The Most Popular Yankee

Beaufort, SC suddenly became the focus of the nation. It was the 80s and Operation Jackpot was about to explode in our quiet little town.

The Rhett House Inn honors our past and is a symbol of beauty and tranquility.

For many years, the most excitement some folks had in our sleepy town was a trip to The Yankee. But a storm was brewing. A small cadre of pot-smuggling Southern gentlemen were about to change all that.

Seafood - catching it, gathering it, and cooking it was how many folks in the Lowcountry earned an honest day’s wages.

Eating platters of seafood fried to a golden brown and piled high is a rite of summer in the South. While longtime favorite seafood shacks like Bowen’s Island, SeeWee Outpost, and The Wreck of Charlene are loved and known by all, once upon a time, there was a one-of-a-kind place in Beaufort off the tourists' radar.

Pearl and Manny Palmer were tough New Jersey folks with a Joisey accent who opened The Yankee in a one-story cinder block building with a brick facade. I guess you could call them damned Yankees, the kind who come South and stay. What was it? A gathering place for everyone in Beaufort, and I mean everyone. Shrimpers, politicians, doctors, lawyers, families with children, Marines from Paris Island and the Air Station, movie stars, migrant workers in town to pick tomatoes during the summer harvest - everyone. Enter from Newcastle Street - pinball machines, pool tables, a long bar, and plenty of cigarette haze.

 Indeed, this place was the most popular Yankee in town. In recent years, it became the most rollicking celebration spot during Beaufort’s Tricentennial celebration in 2011, where former patrons gathered for a reunion.  It had been “THE” happening hangout in all of Beaufort for a good part of the late 20th century.  It was a lunch spot by day, a watering hole by night, and a gathering place for all politicians, truck drivers, bottle washers, and everybody else.

The Yankee was one of the only spots in Beaufort where military and civilians hung out together. These were very political times, and folks were waiting to see who else would be deployed. Some Marines were known to wear wigs just to fit in and act like any other Beaufortonian. Arguments often got out of hand, and I remember Manny was the enforcer of the rules, sporting a tight perm, short fuse, and a dangling cigarette out the side of her mouth. She’d yell, “Take it outside.” No one messed with Manny, the impresario in a white t-shirt, sometimes with a Playboy bunny on it.

One evening, a group of teenagers, maybe some of the legal drinking age, maybe not, cavorted around the pool tables. Some were barefooted.  Anyway, they got too rowdy, and Manny told them to leave. They refused.  Systematically, Manny began to smash beer bottles on the hard concrete slab floor. Those kids hightailed it before they had to walk across broken glass with bare feet.

In those days, I thought the war everyone was arguing about at the bar was the Vietnam War.  Took me a little time to figure out it was The War, the Civil War.  Maybe they didn’t realize it was over. You were guaranteed to meet an interesting cast of characters and find out all kinds of useless information - never a dull moment.

 Here is where you’d most likely run into the cast for The Prince of Tides.  Future Oscar award winner Gwyneth Paltrow came to the Yankee the night her mother, Blythe Danner’s movie The Great Santini, premiered at the Plaza Theater. And perhaps best of all, the Yankee was rumor-central.  Any and everything was news at the Yankee- nothing was off-limits. 

Although it’s been gone since 1985, its memory has never died.  Whenever I hear the song “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road,” I remember it was Manny’s favorite pick on the old jukebox in the middle of the dining hall.  During the Beaufort Tricentennial, the place rose from the ashes with a reunion at St. Peter’s Catholic Church and featured the Yankee’s Damn Good Chowder amidst plenty of brouhaha. It was my favorite comfort food - nothing else could compare. Sorry, I don’t have the recipe!

As a young, ambitious news reporter in town, I hung around the Yankee almost daily. Long before anyone ever thought of cable TV and 24/7 news, there was The Yankee for all breaking news. That’s all we needed. The late state senator Jim Waddell, whose office was just across the street, was a Yankee regular every morning.  He was impossible to reach by phone, but I could catch him early before he headed up to Columbia.

There was plenty to catch up on with Operation Jackpot still in the rumor state.  No indictments had been handed down, only investigators all over town.  Everyone was secretly talking about who was ‘goin’ down.”  This was the late 1970s and early 80s when a group of freewheeling, Southern pot smugglers lived at the crossroads of Miami Vice and a Jimmy Buffet song. This was the golden age of marijuana trafficking by a bunch of fun-loving Southern gentlemen who forsook college educations to sail drug-laden sailboats across the Atlantic and Caribbean.

Beaufort’s miles and miles of marshlands created the perfect environment for their smuggling operations. These irrepressible men unloaded nearly a billion dollars worth of marijuana and hashish through our eastern seaboard. Then came their undoing: Operation Jackpot, one of the largest drug investigations ever, and marked the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs.

For fast-breaking news - we headed over to The Yankee. No TV back then. Seems everyone in town trusted The Yankee.

It was a place and time never again to be replicated.