photo provided

Retired Charleston Day School Headmaster Ned Jaycoks and wife, Lucia, are shown at the unveiling of the portrait.

photo provided

Young Ned Jaycocks poses beside a seaplane at the Savannah Wildlife Refuge.

For Southern boys growing up in the 1950s and early '60s, the only television that interested us was Fess Parker's Daniel Boone, the goofy Maynard B. Kreps of Gilligan's Island, and Marlin Perkins' amazing Wild Kingdom. Episodes from those TV shows fed our imagination with adventure beyond what was possible then -- even in the rural South. One Lowcountry native, however, lived the boyhood dreams that all the rest of us yearned for.

Ned Jaycocks, the retired headmaster of Charleston Day School and longtime math teacher at Porter-Gaud, grew up as son of a federal refuge manager on the Savannah Wildlife Refuge until age 10 and then on the Cape Romain Refuge until he went off to the College of Charleston. Ned is a native son of the Carolina Lowcountry from his accent to his crisp khakis and button-down oxford shirt. This affable Lowcountry gentleman and outdoor enthusiast was grandson of the youngest member of Butler's Cavalry.

Those who are native to Charleston need no introduction to Ned Jaycocks, or to his family, for they have been a part of the coastal plantation culture for generations. In Duncan Clinch Heyward's 1937 classic book on the Carolina rice culture, <I>Seed From Madagascar</I>, there's a tribute to the Jaycocks family who served as plantation overseers for Heyward holdings along the Combahee River in the late 1800s and early 1900s. There's even a picture of Ned's grandfather standing near a rice field.

Of course, the hurricane of 1912 ended forever much of the cultivation of rice in South Carolina. Preservationists and sportsmen have kept tracts as part of a precious and historic nature conservancy known these days as the ACE Basin. The letters refer to the wetlands encompassed by the Ashepoo, Combahee, and Edisto Rivers. In his youth, Ned Jaycocks lived the life of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as he accompanied his father through the entanglement of estuaries that make up the eco-system of the Carolina coast.

Plantation overseers along the Carolina coast were a tight-knit fraternity. Those unique men were masters of many trades relating to agriculture. From getting the crops to grow, to tending the livestock, to engineering of rice trunks or constructing barns, the overseer possessed the requisite skills. His essential skill, however, was the effective management of people. Ned's father worked for a number of years for the Heywards before going to work in wildlife conservation.

Just a month prior to Ned's birth in the 1940s his parents were living on a federal wildlife refuge so remote in the Mississippi Delta that medical help was a day away. Fearing that childbirth in the primitive Delta was too risky, Ned's father brought his wife to Savannah to deliver. Soon thereafter the family took up quarters in the manager's cottage deep inside the Savannah Wildlife Refuge. The nearest town was Hardeeville, and that rural community was reachable only by a series of rural roads leading ultimately to U.S. Highway 17.

Don't rat on him to the Wildlife folks, but Ned learned to drive using their vehicles when he was 9 years old. He remembers well the day his father sent him to bring the car around and he bent the driver's door backward. So excited was he to be behind the wheel that he forgot to shut the door as he wheeled the big Buick out of the garage.

When the rest of us were going off to summer camp to canoe and learn achery, Ned was acquiring the basics of farm tractors and how to cut a fire line through the woods. What boy wouldn't trade pottery and tossing horseshoes for some real-life experience in the wild woods?

The wetlands surrounded the manager's cottage so the family dog had to be gator savvy in order to see the next sunrise. Ned recalls something about those days that he doesn't recommend anyone try, but when you have few playmates and television is a fuzzy two-channel thing with rabbit ears, you have to create your own fun. He winces when he tells about putting fried chicken bits on a four-foot stick and holding it for alligators to snap it off. Before long, gators lined up in the yard with their ugly jaws gaping open awaiting their chicken treats.

When the rest of us pedaled our bikes to the country club pools to splash around in the summer heat, we thought we were young princes of the realm. Not so for Ned. His backyard was thousands of acres of marsh and coastal plain. He had 100 options for a summer's day of play. Jaycocks' father built him an eight-foot diving platform on a riverbank where the water was well over the boy's head at high tide.

Porpoises, turtles, sharks, and pelicans vied to amuse Ned as his imagination conjured Indians and pirates maneuvering through the creeks. Pirates such as Blackbeard, Calico Jack, Anne Bonny, and Stede Bonnet really did comb this part of the Carolina coast -- so did Confederate blockade runners and prohibition era rum runners.

Ned's closest neighbor was the son of the African-American shop foreman on the vast property. Segregation meant very little on the Savannah Wildlife Refuge. A friend was a friend, no matter what color the skin. Ned's other best friend was his pinto pony named Nightwind and his gator-savvy dog, Bingo.

While the rest of us were watching the adventures of Lloyd Bridges and his famed Sea Hunt television series, Ned experienced the real thing by growing up as the son of a wildlife manager. One day when he was about age 10, he and his father were out cruising the waters and marshes when they noticed a suspicious watercraft. Moonshiners were known to inhabit the coastal swamps, and one of the Wildlife Department's duties was to break up stills and make arrests. Ned's father swung the bow around and gave chase, but the powerful engines of the moonshiners outran them. Soon a shot was fired in their direction and Ned's Dad reached for his sidearm and returned fire as the moonshiners roared out of sight. Few city boys can match that one.

Another great TV program that captivated red-blooded males growing up in the '60s was Sky King, a sort of aerial highway patrolman over the vast Arizona deserts. Sky King flew a twin-engined Cessna 310 Songbird, and he always bagged his quarry by derring-do in the air. Ned didn't have to watch Sky King for his aviation fixes. Every now and then a sea plane owned by the Fish and Wildlife Service would circle the family compound, swoop in and land on the pond. Ned would run out and greet the pilot and climb up on the pontoons. Being aboard a seaplane while it taxies to a dock is a thrilling moment in a boy's life. Taking off from the water and climbing into the summer sky is an adventure not to be found even in the best summer camps.

Occasionally Ned's family would load the motor launch and navigate the labyrinthine-like network of creeks and inlets that led to the city of Savannah. Going by water was more of a diversion than a necessity in the 1950s, but this outdoor boy soon learned the art of maneuvering an inboard motor launch through tidal waters. Along the way his father pointed out ring-necks, teals, pintails, red tail hawks, and ospreys.

By age 12 young Jaycocks was adept at throwing a cast net and setting crab trot lines. He could fillet a sea bass and find enough wild rice for dinner. Mark Twain's fictional characters had nothing on this most fortunate of Carolina lads.

Ned spent the first decade of his youth on the Savannah Refuge, and the second he spent on the Cape Romain Refuge with his family living in McClellanville. As he got older, the adventures of being the son of a refuge manager just got grander. He recalls that at Cape Romain his father's job required, among other things, driving a small patrol boat. Of course, Ned hopped aboard and learned to maneuver that powerful sea horse. Then there was the 65-foot Army landing craft that the agency used to haul vehicles over to Bull's Island and other remote locations. He knew many of the watermen who fished the local waters, and he learned from the masters how to set a gill net and pull a seine.

Not far down the street was Archibald Rutledge, the State's poet laureate and owner of Hampton Plantation. Rutledge preferred to live in his small McClellanville cottage and Ned remembers the old gentleman well.

The fire tower with its old-time vector device for reckoning the direction of forest fires was another dimension to Ned's father's Cape Romain work. He laughs when he recalls that the wildlife officials sometimes used the tower to look for smoke indicating moonshine stills along the Santee delta.

The happy days of living on a wildlife refuge ended when Ned went away to the College of Charleston in the early 1960s. In his 40-plus years as an educator -- much of it as a headmaster, Ned has had many occasions to share his love of nature with his students.

Today, a retired Ned Jaycocks remains an avid outdoorsman and bides his time with his wife Lucia between McClellanville, Mount Pleasant's Old Village, and the mountains of North Carolina.

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