A Lowcountry guide to the Murdaugh murder trial media circus | Opinion

Fasten your seat belts.

The Murdaugh murder trial is supposed to start Monday, bringing a circus without elephants to Walterboro.

I expect this roving circus of my media brothers and sisters – or maybe I should call them my “Cousin Eddies” – to take every chance to look down upon us, and the rural nature of Colleton County and its quiet county seat.

Lord knows, Richard Alexander “Alex” Murdaugh of nearby Hampton has given the world plenty of reasons to look down upon us. We even look down upon ourselves, wondering how we let this happen – how a fourth-generation leader of the law now stands accused of murdering his own wife and son.

In fact, it was in Colleton County that his grandfather, the late Randolph “Buster” Murdaugh Jr., gave his clan the blueprint on living above the law, even when it’s your sworn constitutional duty to uphold the law.

Buster was the region’s state prosecutor for 46 years, like his father before him and his son after him. And Buster was the only key figure to be found not guilty in the “Colleton Whiskey Conspiracy” case of the 1950s, a rampant criminal enterprise with cops and judges profiting from a widespread and illegal local bootlegging industry.

But Buster didn’t escape the ridicule of the presiding federal judge and prosecutors who claimed he benefited from jury tampering and witness tampering at about the same stage of the game that his grandson now faces as he sits in a county jail.

Even as the world cranes its neck to see if a Murdaugh could ever face the rap in a place called “The Front Porch of the Lowcountry,” I would encourage the circus not to go off its rocker.

Greatest generation

Truth is, the media will be too busy to do much poking around to pass judgment on us.

Enough dirty secrets will ooze from the courtroom.

But I have some humble suggestions to guide them to a side of town some of us see.

They could venture to the Colleton Museum and Farmers Market and pick up a bottle of Keith’s Red Barn dipping sauce and see silhouettes by Carew Rice. Only God Almighty has etched a truer picture of the Lowcountry than Rice did with his tiny scissors and black paper.

Instead of taking home a homogenized trinket from a soul-less airport, they need to choose from the works of 350 juried artists at the South Carolina Artisans Center in Walterboro.

They could travel back in time to 1949 with a visit to the Dairy Bar, still cranking burgers out one at a time after all these years.

They could appreciate a town that is the gateway to the ACE Basin, called one of the world’s “last great places,” and has in its heart an 800-acre nature preserve.

And a town that is home to the Veterans’ Victory House nursing care facility, “Home of the Greatest Generation.”

One of its wings is named for hometown boy John H. Truluck Jr., a World War II ace who shot down seven German planes. He got in a dozen airborne fights during his 72 missions in a P-47.

His duty was to keep German fighters off our bombers.

And this Lowcountry man took his duty seriously.

Tuskegee Airmen

World War II actually came to Walterboro when 500 Tuskegee Airmen got combat training at its airfield in 1944 and 1945 — after they earned their wings in Tuskegee, Alabama.

Johnnie Thompson, an Army veteran and Walterboro City Council member for 28 years, got a memorial park and monument in place at the airport that visitors should appreciate.

He said those airmen had to win the war in the sky, and then on the ground, where they were denied admission to a Walterboro USO while white German prisoners of war were welcomed.

Thompson said:

“We know what it was like back then. Let’s don’t concentrate on all that. Let’s work on what it’s like now and in the future. That’s why I want young people to know this story.

“We ALL should be proud here in Colleton County to have played this role in U.S. history.”

And for those who want to see Walterboro as a haven of hayseeds, let me remind them of native son Robert Marvin, the father of Southern landscape architecture.

When he and his wife, Ana Lou Marvin, drove a red Volkswagen Beetle to the Aspen International Design Conference on Man’s Environment, he heard Dr. Karl Menninger, world-renowned Kansas psychiatrist, say that “a man’s success and happiness are affected as much by his emotional response to his environment as by his physical comfort in it.

“It was Dr. Menninger’s belief that the answer to mounting problems of mental health lies in the preventive measure of creating living environments which consider the emotional needs of people.”

Marvin influenced a nation with his philosophy: “We need to knock the walls down and let nature in again. Man needs to get out of his box that technology has created. He needs to wrap his arms around nature.”

Mac’s Farm Supply

But, alas, what visiting media always want is a peculiar dateline.

My hot tip to them is this: It’s Round O, Bo.

Round O, South Carolina, is not far from town, and it’s home to a Lowcountry version of Trader Joe’s.

My friend, Barry Ginn, once took me to Mac’s Farm Supply and ACE Basin Milling Co., where you can get pickled quail eggs, Benton’s boiled peanuts, a Ne-Hi grape or muscadine grape juice, sugar cane, pecans, a custom chicken coop, or corn meal and grits.

If that isn’t up to their standards, they can head down to Yemassee for a nip at Harold’s Country Club before hitting the Amtrak station to take the Silver Meteor right out of here, thank you very much.

I’ll be happily stuck here in gothic land after the circus moves on, still clinging to the words of the lovely bundle of joy that was Anna Lou Marvin:

“If you don’t like Walterboro, you probably won’t like heaven.”