July 28, 2025 • 33 mins
“All the dancers wanted that black music. Why? Because it had a danceable backbeat.”
Dance at Charlie’s Place wasn’t just dance; it captured the spirit of an era defined by both segregation and creativity. When white audiences arrived for the music, these moments sparked shifts that transformed Myrtle Beach and resonated far beyond its borders.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Pushkin a quick warning, some of the language and imagery
used to describe this period of time may be upsetting.
Please take care while listening. Dino Thompson has had a
(00:39):
gun pointed at him six times, and he's been in
love twenty times. From these stats, he might seem like
more of a lover than a fighter. But at Charlie's Place,
the club in Carver Street, the owner, Sarah Fitzgerald, only
cared about Dino's capacity to find trouble. She'd heard about
his reputation on the Boulevard. That's how people refer to
(01:01):
Ocean Boulevard, which was a street closest to the water,
running parallel to the beach. Back then, Ocean Boulevard was
strictly a white part of town. Black people were literally
only allowed on the boulevard if they worked there. They
had to carry cards to prove it or they could
get arrested. Miss Sarah knew that if Dino fought at
(01:22):
Charlie's Place, it would have different consequences than on the Boulevard,
and that's what she told Dino when she saw him
in her club.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
She told me on several occasions, she said, I know
you're feisty, I heard you you're a boulevard fighter eyes
So well, ma'am, I don't start fights. We just it happens.
But she laughed and she said, but you can never
have a problem in here. Do you understand She didn't
want a white boy getting his butt kicked in a
black nightclub. You know, in the fifties.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Miss Sarah knew that a white boy getting beat up
in a black nightclub wouldn't just affect Dino, it would
be dangerous for every person in there.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
It could be deadly.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Before Dino stepped foot into Charlie's place, he was just
a Greek king from the boulevard. The boulevard was his
stomping ground, and when he wasn't getting into fights, he
was dancing.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
That was a product in the boulevard. You know, we
grew up on the boulevard. We learned to dance at
a very young age because that was how you met girls.
That was very important, and if you could dance, you
could always meet the kudus girl.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
All the white kids in Myrtle Beach got together at
the pavilion on the boulevard to dance. They called themselves beachcats.
They danced the jitterbug, a jittery version of swing.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
One might call it the white man's Lindy hop. If
you know, you know. Those who could dance the best.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Were kings out there on the boulevard, But Dino realized
they had nothing on what was happening at Charlie's Place.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
If Dino really wanted to learn how to dance, he
had to leave the boulevard.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
He had to enter that other world of Myrtle Beach,
the Hill and go to the club on Carver Street
to Charlie's Place. Once inside, though, Dino would learn that
dance was just part of his lesson at Charlie's Place,
because dance wasn't just dance, and Charlie's Place wasn't just
(03:35):
a club.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
It was where all the passions of life, the tensions.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
The fears, the anger, the love, the delight, the joy
would come out, would unfurl and would change the fabric
of Myrtle Beach. I'm rim guisee, this is Charlie's Place,
Episode two, Sinn City. As I continued on my journey
(04:16):
to understand Charlie, I realized I had to understand what
he built. I needed to get inside Charlie's Place the
best I could given that the building the nightclub was
in no longer exists more than who performed there, who
danced there? Why were music and dance so important to
all the people I talked to. Dino, the Greek kid
(04:39):
known for fighting on the boulevard, had a.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
Unique perspective on it all.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
His dad owned a restaurant in town called the Cozy Corner,
and that's where Dino first encountered Charlie Fitzgerald when Dino
was just a little kid.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
And my first memories of Charlie Fitzgerald were him sitting
in the Cozy Corner at what we call the family tables,
right by the cash register, and there were always a
group of kibitzers there, a couple of Jews, a couple
eleven a's of Greek, a Baptist, and Charlie is joining in.
(05:14):
He was quiet, he was more serious man. But for
lunch you'd always eat a club sandwich. Before long, he
was just one of the guys sitting around the family
table with five astrays for cigarettes and six cups of coffee.
And one of my jobs was keep emptying those astrays
back and forth. One day I had my cowboy outfit on.
(05:39):
It was about seven. I had two guns on a
little silk cowboys shirt, my boots, and I noticed when
he turned he had I had two plastic pistols like
pearl handles. And I said, well, you've got a pistol
like mine, And I said, can I see it? Charlie
(06:00):
takes the bullets out, I'd take it. I'd leave mine there,
and I put it in my holster and I go
down the street and I shoot ten fifteen people with
charlie pistol, you know, with no bullets, and I'd come
back fifteen twenty minutes later. I get it back to him,
puts some bullets, bag foots bags. It was just something
(06:21):
he had. But he was the only one I know
back then carrying a shoulder pistol tucked neatly under his jacket.
So that was an air of mystery to me as
a child.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
People I spoke to talked about the Restaurantino's dad owned
as a safe zone, a place outside the hill where
black people would be served without hassle. What I took
this to mean was Cozy Corner was less racist than
the other places in the area, but even at the
Cozy Corner, segregation was still the law and Black patrons
still could only order food to go through a side window,
(07:05):
but there was one exception Charlie and Charlie defied the
segregation in broad daylight in front of a window for
everyone on main street to see.
Speaker 4 (07:16):
No one told him what to do. What he wanted
to do, That's what he did.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Leroy Brunson was close in age to Dino and they
became friends. LeRoy's dad was a cook at Cozy Corner,
but Leroy could never visit his dad there on the inside.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
Because we thought it was natural normal as a kid,
you know, you know the places that they didn't want you,
we didn't go. You'd walk the street, they'd ride by
some and calls and they would throw things at you
sometime walking the street.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
But for a moment in time, Leroy thought the rules
had changed because one day he saw Charlie sitting inside
the Cozy Corner eating lunch with Dino's dad in a
booth together.
Speaker 4 (08:03):
And the first time that I saw Charlie sit down
in Dino's father's place having lunch, and that's what I
wanted to do. But my brother, you know he's a
little old to me, said no he can't. No, no, no, no, no,
so we stayed outside.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
There's nothing I could remember that would affect me. Like
Leroy telling me that story, it stuck with me. I
just stared at Leroy a minute, trying to imagine what
he was feeling. Of course, I couldn't go there. I
couldn't get there.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
It would be years before the Civil Rights Act of
nineteen sixty four would make segregation illegal in public places.
The regulars at Cosey Corner were men who smoked and
drank and played cards. These were immigrants from European countries
finding community in a foreign land, and somehow Charlie fit.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
In sitting well. The black man was no big deal
to them. They'd seen the horrors of war, so there
were bigger things in their lives they had dealt with,
and this segregation thing that was going on in America.
So maybe it was a naive to think that things
weren't happening in other places. But in my world things
(09:24):
were okay.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
From what I heard, it sounds like Dino's dad and
Charlie had a true friendship. Maybe they recognized something in
each other, had similar dreams of finding home in Myrtle Beach,
even if they were sometimes seen as outsiders. At the
end of the night, Dino's dad would give his staff
who lived on the hill, a ride home, and Dina
would tag along. Remember, the hill was where black people
(09:48):
and Myrtle Beach lived and could move freely. After his
dad had dropped everyone off, he'd often stop at Charlie's place.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
I'd wander around and play a pinball machine, and sometimes
I'd punch up a record on the jukebox. Charlie would
actually give me a quarter, and I remember some of
the songs I'd punch up were dirty blues. He would
look at me and say you played that. I'd say, yes, sir,
you please warme or Winerd or some of that. Back then,
(10:19):
dirty blues that were no dirty words. There was all annuendo,
but it was dirty music back then. So I thought
it was cool to be able to punch in songs
like that. So I got introduced to black music at
very young age.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Charlie's Place was all about black music in lots of forms.
There was the music on the jukeboxes, the songs Dino
sought out for a quarter. But really, what people of
this time mean when they say black music is R
and B. This music specifically was banned on the outside.
Local radio stations called it race music or jungle music
(11:01):
and vowed to never play it. When the biggest R
and B artists of the time came to play at
Charlie's place, Dino made sure not to miss it. The
problem was, do you know was a kid, and Charlie
had that rule no kids after nine point thirty, so
do you know snuck in.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
I'm walking through a throng of people. Charlie sees me
and he says, what are you doing. I said, I'm
here to see little Richard and he laughed and he said,
where's your daddy. I said, he's still working. And he
puts me on the end of the stage and he said,
don't move from here. I want you not to move.
And I'm sitting on the end of the stage. And
of course Little Richard plays a piano, but you know,
(11:42):
he's acrobatic. He's everywhere, and I got the best seat
in the house. He's dancing all over me, all around me.
I remember he had a pair of blue suede shoes
that had metal fronts in a metal back. I'd never
seen a pair of shoes like that, so made an impression.
(12:02):
When I got home. My dad said, I thought you
were spending the night with Little Richard, and I tried
to explain to him. I went to see Little Richard's singer.
It didn't register with Dad, and I said, he plays
a piano with his head, his elbows and his feet.
And my dad says, much wrong with the man. He's
(12:23):
got no hands, and I said, good night, Dad.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Dino loved the music you could find at Charlie's place,
and as he learned how to dance, he couldn't stay away.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
All the dancers wanted that black music. Why because it
had a danceable backbeat.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
Music and dance on the Hill was one and the same,
and no one could deny the influence they were beginning
to have on the outside of the night clubs in
Myrtle Beach and even far beyond. There was something big
happening in Myrtle Beach and its neighboring towns along the
Carolina Coast. White kids were falling in love with black music.
The author Frank Beacham wrote an oral history of dance
(13:00):
and music in Myrtle Beach during the nineteen forties and fifties.
He attributes the spread of R and B in white
clubs along the Carolina coast to a white dancer who
went by the name Big George. Big George collected the
most popular records from the jukeboxes in black clubs and
loaded them in the jukeboxes of white clubs on the boulevard.
(13:21):
These R and B records were known as beach music,
what many and Myrtle Beach still consider the sound of home.
Back then, if you wanted to buy black music, there
were two options. You could order it from this one
record shop in Tennessee called Randy's Record Shop, or you
could order directly from the label. Most of the great
(13:41):
R and B artists of the time were represented by
Atlantic Records, and the president of Atlantic Records began to.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Notice white teenagers from this little area from Carolina Beach
to Pauley's Island were ordering black music by mail. And
he was wondering, why are so many white teenagers, Because
we had it on our jukeboxes, and when you heard it,
you wanted it. You wanted it for your little record player.
You wanted that little Raspberry forty five. Back then, race
(14:10):
music is red. So he sent Jesse Stone down, a
black songwriter who wrote Shake, Rattle and Roll from big
Joe Turner. He sent him down here to see what
the heck's happening. What's going on down here? Why are
so many white teenagers ordering this black music? This forbidden
black music wasn't allowed to be played on the radio.
(14:31):
So Jesse comes down here. He goes to some of
the juke joints at the clubs. He goes to Charlie's place,
and he says, anything that's got that danceable backbeat, these
white kids dance and they want it, they crave it,
they love it. And he said, they're actually dancing with
each other, blacks and whites. It was kind of an
(14:51):
unusual moment in history.
Speaker 4 (14:54):
The only white music we had on our juke box
was Evis Presley and the Full Seasons.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
Back then.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
Do you know what was kind of like LeRoy's shadow?
If Leroy and his friends went to the movies, I
had to sit in the balcony upstairs because they were black.
Whites sat downstairs. But Leroy remembers Dino stuck up there
and sat with his friends, and Usher.
Speaker 4 (15:20):
Would come down and they would ruin him downstairs. And
when they ruined him down, he would sneak back.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
At least once Leroy says he got Dino out of
some trouble for dancing with a girl who had a boyfriend.
He also says Dino used to carry a small gun
on him, which feels like an emulation of Charlie. Wherever
Leroy went, Dino went. And because of that friendship, Leroy says,
no one bothered Dino, you.
Speaker 4 (15:45):
Know, because he was friends of the boys. I will
say he understood.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
And on Saturday nights, the boys went to Charlie's place
dressed up in their suits and ties.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
I remember I was fourteen and the place was packed
and I was sitting with leroy brunts and the Seth
King and some of their friends. Leroy said, do you
like to dance? And my girlfriend who later became his wife, Costell,
very very pretty lady, young lady back then. She was
probably seventeen. I'm fourteen, and I said yes, And so
(16:22):
I asked across dellowich light and dance, and we stepped
about four feet away from the dance floor, and she
stopped me. I had her hand and she stopped me,
and she said, you better know how to dance. I'll
leave your ass right here on the dance floor. And
I said, I can dance a bit, and I could dance.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Dance at Charlie's place was a living, breathing thing, never static,
never stamp. Dances were born and shifted into something else
so fast it was like trying to capture the outline
of a cloud. By this time you decided what it was,
it's already something new.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
Every time I went to Charlie's space, every time, they
showed me a new dance every time. And so I'd
go home and I'd work on a little bit, and
the next time I'd go and Leroy would do this
to He did this to me fifteen times. I had
to wobble down. So I went out there and I
did the wom He said, we don't do that anymore.
(17:21):
We now do the slop. And he'd showed me the slop.
But they were so creative, And I'm wondering who thinks
of these dances? Always want to know somebody, somebody thought
this dance up, and it just spread like wildfire through
the black community, and then it would infect us. We'd
soon be doing the same dances. They stayed lower and
(17:43):
the whites seemed to stand up straighter. So and then
when they did the belly roll, and the pivot. They
did it lower, and so we used to love watching
their style, that kind of dog watching what we did.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
Sometimes Dino would come ready to impress with a new
dance step.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
Because we go home and make up the step, and
you know, we always wanted to show it off. And
if we went to Charlie's, we'd definitely show our new
step off and somebody would come up show me that,
you know, and they'd have it in ten seconds.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
The dancers in Charlie's Club say that they could see
something magical was happening there at night. Segregation by day,
integration by night. Through music and dance and just love
for the movement, black and white friends could dance together,
partner together, teach each other, value each other's art, break
through all the cruel, oppressive restraints of the walled world
(18:37):
they lived in. No one thought about things like whether
a black girl dipping her toe in the ocean would
dirty the white children there. No one made threats over
white KKK robes lying on a bed, because art was
letting them move past all that art was showing the truth,
showing how ridiculous and evil those barriers were.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
And the music, dance lyrics, the creation of it more
than any judge's gabble brought the races together from the twenties, thirties, forties,
and fifties, and all through Jim Crow.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
A lot of the dancing was a variation of swing,
but easily dozens of dances emerged during this time at
Charlie's Place. The innovation came with the little moves and embellishments,
or a new step someone might add into the mix.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
The frog, the wobble, that want Tusci, the James Brown.
Speaker 4 (19:43):
The slop. And then there was the boomp, the hourly
Gurley boogie boogie.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
I saw the twists three years before the world was
doing it at Charlie's Place.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
And then there was the Shag.
Speaker 5 (19:56):
Yeah, I need the shag, That's the main thing.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
This is the dance I heard mentioned the most. I mean,
spend five minutes of Myrtle Beach and you'll probably hear
about it. Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, home of the Shack.
South CA Online is official state dance the Shag. The
Shags started right here in Myrtle Beach. I heard about
it everywhere, and I wanted to know what all the
hype was about. So I looked up some videos, and here's.
Speaker 6 (20:24):
How the ladies start again on the right foot one
and two, three and four rock step. We are walking,
We are not shuffling. We are actually picking our feet up,
but so minimally that it looks like almost like a glide.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
I saw a lot of white people over the age
of sixty. From what I can tell, the shag is
kind of like a moonwalk version of swing dance.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
Like it's smoother tying.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
At its best, it looks like the couples are gliding,
creating an optical illusion of being on skates. The most
skilled shaggers add their own flare, single foots, spins, swung
out knees, legs that looked like rubber as a swollen twist.
Speaker 7 (21:19):
Shag dancing takes up a lot of space, so we
tried to tail our music to hugging and belly rubbing dance.
Speaker 3 (21:30):
I love it.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
Leroy and Dino and the others who danced at Charlie's place,
remember the shag emerging. The fast athletic movements of the
jitterbug or the Lindy Hop started to be replaced by
a slower halftime speed.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
We wanted to be cooler, smoother, that became a thing,
and Belly Jeffers said, one of the great all time dancers.
He said, well, he said, we just started dancing like
we talk, kind of slow, and the girls liked it.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
And a lot of people told me the shag, South
Carolina's pride and joy was actually invented at Charlie's Place.
I read an interview with the first black police officer
in Myrtle Beach, a guy named pork Chop Hemming. He
was asked about the shag before he died and said,
the shag of today is very different from the version
at Charlie's Place. At Charlie's Place, it was called the
(22:20):
dirty shag and it was a bump and grind kind
of thing, where today's shag is a smooth dance. But
he said, the first person he ever saw do the
shag anywhere was a girl from ellery South Carolina. That
girl was Cynthia Harrel and her nickname was Shag.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
A later dance with Cynthia Harold, who they called Shag,
and she was a heck of a good dancer because
she had the all styled swing and Lindy's style that
she could do, which was fascinating to me. She could
shake it down.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Everyone at Charlie's place wanted to dance with Cynthia. She
worked there as a hostess and even lived with Charlie
and Sarah for a time. She made frequent trips to
New York and would bring back new moves she'd pick
up at the dance hall and Harlem. Many people believe
Cynthia or Shag was the inventor of the Shag, and
after hearing this a lot, I wanted to see if
(23:20):
I could find out whether that was true. What I
ultimately found is that it's pretty impossible to actually say
who invented a social dance. And Thomas Defrance, a dance
scholar at Northwestern University, says that's because that question actually
misses the point. He says, naming a dance after someone
is a way to honor them. It's not about ownership
(23:40):
or invention at all, which he says are more capitalist ideas.
Speaker 5 (23:44):
We want to lift people up, and if we know
their names, we say their names. It's very important to
us as Black Americans. It doesn't mean that they necessarily
invented a dance like that's kind of silly. Dances invented
in the relationship among people and music and the moment
and the place.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
In other words, art is collective. In Black American social dance,
a dance is not invented by one person, something that
happens on a dance floor among people.
Speaker 5 (24:13):
We create these things together. Are just not real estate,
and we're not trying to sell a building, so we're
not putting someone's name on a building and selling it
to someone else. We're a collective kind of culture, and
we think of the group as being essentially more important
than the individual.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
When I started asking about Charlie's Place, the people on
the Hill made sure I knew about Cynthia Harrell and
the Shag, especially Roddy Brown. He remembers when white people
came to the Hill. He says, they came to watch
them dance.
Speaker 7 (24:45):
Can we come and watch? I said, yeah, you could come,
and what they want to see what the black people
were doing.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
So I guess the black community here wasn't bothered by
the fact that white people were coming into town, well
into Charlie's and mixing.
Speaker 7 (25:01):
In fact, you're welcome, that's money, right.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Roddy's dad owned Club Bamboo next door to Charlie's Place.
I talked with Roddy and a few of his friends
the old club. They sat around me in a circle,
and for all the beautiful talk about white and black
people coming together through dance at Charlie's Place, they also
shared frustration about how the history was lost, papered over,
and how over the decades white people seem to have
(25:27):
claimed the dance forgetting its roots.
Speaker 7 (25:29):
We started to shake, took it out of it, and
and lied about it.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
I thought a lot about what integration at Charlie's Place meant.
Maybe the people who actually benefited from the integration were
the white people, not the black artists and patrons. Dance
scholar Thomas de France helped me think about this. He
pointed out, you have to recognize the effect of these
two groups coming together when one group is actively and
(26:05):
violently oppressing the other. What he said is something I'll
always remember.
Speaker 5 (26:10):
There's It's not really a world, especially at the middle
of the last century, where whites could generously or innocently
watch African Americans in dance practice and think that their
presence had no effect on the dancing. When we gather
in our difference, but with a power relation that places
(26:31):
whites in this supremacist sort of role African Americans. We
change our dancing. Our dancing might get stronger, it might
get showier. We might be more fem and more aggressive.
We might show off things we didn't know we could do,
and we might dance less. We hide things, we hold
(26:53):
things back, we don't show our best steps. We kind
of remove some of the things that we know the
dances for because in that dynamic things are different. So
while the connection of people through dancing is really import
we might all be a bit suspicious of thinking that
(27:15):
dancing together means we understand each other. I just hoped
that the people who remember with great fondness how they
were able to dance together can hold on to the
fondness of the memory and also consider that that encounter
was not the same for everyone who was in the encounter.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
The Greek kid Dino practically lived on Carver Street. He'd
go over there to dance, of course, but also to gamble,
play cards and shoot pull. When he went by Charlie's place,
he promised Miss Sarah he wouldn't create a problem, promised
no white boy would get beat up inside Charlie's place.
But like Dino said, with him, feis just sort of happened.
(28:10):
As Roddy Brown said, things could get rowdy at Charlie's place.
Speaker 7 (28:15):
Totally caught me.
Speaker 3 (28:17):
Same city, Dino had to learn his place.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
I remember this one occasion a fellow was real drunk
and he was leaning over. He was kind of spitting
on me when he was talking. He was just drunk,
and I shoved him back. When I did, he kind
of took a swing over the top of my head
and I ducked and I got up. I was kind
of ready for him to swing again, and all of
(28:41):
a sudden, Robert Gore had him by two arms.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
Robert was a bouncer there.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
Robert was six foot four, two hundred and seventy pounds.
He could pick anybody off the ground. And he had
him off ground and he was hollering as he was
being pulled away. He said, your chicken shit, you're hiding
behind Miss Sarah's skirt.
Speaker 3 (29:05):
Dino says.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
He turned to Miss Sarah and told her what the
guy had said. He explained that they'd take it out back,
no one would know about it.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
I just couldn't stand being told I was chicken, So
she told Robert. He searched him and he had a
pretty big knife, which would have spoil my day. And
he took it from and we went out back and
he was drinking pretty good. He took a couple of
swings and I stepped inside and I popped him twice
and he went down. The fight was over, and she said,
(29:35):
that's it. It's over, and Robert told him get the
hell off the property.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
Then Miss Sarah stepped in.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
She stepped up, and she pulled her skirt up to
her up her thigh, and she said, next time you'll
deal with me. This is what hides onto my skirt,
and she had a little pistol taped to her thigh.
From that day on, I looked at her just a
bit different than I did.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
From that time on, Miss Sarah wasn't just protecting Dino.
She was protecting everyone in that club at a time
when any black person could be lunched. Dino was learning
from as Sarah how careful you had to be in
this racist time. But he also learned from Charlie that
you don't take things lying down. It was during one
(30:22):
of the card games in the back room of the
club that Dino says he saw that side of Charlie.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
My dad and I would go sit back there and
watch the game, and Charlie would wander by and you
could see from his facial expressions he was telling somebody
to shut up without saying anything. I never forgot that.
He would just say Glenn, and Glenn would turn around
(30:48):
and he would just look at him, and that meant
you're running your mouth too much, or whatever it was.
And I could even then, I could tell the vibe
was saying and that they respected him and also feared him.
And he was not a big man, you know, he
was slender built, but there was something about him that
(31:09):
made people think they're not have with Charlie.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
In Charlie's place, Dino wasn't just learning how to dance.
He was learning how to be in the world, how
and when to not be chicken shit, because Charlie was
never chicken shit. Two opposite lessons from this couple. There's
a time you fight and there's a time you don't,
(31:38):
and you have to think hard about which one it's
going to be.
Speaker 3 (31:42):
And when coming up on Charlie's place.
Speaker 8 (32:01):
McClay has bell over here and they say they're coming back,
and the people are not going to sit back and
be slaughtered like dogs. They will fight as they come back,
and there'll be some book.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Charlie's Place is a production of Atlas Obscura and Rococo
Punch in partnership with Pushkin Industries and presented by Visit
Myrtle Beach. It's written and produced by Emily Foreman. Our
story editor is Erica Lance. Our team at Atlas Obscura
is Doug Baldinger, Chris Naka, Johanna Mayer, Linda Lobel, and
Emily Yates. You can follow us on Instagram at Atlas Obscura.
(32:43):
Please head to Charlie's placeshow dot com for more information
about the locations mentioned in the series and how you
can visit yourself. Irin Guise, thanks for listening. Binge the
(33:13):
entire season of Charlie's Place add free by subscribing to
Pushkin Plus. Sign up on the show page on Apple
Podcasts or Pushkin dot Fm Slash Plus. Pushkin Plus subscribers
can access ad free episodes, full audiobooks, and exclusive binges
of other true crime podcasts throughout the year.
Pushkin a quick warning, some of the language and imagery
used to describe this period of time may be upsetting.
Please take care while listening. Dino Thompson has had a
(00:39):
gun pointed at him six times, and he's been in
love twenty times. From these stats, he might seem like
more of a lover than a fighter. But at Charlie's Place,
the club in Carver Street, the owner, Sarah Fitzgerald, only
cared about Dino's capacity to find trouble. She'd heard about
his reputation on the Boulevard. That's how people refer to
(01:01):
Ocean Boulevard, which was a street closest to the water,
running parallel to the beach. Back then, Ocean Boulevard was
strictly a white part of town. Black people were literally
only allowed on the boulevard if they worked there. They
had to carry cards to prove it or they could
get arrested. Miss Sarah knew that if Dino fought at
(01:22):
Charlie's Place, it would have different consequences than on the Boulevard,
and that's what she told Dino when she saw him
in her club.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
She told me on several occasions, she said, I know
you're feisty, I heard you you're a boulevard fighter eyes
So well, ma'am, I don't start fights. We just it happens.
But she laughed and she said, but you can never
have a problem in here. Do you understand She didn't
want a white boy getting his butt kicked in a
black nightclub. You know, in the fifties.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Miss Sarah knew that a white boy getting beat up
in a black nightclub wouldn't just affect Dino, it would
be dangerous for every person in there.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
It could be deadly.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Before Dino stepped foot into Charlie's place, he was just
a Greek king from the boulevard. The boulevard was his
stomping ground, and when he wasn't getting into fights, he
was dancing.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
That was a product in the boulevard. You know, we
grew up on the boulevard. We learned to dance at
a very young age because that was how you met girls.
That was very important, and if you could dance, you
could always meet the kudus girl.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
All the white kids in Myrtle Beach got together at
the pavilion on the boulevard to dance. They called themselves beachcats.
They danced the jitterbug, a jittery version of swing.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
One might call it the white man's Lindy hop. If
you know, you know. Those who could dance the best.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Were kings out there on the boulevard, But Dino realized
they had nothing on what was happening at Charlie's Place.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
If Dino really wanted to learn how to dance, he
had to leave the boulevard.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
He had to enter that other world of Myrtle Beach,
the Hill and go to the club on Carver Street
to Charlie's Place. Once inside, though, Dino would learn that
dance was just part of his lesson at Charlie's Place,
because dance wasn't just dance, and Charlie's Place wasn't just
(03:35):
a club.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
It was where all the passions of life, the tensions.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
The fears, the anger, the love, the delight, the joy
would come out, would unfurl and would change the fabric
of Myrtle Beach. I'm rim guisee, this is Charlie's Place,
Episode two, Sinn City. As I continued on my journey
(04:16):
to understand Charlie, I realized I had to understand what
he built. I needed to get inside Charlie's Place the
best I could given that the building the nightclub was
in no longer exists more than who performed there, who
danced there? Why were music and dance so important to
all the people I talked to. Dino, the Greek kid
(04:39):
known for fighting on the boulevard, had a.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
Unique perspective on it all.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
His dad owned a restaurant in town called the Cozy Corner,
and that's where Dino first encountered Charlie Fitzgerald when Dino
was just a little kid.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
And my first memories of Charlie Fitzgerald were him sitting
in the Cozy Corner at what we call the family tables,
right by the cash register, and there were always a
group of kibitzers there, a couple of Jews, a couple
eleven a's of Greek, a Baptist, and Charlie is joining in.
(05:14):
He was quiet, he was more serious man. But for
lunch you'd always eat a club sandwich. Before long, he
was just one of the guys sitting around the family
table with five astrays for cigarettes and six cups of coffee.
And one of my jobs was keep emptying those astrays
back and forth. One day I had my cowboy outfit on.
(05:39):
It was about seven. I had two guns on a
little silk cowboys shirt, my boots, and I noticed when
he turned he had I had two plastic pistols like
pearl handles. And I said, well, you've got a pistol
like mine, And I said, can I see it? Charlie
(06:00):
takes the bullets out, I'd take it. I'd leave mine there,
and I put it in my holster and I go
down the street and I shoot ten fifteen people with
charlie pistol, you know, with no bullets, and I'd come
back fifteen twenty minutes later. I get it back to him,
puts some bullets, bag foots bags. It was just something
(06:21):
he had. But he was the only one I know
back then carrying a shoulder pistol tucked neatly under his jacket.
So that was an air of mystery to me as
a child.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
People I spoke to talked about the Restaurantino's dad owned
as a safe zone, a place outside the hill where
black people would be served without hassle. What I took
this to mean was Cozy Corner was less racist than
the other places in the area, but even at the
Cozy Corner, segregation was still the law and Black patrons
still could only order food to go through a side window,
(07:05):
but there was one exception Charlie and Charlie defied the
segregation in broad daylight in front of a window for
everyone on main street to see.
Speaker 4 (07:16):
No one told him what to do. What he wanted
to do, That's what he did.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Leroy Brunson was close in age to Dino and they
became friends. LeRoy's dad was a cook at Cozy Corner,
but Leroy could never visit his dad there on the inside.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
Because we thought it was natural normal as a kid,
you know, you know the places that they didn't want you,
we didn't go. You'd walk the street, they'd ride by
some and calls and they would throw things at you
sometime walking the street.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
But for a moment in time, Leroy thought the rules
had changed because one day he saw Charlie sitting inside
the Cozy Corner eating lunch with Dino's dad in a
booth together.
Speaker 4 (08:03):
And the first time that I saw Charlie sit down
in Dino's father's place having lunch, and that's what I
wanted to do. But my brother, you know he's a
little old to me, said no he can't. No, no, no, no, no,
so we stayed outside.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
There's nothing I could remember that would affect me. Like
Leroy telling me that story, it stuck with me. I
just stared at Leroy a minute, trying to imagine what
he was feeling. Of course, I couldn't go there. I
couldn't get there.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
It would be years before the Civil Rights Act of
nineteen sixty four would make segregation illegal in public places.
The regulars at Cosey Corner were men who smoked and
drank and played cards. These were immigrants from European countries
finding community in a foreign land, and somehow Charlie fit.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
In sitting well. The black man was no big deal
to them. They'd seen the horrors of war, so there
were bigger things in their lives they had dealt with,
and this segregation thing that was going on in America.
So maybe it was a naive to think that things
weren't happening in other places. But in my world things
(09:24):
were okay.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
From what I heard, it sounds like Dino's dad and
Charlie had a true friendship. Maybe they recognized something in
each other, had similar dreams of finding home in Myrtle Beach,
even if they were sometimes seen as outsiders. At the
end of the night, Dino's dad would give his staff
who lived on the hill, a ride home, and Dina
would tag along. Remember, the hill was where black people
(09:48):
and Myrtle Beach lived and could move freely. After his
dad had dropped everyone off, he'd often stop at Charlie's place.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
I'd wander around and play a pinball machine, and sometimes
I'd punch up a record on the jukebox. Charlie would
actually give me a quarter, and I remember some of
the songs I'd punch up were dirty blues. He would
look at me and say you played that. I'd say, yes, sir,
you please warme or Winerd or some of that. Back then,
(10:19):
dirty blues that were no dirty words. There was all annuendo,
but it was dirty music back then. So I thought
it was cool to be able to punch in songs
like that. So I got introduced to black music at
very young age.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Charlie's Place was all about black music in lots of forms.
There was the music on the jukeboxes, the songs Dino
sought out for a quarter. But really, what people of
this time mean when they say black music is R
and B. This music specifically was banned on the outside.
Local radio stations called it race music or jungle music
(11:01):
and vowed to never play it. When the biggest R
and B artists of the time came to play at
Charlie's place, Dino made sure not to miss it. The
problem was, do you know was a kid, and Charlie
had that rule no kids after nine point thirty, so
do you know snuck in.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
I'm walking through a throng of people. Charlie sees me
and he says, what are you doing. I said, I'm
here to see little Richard and he laughed and he said,
where's your daddy. I said, he's still working. And he
puts me on the end of the stage and he said,
don't move from here. I want you not to move.
And I'm sitting on the end of the stage. And
of course Little Richard plays a piano, but you know,
(11:42):
he's acrobatic. He's everywhere, and I got the best seat
in the house. He's dancing all over me, all around me.
I remember he had a pair of blue suede shoes
that had metal fronts in a metal back. I'd never
seen a pair of shoes like that, so made an impression.
(12:02):
When I got home. My dad said, I thought you
were spending the night with Little Richard, and I tried
to explain to him. I went to see Little Richard's singer.
It didn't register with Dad, and I said, he plays
a piano with his head, his elbows and his feet.
And my dad says, much wrong with the man. He's
(12:23):
got no hands, and I said, good night, Dad.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Dino loved the music you could find at Charlie's place,
and as he learned how to dance, he couldn't stay away.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
All the dancers wanted that black music. Why because it
had a danceable backbeat.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
Music and dance on the Hill was one and the same,
and no one could deny the influence they were beginning
to have on the outside of the night clubs in
Myrtle Beach and even far beyond. There was something big
happening in Myrtle Beach and its neighboring towns along the
Carolina Coast. White kids were falling in love with black music.
The author Frank Beacham wrote an oral history of dance
(13:00):
and music in Myrtle Beach during the nineteen forties and fifties.
He attributes the spread of R and B in white
clubs along the Carolina coast to a white dancer who
went by the name Big George. Big George collected the
most popular records from the jukeboxes in black clubs and
loaded them in the jukeboxes of white clubs on the boulevard.
(13:21):
These R and B records were known as beach music,
what many and Myrtle Beach still consider the sound of home.
Back then, if you wanted to buy black music, there
were two options. You could order it from this one
record shop in Tennessee called Randy's Record Shop, or you
could order directly from the label. Most of the great
(13:41):
R and B artists of the time were represented by
Atlantic Records, and the president of Atlantic Records began to.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Notice white teenagers from this little area from Carolina Beach
to Pauley's Island were ordering black music by mail. And
he was wondering, why are so many white teenagers, Because
we had it on our jukeboxes, and when you heard it,
you wanted it. You wanted it for your little record player.
You wanted that little Raspberry forty five. Back then, race
(14:10):
music is red. So he sent Jesse Stone down, a
black songwriter who wrote Shake, Rattle and Roll from big
Joe Turner. He sent him down here to see what
the heck's happening. What's going on down here? Why are
so many white teenagers ordering this black music? This forbidden
black music wasn't allowed to be played on the radio.
(14:31):
So Jesse comes down here. He goes to some of
the juke joints at the clubs. He goes to Charlie's place,
and he says, anything that's got that danceable backbeat, these
white kids dance and they want it, they crave it,
they love it. And he said, they're actually dancing with
each other, blacks and whites. It was kind of an
(14:51):
unusual moment in history.
Speaker 4 (14:54):
The only white music we had on our juke box
was Evis Presley and the Full Seasons.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
Back then.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
Do you know what was kind of like LeRoy's shadow?
If Leroy and his friends went to the movies, I
had to sit in the balcony upstairs because they were black.
Whites sat downstairs. But Leroy remembers Dino stuck up there
and sat with his friends, and Usher.
Speaker 4 (15:20):
Would come down and they would ruin him downstairs. And
when they ruined him down, he would sneak back.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
At least once Leroy says he got Dino out of
some trouble for dancing with a girl who had a boyfriend.
He also says Dino used to carry a small gun
on him, which feels like an emulation of Charlie. Wherever
Leroy went, Dino went. And because of that friendship, Leroy says,
no one bothered Dino, you.
Speaker 4 (15:45):
Know, because he was friends of the boys. I will
say he understood.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
And on Saturday nights, the boys went to Charlie's place
dressed up in their suits and ties.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
I remember I was fourteen and the place was packed
and I was sitting with leroy brunts and the Seth
King and some of their friends. Leroy said, do you
like to dance? And my girlfriend who later became his wife, Costell,
very very pretty lady, young lady back then. She was
probably seventeen. I'm fourteen, and I said yes, And so
(16:22):
I asked across dellowich light and dance, and we stepped
about four feet away from the dance floor, and she
stopped me. I had her hand and she stopped me,
and she said, you better know how to dance. I'll
leave your ass right here on the dance floor. And
I said, I can dance a bit, and I could dance.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Dance at Charlie's place was a living, breathing thing, never static,
never stamp. Dances were born and shifted into something else
so fast it was like trying to capture the outline
of a cloud. By this time you decided what it was,
it's already something new.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
Every time I went to Charlie's space, every time, they
showed me a new dance every time. And so I'd
go home and I'd work on a little bit, and
the next time I'd go and Leroy would do this
to He did this to me fifteen times. I had
to wobble down. So I went out there and I
did the wom He said, we don't do that anymore.
(17:21):
We now do the slop. And he'd showed me the slop.
But they were so creative, And I'm wondering who thinks
of these dances? Always want to know somebody, somebody thought
this dance up, and it just spread like wildfire through
the black community, and then it would infect us. We'd
soon be doing the same dances. They stayed lower and
(17:43):
the whites seemed to stand up straighter. So and then
when they did the belly roll, and the pivot. They
did it lower, and so we used to love watching
their style, that kind of dog watching what we did.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
Sometimes Dino would come ready to impress with a new
dance step.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
Because we go home and make up the step, and
you know, we always wanted to show it off. And
if we went to Charlie's, we'd definitely show our new
step off and somebody would come up show me that,
you know, and they'd have it in ten seconds.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
The dancers in Charlie's Club say that they could see
something magical was happening there at night. Segregation by day,
integration by night. Through music and dance and just love
for the movement, black and white friends could dance together,
partner together, teach each other, value each other's art, break
through all the cruel, oppressive restraints of the walled world
(18:37):
they lived in. No one thought about things like whether
a black girl dipping her toe in the ocean would
dirty the white children there. No one made threats over
white KKK robes lying on a bed, because art was
letting them move past all that art was showing the truth,
showing how ridiculous and evil those barriers were.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
And the music, dance lyrics, the creation of it more
than any judge's gabble brought the races together from the twenties, thirties, forties,
and fifties, and all through Jim Crow.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
A lot of the dancing was a variation of swing,
but easily dozens of dances emerged during this time at
Charlie's Place. The innovation came with the little moves and embellishments,
or a new step someone might add into the mix.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
The frog, the wobble, that want Tusci, the James Brown.
Speaker 4 (19:43):
The slop. And then there was the boomp, the hourly
Gurley boogie boogie.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
I saw the twists three years before the world was
doing it at Charlie's Place.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
And then there was the Shag.
Speaker 5 (19:56):
Yeah, I need the shag, That's the main thing.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
This is the dance I heard mentioned the most. I mean,
spend five minutes of Myrtle Beach and you'll probably hear
about it. Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, home of the Shack.
South CA Online is official state dance the Shag. The
Shags started right here in Myrtle Beach. I heard about
it everywhere, and I wanted to know what all the
hype was about. So I looked up some videos, and here's.
Speaker 6 (20:24):
How the ladies start again on the right foot one
and two, three and four rock step. We are walking,
We are not shuffling. We are actually picking our feet up,
but so minimally that it looks like almost like a glide.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
I saw a lot of white people over the age
of sixty. From what I can tell, the shag is
kind of like a moonwalk version of swing dance.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
Like it's smoother tying.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
At its best, it looks like the couples are gliding,
creating an optical illusion of being on skates. The most
skilled shaggers add their own flare, single foots, spins, swung
out knees, legs that looked like rubber as a swollen twist.
Speaker 7 (21:19):
Shag dancing takes up a lot of space, so we
tried to tail our music to hugging and belly rubbing dance.
Speaker 3 (21:30):
I love it.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
Leroy and Dino and the others who danced at Charlie's place,
remember the shag emerging. The fast athletic movements of the
jitterbug or the Lindy Hop started to be replaced by
a slower halftime speed.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
We wanted to be cooler, smoother, that became a thing,
and Belly Jeffers said, one of the great all time dancers.
He said, well, he said, we just started dancing like
we talk, kind of slow, and the girls liked it.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
And a lot of people told me the shag, South
Carolina's pride and joy was actually invented at Charlie's Place.
I read an interview with the first black police officer
in Myrtle Beach, a guy named pork Chop Hemming. He
was asked about the shag before he died and said,
the shag of today is very different from the version
at Charlie's Place. At Charlie's Place, it was called the
(22:20):
dirty shag and it was a bump and grind kind
of thing, where today's shag is a smooth dance. But
he said, the first person he ever saw do the
shag anywhere was a girl from ellery South Carolina. That
girl was Cynthia Harrel and her nickname was Shag.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
A later dance with Cynthia Harold, who they called Shag,
and she was a heck of a good dancer because
she had the all styled swing and Lindy's style that
she could do, which was fascinating to me. She could
shake it down.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Everyone at Charlie's place wanted to dance with Cynthia. She
worked there as a hostess and even lived with Charlie
and Sarah for a time. She made frequent trips to
New York and would bring back new moves she'd pick
up at the dance hall and Harlem. Many people believe
Cynthia or Shag was the inventor of the Shag, and
after hearing this a lot, I wanted to see if
(23:20):
I could find out whether that was true. What I
ultimately found is that it's pretty impossible to actually say
who invented a social dance. And Thomas Defrance, a dance
scholar at Northwestern University, says that's because that question actually
misses the point. He says, naming a dance after someone
is a way to honor them. It's not about ownership
(23:40):
or invention at all, which he says are more capitalist ideas.
Speaker 5 (23:44):
We want to lift people up, and if we know
their names, we say their names. It's very important to
us as Black Americans. It doesn't mean that they necessarily
invented a dance like that's kind of silly. Dances invented
in the relationship among people and music and the moment
and the place.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
In other words, art is collective. In Black American social dance,
a dance is not invented by one person, something that
happens on a dance floor among people.
Speaker 5 (24:13):
We create these things together. Are just not real estate,
and we're not trying to sell a building, so we're
not putting someone's name on a building and selling it
to someone else. We're a collective kind of culture, and
we think of the group as being essentially more important
than the individual.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
When I started asking about Charlie's Place, the people on
the Hill made sure I knew about Cynthia Harrell and
the Shag, especially Roddy Brown. He remembers when white people
came to the Hill. He says, they came to watch
them dance.
Speaker 7 (24:45):
Can we come and watch? I said, yeah, you could come,
and what they want to see what the black people
were doing.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
So I guess the black community here wasn't bothered by
the fact that white people were coming into town, well
into Charlie's and mixing.
Speaker 7 (25:01):
In fact, you're welcome, that's money, right.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Roddy's dad owned Club Bamboo next door to Charlie's Place.
I talked with Roddy and a few of his friends
the old club. They sat around me in a circle,
and for all the beautiful talk about white and black
people coming together through dance at Charlie's Place, they also
shared frustration about how the history was lost, papered over,
and how over the decades white people seem to have
(25:27):
claimed the dance forgetting its roots.
Speaker 7 (25:29):
We started to shake, took it out of it, and
and lied about it.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
I thought a lot about what integration at Charlie's Place meant.
Maybe the people who actually benefited from the integration were
the white people, not the black artists and patrons. Dance
scholar Thomas de France helped me think about this. He
pointed out, you have to recognize the effect of these
two groups coming together when one group is actively and
(26:05):
violently oppressing the other. What he said is something I'll
always remember.
Speaker 5 (26:10):
There's It's not really a world, especially at the middle
of the last century, where whites could generously or innocently
watch African Americans in dance practice and think that their
presence had no effect on the dancing. When we gather
in our difference, but with a power relation that places
(26:31):
whites in this supremacist sort of role African Americans. We
change our dancing. Our dancing might get stronger, it might
get showier. We might be more fem and more aggressive.
We might show off things we didn't know we could do,
and we might dance less. We hide things, we hold
(26:53):
things back, we don't show our best steps. We kind
of remove some of the things that we know the
dances for because in that dynamic things are different. So
while the connection of people through dancing is really import
we might all be a bit suspicious of thinking that
(27:15):
dancing together means we understand each other. I just hoped
that the people who remember with great fondness how they
were able to dance together can hold on to the
fondness of the memory and also consider that that encounter
was not the same for everyone who was in the encounter.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
The Greek kid Dino practically lived on Carver Street. He'd
go over there to dance, of course, but also to gamble,
play cards and shoot pull. When he went by Charlie's place,
he promised Miss Sarah he wouldn't create a problem, promised
no white boy would get beat up inside Charlie's place.
But like Dino said, with him, feis just sort of happened.
(28:10):
As Roddy Brown said, things could get rowdy at Charlie's place.
Speaker 7 (28:15):
Totally caught me.
Speaker 3 (28:17):
Same city, Dino had to learn his place.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
I remember this one occasion a fellow was real drunk
and he was leaning over. He was kind of spitting
on me when he was talking. He was just drunk,
and I shoved him back. When I did, he kind
of took a swing over the top of my head
and I ducked and I got up. I was kind
of ready for him to swing again, and all of
(28:41):
a sudden, Robert Gore had him by two arms.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
Robert was a bouncer there.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
Robert was six foot four, two hundred and seventy pounds.
He could pick anybody off the ground. And he had
him off ground and he was hollering as he was
being pulled away. He said, your chicken shit, you're hiding
behind Miss Sarah's skirt.
Speaker 3 (29:05):
Dino says.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
He turned to Miss Sarah and told her what the
guy had said. He explained that they'd take it out back,
no one would know about it.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
I just couldn't stand being told I was chicken, So
she told Robert. He searched him and he had a
pretty big knife, which would have spoil my day. And
he took it from and we went out back and
he was drinking pretty good. He took a couple of
swings and I stepped inside and I popped him twice
and he went down. The fight was over, and she said,
(29:35):
that's it. It's over, and Robert told him get the
hell off the property.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
Then Miss Sarah stepped in.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
She stepped up, and she pulled her skirt up to
her up her thigh, and she said, next time you'll
deal with me. This is what hides onto my skirt,
and she had a little pistol taped to her thigh.
From that day on, I looked at her just a
bit different than I did.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
From that time on, Miss Sarah wasn't just protecting Dino.
She was protecting everyone in that club at a time
when any black person could be lunched. Dino was learning
from as Sarah how careful you had to be in
this racist time. But he also learned from Charlie that
you don't take things lying down. It was during one
(30:22):
of the card games in the back room of the
club that Dino says he saw that side of Charlie.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
My dad and I would go sit back there and
watch the game, and Charlie would wander by and you
could see from his facial expressions he was telling somebody
to shut up without saying anything. I never forgot that.
He would just say Glenn, and Glenn would turn around
(30:48):
and he would just look at him, and that meant
you're running your mouth too much, or whatever it was.
And I could even then, I could tell the vibe
was saying and that they respected him and also feared him.
And he was not a big man, you know, he
was slender built, but there was something about him that
(31:09):
made people think they're not have with Charlie.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
In Charlie's place, Dino wasn't just learning how to dance.
He was learning how to be in the world, how
and when to not be chicken shit, because Charlie was
never chicken shit. Two opposite lessons from this couple. There's
a time you fight and there's a time you don't,
(31:38):
and you have to think hard about which one it's
going to be.
Speaker 3 (31:42):
And when coming up on Charlie's place.
Speaker 8 (32:01):
McClay has bell over here and they say they're coming back,
and the people are not going to sit back and
be slaughtered like dogs. They will fight as they come back,
and there'll be some book.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Charlie's Place is a production of Atlas Obscura and Rococo
Punch in partnership with Pushkin Industries and presented by Visit
Myrtle Beach. It's written and produced by Emily Foreman. Our
story editor is Erica Lance. Our team at Atlas Obscura
is Doug Baldinger, Chris Naka, Johanna Mayer, Linda Lobel, and
Emily Yates. You can follow us on Instagram at Atlas Obscura.
(32:43):
Please head to Charlie's placeshow dot com for more information
about the locations mentioned in the series and how you
can visit yourself. Irin Guise, thanks for listening. Binge the
(33:13):
entire season of Charlie's Place add free by subscribing to
Pushkin Plus. Sign up on the show page on Apple
Podcasts or Pushkin dot Fm Slash Plus. Pushkin Plus subscribers
can access ad free episodes, full audiobooks, and exclusive binges
of other true crime podcasts throughout the year.
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