Growing up on the Point in Beaufort, South Carolina, in the seventies and eighties was magic. Pure magic. We all became starstruck when Hollywood arrived in town to film Pat Conroy’s novel The Great Santini. We all knew the Conroys.
One Saturday afternoon I was riding my bike on Laurens Street when I popped the sickest wheelie on my Rampar dirt bike, witnessed by a lady out for a jog. She saw me bite it. Blood flowed.
The lady? Blythe Danner. (Lest you think this is not true, Blythe confirmed the story to some friends of ours in her daughter’s kitchen in 2018.)
Introductions were made.
Playdates scheduled.
Further introductions made to her co-stars and other cast members.
Including the one we called Uncle Bobby.
We went on the set at Tidalholm, the Edgar Fripp House, where the fictional Meechum family was living.
Uncle Bobby played basketball with us with a basketball used in an emotional scene.
Uncle Bobby played hide-and-seek around the yard and in the house.
Uncle Bobby would toss a football with us.
He even went trick-or-treating with us and a group of urchins that year. My middle brother was wearing a rabbit costume. Somewhere walking along East Street, he tripped. He was four. A block away on Hancock, he tripped again. Uncle Bobby scooped him up and put him on his shoulders as we made our way. Held him up there all night.
That night our neighbors recognized Uncle Bobby from his past roles as the silent Boo Radley, the meticulous Tom Hagen, the imperious Bill Kilgore.
He would guffaw when my dad would say to him John Wayne’s famous line from True Grit, “I aim to shoot you or see you hanged in Judge Parker’s court. Whichever you prefer.”
Uncle Bobby would reply with his own line, “Mighty bold talk for a one-eyed fat man.”
At boarding school, I watched Francis Ford Coppola’s re-telling of Heart of Darkness set in Vietnam. I watched Uncle Bobby as Bill Kilgore say earnestly, “Charlie don’t surf!”
I turned to one of my classmates and said, “I heard Uncle Bobby say that in person one Halloween.” My classmate didn’t believe me.
I know there are some folks in Beaufort who still do.
Rest in peace, Uncle Bobby.
Hamlin O’Kelley, a native of Beaufort, South Carolina, lives in Charleston, where he practices law to pay for his writing habit.
