There is little doubt that South Carolina’s economy has taken a downturn in recent months. Home sales are down, new home construction is down, and the SC unemployment rate hit a record 7.6% in August placing it fifth in the nation¹. It has since dropped slightly, but some SC counties still rank as high as 11.8%. As more people find themselves out of work and unable to pay their mortgages, the rate of homelessness is increasing. Shelters throughout the state are trying to accommodate first-time homeless families, but limited resources and community opposition are adding to an already enormous problem. Add to that the decrease in donorship that inevitably comes with a suffering economy, and South Carolina’s homeless are in for a very difficult winter.

Homeless Man Sitting on His Bunk at a Shelter

A 2007 report by the South Carolina Council on Homelessness found that on any given night, there were 6,759 homeless people in South Carolina – nearly 20% of whom were children. Considering the fact that Camden has just under 7,000 residents, the enormity of the problem becomes easier to grasp. The Council also found that over the course of a year, SC has more than 17,000 documented cases of homelessness – undocumented cases may increase this number significantly².

SC ETV recently filmed a documentary on homelessness as part of its “Carolina Stories” series. It follows Eric Moseley, a homeless man who goes by the name “Protein,” as he walks viewers through a typical day on the streets of Columbia. Protein stays at a temporary shelter, where he is picked up each morning by a bus that takes him downtown to the labor pool. There, he and countless others wait patiently to see if they’ll be given the opportunity to work that day. The pool operates on a first-come/first-served basis. Arriving after 5:30 AM, Protein’s chances of finding day labor are greatly diminished. Still, he and the others wait for official notice that they will not be given work before heading out in search of food.

The documentary, DOWN (but not out), is an informative and honest look into the reality of homelessness, but the true education is the realization that each person is homeless for a different reason. Many assume that homeless people are all alcoholics, drug addicts, or mentally ill. While there is a fair portion of each, some have simply lost their jobs and, as a result, their homes. Some have served time in prison, which disqualifies them from many jobs. Some have left their homes due to abuse or neglect, and still others have not had the education necessary to allow them to earn a living wage.

Homeless Man Holding a Sign

Eric and others categorize people to differentiate between those who are homeless “by acts of God” (natural disasters, fires, etc.), those who are ill, and those who are simply complacent. Regardless of the reasons, however, the population of homeless South Carolinians is on the rise, and public discrimination is making matters worse.

Attempts to build a permanent homeless shelter in our state capital have been thwarted repeatedly. The Midlands Housing Alliance is a Columbia-based non-profit dedicated to relieving homelessness in the region. Recently, as in years past, a proposed year-round shelter has been bitterly challenged by residents living near the designated site. As a result, the “winter” shelter has been forced to move from one area to the next, in order to avoid upsetting any single community with a continuous presence. The MHA and the Salvation Army have been fighting this battle since 1997 and there is no end in sight. People without homes, seeking shelter and a sense of safety, are forced further into a nomadic lifestyle which prevents them from obtaining the necessary tools to re-establish permanence³.

Similar stories about the lack of resources and community opposition are being told throughout South Carolina. We have compiled a list of recent articles and editorials below. If you would like to find out more about what’s being done to alleviate homelessness in your area, take a few moments to look over our guide to SC Resources for the Homeless.

1. Post and Courier, “SC Unemployment Rate Soars” (Charleston: September 19, 2008).
2. South Carolina Council on Homelessness, “2007 South Carolina Homeless Count.“
3. Columbia Star, “Downtown Neighborhoods Face New Neighbors” (October 31, 2008).

Recent Articles and Opinions on Homelessness in SC

• Anytime is the Best Time to Help Charities - November 12, 2008 - The State
• City Board Throws out Appeal on Shelter - November 12, 2008 - The State
• Poor Economy Squeezing Upstate Nonprofit Agencies - November 10, 2008 - The Herald Journal
• City’s Bumbling Antics on Homeless Issue Stunning - November 9, 2008 - The State
• Downtown Neighborhoods Face New Neighbors - October 31, 2008 - Columbia Star
• Will City Allow Homeless Shelter to Fail? | Shelter is Solution to Neighbors’ Problems - October 22, 2008 - The State
• Rock Hill Winter Shelter Kicks off 2nd Year - October 28, 2008 - Herald Online
• SC Homeless Have Right to Vote - October 10, 2008 - WYFF Channel 4, Greenville
• Columbia Leaders Discuss New Homeless Shelter - October 9, 2008 - WIS Television Channel 10, Columbia

Want to Help? Steps to End Homelessness in South Carolina

Think you don’t have the time or resources to help? Good news! It’s easier than you think. Below are just a few of the ways you can help relieve homelessness in your community. For more specific information, just visit our directory of resources for the homeless in South Carolina. Click the city or town nearest you and find simple ways to contribute in your community.

• Sign a Petition - PDF - Print and sign this petition to show your support for the Midland Housing Alliance’s Homeless Transition Center in Columbia
• Go Shopping - PDF - Charleston area residents, add a few simple items to your holiday shopping from Crisis Ministries’ Holiday Wish List
• Become a Bi-Lo Booster - In Florence, simply print the “boosterplus” form and ask the cashier to scan it at checkout
• Tell a Friend - Fill out this online form to tell someone you know about Golden Harvest Food Bank in Aiken
• Build a House - Volunteer to help copnstruct a Habitat for Humanity home in Beaufort County

South Carolinians turned out in record numbers for the 2008 elections. Lines were long and problems with voting machines were reported in precincts throughout our state. While some races are still being contested, the majority have been called.

View SC statewide election results.

View SC county election results.

A Cut Above – When Pearl Fryar moved to Bishopville in 1976, the three acres that surround his suburban ranch-style home consisted of nothing but flat, barren cornfields. In the early eighties, he began planting and pruning trees and shrubs. After two-and-a-half decades of near constant labor, he has transformed his yard into an internationally-known topiary garden that attracts 5,000 visitors a year. This month, SCIway traveled to Bishopville to meet Mr. Fryar, who talked to us for the better part of two hours and treated us to ice cold bottles of water and our very first ride on a cherry picker!

Madness lends itself to legend, and by now most of us have heard the story behind Pearl Fryar’s wild, whimsical garden just outside Bishopville in Lee County. Mr. Fryar, they say, simply wanted to win “Yard of the Month.”

Fryar regularly spreads this rumor himself, but dig a little deeper, and you may find yourself asking, “Why?” Turns out that when Fryar, his wife Metra, and their son Patrick first came to Bishopville back in the early eighties, they tried to buy a house in an all-white neighborhood but soon found they weren’t welcome. Black folks, they were told, “don’t keep up their yards.”

	FISHBONE TOPIARY		LOVE & UNITY SCULPTURE		PEARL FRYAR’S POTHEAD

 
A quarter-century later, it’s pretty clear that’s not the case. Since that time, Fryar has won “Yard of the Month” three times – a feat considering the piece of property he eventually bought lies outside of the town’s limits and isn’t technically even eligible. He’s also been awarded a Medal of Honor in Art from Winthrop University and serves as artist-in-residence at Coker College, where he teaches classes.

If that weren’t enough, he’s also a hot commodity on the lecture circuit, traveling near and far to speak and demonstrate his unorthodox techniques. His topiaries have sold as installations of “living sculpture” to museums for as much as 35 grand apiece. He’s a fixture on television shows including HGTV and PBS’s Victory Gardens. Perhaps most impressive of all, his garden was recently selected by the Garden Conservancy as one of the four most important gardens in the Southeast. As such, they hope to help preserve it long after Fryar himself is gone. (South Carolina’s Brookgreen Gardens is another of the four gardens selected.)

But don’t stop there. Dig deeper still and you’ll learn that Fryar was born a sharecropper’s son in rural Clinton, North Carolina. Growing up he learned from his parents that the way to survive in this world was to become “invisible.” Fryar, who was active in sit-ins and protests during the Civil Rights movement, often wrote home to his mother and said, “Mama. I got nothing to do with this.” His hero was and remains Jackie Robinson. Though Fryar never played much baseball, he watched as Robinson broke into a previously all-white world. Robinson, he says, laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights movement and made things possible for Fryar’s other hero, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

After serving in Korea, Fryar followed his grade school sweetheart to New York. They married, and he soon found work as a troubleshooter at a canning plant. Eventually they were transferred to Atlanta, and when an opportunity to move to Bishopville arose, Fryar took it to be closer to his family.
Despite years of service to his company, Fryar was never promoted to plant manager. When the New York Times interviewed Fryar in 2005, they asked him if this was “because he was black.” Fryar chose his words carefully, explaining that the situation in the South “had not changed that much.” His wife Metra answered more directly: “Yes.”

Whatever the reason, Fryar’s frustration was real. Mrs. Fryar explains that one day Fryar went out into the front yard and cut up their holly. Thinking back, she says, “I thought he had lost it.”
Maybe he had. From then on, Fryar found himself working ten-hour shifts at the plant, then coming home to set up ladders and spotlights so he could work all night and into the morning on his “Dr. Seuss meets Salvador Dali” designs. The local electric company eventually set up a street light in his backyard to help him out. Today the lamp is festooned in a thirty-foot teepee of creeping juniper – easily one of the loveliest luminaries in all of SC.

Down but not out, Fryar had discovered a new way to excel and receive recognition. He retired three years ago and now prunes full-time. Fryar says his garden is “finished” now, meaning he no longer adds new plants. The maintenance is constant, of course, and he is quick to point out that topiaries aren’t a good hobby for someone who wants to hunt, fish, or really, do just about anything else.

At 68, Fryar finally has a little help around the yard. With support from the Garden Conservancy and the newly-formed Friends of Pearl Fryar’s Topiary Garden, he’s been able to hire a man part-time. That doesn’t mean he’s taking it easy – far from it in fact. Fryar seems to be busier than ever these days, but he’s never too busy to greet his guests. In all he welcomes about 5,000 visitors to his yard each year – at no charge – and it seems important to him to make sure people understand what he calls his “message.”

Mr. Fryar should rest assured: That message is hard to miss. From the “junk art” metal ornaments he welds with his neighbor and emboldens with words like love, unity, and faith to the giant four-foot letters he’s cut into his sod to spell “Peace, Love, and Goodwill,” it is plain to see there’s a higher purpose operating here.

In short, Fryar seeks to inspire. He is a man who has risen above disappointment and ordinary constraints – constraints of society, constraints of nature, and constraints of art. His garden grows tall and proud with plants that have no business surviving summers in the South. He uses no fertilizers or pesticides and waters very little. He has no formal training in what is traditionally considered a formal art. His only lesson was a three-minute demonstration from a nurseryman in Camden two-and-a-half decades ago. Then again, as Fryar is fond of saying, “Not knowing ahead of time that something is supposed to be impossible often makes it possible to achieve.”

And the result? Well, these days Pearl Fryar is hardly invisible. Still, somehow we think his parents would not only be pleased but also incredibly proud.

Want to learn more about the man and his art? Check out SCIway’s Guide to the Pearl Fryar Topiary Gardens to find pictures, stories, videos, and more. Also stay tuned for A Man Named Pearl, the feature-length documentary being released nationwide this summer. Most importantly, go visit the gardens yourself. You won’t be sorry – they’re worth the trip!

On May 30, 2007, SCIway sat down with Joan Perry, creator of walkthisway.org, a photo blog featuring the Palmetto State. Read on to find out what Joan has to say about sidewalk graffiti and the strangest sights in South Carolina ….

Joan Perry and Camera

1. SCIway: I notice much of your family lives in Canada and you grew up in India. What brought you to Charleston? How long have you been here, and have you lived anywhere else?

   Joan: I am from a large family and the third of eight siblings. Who has families that size anymore? My father had been a high school teacher in Canada but moved us all to the hills of northeast India to be headmaster of a local elementary school in Meghalaya. We lived in a beautiful part of the country that the British used to call the “Scotland of the East.”

   I returned to Toronto to go to nursing school and happened to graduate at a time when there were no jobs for nurses in Canada. Most of my class was recruited to The States. I worked briefly in Florida and then spent ten years in West Virginia before moving to Charleston in 1987. My time in healthcare was spent as a Labor and Delivery Nurse and I am currently the Director of Volunteers for Roper St Francis Healthcare. I am very fortunate not only to live in one of the most beautiful cities in the world but to work with people who are doing important work because they choose to. I work with the most incredible group of volunteers and have a job that allows me to be creative.

2. SCIway: Your blog is AMAZING. If I didn’t work for a website, I’d make it my homepage! It must take an incredible amount of time and energy to keep up with. It also involves a lot of traveling on your part. Why do you do it? (In other words … why did you start, and what keeps you going?)

   Joan: Thank you! Much of what is in my blog would have been scribbled on note pads, filed away, or put in a photo album before I started blogging. Blogs are actually a good way to sort and document material. I can separate quotes and poems, recipes and travel. An unexpected delight was all the positive feedback I received and the friendships and connections that developed with regular readers. I have had an unusual background and had a lot of travel tales that I wanted to jot down. It was much more fun with an audience. Knowing I have readers expecting an entry does keep me searching for new material or “blog fodder.” Now readers send me tips on places I should visit or jokes I may want to use.

3. SCIway: By the way, how old is your blog?

   Joan: I started Walk this Way in March of 2004 and average 500-600 visitors or hits a day.

4. SCIway: But back to traveling … I see that you have been all around the Lowcountry, from Beaufort to Myrtle Beach and even up to Kingstree and Bishopsville. You seem to have spent a lot of time in the Edisto and Orangeburg areas, and you’ve visited the Upstate some too (Greenville and Laurens and Spartanburg counties). I loved the section on the Town of Perry in Aiken!

   What I want to know is how do you decide where to go? How many weekends a month do you travel? And do you travel for work, or to go to festivals, or are road trips just a great love of yours?

   Joan: The funny thing is I don’t even enjoy driving very much, but I always have my eye out for a quaint scene, historic spot, or fun sign. When I do travel I tend to get up early and explore on foot. If someone else is driving I boast of being the world’s best passenger, but they get used to me squealing that we have to stop for a photo op! I get together periodically with other volunteer coordinators in the state and often serve as photographer for our events. Nothing cheers me up more than a day trip to see new sights on a beautiful morning with either a picnic packed or a stop at a BBQ restaurant.

5. SCIway: Another one of my favorite sections is the one for Spit and Argue Club. For some reason, it reminds me of an old juke joint I used to know of called the Too Sweet Disco. I think if I were a blogger, I would want to go around and take pictures of old juke joints around the state! My coworkers Cedric and Kerri say they’d want to take pictures of “cars on poles” – which until recently I didn’t even know existed! What made you decide to be Charleston’s Unofficial Sidewalk Graffiti Curator? Churches, cemeteries, signs … all of these seem to be special loves of yours. (As opposed to, say, old barns or beautiful windows or lighthouses or slave cabins.) What do you think draws you to these subjects in particular?

   Joan: The sidewalk graffiti fascinates me. Let me begin by saying that I am absolutely against graffiti that damages homes and buildings. Sidewalk graffiti seems different – nothing is harmed and it leaves a quick, personal, and permanent message. Our Charleston sidewalks are a clear sign that we have a city that has been lived in by mischievous children and intelligent young people. Considering the brief window of opportunity when you can write in cement, I am amazed as what I find. From “Wow! Wet Cement!” to bits of poetry or a simple “Be Kind.” I’ve collected hundreds of messages in cement. What would you write if you had the opportunity to leave a message? Some of my favorites are “I Spoke Your Name for Many Days,” “Enjoy Being,” and “Love is for All, You and Me.”

   I do tend to haunt old cemeteries and church yards. Again I think what interests me is the message people chose to pass on in the inscriptions on tombstones as well as the perfect peacefulness. Handwritten signs charm me.

6. SCIway: In all your walks and travels, you have definitely seen some crazy things! What stands out in your mind as the strangest of all?

   Joan: I was able to stop a young man who was stealing artifacts from a historical cemetery by taking pictures of him in action. I was so outraged that I started taking pictures of him in action. He actually put them back and I was later thanked by the church after the incident was publicized. I’ve seen baby herons testing their legs for the first time, a pianist playing a piano outside Galliard Auditorium while it was waiting for the movers, a house on Gillon Street that was covered in fake snow in the middle of summer for a photo shoot. I’ve been able to offer help to lost souls and people who have fallen, and almost stepped on a rattlesnake myself on a swamp path. I will always regret missing a picture of the lady Civil War re-enactors dressed in hoop skirts trying to get into a port-a-potty.

7. SCIway: What stands out as the most poignant or beautiful?

   Joan: I’ve been amazed at the rewarding connections I’ve made through the blog. I’ve been in touch with the young descendants of the gentleman who lived in my house in the 1800’s. I’ve been contacted by children of friends I went to high school with in India. I’ve been visited by new friends from Tennessee and Texas who got to know me through the blog and met a new group of local bloggers here in the lowcountry who have been getting together socially for a year now. That said, most of the people I work with every day have no idea that I do this and have never read “Walk this Way.”

8. SCIway: Last but not least, what do you do when you’re not blogging?

   Joan: I do a lot of walking obviously, that’s where I get most of my material and photographs. I believe walking is the most efficient, cheapest, and easiest form of exercise.

   I am the Volunteer Director for Roper St Francis Healthcare in Charleston, a supporter of the American Heart Association, and I serve as photographer for quite a few non-profit events. One of my missions to is to encourage the right young people to go into healthcare, and every year I see a few new graduates hired who started serving with me as a teenage volunteers and discovered their career path.

   My camera gets me invited to a lot of interesting events! I do love to travel and that fits nicely with the walking and photography. I’ve taken hiking trips to Ireland and Peru in the last few years.

South Carolina is never short on providing its citizens with a bounty of wonderful places that inspire. Better yet, our state is full of people who recognize our good fortune and take the time to share their discoveries with the rest of us. That’s a big part of the reason SCIway.net exists. We take pride in sharing SC websites created by such folks.

Enter a website devoted to SC’s movie stars of the past. No, we’re not talking about the people on the screen, but the screens themselves. We’re talking about SC’s rich history of single-screen movie theaters. It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when little to no televisions were to be found and a computer was the kid down the street who could do long division in his head. The only way to watch movies and news reels was to march down to your local theater dressed in your best and take in the cinema.

The music was live and uniformed ushers were there to greet you and seat you as you were immersed in the splendor of Hollywood. And just like a movie, each SC theater had its own personality, its own story to tell.

Those stories have now found a home. SCMovieTheatres.com, starring John Coles and Mark Tiedje, is the place to re-live, or perhaps discover, the glory of old Palmetto State movie theaters and the silver-screened memories they inspired. John and Mark have been traveling throughout our state researching theaters and documenting movie memories, and they are also writing a book – South Carolina Movie Theatre Memories.

Recently, we caught up with these gumshoes at the wonderful Majestic Grill in Charleston to talk to them about their adventures. Click here to find out what they had to say.