Forty years ago there was no Charleston Place convention center with grand hotel and arcade of boutiques. Forty years ago there was just one horse-drawn carriage in downtown Charleston — a distinguished white-haired gentleman named Wagener in Bavarian attire perched upon an elegant landau carriage. The driver looked for the world like Captain von Trapp waiting for Maria to alight from the Villa Margarita.
That carriage was reserved for lovers, rather than overweight gawkers peering from behind a straining horse. Wagener moved to Savannah when the mega-carriage companies moved in.
Popular Charleston nightlife in 1969 revolved around establishments such as Perdita’s, Colony House, Harbor House, the Rampart Room of The Fort Sumter Hotel, and Mount Pleasant’s Blue Hawaiian, or Lorelei. The college crowd preferred noisier eateries such as Lum’s, the Rathskeller, Francis Willard’s, Club Xanadu on Lockwood Boulevard, or “the Merch” on East Bay Street. Of course, Big John’s Tavern on East Bay had been a favorite pub since the 1950s.
Today’s watering-holes offer a selection of beers from around the world. One local favorite recommends that the bartender add a slice of lime. However, in the ‘60s, for a nickel the barkeep added a dash of lime juice. It was called a lime-logger and sold for 30-cents.
A bawdy venue called the Swinging Cellar was located in the lower floor of the Downtowner Hotel on King Street. Young women in day-glow bikinis danced on tables and atop a black-light bar. Cadets and C. of C. fraternity boys cheered approvingly.
Not a trace of these prized venues survives. Gone, too, are the Cavallaro on Savannah Highway, the Flying Dutchman on Dorchester Road, Patrick’s Deli on George Street, and Harold’s Cabin on Wentworth. A landmark, the Sugar and Spice Room of the Francis Marion Hotel, has undergone at least four reincarnations, as has the Swamp Fox Room. Time marches on, but time is also a thief.
Our city in 1969 was hot, shabby, and flooded to paraphrase Thomas Friedman’s catchy new book title. The News and Courier was in the capable hands of Admiral Wilcox, Tom Waring, and Doug Donahue. If that wasn’t a triune of “We The People,” then it’d be hard to find a more worthy trio. Scanning microfilmed pages of the News and Courier of 40 years past is a walk back in time.
It’s doubtful that anyone could call 1969 a simpler time than our wifi world of pop culture, divisive politics, and abiding impermanence.
However, the fall of 1969 witnessed a brief quietus of racial bitterness. And the Tet Offensive of 1968 had stabilized into routine search and destroy missions on the ground and in the air over Vietnam. Acid-rock groups made even the radio airwaves a psychedelic haven for hippies. Local radio station WTMA held fast to the traditional sound of soft-rock, but one didn’t have to go far to experience the new “culture of alienation” that was sweeping the country.
There was a public bra-burning at Marion Square on the northeast corner of King and Calhoun. Chagrinned Citadel cadets arrived in time to discover that just a few stringy-haired girls were stoking a fire in a trash can filled with old lingerie.
The Navy’s shore-patrol jeep monitored shore-leave sailors as local police squads kept antiwar protesters apart from a larger crowd of supporters for our deployed troops. For most Charlestonians the specter of civil rights and antiwar violence seemed as remote as the Detroit Auto Show - or Southern Cal Trojan’s football stadium on the edge of the Watt’s section of LA. Lacking 24/7 cable news to bring everyone’s trauma to your telly, the era of the ‘60s very nearly passed Charleston by entirely.
The September News and Courier was running daily stories on page 4-B of a local sanitation workers strike that was gaining momentum despite local Mayor Palmer Gaillard’s efforts at mediation. Several cub reporters, including recent Washington and Lee grad, William “Bill” Walker, were cutting their “journalistic teeth” on the garbage worker story. Charleston soon was catapulted onto the front pages of the national newspapers and into the evening news of the Big Three: NBC, ABC, and CBS.
A march of striking garbage workers took place here on Labor Day led by the Reverend James Orange of the Southern Leadership Conference. Cleveland Robinson, president of the national Council of Distribution Workers of America, joined arms with Orange at the head of the strikers. The entourage, with police escort, walked silently down Meeting Street and onto Broad, stopping at City Hall.
Mayor Gaillard had met previously with the workers about their $3 an hour “living wage” demand. In front of the steps of city hall, with local tv stations recording, spokeswoman Elizabeth Crawford read a statement concerning worker demands. Of course state law prevented public employees from collective-bargaining.
The matter intensified over September, but the newspaper kept the story on the interior pages. Lost on many here was the fact that it’d been just such a garbage strike that had drawn Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to Memphis and subsequently his assassination a year earlier.
Four blocks from where the sanitation workers marched, a group of nurses’ aides, all of whom were black, met to discuss their grievances with MUSC officials.
A week later, a similar group of nurses’ aids and orderlies at Charleston County Memorial Hospital met to discuss the ‘living wage’ idea and the way that grievances are handled in big organizations that don’t allow labor unions for wage workers. Charlestonians didn’t realize it at the time, but they were headed into racial strife unlike anything seen since Reconstruction and the adoption of Jim Crow policies.
Meanwhile, the News and Courier reported on Labor Day evening that a state highway patrolman pulled over a car on Rifle Range Road in Mount Pleasant and that a gang of teens wrestled with the trooper and got his hand gun.
Bloodhounds from S.L.E.D. in Columbia were dispatched to track the teens who disappeared into the heavily wooded area. Mount Pleasant was so rural that the highway patrol policed most areas that are our suburbs today.
The long, hot summer of 1969 was about to get a lot hotter than anyone ever dreamed could happen in this tranquil city.

(Dr. Thomas B. Horton is a history teacher at Porter-Gaud School. He lives in the Old Village of Mount Pleasant. Visit his Web site online at  www.historyslostmoments.com)

photo provided