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SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2014
N.G. Osteen 1843-1936 The Watchman and Southron
THE SUMTER ITEM
H.G. Osteen 1870-1955 Founder, The Item
H.D. Osteen 1904-1987 The Item
Margaret W. Osteen 1908-1996 The Item Hubert D. Osteen Jr. Chairman & Editor-in-Chief Graham Osteen Co-President Kyle Osteen Co-President Jack Osteen Editor and Publisher Larry Miller CEO
20 N. Magnolia St., Sumter, South Carolina 29150 • Founded October 15, 1894
A look back at Hurricane Hugo: Day 1
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he first time our son slept through the night was when Hurricane Hugo came to Sumter in September 1989. He was 12 weeks old. We lived in an old house on Hampton Avenue with a small butler’s pantry in the middle, away from any windows. We put a mattress on the floor, lit some candles, turned Graham on the transistor radio Osteen (with J.R. Berry) and hunkered down for the storm. The old house was swaying and creaking all night, but it never came apart. I would periodically crack open the front door to get a peek, and my wife would immediately freak out, imagining a wind tunnel sucking the baby and our
talkative four-year-old daughter out into the dark, swirling wilderness on the other side. Kind of like in The Wizard of Oz. By first light, it had settled down enough for me to go outside, where power lines and freshly cracked open trees littered the streets. There were wounded birds flailing around amid the debris, and the dominant sounds were chirping, wood cracking and live power lines humming. It smelled of sap and smoke. I made my way through the mess from Hampton Avenue back across the neighborhood, crossing Calhoun, Haynsworth and through the Patriot Hall complex over to Hasell Street, where my 81-year-old grandmother Toody lived alone. She had been a widow for two years. A back door into her kitchen was open, and a large tree branch was sticking through the ceiling, hanging a few feet above the stove. Water was still pouring through the hole, and
COMMENTARY she was wearing a pink bathrobe, a baseball cap and her late husband Hubert’s L.L. Bean Duck boots. She was mopping the floor at a furious pace, saying something about how she was fine and wasn’t going anywhere. I walked to The Sumter Item offices downtown, where the yellow McDonald’s sign from the Lafayette Boulevard eatery had blown through the front windows of our building. I was the managing editor at the time, and we began a news team logistical process that would repeat itself daily for the next several days. We’d gather news and photos throughout the day, then carpool over to The Times and Democrat newspaper offices in Orangeburg. There we typed in stories, processed film, put the paper together, printed it and hauled it back to Sumter for free distribution all over the region. It was a
great team effort on everyone’s part, from the reporters to the carriers. The first week or 10 days were such a blur that it’s impossible to remember the gory details of daily life. Some of our family members evacuated inland from the coast, so the day after Hugo on Hampton Avenue we added another 12-weekold baby boy, another 4-year-old girl, a 6-year-old girl, my sister-in-law and her mother, who was visiting from Boston. The women and children had taken over the house/ asylum at that point, leaving me free to work and gather supplies throughout the day and night, like a cave man. I got word that a fellow was coming to Lee County late one night with a trailer full of generators and somehow found him in a dark field near Wisacky. I bought three at highly inflated prices — one for my parents who were stranded in the country, one for my grandmother
and one for us. We fired up lamps and a refrigerator and even had enough juice left to hook up some lights for our neighbors, the late, great Paul and Mildred DuCom. A lot of outdoor neighborhood cooking went on, and we got to know people we had barely laid eyes on within a three-block radius. Natural tragedies define communities, and Sumter rallied in the wake of the Hurricane Hugo experience. Looking back this week at our coverage of the people, hard work and broad community efforts that went into dealing with such a disaster, many people can and should be proud of their efforts 25 years ago. Sumter rose to the occasion, and we can all still be thankful it wasn’t even worse. Graham Osteen is Editor-AtLarge of The Item. He can be reached at graham@theitem. com. Follow him on Twitter @GrahamOsteen, or visit www.grahamosteen.com.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR OUR PRESIDENT IS GUILTY OF POLARIZING CONGRESS Where the heck are you getting your facts from, Mr. Lloyd Young (Friday’s Item)? During the eight years of the Bush administration, budget deficits totaled slightly less than $2.04 trillion. In just six years of the Obama administration, budget deficits have totaled more than $6.2 trillion through 2013, more than 3 times as much as Bush, with two more years to go. Bush never had a single year budget deficit as high as Obama’s best year. As for why Republicans won’t work with President Obama like they did with President Clinton, when Clinton came into office, Republicans controlled the House and Senate, so Clinton had to work with Republicans. On the other hand when President Obama
came into office, Democrats controlled the House and Senate, so President Obama did not see the need to work with Republicans and tried to shut them out. Remember the $800 billion stimulus bill that Republicans did not even get to see until the night before the vote, much less have any input into it? How about Obamacare, where Republicans were allowed no input, and it was passed without a single Republican vote? Now we have a House controlled by Republicans and President Obama tries to bypass them any way he can, including ruling by decree. There are many who are responsible for the polarizing of Congress, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sens. Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell, but President Obama is as guilty as anyone. ROBERT W. WILDER Sumter
Memories of USC students’ escapades bring some smiles
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he University of South Carolina continues to build on its successes on the football field with the Gamecocks surviving a hard-fought game last Saturday against the University of Georgia Bulldogs in a narrow 38-35 win. While the gridsters continue to shed the “Chicken Curse” on the football and baseball fields, there are even more successes, not the least of which is the Darla Moore School of Business, which has been acclaimed as having the top international business program in the world, according to several publications. Moore, who made her fortune in the financial world and is a graduate of USC as well as a native of Lake City, has pumped some $70 million of her own money into making the school a world-class institution. Carolina indeed has come a long way through the years, but I can remember when it wasn’t regarded quite as seriously as an institution of higher learning as it is today. There were always more stories making the rounds about the escapades of USC football players in some of Columbia’s gin mills and night spots than there were about significant academic achievements. Growing up, I had several friends who attended USC, and
when I got together with them from time to time, they would talk more about the debauchery and revelry than their scholastic achievements. These old chums roomed together. One was a former star football player at Edmunds High (I’m not giving out any names here) who was quite large and nicknamed “Gorilla.” He was not the kind of person one should trifle with. His tolerance for pranks or jokes at his expense was quite low, and his propensity for violence was quite high. Hubert D. Knowing this, his Osteen Jr. roommates, during their idle moments, which were considerable, would invent schemes to irritate, bedevil or even enrage Gorilla. One such stunt was designed to make a particularly unpopular student the innocent victim of Gorilla’s wrath. They concocted a series of raids on Gorilla’s effects when he was out of the room they shared with him. The jokesters would tear up his bed, rip out his clothes from his dresser and closet and scatter his books around the room, mak-
COMMENTARY ing a big mess. Then they would attach a note to the disarray that read, “The Phantom was here.” This went on for several weeks. Gorilla would return to the room and find his clothes, books and bedsheets scattered everywhere. And there would always be the note from “The Phantom.” Gorilla’s rage mounted with each incident until he was literally foaming at the mouth in anticipation of the pain he was prepared to inflict on the culprit if he ever found out who he was. Finally one day the conspirators revealed to Gorilla they had discovered who “The Phantom” was and fingered the unpopular student who roomed up the hall of the dormitory. Gorilla took immediate action when the unfortunate student returned to the dormitory and ran toward his room after Gorilla spotted him and gave chase. The terrified student made it to his room and locked the door behind him. That didn’t work. Gorilla tore down the door on the hapless student and proceeded to administer a severe beating on the fall guy’s writhing, defenseless body in spite of his pleas of innocence. “It was terrible what went on in that
room,” one of the co-conspirators revealed to me. “There were awful noises, like a wild animal had been released from his cage.” Fortunately, after a few days in the infirmary the luckless student was as good as new, although he did transfer to another dormitory. Carolina survived such escapades, and presumably, more serious students showed up in the dorms as well as the fraternity houses. My youngest son attended USC and joined a fraternity. According to reliable sources, the fraternity was not a paragon of academic excellence. There were rumors that its members were throwbacks to my yesteryear chums, many of whom resided in an animal house and engaged in a substantial number of trivial pursuits, among which was the consumption of adult beverages. I do know for a fact the younger son graduated from USC, so his extracurricular activities couldn’t have been too harmful, right? One of the charms of the old USC is the previously mentioned folklore. Such memories will continue to bring smiles to lots of faces. Reach Hubert D. Osteen Jr. at hubert@ theitem.com.
HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY? Send your letter to letters@theitem.com, drop it off at The Sumter Item office, 20 N. Magnolia St., or mail it to The Sumter Item, P.O. Box 1677, Sumter, SC 29151, along with the writer’s full name, address and telephone number (for verification purposes only). Letters that exceed 350 words will be cut accordingly in the print edition, but available in their entirety at www.theitem.com/opinion/letters_to_editor.