Returning to South Carolina meant getting a normal job in a normal town with normal people and marrying a normal person. I wanted the glamour and opportunity of the world.
Cold weather probably played a bigger role in bringing back the hat, but sadly, the hat common to New Jersey guidos, South Carolina rednecks, Idaho potato farmers and Los Angeles gang bangers is the ubiquitous 'tractor hat,' which is derived from the cheap baseball style cap with the adjustable plastic tab.
I fight for the things that I care about, which are jobs and the economy. I fight for the things I think are important, which are reducing the debt and getting more companies to come to South Carolina.
Parents and teachers alike are alarmed by this top-down approach to education that wrongly ties education money for states to the adoption of academic standards that do not fully reflect the values of South Carolina.
On matters of race, South Carolina has a tough history. We all know that. Many of us have seen it in our own lives - in the lives of our parents and our grandparents. We don't need reminders.
I grew up in South Carolina. A lot of what I remember back in the day is AM radio. When I was a kid, you could hear Stevie Wonder and Buck Owens on the same station. All the walls and lines between music were taken down for me.
Over the years, I've traveled to many places for inspiration and research, including Pennsylvania, Ohio, South Carolina, California, and Hawaii.
My particular lifetime, my individual profile, represents something very basic to African-American history and culture because I was a second generation immigrant, so to speak, from the South. My grandfather was born in South Carolina - well, both grandfathers were born in the South.
I grew up in Beaufort, South Carolina, in a six-room farmhouse with a couple of leaning posts to keep it from fallin'. I came up in a time when men were men.
My family's support and the negative environment of the day toward blacks in South Carolina became the forces that led me out of the South - first to New York, then to Philadelphia, where I found opportunity in the form of a PAL gym and my trainer, Yank Durham.
In the fall of 1978, I left the religious, conservative, biracial, slow-paced culture of South Carolina for the secular, liberal, multi-ethnic, intense culture of Princeton University. Like most immigrants, I was looking for a better life in a place I only half understood.
I was raised in South Carolina; I wasn't aware of any art in South Carolina. There was a minor museum in Charleston, which had nothing of interest in it. It showed local artists, paintings of birds.
