Spoleto Festival, Charleston offer learning, Southern charm, fun

Architect Doug Fuller has me convinced of the power of the Kent State University logo as a conversation opener.

During a week-long visit to Charleston, South Carolina, Doug, a KSU alumnus, proudly wore his KSU hat and shirts and was repeatedly asked about the university, I think he said, five times, by people residing in Charleston who are graduates of Kent State or have connections.

Even Ravenna native and Hiram College alumna, Dr. Sally Webb, a pediatrician who has practiced medicine in Charleston for more than 30 years, introduced herself to Doug upon seeing a KSU logo on his shirt.

Doug and his wife, Karen, along with Janet and me, were visiting Charleston during its renowned Spoleto Festival. The festival was founded in 1977 as a collaboration between the city and Gian Carlo Menotti, the Pulitzer Prize winning-composer who sought to establish an American counterpart to the Festival del Due Mondi in Spoleto, Italy.

Having since grown into one of America’s foremost summer arts festivals, Spoleto has been on my bucket list for years. So when Will Hubin, a retired KSU Physics professor, last winter mentioned he planned to attend, we decided to do the same.  Will was going as a participant in the Road Scholar touring company that focuses on learning for retirees.  It arranges a one-week experience at the festival, which in total lasts three weeks, and brings many thousands to Charleston.

Janet and I followed Will’s example.  Doug and Karen did the same.  So did Terry Schoettler, a professional musician, who has taught music. Of the 34 participants in our Road Scholar group last week, the six of us were conspicuous for hailing from the same small, bustling university town in Ohio. Others came from California, Minnesota, New York, Virginia, North Carolina, and other parts of the country.

Road Scholar had booked several performances for us that included jazz and Broadway dancing, symphony orchestral and chamber orchestral music, a retelling of Homer’s Iliad as an anti-war jeremiad, and “Vanessa”, an opera by Menotti and Samuel Barber. We could purchase tickets for additional concerts and performances and did.

Old Charleston, founded in 1670, is so pedestrian friendly and so rich in history that much of the fun was exploring on our own during the blocks of free time that Road Scholar inserted into our schedules. Participants went their own ways and then told of their adventures at Road Scholar group lively dinners and breakfasts.

We especially enjoyed walking with the Fullers. Doug’s background as an architect and his interest in preservation were perfect for Charleston, a city that is capitalizing on its history and is busy restoring and repurposing homes, civic centers, and commercial buildings of the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.

Doug pointed out that the Francis Marion Hotel, named for an American Revolutionary War hero and where our tour group was staying, is a larger and more luxurious version of Kent's Franklin Hotel.  Both were built in the 1920s and Doug said architectural plan books for hotels of that type were available for builders. In two 18^th century mansions near the downtown that our group toured, Doug spotted building features that the rest of us would have missed.

Architectural reviews and preservation are a serious business in Charleston, we learned, as our guide, Kathy Elliott with her husband, walked us along the Battery, the city’s shoreline where Charleston’s 18^th and 19^th century elite resided in beautiful waterfront mansions. Their wealth came from inland rice, indigo, and cotton plantations where thousands of human beings labored without pay, treated as subhuman farm chattel by their owners.

Across the Charleston Harbor stood Fort Sumter, the U.S. Army island-fortress, whose shelling in April 1861 began the hostilities of what became our brutal American Civil War that eventually eviscerated the South.

Before the Civil War, Charleston was an important market for the buying and selling of slaves. An estimated 40 percent of all people in bondage who came to the United States passed through the port of Charleston.  From 1708 until the Civil War, Black Americans, 98 percent of them slaves, outnumbered white Americans in South Carolina by as many as two to one. Their unpaid labor contributed to Charleston’s reign as one of America’s wealthiest cities.

After the Civil War, Charleston lay in ruins.  Recovery took nearly a century. Only after World War II, when the new national highway system was built did industry, attracted by low southern wages, start locating new factories there. The pace picked up. Charleston, along with other cities in the South, found a new vitality and is booming.  Its deep harbor port is one of the East Coast’s busiest.  Greater Charleston has a population of nearly 900,000.  Its Sunbelt climate, tax abatements, business-friendly labor laws and new accessible highways attract manufacturing and distribution centers.

The fine arts have long benefitted from Charleston hospitality.  George Gershwin, Edgar Allen Poe, James P. Johnson’s Charleston dance, Charles Edwin Pachelbel, the Jenkins Orphanage Band and Pat Conroy are only a few whose work has Charleston inspiration. City leaders recognized that Gian Carlo Menotti’s proposed fine arts festival would further the community’s reputation as a vital cultural arts center and help bury its past as the cradle of the Confederacy where the issue of race was so defining.

The Spoleto Festival provides Charleston the opportunity to present itself as an oasis of enlightenment where music and live theater flourish and visitors who enjoy them are welcome.  Attractive, walkable streets lined with interesting, restored historic buildings, some of them shaded by the city’s palmetto palms, cast a spell.  It is hard to leave Charleston and one does so, hoping to return for a visit someday soon.

David E. Dix is a retired publisher of the Record-Courier.

This article originally appeared on Record-Courier: Spoleto Festival, Charleston offer learning, Southern charm, fun