Southern cookin’ and free counsel: Katie McElveen, born in 1904

SOUTHERN AND FREE COUNSEL

Katie McElveen

Born in 1904

Carpenters, electricians, construction crews, business owners, traveling salesmen and laborers broke cornbread together at Miz Mac’s table Monday through

Katie McElveen was a local folk heroine. She was a liquor storeowner who advised people not to drink. She was a restaurant owner who snapped the fresh green beans while chatting with the customers. Long past the age of most people’s retirement, Katie was up and at it six days a week, tending Hilton Head Island’s once-famous Roadside Restaurant from 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., always with a wink and a chuckle.

   Nobody called her “Mrs. McElveen.” Almost nobody called her “Katie.” She was “Miz Mac” or “Mama.”

   She learned young to keep busy. Born in 1904 on a farm near Statesboro, Georgia, the youngest of eight children, she walked three miles to a rural school until she’d completed sixth grade. Then she took up what became her life’s work. She started preparing the midday meal for the family, which by then included brothers’ wives and children, and for the “hands,” the workers on her family’s farm.

   The menu—usually for sixteen or more—included ham and sausage from the smokehouse, sweet potatoes from the earthen beds, peas from the patch and corn from the field. Katie and her sister-in-law were in charge of the gathering, shelling, shucking, slicing and washing of the fresh vegetables as well as the cooking, but as Miz Mac remembered it, all of that work was “no burden.”

   “You get used to it. You learn where to put your hands to get the cooking done, and it’s no big thing.”

   By the time Katie was tied up in her family’s farm kitchen, she’d already met her future husband, a fellow who lived a little more than two miles down the road. On the occasion of a quilting party she attended with her mother, she had a call to the outdoor toilet. In the fashion of the times, she sat down over a hole in a board, and when she looked around, a young man was already sitting on an adjacent hole in the same board. Her toilet partner was young Joseph T. McElveen, called “Mac”—the man she would marry a few years later.

   “That was how Mac and I got our first look at one another,” she said several decades later, a belly laugh following her words.

ON THE WAY TO

Katie, Mac and their daughter, Lou Vera, lived briefly in Atlanta, briefly in Savannah, Georgia, and, during the Depression, on the family farm in Georgia, selling eggs for 8 cents a dozen and corn for 35 cents a bushel. Mac started killing a hog on Fridays, barbecuing it that night and taking barbecue sandwiches to the little town of Register, Georgia, for sale on Saturdays.

   Then Union Camp Corp. offered Mac the job of gamekeeper on its hunting property at Palmetto Bluff near Pritchardville, and suddenly the Georgia farm girl was living in the woods on the edge of the May River and loving it. “I could go crabbing and fishing and shrimping, and could pick oysters. They had all the free vegetables on the place I could possibly use or can or freeze. It was quiet in the summer and busy with hunters August through March. They hunted hogs, deer, turkeys, ’coons, anything you hunt. It was wonderful.”

   In the early 1950s, the McElveens ran a barbecue restaurant in Savannah. In 1955, when Hilton Head Island’s resident community consisted of eleven hundred blacks and forty-nine whites, when there was only a ferry to connect the island with the mainland, the McElveens opened a liquor store, a variety shop and a barbecue sandwich place on present-day U.S. Route 278 just south of what later became the heart of Hilton Head Island’s resort communities.

   “At that time, we had everything from cuff links to gasoline to hamburgers and gin for sale, but we didn’t sell much of anything,” Katie said. “You might think we sold a lot of liquor, but there was too much moonshining going on. That wasn’t much of a business.”

   “Lewis McKibben had The Arcade on the beach [South Forest Beach] then, and he would come up to have a cup of coffee with us without worrying about a thing. If we saw a car go by, we’d know it was going to The Arcade, because there wasn’t anything else down there on the south end. He’d finish his coffee and go. One day I sat here all day and didn’t sell a thing but a 10-cent Coke,” she said.

   As the island’s population grew, Katie and Mac earned a reputation for barbecue, seafood and fresh vegetables on the table, and they quit selling gasoline and cuff links.

NO LIQUOR FOR DRUNKS

They kept the liquor business, despite Katie’s warning to the customers about too much boozing.

   “I don’t feel I have to apologize for selling it. It’s fine for those who use it right, but it’s not right for everybody. Why, a fellow I knew had just been baptized in our church—I’m Baptist, you know—when he came here to buy liquor, drunk. I wouldn’t sell it to him. I told him he ought to be ashamed of himself—just baptized and getting drunk. All the drunks and alcoholics knew to go somewhere else to buy it.”

   Maybe Katie’s refusal to sell liquor surprised the recently baptized fellow, but he wasn’t the first customer to be surprised at an offer of advice from Miz Mac.

   “They came in here with all kinds of problems. Some of them were stepping out on their wives—or their husbands. I tell them about that. Some of them had financial troubles. I told them to quit wasting money and to pray about the situation.”

   For a quarter of a century, at the Roadside Restaurant, Miz Mac served fresh summer squash and deviled crab, rice and gravy and biscuits—and regular counseling to those who asked. “You don’t know how good the Lord can be to you until you ask him,” she told her customers.

ROADSIDE MESSAGE CENTER

Mac died in 1964, just as the island’s growth picked up. Within a few years, the Roadside Restaurant had become a meeting place for a faithful crowd of working people who enjoyed Southern cooking and Miz Mac became the unofficial secretary/public relations coordinator for a dozen builders and subcontractors.

   Carpenters, electricians, construction crews, business owners, traveling salesmen and laborers broke cornbread together at Miz Mac’s table Monday through Friday. When the phone rang, it might be about restaurant business, but it could just as well have been one “sub” trying to get in touch with another.

   “If somebody was going to Savannah for something, and somebody who works for him wanted to tell him to pick up something else, and the only place he could catch him was here, why shouldn’t we take the message for him?” Miz Mac asked. “I guess a million dollars worth of construction business has been handled right in here at these tables. These are my people.”

   At the age of seventy-seven, in 1981, she was briefly tempted to sell the restaurant so she could go fishing more and spend less time peeling peaches and snapping green beans. She did sometimes take her great-grandson fishing in the late afternoons.

   “They say you should measure age not in years but in the number of friends you have. I think I’m getting along OK doing just like I’m doing,” she said.

   In 1985, at the age of eighty, Miz Mac finally closed the business and moved to Bluffton to be near her daughter. When Parkway Medical Center opened on the site of the old Roadside Restaurant, the owners hung a picture of Miz Mac and the restaurant on the wall and named an examining room for her. Seeing her face and reading her name, old-timers who happened by as patients might recall the taste and smell of her wonderful food from the past—or remember some of her advice.