Author: Margaret Evans

A great old Twilight Zone episode played on MeTV one night recently.  It got me thinking about time and space, so the series’ creator Rod Serling (1924-1975) would have been happy.  The story, “The Thirty-Fathom Grave,” starred Simon Oakland (remember him as Lieutenant Schrank in the movie version of “West Side Story”?), Mike Kellin (“American Buffalo”), and Bill Bixby (“The Incredible Hulk”).  The year is 1963.  A U.S. Navy destroyer is on a routine patrol in the South Pacific when its sonar detects the sound of metallic clanging under water.  It sounds like a hammer banging against the hull of a ship.

The local television station will offer The Beaufort News, The Bluffton News and The Hilton Head News daily   On December 18, 2005 Beaufort lost its only newscast when WJWJ-TV pulled the plug on its evening news report. A few years later in 2008, the Beaufort Gazette moved from its building on Salem Road to Bluffton, a move the publication still maintains was not a “merger” of the Gazette and The Island Packet. But we in Beaufort quickly realized the shift in priority. The dynamics between municipalities north and south of the Broad became more divided than ever after the move, to no one’s fault or benefit.

On a gorgeous afternoon earlier this month, Lowcountry Weekly joined other media folks, along with a host of university employees, for a delightful cruise around the Calibogue Sound, courtesy of USCB and Vagabond Cruise.

Penn Center is one of the oldest and most historically significant African American cultural and educational institutions in the United States.   Founded in 1862 as one of the first schools established in the South to educate newly freed African slaves, today, Penn Center remains a major educational, historical and cultural resource and service center for Sea Islanders and offers a wide range of programs and activities to tens of thousands of visitors annually.  The recent passing of the legislation of the Gullah/Geechee Act has focused on Penn Center as one of the interpretive sites along the national Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor.