Introducing Charlie’s Place: A Cultural Haven That Brought People Together Through Music

Here’s a preview from a new podcast, Charlie’s Place. How did a Black man in the 1940s Jim Crow South open a club where Black and white people danced together? Charlie’s Place was revolutionary, and that meant it was dangerous. Host Rhym Guissé explores the unbelievable true story of Charlie Fitzgerald, a mysterious Black businessman whose nightclub became an unlikely site of integration in Myrtle Beach. Charlie broke down racial barriers through the power of music and dance, hosting some of the greatest musicians of our time: Little Richard, Count Basie, Ray Charles, Duke Ellington, and many more. But who was Charlie? How did he rise to power? And what price did he pay for achieving the impossible—an integrated club in the Jim Crow South? This is a story of joy and passion that erupted into violence and changed a community forever. Listen to Charlie’s Place wherever you get your podcasts. Binge the entire season early and ad-free by subscribing to Pushkin+. Sign up on the Charlie's Place show page on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/charlies-place/id1823737633 or at pushkin.fm/plus http://pushkin.fm/plus. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:53Glynn Washington?

  Hey, it's Glenn here, and I've got something special to share. It's a preview of a new podcast, Charlie's Place, that tells the story of an iconic music venue that united a community divided by racial segregation.

• 2:08Glynn Washington?

  Segregation was the law in the 1940s and 50s, but Charlie's Place had its own rules. Black and white people were welcome to enjoy some of the greatest musicians of our time: Little Richard, Ray Charles, Duke Ellington, Lena Horne, many, many more. Charlie Fitzgerald, a revolutionary but mysterious black businessman, was the club's founder. Charlie's Place was a Myrtle Beach cultural hub that defied the racial barriers of the time, but it sparked intense resistance from segregationists, leading to a raid by Ku Klux Klan members and profound change that reverberated through the community. Interfering interviews with historians, cultural experts, and Carolinians who share firsthand accounts

• 2:52Glynn Washington?

  of growing up during the height of Charlie's Place. Host Rin Gise tells this tale of triumph and tragedy, of resilience and joy of a place where music did more than entertain. It changed lives and shaped a movement. Enjoy this preview. If you want to hear more, find Charlie's Place wherever you get your podcasts.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  Pushkin.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  A quick warning: Some of the language and imagery used to describe this period of time may be upsetting. Please take care while listening.

• 3:40Speaker 03

  I was interviewing a gentleman about his participation in student demonstrations in 1960. He stopped me and he said, "You know I'm from South Carolina. Have you ever heard of Charlie Fitzgerald?" He mentioned specifically knowing Charlie Fitzgerald, knowing his wife, and then relaying to me what he remembered happening in 1950.

• 4:11Speaker 03

  Charlie Fitzgerald was notorious. That's a good adjective for him. He was constantly having makeovers, seemingly always reinventing himself. He was a roving entrepreneur who was beloved and respected by some and despised and ridiculed by others. Traitor, turncoat, folk hero, defiant. The atmosphere is thick with this vehement rhetoric of white supremacy.

• 4:50Speaker 03

  He was a black man who thumbed his nose at laws and customs. And that is why he's a threat. What happened to Charlie Fitzgerald was almost, I guess it would be an Emmett Till moment. It would be a Pearl Harbor moment. People remembered vividly. An ordinary person would say, "The hell with it. I'm going to the promised land. I'm going elsewhere." But Charlie was not ordinary.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  I came to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in search of a folk hero. A man who died in 1955. A man who's almost forgotten, but whose name is still in the air. He was the mythic proprietor of a mythic space, a place that sounded like a mirage. But it did exist, on a Saturday night in 1940, in the seaside town of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The smell of salty air and perfume, a night out on the town. Everyone is filing into a nightclub.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  The sound of Count Basie's orchestra carries into the night.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  Jim Crow laws are in full effect. It would still be decades before black and white people were allowed to even eat together in a restaurant.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  But something surprising is happening inside the club. Something the laws were designed to prevent throughout the South. Black and white people dance together. They partner, press against each other, swing and sway to the music.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  It doesn't feel dangerous. It feels joyous. Nothing else seems to matter. The lines on the outside don't exist. This was Charlie's place.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  It doesn't seem real.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  But a few people still remember.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  I heard a phrase on one of my visits to Myrtle Beach about Charlie's place.

• 7:36Speaker 04

  Segregation in the day, integration at night.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  Segregation by day, integration by night. The people who lived it even have a hard time explaining it. How this nightclub existed when it did, for as long as it did, from 1937 to 1966. But they say it had everything to do with Charlie Fitzgerald.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  Things just went that way with Charlie. He blurred the lines. The rules just didn't seem to apply to him.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  And when I asked why, it just led to more questions.

• 8:11Speaker 04

  Charlie was a big question mark. A lot of people knew him, but didn't really know him.

• 8:17Speaker 05

  He always had an aura about him. And people used to say, "He was a serious man." I took that to mean that he could be a dangerous man.

• 8:29Speaker 06

  He carried two pistols. He had a .45 on one side and a .38 on the other side. And he carried those guns with him all the time. The rumor was spread that Charlie was running a prostitution ring over there.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  Charlie was a source of constant speculation and misinformation. I got to work separating rumors from the facts. Now, as far as businesses go, what we learned about Charlie was he had gambling in the back.

• 9:01Speaker 04

  Yes, yes.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  And some other businesses.

• 9:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, but I can't disclose that.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  When I came to Myrtle Beach, these questions were sometimes met with a guarded attitude. There was something here people were compelled to protect. I was on a mission to find out what that was. I'm Reem Gisey, and this is Charlie's Place. Episode one, Whispering Pines.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  I had to prepare to go back to the South, a place I've rarely been since I was a girl in Louisiana. I usually wear my hair natural, but for the trip to Myrtle Beach, I straightened it. My parents and I first moved to the South when I was 12 years old. We came here from the Ivory Coast. I didn't speak English, and I still remember what my teacher told me while I learned the language. She said, "Listen, things we do not talk about. Sex, religion, politics. Do not touch those subjects." That never made sense to me as a kid. What else is there to talk about?

• 10:32Speaker 02

  That stuck with me, and this story, it turns out, would touch on all the things that you don't talk about in polite conversation in the South.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  Coaxing out the truth would be delicate. I had one shot to get this right. And I didn't have a lot of time. Because most of the people who really knew the story were well into their 80s. There weren't a lot of people left.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  But there was Ms. Pat. But Ms. Pat, I was curious. Do you still stay in contact with everybody you grew up with that's still, you know, here? You do. Yeah.

• 11:10Speaker 07

  I have the most of them. If I can find them, I might stay in contact with them.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:15Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm. But so many of them younger than me dead.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:19Speaker 07

  And it bothers me. I get nervous.

• 11:23Speaker 07

  I'm not ready to go yet.

• 11:26Speaker 07

  Mm-mm.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. Ms. Pat has a wheelchair ramp leading into her house because she has very limited mobility. She had a heart attack recently and can't leave her home. She says most everyone who worked dry cleaners in Myrtle Beach in the 50s, like she did, ended up with either cancer or heart trouble because of the cleaning fluids they used. Each time I walked up to her house, she'd spot me first and call out through the screen door from her lazy boy, "Hey, baby." And each time, it was good to be reminded of the warmth in her voice.

• 11:59Speaker 07

  Charlie Fisher was a good man to the whole neighborhood, the town everywhere. And you either respect him or you hate him. And see, I respect him because, see, he didn't mind putting something on you. That's what Mr. Charlie was to us. You respect him.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  Not many folks really knew him. And I would come to believe that maybe that was intentional on Charlie's part. But Ms. Pat knew Charlie. And everyone that sent me her way described her as a mess. I knew exactly what that meant. A mess in the South is someone who talks a lot.

• 12:37Speaker 07

  Now, you stop me because I don't know when to hush.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  A mess was exactly what I needed.

• 12:44Speaker 07

  Hmm, now, what you want to talk about? How I was raised on Myrtle Beach on Carver Street?

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Ms. Pat helped me understand the setting around Charlie's Club. In the 1940s, before integration, Carver Street was the center of Black life in Myrtle Beach. There were shops, restaurants, clubs, juke joints, all owned by Black people for Black people.

• 13:10Speaker 07

  Carver Street was the only street that we could sell anything, open up a business. We weren't allowed on Oak Street at all.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  Back then, there were boundaries around where Black people lived and where they were allowed to move freely in Myrtle Beach. This neighborhood was known as The Hill, made up of several streets, including Carver, set a few blocks back from the ocean. Ms. Pat was born on The Hill in 1943. By the time she was two years old, her mother and two sisters died from tuberculosis. She was raised by her grandmother.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  They survived by knowing where to find cracks in the system. They existed between broken rules and abandoned materials. During this time of extreme segregation, Ms. Pat's grandmother was resourceful. Black people weren't allowed to buy coal in town, so they collected fragments that fell off the coal train. They dug tar out of the street before it dried to patch their roof. They worked at night to avoid the police.

• 14:13Speaker 07

  We sure did.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  The first gas stove her family owned was fished out of the ocean after Hurricane Hazel.

• 14:19Speaker 07

  And dried it out for three weeks before we could put it together.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  They kept pigs, grew their own fruits and vegetables, sold corn liquor, and did laundry for tourists.

• 14:28Speaker 07

  Oh, God, there's some nasty girls come to Myrtle Beach. Oh, my God. I went and touched the clothes. I said, "No, no, I don't want the germs. Clean your clothes." The girls. The men's was all right, but them girls, oh, my God.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  She shared her vivid memories with me, revealing them as kind of a mental map. Geographically, her world was small, but the details she shared conveyed something much bigger. It helped me understand what the community on The Hill was made of and what it took for Ms. Pat to survive, to live out an entire life here. It was almost freedom, as long as she stayed in the lines. Outside the hill, Ms. Pat was barely allowed to exist. Because outside the hill, she couldn't eat inside restaurants. Outside the hill, she couldn't wear shorts on the boardwalk along the ocean. Outside the hill, she couldn't step barefoot on the sand, let alone touch the water.

• 15:29Speaker 07

  Myrtle Beach was a good place if you stay in your place. I'll put it like that.

• 15:36Speaker 07

  You couldn't go in the ocean. You couldn't go in none of the water.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  Until the late 1960s, it was forbidden for black people to swim in the ocean in Myrtle Beach.

• 15:46Speaker 07

  Because they said the dirt would come off it and go in the water.

• 15:52Speaker 07

  That's why we couldn't go, because we contaminated the water.

• 15:56Speaker 07

  But, um, other than that, it was alright.

• 16:20Speaker 07

  I love family. My family was the biggest thing that ever happened to me.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  When Ms. Pat wasn't helping her grandmother, she was hanging out at her grandfather's barber shop.

• 16:31Speaker 07

  My granddaddy was something. You didn't, nobody ever had a granddaddy like mine. And he would call me to cut his hair and say, "If I cut him, he gonna shoot me." And shoot, and, and show me how to shoot a gun. The pistol and the shotgun.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  How old were you?

• 16:49Speaker 07

  Fifteen.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  Everything happened in her grandfather's yard behind the barber shop. It's where she learned how to shoot a gun, how to shave her granddad's head with a straight razor without cutting him, and where she learned how to dance.

• 17:03Speaker 07

  And dance, oh my god.

• 17:07Speaker 07

  We danced in the yard. We didn't worry about what went on outside. But we danced all we want. I love to dance more than I did anything else. Didn't drink, didn't hang out, but honey, I danced. Anybody wanna dance already?

• 17:24Speaker 02

  When Ms. Pat says, "We didn't worry about what went on on the outside," she means outside of the hill. That world didn't matter. What mattered was who she was on the hill. And on the hill, Ms. Pat was known as one of the best dancers in Myrtle Beach. Dance was everything. And right on Carver, in the center of all the action, was the best place to dance, Charlie Fitzgerald's nightclub, Charlie's Place.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  The insiders know that before it was Charlie's Place, everyone knew it as Whispering Pines. They called it that because of a legend.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  Once, Billie Holiday and Count Basie came and played two nights in a row. The locals say, Billie Holiday's voice lingered like a whisper through those pine trees.

• 18:16Speaker 07

  And that's why they called it Whispering Pines. Because when the wind blow those trees was, oh my God, it was beautiful.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  Whispering Pines was run by a married couple, two black entrepreneurs, Charlie and Sarah Fitzgerald. According to the people who lived on the hill, Charlie and Sarah were forces of nature, two outsiders who came to town in 1937. When I asked people, "Where did Charlie come from?" I thought it was a simple question with a simple answer.

• 18:46Speaker 04

  Some said he's from Georgia.

• 18:48Speaker 05

  I think Charlie was from New York somewhere. So I think he came from Jamaica or someplace. And he came from up north. Nobody knew exactly where. Nobody talked about where he came from.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  So yeah, not so simple. But wherever Sarah and Charlie came from, they ended up in Myrtle Beach. When they opened their club in 1937, it drew entertainers and visitors from all over the country. On Saturday night, Carswood Line Carver Street. Women emerged in evening gowns and men in white tuxes. The crowd felt enormous. And they were all there for the music. And not just any music. It was the best music.

• 19:32Speaker 07

  Oh, yes, God, Ruth Brown, Jane Brown. Girl, I see so many people up in there.

• 19:39Speaker 08

  David Ritchie, you ever heard of him?

• 19:40Speaker 07

  Oh, my God. They don't talk about Wilson Pickett. They don't talk about him. They're right there from the country.

• 19:50Speaker 08

  Roy Hamilton, Johnny Ace, my favorite, The Drifters, Pat Domino. Johnny Taylor, Rossy Clark, Curtis Mayfield, The Impressions. Marvin Gaye was here. Marvin Gaye used to come to there. The barber shop, get his hair cut. The last concert that I attended here with Otis Redding, we were having such a good time that the floor was really caving in.

• 20:16Speaker 07

  It was crowded. People from all over South Carolina, I didn't see it in Charlie Fisher's place.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  Charlie's Place, or Whispering Pines, was a stop on the Chitlin' Circuit, safe venues for black entertainers in the Jim Crow South. These clubs and juke joints launched artists' careers, and Charlie's Place contributed to that. I wanted to know what it felt like to be inside that history. Most people I interviewed, their memories are of a specific era at Charlie's Place. Maybe a few remember the late 40s, and a lot, like Ms. Pat, remember the 50s and 60s. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall.

• 20:51Speaker 07

  It was like stepping in another world.

• 20:55Speaker 07

  And they had these black and white squares on the floor. You would never see nothing like that. All you see is wood floor. I mean, it was so pretty and so different.

• 21:06Speaker 02

  Charlie and Sarah kept tabs on the kids and let them in to dance while the acts warmed up, as long as you were out of there by 9:30. Ms. Pat took advantage of that. She put on a dress and went to see all the artists who came through.

• 21:19Speaker 07

  You couldn't wear no pants, no slacks at all. And my older sister, whenever there's slacks on it, he marched her right back home. That's right, and you had to be out of there by 9:30. He just was strict when it come down to children. He didn't allow children to be in grown people company.

• 21:35Speaker 02

  The more time I spent in Myrtle Beach, the more people turned up with something to share about Charlie's place. The club isn't there anymore, but I heard many stories about what it looked like inside. I'd sketch as I listened and tried to capture it in as much detail as possible, pieced together from people's distant memories. Roddy Brown's family ran Club Bamboo next door to Charlie's place. He says Charlie's place was always packed.

• 21:59Speaker 04

  Okay, you got a huge building here, and you could see maybe 1,500 people in here.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  1,500?

• 22:10Speaker 04

  That's 1,500.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  See, we have no pictures.

• 22:14Speaker 04

  You need to get some authentic pictures, because there got to be some pictures of Charlie.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  There aren't any, other than that bar.

• 22:20Speaker 04

  No interior pictures?

• 22:21Speaker 02

  No.

• 22:23Speaker 02

  What I can gather is when you stepped inside, there was a big bar in front. And towards the back, there were a set of folding tables and chairs. They were in clear view of the front door. Ms. Pat says she always found her dad there with his girlfriends. If his wife walked in the door, he'd have time to spot her and move the girlfriend out of view.

• 22:42Speaker 07

  I didn't care what he done, as long as he didn't bother me. I didn't like my daddy too good.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Further behind the tables was Charlie's back room. As a kid, you'd be in trouble if Charlie caught you trying to sneak in there.

• 22:55Speaker 07

  But you're never allowed to go in that back room. But Mr. Charlie will let you know. I'll get you tomorrow if I don't get you today.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Ms. Pat says that didn't stop kids trying to get back there to rob him. That's where the money was, in the back room where the grownups gambled. On the right side was a patio. That's where the musicians performed. It was sort of a makeshift enclosure made from old signs and a big green canvas curtain, so you couldn't watch the music from outside.

• 23:25Speaker 04

  I used to listen in my bed. I used to slip out of my bed, slip around the Charlies and see the performers. I was 12 years old.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  Roddy and his friends climbed the trees outside to try to catch a glimpse of the performers. Of course, Charlie, the man of mystery, didn't make it easy for him.

• 23:43Speaker 04

  He had curtains, big military curtains to block off the view. I don't know where Charlie got those curtains. Those things were so big, you'd take a whole day to put them up.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  Everything happened at Charlie's place. The dancing, the music, yes. But it was also a place where people came to blow off steam. And that could look like a lot of things. Roddy remembers being there in the daytime and seeing something that would stick with him. In broad daylight, in Charlie's club, Roddy saw a man get shot right in front of him. He said a guy he knew named Nathan pulled the trigger. As Roddy puts it, he witnessed an almost killing.

• 24:28Speaker 04

  And here I am, twelve years, looking at it, almost a killing, all kinds of... We were so terrified, you know? So, this was during the day, these guys getting drunk, getting ready for the dance and starting some foolishness. Charlie came up and said, "Boy, Nathan put that gun up." Nathan, my old cousin and all that. It was a time, you see, we were living in an age, it's totally different from this atmosphere. Totally carnal, a sin city.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  But Charlie was prepared for anything. He always carried two pistols. Everyone knew they were there, under his coat.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  If the Hill was one big family, Charlie and Sarah were the matriarch and patriarch to many who lived there. They were Miss Pat's neighbors, and they looked out for her.

• 25:22Speaker 07

  And Mr. Charlie was a good-looking man. He was real tall, and his wife was kind of halfway short. And she had real curly hair, but she was so pretty. And she would make hot dogs, the best hot dog you ever had on her beach.

• 25:36Speaker 02

  The Fitzgeralds also owned a motel next to the club. The building bent around in a horseshoe. In the center of the horseshoe was the house where the Fitzgeralds lived. They ran a supper club out of it, and sometimes invited the kids in for hot dogs and candy.

• 25:50Speaker 07

  Charlie was a good man.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  Charlie made sure Miss Pat got her share.

• 25:55Speaker 07

  What he said, he meant it. And he said, Patricia, I was real skinny. He said, if you don't get in here and get the candy, all the candy, if you're going, you too little to let them take all the candy. And Miss Sarah would give me my hot dog first so I can gain weight. My other sister was big and I was little. I was little and skinny, but they were so nice people.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  They were kind, but they were more than that. They had standards everyone learned to maintain.

• 26:21Speaker 07

  And Miss Sarah was a sweetheart. She was a pretty woman, but she was very strict. You didn't go in her house any kind of way you come through the side.

• 26:31Speaker 02

  Ms. Pat says the Fitzgeralds were big on education. Before there was an integrated school in Myrtle Beach, the kids on the hill had to ride a bus to Conway, 14 miles away, and they never knew when it was going to come. And when it did, it got stuck on a hill heading out of town. The bus would start to roll backwards and the kids would have to jump out and push it over.

• 26:54Speaker 07

  Every time.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  But Sarah made sure Ms. Pat got to school.

• 27:00Speaker 07

  And we missed that school bus. She would fuss all the way to Conway, 14 miles. Why did you miss the school bus? Was the bus too early or was you lazy? Or you couldn't get up? What was the problem?

• 27:13Speaker 07

  Oh, my God. As long as you weren't involved in it doing wrong, she would take you to school. And wouldn't say nothing. But if it was your fault, you didn't get up on time, oh, honey, she fuss the whole time. Uh huh, and fix your breakfast.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  That sounds brutal, but also very loving.

• 27:32Speaker 07

  It is, she was.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  And since the kids on the hill couldn't go to the beach, Ms. Pat says the Fitzgeralds put a kiddie pool in the back. But another neighbor, Leroy Brunson, mainly recalls the great lengths Miss Sarah took to keep the kids out of it. So she wasn't always sweet.

• 27:49Speaker 06

  Well, Ms. Fitzgerald was.

• 27:54Speaker 06

  She had a temper.

• 27:58Speaker 06

  She didn't care for kids.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  The way Leroy tells it, instead of a guard dog, the Fitzgeralds had a guard monkey, a spider monkey. Leroy remembers Ms. Sarah kept the monkey near the pool tied to a tree.

• 28:11Speaker 06

  She took the monkey

• 28:16Speaker 06

  and she put a longer line on him so he could reach all the way to the front of the pool.

• 28:24Speaker 06

  So my little niece and my son, he told us, said, "Don't go around the pool.

• 28:32Speaker 06

  That monkey here back there."

• 28:37Speaker 06

  Excuse me. She went anyway.

• 28:42Speaker 06

  She tried to run and the monkey caught her off her shirt. And he was holding her, man. So Ms. Sarah came out there and she got the monkey off her and told us, "I told you kids to don't come around here." So get off around here and don't come around here anymore.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  That's so funny. I didn't hear anything about a monkey.

• 29:00Speaker 06

  And she had out front, it used to be the little palm trees with the little fruits on them, the little orange type fruits on the palm of the tree. And the kids used to come in and pick them and they would eat them because they were really sweet. And she went out there and she chopped them down.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  It's hard to tell if she was a contradiction all along or changed over the years. But Ms. Sarah lived into her 90s, so people in town have much more vivid memories of her. Either way, people remember Sarah and Charlie's kindness.

• 29:32Speaker 07

  He would allow the children to come over there for Christmas. He'd give everybody a child who could walk, who could crawl, who could dance, who could do anything. He'd give everybody a child a gift.

• 29:42Speaker 06

  He'd get all the kids on Christmas, come out there and he would have a bucket with dollar bills. I mean, maybe, I don't know, back then probably a hundred dollars. And he'd all the kids line up and he would throw them up in the air. Boy, we would, we would tussle for that money.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  It always seemed like the Fitzgeralds had cash to spare and spread around to neighbors. And Leroy had said something about that money when I first met him that stuck in the back of my mind. He told me Charlie went to New York a lot.

• 30:13Speaker 06

  He'd go to New York about once a month he would go to New York. And we thought maybe Charlie was...

• 30:22Speaker 06

  You know, with the big boys, you know, I'm not saying that he was, you know.

• 30:28Speaker 02

  Others would mention potential ties to organized crime too. Charlie did spend time in New York, but that's about all I could verify. It was hard to find anything concrete about Charlie. I could only find two photographs of him. People that knew him told me he didn't like to get his picture taken. In fact, there's a book about Myrtle Beach with a picture of a man labeled Charlie Fitzgerald, and it's clearly not him. For such an important figure, someone larger than life, who shaped the attitudes and culture in Myrtle Beach and beyond, this is bizarre, and honestly, kind of shocking. Charlie is someone everyone knew. How does that knowledge get lost? Has it been lost? It's clear Charlie's going to be hard to pin down.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  Despite Ms. Sarah's help with getting to school, Ms. Pat dropped out when she was 16. She says it was because she was mad at her dad. He spent the money she'd saved for her graduation cap and gown, so she just quit and started working full-time. And there weren't many jobs Ms. Pat didn't like. Cooking, slapping the hogs. But she loved working at the dry cleaners the best, even though it paid the worst.

• 31:45Speaker 07

  I love to see clothes nice and fresh. And them pants crease down to the max, I love that.

• 31:53Speaker 02

  And for the most part, she liked taking care of the kids of white families, even though it brought her into the lion's den. There was a family in town she babysat for often. In the summer, she took the little girl to the beach. Ms. Pat was careful to never let the waves lap at her feet and get her socks wet. If she came back with wet socks, the parents would know she had touched that water, and she could get fired. But Ms. Pat says they were a nice family. Nice enough.

• 32:23Speaker 02

  One day while babysitting, she saw something laid out on a bed. It looked like a white dress. Then she saw it had a hood. She knew exactly what it was.

• 32:36Speaker 07

  And you had them in the cleaners all the time, because I work in the cleaners all the time. You just go ahead and do it.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  You washed and ironed the white KKK suit?

• 32:48Speaker 02

  Although her friends and family had a good life on the hill, they knew that the Ku Klux Klan was everywhere. White-clad ghosts that threatened all their lives. And here it was again, in the house of the white family she babysat for. A KKK robe. As she looked at the Klan uniform laid out on the bed, the little girl she was watching turned and threatened her. She said,

• 33:16Speaker 07

  You see this? I said, "Yes." She said, "If you don't do what I tell you to do, my daddy will put this back on and he'll do you like he did Mr. Charlie."

• 33:28Speaker 07

  And I just let it go.

• 33:57Speaker 02

  Coming up on Charlie's Place.

• 33:59Speaker 06

  It is a feeling that says, "You belong. This is home." The slop, and then there was the bump, the boogie-woogie.

• 34:08Speaker 07

  Yeah, I did the shag. That was the main thing.

• 34:14Speaker 03

  Charlie was an example of power.

• 34:17Speaker 06

  No one told him what to do. What he wanted to do, that's what he did.

• 34:22Speaker 07

  When you come in here and stir up trouble, it gonna be trouble. When you think somebody making more money than you make, they gonna stir up trouble. We was in trees and in the woods on Copper Street, waiting on them to come.

• 34:47Speaker 02

  Charlie's Place is a production of Atlas Obscura and Rococo Punch, in partnership with Pushkin Industries and presented by Visit Myrtle Beach. It's written and produced by Emily Foreman. Our story editor is Erica Lance. Our team at Atlas Obscura is Doug Baldinger, Chris Naka, Johanna Mayer, Linda Lobell, and Emily Yates. You can follow us on Instagram @atlasobscura. Please head to charliesplaceshow.com for more information about the locations mentioned in the series and how you can visit yourself. I'm Reem Gisey. Thanks for listening.

• 35:32Glynn Washington?

  I hope you enjoyed this preview of Charlie's Place. Find Charlie's Place wherever you get your podcast. If you want the full story right now, you can binge Charlie's Place ad-free with a Pushkin Plus subscription. Sign up on the Charlie's Place Apple Show page or at pushkin.fm/plus.