Myrtle Beach Memories

As years pass and temperatures rise, thoughts of summer vacations of the past march into our thoughts. Lonnie Mann shares his Myrtle Beach memories, of roaring surf, family, the Pavilion, Lloyd’s Motor Court, and more.

At 82 my remaining synapses occasionally spark up enduring childhood memories of Myrtle Beach. It was just after sunrise, and we had crested the dune looking down on the morning light playing off the translucent to green surf. The power of the roaring surf made my pulse pound.

Hours earlier we had left Charlotte in the wee hours. Awakened in the dark, still in pajamas, I was packed into our old Plymouth. Dad, as usual, had placed an ineffectual box of dry ice onto the floorboard by the vent. My tiny bladder inevitably issued a last call somewhere in the sticks. My prissy mom would send me into gas station restrooms whose doors were ajar round the clock. Dim lights revealed porcelain stained from the artesian groundwater – or whatever. Any movement scattered bugs secreted behind the tank. At least I thought they were bugs. Many years later I was told about a German exchange student who, in the ’60s, had sought relief by a dark roadside only to be spotted by the sheriff and jailed for indecent exposure. Guess mother knew best.

I recall being in the company of an attractive aunt and her equally comely friend whose family owned a house at Ocean Drive. Cruising in a late-model, light blue Buick convertible, hopeful suitors bought me cokes to curry Auntie’s favor. I mostly remember Turk, an early John Belushi prototype who ran the chuck-a-luck table in the Pavillion, who would slip me “get-lost-kid money.” After putting it all in the machines, I walked among the carnival mirrors. I did not suspect that one of them would predict the image of my midriff 75 years later.

The street on the north side of the Pavilion was always permeated with an aroma unidentifiable to me until teenage years – stale beer from the Bowry.

When I was with Mom and Dad, we would always arrive early at Lloyd’s Motor Court while rooms were still plentiful. Sometimes we were with groups of family or friends. Then we would be billeted in large two-story houses on the “front row” whose enormous windows and breezeways allowed cooling winds to roar through the house at night. I loved going to bed and waking up to the sound of the surf.

I vividly remember playing out in the shallows when I was hit in the calf by a sting ray. The barb wouldn’t come out and we had to find a doctor – I still have the souvenir scar.

In my teen years I only lasted a few summer days flipping burgers. I didn’t have a hair left on my face from grease fires. Back then mobs congregated at the Parker House roof deck on Mother’s Day weekend. Of course, nobody was actually staying there – at least I never met anyone who was. Rowdy drunks yelled at people below. Police rounded up the most combative troublemakers who I believe were kept in a fenced area until a friend showed up with bail.

CAPTION, TOP IMAGE: Lonnie Mann’s parents in front of the grand old houses that used to be, in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Provided by the writer.

Lonnie Mann is a retired mental health professional and an avocational archaeologist from Tallahassee, Florida, who was never among the rowdy troublemakers who needed bail. He was born and grew up in Charlotte, N.C., where his family had been in the area since before the Revolutionary War.