In the oyster business at the age of nine: James Benjamin “Bennie” Hudson Jr., born in 1932

IN THE OYSTER BUSINESS AT THE AGE OF NINE

James Benjamin “Bennie” Hudson Jr.

Born in 1932

A banker told him politely that his new seafood restaurant, Hudson’s, was too far off the beaten path and probably would not

James Benjamin “Bennie” Hudson Jr. loved Hilton Head Island as a remote island settlement and as a resort-retirement community.

   In the first half of the twentieth century, Bennie’s father ran the magistrate’s court, a general store and oyster factories. In the second half, Bennie ran a few operations, wholesale and retail, at one time juggling a restaurant, an oyster-packing shed, a seafood market, a small fleet of shrimp trawlers and several oystermen picking his fifty-two acres of leased oyster beds. Later, he owned and operated a furniture store. Meantime, he raised great quantities of corn, peas, beans, tomatoes and okra in his big garden on Squire Pope Road—and gave most of it away.

   “I’ve never been lazy,” he said. “I like to see things happening, cash flowing.”

   A roly-poly fellow but “light” on his feet as a dancer specializing in the Carolina shag, for a few years Bennie was as well known for his partying as for his hard work. Married young, he and his first wife had three children in thirteen years and then divorced. As a bachelor for nine years, he kept a suitcase in his car with two suits, two pair of polished shoes and a half-dozen kinds of whiskies with chasers to match. He spent six nights a week in Savannah, Georgia, he said, chasing women and having women chase him.

   Then he fell for Barbara Brannen—a woman he called “the best thing” that ever happened to him. After they married, Barbara announced that Bennie was no longer available. Partners in business and in pleasure, they were together for twenty-five years until Bennie died in 1997.

   Bennie was a second-generation Hudson born on Hilton Head Island. “Old Man Ben,” Bennie’s father, grew up on Hilton Head, learning the magistrate’s and the postmaster’s business from his father. Ben married Bertha Geneva “Neva” Platt of Denmark, South Carolina, and brought her back to Hilton Head. When Ben and Neva were about to become parents with the birth of young Bennie in 1932, Neva caught the steamer Clivedon to Savannah. She had hoped to have the baby in a hospital, but Bennie was born instead at his uncle’s home in Thunderbolt, Georgia.

   Neva brought the baby back to the island community of sandy roads and tidal rhythms. Along with a handful of other white children, Bennie went to elementary school on Honey Horn Plantation. School, though, was never an important part of his life. He was nine years old when he started driving a truck to haul oyster shuckers and pickers, and began measuring oysters in the factory on Skull Creek. Besides the Skull Creek oyster house, Old Man Ben had a factory on Calibogue Sound, at the end of Spanish Wells Road, and one in Gardner, on Broad Creek, off Marshland Road. During the season, Bennie said, they would get between 150 and 200 gallons of raw oysters per day from each factory.

   “Oysters were abundant and beautiful, about half of them single selects. In 1947, we paid $1.40 a gallon, 70 cents of that going to the shucker and 70 cents to the picker. One picker would have five or six shuckers working for him. Daddy paid wages in Hudson currency, which could be spent at the Hudson store. Maggioni and Toomer [L.P. Maggioni and Co. and S.V. “Cap” Toomer, two other factory owners in the region] did the same thing.”

   Like other oystermen, Ben had a keen interest in protecting his valuable oyster bed leases and paid patrolmen to keep poachers away. Keenly aware that the resource had to be managed as well as exploited, he occasionally had the pickers break up clusters to give them room to grow as singles; sometimes he moved oysters from the edge of the creek to the “creek drain,” so the shells would grow thicker and the oysters fatter.

   Hudson’s headquarters in old Stoney Plantation, at what is now the intersection of Squire Pope Road and William Hilton Parkway, housed a mix of services for all Hilton Head Islanders, a population dwindled by then to less than 1,000. The post office was in the general store. In the summer, the magistrate held court in his garage. In the winter, he held it in an outbuilding in the yard.

   With no jail on the island, the magistrate improvised incarceration services when necessary. “Daddy had a tree with a stool built around it. If he needed to send somebody to jail in Beaufort, he’d have a constable chain him to the tree till the steamer came. In those days, the ‘boat days’ were Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday, so the prisoners could have quite a wait sometimes.”

   For young Bennie, court attendance was compulsory. “I had to go,” he said, “so I’d know what was going on and what I’d better not get into. The chain and that tree made quite an impression on us all.”

   The magistrate, as one of the island’s largest employers and also its postmaster, knew every island family and so was able to settle many disputes peacefully. Whenever feasible, Old Man Ben sent those seeking warrants to the preachers and deacons, in hopes that they could settle arguments outside of court. Not only did he dislike having prisoners chained to the oak tree, he disliked hassling and backbiting among his oyster shuckers and pickers. As Bennie remembered how it worked, he said, “The church handled a lot for him.”

   As for young Bennie, among the pleasures of Hilton Head in the 1930s and 1940s were racing a 1935 Chevrolet, a 1934 Chevrolet and a Model A Ford on the roads and beaches. Another was horseback riding from one end of the island to the other. Still another was watching the loggerhead turtles lay eggs in the warm beach sand on muggy summer nights.

   “I’ve held my hand under the turtle, and she’d go like this,” Bennie said, breathing deeply and sighing. “She’d lay an egg every time she did that, and I’d catch them.”

A KNACK FOR FIGURES

Bennie went through ninth grade in Bluffton before joining his father full time in business. He said he never did well in history, English or science but had always found math easy.

   “I could do numbers. I knew money, and I could then—and can still—remember numbers,” he said. His education wasn’t over anyway. He remembered what his father taught him: “On the vehicles, I was taught to check the oil and check the water right away before running the engine. Daddy said if the gas was out, hell, you could walk, but if the oil was gone, you could tear up something.”

   Old Man Ben died in 1954, the year after the start of the first state ferry between the mainland and Jenkins Island.

   Beginning in 1955, for a couple of years, Bennie was in the steam oyster business, using a process that handles oysters about twenty times as fast as the raw-shucking. Bennie said he gave up steaming because he feared that the continued harvesting at the pace necessary to run a cannery would deplete the resource. Raw oysters, opened by hand with a knife and a hammer, were in demand locally and in coastal states, where the customers appreciated the taste and were willing to pay the price. Refrigerated, raw oysters will keep eleven days; on ice, fourteen days.

   A constant concern, he said, was the continuing practice of some oystermen to shuck oysters right where they were picked, instead of hauling them in the shells into the factories. On-site shucking made the bateau hauling easier and produced great mounds of oyster shells on the banks of the creeks and sounds—which soon turned bright white under the steady bleaching of the sun. But the health department didn’t like it.

   Although the oyster business continued to thrive in the 1950s, after development began on the south end of the island, Bennie started trying to think of another business to take advantage of the growth. Along with his oyster factory, he had three shrimp trawlers running; was shipping crabs to Baltimore, Maryland; was sending clams to Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and was selling seafood retail to islanders and island visitors.

   By 1967, the tourists were beginning to get recipes from him and were returning from one season to the next. He decided it was time to show the tourists how Lowcountry boys cook and eat. When the health department challenged him to show the inspectors the plans for the restaurant he intended to open, he said, characteristically: “Hell, you can’t see the plans. They’re not anywhere but in my head. When I get it finished, I’ll call you so you can inspect it if you want to, but I’m opening up.” He whipped up some batter for frying shrimp, heated up some milk for oyster stew and opened Hudson’s Seafood Restaurant on February 12, 1968.

   Hoping to expand soon after opening with ninety-eight seats, Bennie had trouble getting a bank loan, however. A banker told him politely that his new seafood restaurant was too far off the beaten path, saying, “Nobody will drive all the way down that road to eat.” The banker was wrong, and Bennie was right. He got a loan from another bank and enlarged the restaurant.

   On Good Friday 1975, Hudson’s served 775 meals between 4:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m., taking in $5,507.

   Within seven years, Hudson’s became successful. So much so that when Bennie learned, in the summer of 1975, that he had heart problems and sold the restaurant to Brian Carmines, he and Barbara were able to move to Key West, Florida, and take it easy. He did, of course, have a shrimp trawler there and a boat for pulling lobster traps. When frequent guests from South Carolina and Georgia came to Key West for visits, he treated them with plenty of seafood.

   Eventually, Bennie and Barbara landed back on Hilton Head, happy to be once more under familiar live oaks and next to Skull Creek. Bennie said he had been to Jamaica and Puerto Rico, in forty-three states and to seventeen countries, but there was no place like Hilton Head.

   After Bennie’s death, Barbara continued the tradition in the Hudson family of entrepreneurship. She was still in the wholesale shrimp business in the twenty-first century.