Born in December of 1952 in the small South Carolina town of Summerville, I missed out on the Beatniks, except, of course, for Maynard G Krebs, the goateed bongo-bopping pal of Dobie Gillis in the sitcom that ran from 1959-63.^[1]

If Summerville had any beatniks, I never ran into them in my family excursions to the Cub Drive-In, Eva’s, or the Piggly Wiggly. I’m pretty sure we didn’t have a coffee shop in the sense of a bohemian hangout where beret-wearing malcontents high on MaryJane passed around copies of Alan Ginsberg’s Howl. 

It’s too bad because I happen to think that bohemian cultures are healthy counterbalances to potentially stifling conformity. When I taught at Porter-Gaud, after the Magnet School of the Arts opened, we lost a slew of our countercultural students, i.e., nearly all of our liberals, and so without safety in numbers, fewer divergent thinkers were willing express unpopular opinions, which, of course, can led to smug complacency, especially in a community that lacks economic diversity. Plus, occasionally it’s fun to encounter a hep-cat daddy-o sporting a black turtleneck and straight-legged cigarette pants.^[2]

So when did Summerville begin to develop a counterculture you may – but I doubt it – wonder?  From my admittedly fogbound memory, I’m going to peg the year as 1965 and credit surfers as the first countercultural subgroup of Summerville.

Back in those days, at Spann Junior High, PE classes weren’t divided into grades, but 7^th, 8^th, and 9^th graders met en masse during whatever period you happened to have PE. After playing football or basketball or softball, we were supposed to take showers, which could be a tad bit uncomfortable, depending upon whatever stage of hormonal transformation you happened to find yourself.^[3]  Anyway, one afternoon when we were showering after PE, someone shouted, “Are there any surfers in here?” One of my fellow 7th graders, I think it might have been Joe Dorn, answered enthusiastically, “I am” and was met with a basso chorus of “Surfers suck!”

This rather unsettling incident occurred right about the time a fellow named Greg Nutt arrived at Summerville High from California. Greg sported longish blonde hair, horizonal striped shirts, white jeans, and spoke in that somewhat whiny affected accent we associate with California. Greg claimed to have had some musical connection with the Beach Boys and played drums in a really good band called the Pendleton’s.^[4]  Greg was a charismatic cat, as we jazz enthusiasts like to say, and after the administration booked the band for a pep rally before a big game against archrival Berkeley, the animosity against surfing abated somewhat. The Pendleton’s performed killer covers of “Pipeline” and “Wipe Out,” and it would take one cold-blooded adolescent not to get off on that the drum solo from “Wipe Out.” In fact, Greg might have been the first non-football player who achieved some degree of celebrity at Summerville High.

And so more and more of Summerville’s youth turned to surfing, despite the long trip to Folly Beach in those wireless days when you had to call long distance to McKevlin’s to get a not very up-to-date and perhaps enhanced surf report.

And to be a surfer, you wanted to look like a surfer, which meant long hair and flipflops as opposed to flattops and tasseled alligator loafers. Ven Diagrams of surfer and hippie costumes share a large swath of concentric shading, and on 15 October 1969, the day of the Moratorium to end the Viet Nam War, many of the Summerville High students who wore black armbands were surfers.

Thus, the counterculture had arrived for sure in Flowertown, which meant marijuana, LSD, and all that jazz heavy metal. Bye-Bye American pie; hello tie-dye.^[5]

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^[1] Maynard was played by Bob Denver, who became much more famous as asexual Gilligan, the most famous castaway this side of Robinson Crusoe.

^[2] On the other hand, too much of a good thing can be equally offputting; a completely countercultural community can be just as conformist in its own way as a country club. As much as I like Asheville, I sometimes wish I’d run across someone sporting a polo shirt and pair of khakis. 

^[3] Alas, puberty had yet to even knock on my door when I was a seventh grader, so showering among 9^th graders who had failed a grade or so was, shall we say, unfun.

^[4] Greg also played the sousaphone in the marching band where I encountered him in my short-lived gig of pantomiming playing the clarinet in that group.

^[5] By the way, my friend Tim Miskell was the first to bring the art of tie-dying to Summerville. He had sneaked off to his old stomping ground of Croton-on-the-Hudson, which was, not surprisingly, much hipper than Summerville, and upon his return started tie-dying his friends’ t-shirts and bell bottoms for a nominal fee.