Holding On to the Magic

Tallu Fish loved Jekyll so much, she started a museum

BY JENNIFER SENATOR

As a child growing up in Waycross, Georgia, Tallulah

"Tallu" Fish was captivated by Jekyll Island.

"Her mother would bring her to Brunswick and they would look across the river to where the millionaires were," says Sarah Tallu Schuyler, Fish's granddaughter. "She thought it was a magical place."

Years later, after a career in journalism (she was editor of the Democratic Women's Club Journal of Kentucky and a columnist for The Courier-Journal in Louisville) and after the death of her husband, Fish found her way to Jekyll at last, hired by the state to establish the Jekyll Island Museum in Indian Mound Cottage, the former home of William Rockefeller.

"They gave her about 20 days to get it up and running," says Andrea Marroquin, Curator of Mosaic, Jekyll Island Museum. Undaunted, Fish moved into the cottage's servants quarters and got to work. She salvaged furniture, decorations, porcelain, and taxidermy from surrounding buildings and cottages to recreate the splendor of Club Era island life. The museum opened its doors on December 11, 1954, the same day the causeway to Jekyll Island opened to the public. westinjekyllisland.com

Known for her outgoing personality, Fish "was a woman with great big ideas," says Schuyler. One was to charge visitors to sit in the "Wishing Chair," an ornately carved chair that she may have found in the clubhouse.

"She came up with a story that if you sat in it, your wish would come true," says Marroquin. "It was one of the many ways she raised money for the museum."

Fish also put her 13 grandchildren to work when they visited every year.

"She would have us memorize a spiel about the Rockefellers and give tours to visitors," says Schuyler. The children also recited Marshes of Glynn, Sidney Lanier's ode to the local salt marshes, and gathered shells and sand dollars to sell in the museum.

"She gave us a nickel for every sand dollar," remembers Schuyler.

Fish, who lived in Indian Mound Cottage (once known as Rockefeller Cottage) for more than eight years until moving into her home on Bliss Lane, helmed the museum through the 1950s and '60s. She compiled the museum's archives and wrote several books and numerous articles about Jekyll Island.

Fish died in 1971, but the Wishing Chair and other items she collected are still in Indian Mound Cottage, along with her portrait, painted by her daughter, Betty Smith. (Her family remains connected to Jekyll as well. Schuyler and her husband live on the island, and Fish's 12 other grandchildren visit each year with their families.) A street near the beach, Tallu Fish Lane, was named in her honor.

"She loved this island and its stories, and everyone loved her, too," says Schuyler. "You would never forget her if you met her."

Carl Sears

Pastry Chef

The man behind Jekyll’s most scrumptious sweets

The Jekyll Island Club’s key lime pie contains just three main ingredients: sweetened condensed milk, egg yolks, and key lime juice. It may sound simple, but the tangy, creamy dessert—perhaps the island's most famous dish—is what keeps many guests coming back year after year (or, for those nearby, week after week).

"The hotel has been serving it since reopening in 1987," says pastry chef Carl Sears. "I've never changed the recipe. I think if I did, I would be shot."

Sears has been at the Jekyll Island Club since a culinary school internship 23 years ago. Cooking is his second career. He started out working for IBM in Atlanta after earning a degree in mathematics from Georgia Tech. But he grew bored with desk work after a few years, and he'd been baking since he was a kid, helping his mom roll out Christmas cookies when he was barely tall enough to reach the counter.

In some ways, Sears says, being a math whiz was a natural prerequisite for his career in the kitchen.

"Baking is a precise art," he says. "You can't taste and change the recipe as you go. You have to do it by the book, every time."

Sears is constantly testing and perfecting new desserts for the Jekyll Island Club’s four restaurants. The menus change seasonally with the exception of a few mainstays, like that key lime pie. (A recent favorite: a s'mores torte with homemade marshmallows.) But the best part of the job, he says, is creating wedding cakes for the more than 100 couples who get married at the resort every year.

"The craziest one I ever did was probably a scale model of the hotel, in cake form,” he says. Grooms’ cakes often provide an opportunity for some fun.

Sears has sculpted a cake bust of Mr. T and an Arkansas Razorback. Last year, one of his cakes made news when Josh Reddick, an outfielder for the Houston Astros who grew up nearby, hosted a Spiderman-themed ceremony. One half of the tiered wedding cake was traditional white fondant, the other half decorated like the front of Spidey's suit.

After nearly a quarter-century at the Jekyll Island Club, Sears has no desire to hang up his spatula and move on. He loves uncovering new bits of history about the resort (which dates to 1888), trading ghost stories with hotel workers, and strolling along Driftwood Beach when his shift is over.

"Coming to work here every day, you never get over how beautiful it is," he says. "The island becomes almost ingrained in you. I came for an internship, but it turned into family, and I never wanted to leave."

“I remember that first marsh walk very, very well. I was a little scared I would see an alligator but I think I had watched too much ‛Crocodile Hunter.’ There were hundreds of fiddler crabs running everywhere, and we came back covered in mud ... it was wonderful.”

—chris nowicki, of savannah, attended several georgia 4-h camps on jekyll island as a teenager. the marsh walk, a hands-on exploration of jekyll ’ s salt marsh ecosystem, continues to be a favorite activity for campers.

As told to JENNIFER SENATOR Photograph courtesy of Camp Jekyll

By Elizabeth Florio • Illustrations by Kelsey Oseid

My first attempt at serious stargazing ended in embarrassment. I'd traveled to Jekyll Island with my mom and young daughter, three city girls armed with binoculars and a Sky Guide app. Conditions were optimal, the February air clear and bracing, the moon a day shy of being new.

Stargazing Rule No. 1: For the sharpest view, pick a night with little to no moonlight.

I wondered about location, too. If you want to catch a sunrise, Driftwood Beach is your spot. But the lights of nearby St. Simons may interfere with constellation-spotting, I thought. Jekyll's remote southern beaches seemed better suited to the task. So we headed south.

Stargazing Rule No. 1:

For the sharpest view, pick a night with little to no moonlight.

By day, Glory Beach is a broad, inviting stretch of sand pockmarked with seashells, a favorite spot for birders. It's named for the 1989 film Glory, which was filmed here. To access the beach, a 200-foot-long boardwalk slices through a picturesque tangle of live oak, red cedar, and saw palmetto.

But by night, as we drove a lonely stretch of road to the Jekyll Island Soccer Complex, where Glory Beach and its boardwalk are located, the darkness deepened, broken only by my headlights and the reflected eyes of deer in the woods. Pulling into the deserted parking lot, we caught another pair of green eyes; an opossum, who shuffled under the boardwalk in no particular hurry. I switched off the engine and the world was blotted out. We had driven five hours from Atlanta. All that stood between us now and an epic view of the heavens was a 200-foot walk in blackness like this city girl has rarely experienced through a thicket probably teeming with wild critters. (Visceral fear trumps reason. I had an actual lump in my throat. Some moonlight, I thought, would be nice.)

"Scared off by deer and an opossum," my mom said as we lay down on our backs in the parking lot of the soccer complex. "We really are city girls."

Stargazing Rule No. 2: Bring a blanket. All that craning will get to your neck.

Stargazing Rule No. 2:

The truth is, there's not a bad place to sky-watch on Jekyll. That's the opinion of Dawn Zenkert, coordinator of the UGA 4-H Tidelands Nature Center. "When I put my garbage out, I go, ‘Oh wow, look at the stars!'" she says. Zenkert moved to the island some 20 years ago, just in time to catch a meteor shower. She lay on the beach watching green streaks paint the night. There are certainly more remote destinations in Georgia to stare at the night sky, and one certified dark sky park, Stephen C. Foster State Park in the Okefenokee Swamp. (If you're game for a nighttime paddle over gator-infested waters, good for you.) But for an easy-access vacation locale, Jekyll gets pretty dark. The majority of the land is undeveloped. To protect sea turtle hatchlings that follow the horizon to the ocean, artificial beachfront lighting and even flashlights on the beach are forbidden.

Stargazing Rule No. 3: Use a red LED flashlight. The longer wavelength preserves your night vision and, conveniently, doesn't bother sea turtles.

About four times a summer, the Tidelands Nature Center hosts astronomy nights on a deck overlooking a saltwater pond. Attendees are shown a PowerPoint tour of the sky before glimpsing the real deal through telescopes. They learn about things like circumpolar constellations, which never set below the horizon. In the Northern Hemisphere, these include Ursa Major (the Great Bear containing the Big Dipper), Ursa Minor (home to the North Star), Draco the dragon, Cepheus the king, and vain queen Cassiopeia, whose famous W shape traces a woman's body as she reclines in a chair combing her hair. The most important thing to know

Stargazing Rule No. 3:

Use a red LED flashlight on the beach at night.

about stars is that they're always there; we just can't always see them. As the earth journeys around the sun, different stars shift into our nighttime view. The same holds true for planets, but as moving targets with varying orbital speeds, planets have less-fixed schedules. Venus, the brightest celestial object after the sun and moon, will retreat in May this year, ceding her majesty to Jupiter and Saturn. (Tip: If the light doesn't twinkle, you're looking at a planet, not a star.)

Dillon Marcy, coordinator of the Georgia Southern University Planetarium, grew up studying the constellations in Brunswick and St. Simons. He has two favorite landmarks in the summer sky: "Scorpio makes an easyto-find J hook, and the main part of Sagittarius looks like a teapot. In between them you can point to the center of our Milky Way, where a supermassive black hole is located."

In enhanced photographs, the Milky Way appears as a volcanic rend in the sky, glowing orange and blue. Standing on a Jekyll beach on a moonless night, you might be able to distinguish a dim white arc. In most places you won't see anything at all. Though it's now fading from our light-polluted view, this galactic streak has long transfixed humans. The Mississippians, an ancient Native American civilization that flourished in the Southeastern United States, saw it as a "path of souls," a springboard to our final destination.

What To Bring

A red LED flashlight is friendly to both sea turtles and astronomers. Ordinary white light flashlights are not permitted on Jekyll beaches from May to October.

A stargazing app lets you point your smartphone at the sky and identify objects. Options include Sky Guide, SkyView, and Night Sky. Be sure to use your dimmest phone setting.

A blanket or towel will save your neck.

Binoculars (optional) are easy to bring along and, as a bonus, can be used for bird-watching during the day.

Stargazing Rule No. 4:

Leave your equipment alone for a while to enjoy the whole sky.

In 1886, Northern business tycoons put Jekyll on the map by founding an exclusive resort community. The Jekyll Island Club drew Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and one Robert C. Pruyn, who in 1893 financed the Pruyn equatorial telescope at the Dudley Observatory in Albany, New York. It would serve science for more than six decades. In 1911, club member Andrew Carnegie funded the completion of the Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles, the most powerful instrument of its time.

To be sure, a complex instrument like that can help unlock many secrets of the sky. But a portable telescope or a good pair of binoculars will reveal details like the moons of Jupiter or the elliptical shape of Andromeda, our nearest galaxy. And for novices, the naked eye and a clear forecast will do just fine. Take it from Marcy, who has an undergraduate degree in physics and astronomy and knows a nebula from a star cluster. For him, the allure of stargazing is basic: "We're barely a grain of sand compared to the earth, the earth is barely a grain of sand to the sun, and if you look out on a dark night, you see thousands of other stars. That puts things into perspective."

Though there isn't a bad place to stargaze on Jekyll, when pondering your insignificance, an oceanside seat can't be beat. On my second attempt, I learned that a short walk along the beach near my hotel afforded ample darkness. The water was a roaring shadow. The sky was littered with stars, the showiest orbs

When To Gaze

MID -JULY: Jupiter and Saturn will be in opposition, making our two biggest planets extra bright.

AUGUST 11 -12: During the Perseid meteor shower, you can see as many as 100 meteors per hour.

DECEMBER 13 -14: The Gemini meteor shower will correspond with a new moon, making for a spectacular light show.

ANY MONTH: Check out spotthestation.nasa.gov to see when the International Space Station will pass high enough over your destination to be in view. You have only a few seconds to catch the exciting sight.

backstopped by a crowded mosaic of fainter specks. Holding up my Sky Guide app, I scanned the names of what I saw. Stalwart Sirius, the dog star, the brightest star in the night sky (and actually two stars). The red giant Betelgeuse, recently dimmed by a cloud of circumstellar dust, triggering false hopes of a supernova. The Pleiades, a tight, adorable cluster that the Japanese call Subaru. Eventually I set down my phone and basked in the beauty and hugeness of it all.

Stargazing Rule No. 4: No matter what equipment you bring, leave it alone for a while.

When astronauts enter space and look back at our fragile blue marble, a cognitive shift called the overview effect occurs. Political divisions disappear. Borders suddenly seem petty. A wider view of home is born. Most of us will never experience that perspective. Lying beneath this glittering dome is surely the next best thing.