The Golden Rose Park

(Excerpt)

The juke box was playing Marvin Gaye and Wilson Pickett, the salt breeze eased in gentle from the marsh and overhead the Atlantic Ocean forever waved upside down on the hand-plastered ceiling. The beer was cold. The ribs were spicy. The company was warm and wise. It was the good life. It was the Golden Rose Park.

For more than three decades Gene and Clothilde Wiley's Golden Rose Park was legend on Hilton Head Island. Everybody went there from white boys looking for cool music and a good time, to Island natives and world traveled musicians. It didn't matter. Sophisticates and innocents, black and white, old-timers and newcomers mingled beneath the large old oak tree under which Gene Wiley claimed to have been born, and kicked back.

"That place was like home. We lived there," Isa Saunders told me when I called him at his business in Virginia Beach. "Man -- we had some good times there! It was like 'Cheers,' ya know? Everybody knew your name."

Yeah. It was like that. But better. As the memories pour fast and warm from the many patrons of the Golden Rose Park, everyone, regardless of age or current place says in one way or another the same thing. It was like home -- and Gene was the reason.

Eugene Wiley was born under or near the great oak in the community known as Grassland. Some folk call the area, off Union Cemetery Road, Grass Lawn these days, but binyah's, folk who've always been on the island, set it straight. "It was Grassland then and it still is," I was told. It certainly was when Gene was a child playing, hunting and working in the marshy fields and woods. At 15, eager for adventure and to see what lay beyond Hilton Head's edges, he ran off and joined the Navy, lying about his age. And Uncle Sam kindly picked him up and took him along. World War II was in swing.

Gene kept his eyes and ears open, did his part and stayed alive in different places around the world. When his time was up he settled in Brooklyn, New York. It was there he met Clothilde, who'd come from New Orleans. After several years in the city, though, the salt water in his veins started pulling him home. It does that. Just ask any Sea Island native. So Gene and Clothilde packed it in and came back to Hilton Head Island about 1959, and he built his magic park on the land he grew up on.

"Oh, it was beautiful there, just beautiful," Tom Barnwell, a local Island entrepreneur, told me. "It was tucked just so into the landscape with benches under the trees. And the barbecue was out of this world!"

A lot of folk raved about the barbecue. And the music. Hilton Head Island wasn't the hot spot it is now, but musicians would come from Savannah and roundabout to play at The Golden Rose Park. Good stuff, too. Cars would be parked in the fields until almost sunrise while folk laughed and ate and drank and danced. And listened to Gene hold court.