10¢ to watch dancers from the nightclub balcony.

Big Thursday’s popularity exploded after World War II. By the late 1950s, however, Clemson was pushing for an end-of-season game played on an alternating home schedule, in part so that Clemson could share the tourist money that surrounded the game. Both schools agreed that 1959 would be the last Big Thursday game, which Clemson won, 27–0. Big Thursday ended with Clemson holding a 33–21–3 advantage.

In some places the Black River is swamplike, while in others it is swift moving with a sandy bottom. With the exception of the town of Kingstree and the final stretch in Georgetown County, the banks of the Black River remain forested and largely undisturbed by development. Since the collapse of the rice culture, South Carolinians have mostly used the Black River basin as a resource for timbering, hunting, and fishing.

Prior to the Civil War, Blackville prospered as a cotton reception point, which stimulated the development of a bustling mercantile community. The final decades of the twentieth century found Blackville struggling to maintain its position of economic importance within Barnwell County. In 1979 more than one-fifth of Blackville families lived below the poverty line, and the removal of the town’s railroad line in the late 1980s further added to difficulties.

Blair joined NBC-TV in 1950 and moderated “The American Forum of the Air,” a debate program. He was named Washington, D.C., correspondent for “The Today Show,” which was launched on January 14, 1952, as an experimental morning news program. The innovative enterprise eventually won acclaim with Dave Garroway and Jack Lescoulie as hosts and Blair as newscaster. Blair worked with twenty-five hosts during his twenty-three years on the show.

Standing six feet tall and weighing more than two hundred pounds, Blanchard distinguished himself as a fullback on the West Point football teams from 1944 to 1946. He received the Heisman Trophy as the nation’s top collegiate player in 1945, the first junior to gain that recognition, and was named to the All-America teams in 1944, 1945, and 1946.

In South Carolina, the hotbed was the Greenville-Spartanburg area, where a coterie of talented guitarists contributed to a style that became known as the “Piedmont” or East Coast school of blues.

Located on the twenty-foot-high bluffs of the May River and facing the cool, southerly winds, it was an ideal summer refuge for planter families. The town, known first simply as May River and then later as Kirk’s Bluff, was officially named Bluffton in 1844. The development of Hilton Head as a major tourist destination in the early 1970s marked a revitalization of Bluffton. Annexations and the spread of Hilton Head’s resort and tourism economy led to a seventy-five percent increase in Bluffton’s population during the 1990s.

In November 1926 Chris returned to Atlanta for the first of six sessions for Columbia Records. His initial effort resulted in “Talking Blues” and “Hannah (Won’t You Open That Door),” both of which went on to become highly successful and widely copied numbers that sold nearly 100,000 copies. One of his 1927 recordings, “Born in Hard Luck”/“The Medicine Show,” also did quite well, racking up sales in excess of 40,000 at a time when anything that sold more than 20,000 copies could be considered a hit.

Boyd has published four novels: Nerves (1973), Mourning the Death of Magic (1977), The Revolution of Little Girls (1991), and Terminal Velocity (1997). The last two are part of a trilogy telling the story of Ellen Burns, a Charleston native who experiences an unsatisfying marriage, experiments with heavy drinking and drugs, and loses herself through various affairs and lifestyle changes. In 1988 she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Fellowship. Four years later she received the Lambda Literary Award for her novel The Revolution of Little Girls, and in 1993–1994 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

This amiable, small, dark brown retriever is a superb hunter and loving family pet. It was bred to provide an ideal dog for hunting fowl in the swamps along the Wateree River, which demanded a sturdy, compact dog built for boat travel and capable of retrieving on land or water. Lemuel Whitaker “Whit” Boykin, a planter and sportsman from the Boykin community near Camden, tested many dogs to answer these needs. With luck and selective breeding, the multipurpose retriever was being bred to type by the 1920s.

In October 1920 Bragg was named director of the Charleston Museum and became the first woman in the country to hold such a position at a publicly supported museum. Soon thereafter she opened the museum to black patrons one afternoon a week. She continued the educational focus of the museum and added a children’s library and a reading room that lent books. These efforts were the forerunners of the Charleston Free Library, which opened in January 1931. She was both its trustee and its first librarian.

Incorporated in 1858, Branchville is known as Orangeburg County’s “railroad town” because of its recognition as the oldest railroad junction in the world. The South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company completed its track to Branchville from Charleston on November 7, 1832. Every September, Branchville’s railroad history comes to the forefront during “Raylrode Daze Festivul,” a weekend event that centers around the town’s historic railroad depot/museum.

Bristow’s natural storytelling ability, neatly devised and detailed plots, sharply drawn characters, telling eye for landscape and its detail, use of common sense, gift for dramatic effect, and emotional sincerity were the characteristics of her work that critics and reviewers singled out for praise. Margaret Wallace spoke of her “solid and versatile talent as a novelist.” The critic Susan Quinn Berneis claimed that Bristow’s greatest skill was reserved for “the unfolding of American history as displayed around the lives of the people who created it.” And Eugene Armfield remarked that she belonged “among those Southern novelists who [were] trying to interpret the South and its past in critical terms.”