For the better part of a century, folks have been returning every year to Pawleys Island’s lofty, rambling Sea View Inn for a delightful sojourn by the Atlantic and three delicious home-cooked meals a day. Some folks are so happy during their stay here that they continue to visit even though their time on earth has passed.
A sprawling two-story wooden lodge built atop high, grass-covered dunes, Sea View Inn rises out of the trees amid tiered wooden walkways and breezy, wood-framed screen porches. A long, old-fashioned back porch opens onto the dining room, where culinary delights are served from the big adjoining kitchen. Boasting twenty ocean-air-cooled guest rooms plus a cottage, the inn has a long, deep, wide, shady plantation veranda on the ocean side, lined with wooden rocking chairs and a quintessential Pawleys Island rope hammock.
Brian Henry of Sea View Inn has compiled a history of the inn and its former owners.
By the 1930s, Pawleys Island was already a place where families returned year after year. It was said that everyone knew everyone else, as well as what house they were staying in. Celeste and Will Clinkscales from Spartanburg were no exception. Celeste was a schoolteacher, and Will, her husband, was a math professor at Duke University. They visited Pawleys Island regularly and considered their family and friends to be “Pawleys people” also.
During the 1930s, Celeste helped run a bed-and-breakfast on Pawleys. So pleased was she with the venture that in 1937, she and Will financed and built Sea View Inn. Celeste, the driving force, ultimately became the hostess of Sea View.
The inn almost immediately established itself as a place where guests returned for the same week in the same room each year—just as is done today. The clientele was intended to be the Clinkscales’ friends and family but soon included many regulars who wanted to try the new inn “in the middle of Pawleys Island.”
Celeste and Will always sat at a table in a small alcove on the northern side of Sea View’s dining room. From there, Celeste, the consummate hostess, frequently rose to converse with guests. Gracious, quiet, and interesting, she could engage people easily. Her genteel and friendly demeanor set the tone for the inn.
Celeste and Will Clinkscales kept Sea View for fifteen years.
In April 1952, the inn was sold to three ladies from Queens College in Charlotte, North Carolina. Miss Thelma Albright was the college’s dean of students, Miss Alma Hull was director of guidance, and Miss Loma Squires was the dietician. Miss Thelma and Miss Alma had been going to the inn for the past thirteen years.
In a letter to regular guests dated April 24, 1952, Thelma, Alma, and Loma announced that they had bought their “favorite vacation spot lock, stock, and both barrels!” They promised that “Miss Loma Squires would attend to your inner satisfaction, while Miss Alma and Miss Thelma would see that your other creature comforts are assured.”
Hurricane Hazel struck Pawleys Island in October 1954. The island suffered major damage. Sea View Inn was toppled and destroyed by the storm tide and wind. Its future was in jeopardy.
In a letter dated March 16, 1955, Thelma Albright informed Sea View patrons that the owners were “still smarting a bit from Hazel, and we have not recovered entirely from the shock of seeing the wreckage of Sea View after the hurricane…. We are going to be back in business…. Our loan has been approved…. The plan is essentially the same as the old Sea View…. The house is going to be set back a bit farther from the beach.”
The main building of Sea View—the same structure that exists today—was completed by 1956. The accompanying cottage remains as well.
Over the years, Loma and Thelma went their separate ways, leaving Alma as sole proprietor of Sea View Inn until 1978.
According to the August-September 1980 issue of the Pawleys Island Perspective, “Alma developed some interesting policies during her term. She locked the doors of Sea View promptly at 10 P.M. each evening, and if you were late, that was just too bad. No liquor was served, but some guests brought their own refreshments, which they enjoyed in their own rooms. One gentleman asked Alma if he could get some ice for a drink at 9:30 one evening. Alma replied by calling the man a degenerate!
“On rainy days she pre-addressed post cards to her Congressman and passed them around to guests so that they could write messages.
“There is no doubt that Alma Hull was a character, but she certainly made Sea View become one of the respected inns on the island. Of course, the food helped make that reputation, and if Alma ran the Inn, it was Geneva Polite who was queen of the kitchen, cooking up a storm three times a day.”
The next “protector” of Sea View Inn was Page Oberlin, who had come to Pawleys as both a child and an adult. In 1978, she brought her children from Ohio, where she had been running a restaurant. She contacted Alma, who was ill and eager to sell. Page ran Sea View for twenty-four years.
In the spring of 2002, Sassy and Brian Henry took on the role of the new “protectors” of Sea View. Sassy was born and raised in Atlanta and attended Mary Baldwin College in Virginia. She owned and operated a business called the Sassy Tree in the 1990s and had a particular interest and talent in landscape design, holiday home decorating, antiques, and preparing cut-flower and potted-plant arrangements. Already a proficient cook, Sassy worked as a chef’s apprentice at an executive dining room for three years, honing her expertise in food preparation and planning. Brian was born and raised in Lafayette, Louisiana, and attended Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. After moving to Atlanta in 1990, he acquired professional experience with a consulting firm and with Coca-Cola. He and Sassy married in 1997.
Some of Sassy’s fondest memories were of walking through Pawleys Creek catching crabs with her dad. Her family had visited Pawleys Island since she was a baby. After vacationing on the island with them, Brian also fell in love with the island of rustic old houses, Atlantic sand, uncrowded beaches, and creek mud.
On Brian and Sassy’s second trip together to Pawleys, a family friend mentioned that Sea View Inn was “quietly” for sale. At that time, the Henrys were living just north of downtown Atlanta. Escalating growth, intense competition for private schools, the corporate lifestyle, unbearable traffic, and social climbing already had them considering living in a smaller town. They began to focus their desire for a lifestyle change on the prospect of living on Pawleys Island. Brian and Sassy felt like they “would win the lottery” if they could take advantage of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to purchase Sea View. They believed that their combined talents would be ideally suited for such an endeavor.
It was time to get a plan, get answers to important questions, and begin a six-month process of prayer, negotiation, and cipherin’ (a Southern term for studyin’ and plannin’). The decision to “go for it” led to a memorable first meeting with Page over lunch at the inn in August 2001. Then came numerous phone calls and overnighted proposals. On December 7, they met with Page Oberlin and were informed that they were “the ones.” They loaded up their belongings and their two young daughters and headed for Pawleys.
Brian and Sassy have maintained the integrity and ambiance of what has become an institution for many people. Their primary focus has been to refine without changing and to subtly improve with an eye toward historical appreciation.
And appreciated Sea View Inn is—so much so that guests have been moved to return after passing away from this earthly life.
Mrs. Frances, who works at Sea View, related the following experience, told to her by a previous owner.
“A band used to come here and stayed in the whole upstairs. After their last visit, they were going on to Charleston or Columbia, one of those two cities. They had an accident. All of them died. After that, the owner’s children were in the living room. The children saw all the men coming down the stairs dressed in tuxedos. They asked their mother why she didn’t speak to the men.”
The children’s mother had seen no one.
Brian Henry related a more recent encounter.
“The instructor for Artists’ Week at Sea View Inn had never experienced a ghostly encounter. She didn’t really believe in ghosts but was skittish enough to not enjoy ghost stories. They reminded her of her younger years when she would not find her mom home after walking home from school. The young girl knew she needed to practice the piano before walking up the street to her piano lesson with Mrs. Earle, but she would hear crackles and squeaks throughout the house that she never noticed when Mom was home. She would gather her lesson books and huddle on the curb out front of the house until time to go to her lesson.
“Now that the art teacher was an adult, she had put away those sorts of fears. It never occurred to her there might be ghosts at Sea View Inn.”
For Artists’ Week, Brian put the teacher in the cottage, as he usually did. She had stayed in Room C in the cottage several times and was also familiar with the single bed and writing desk in Room D, the tiny room on the other side of a shared bathroom. At night, the teacher would leave the bathroom light burning and latch the hook of the bathroom door that gave access to Room D.
“As was her habit, she woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom,” Brian related. “Before getting out of the bed, she heard some bumping around that sounded like someone coming up the steps from the outside boardwalk. She heard them opening the screen door and sliding suitcases across the floor.
“ ‘Ah,’ she thought, ‘the night manager has someone with a very late arrival, and he is moving someone into the adjoining room. How nice! I think that was the last empty room in the inn. But now I will have to share my bathroom.’
“The teacher lay still for a few minutes, listening to the newcomer getting settled into the little room. Then her bathroom call was such that she needed to heed that call. When she finished, she carefully unlatched the hook so the new person would have access to their shared bathroom. She then closed the bathroom door leading into her bedroom. Upon settling back in the bed, she distinctly heard the new guest open the bathroom door and lift the lid and seat to the commode.”
The teacher then heard the unmistakable sound of a man relieving himself.
“At breakfast the next morning, the teacher congratulated the owner of the inn for filling all his rooms during the off-season by moving a gentleman into D of the cottage. The owner returned a puzzled look and explained that no one had moved into D during the night.
“ ‘But,’ the teacher exclaimed, ‘I heard them move into the room. I even heard him go into the bathroom and relieve himself!’
“The daughter of the previous owner overheard the conversation and began to laugh. She explained that George was playing one of his cottage tricks. George Frost, she continued, was a manager at Sea View Inn in the 1980s. He managed the inn during the season. During the winter, which was the off-season, he traveled the world. After leaving Sea View, George stayed in touch with an ongoing regular guest by way of online backgammon. They played every Sunday night. In the weeks prior to George’s death, he had not been online for a few weeks, and the guest became concerned. George, confined to a bed at that point, had communicated to the guest just prior to his death that all he wanted to do was return to Sea View Inn one more time.”
George had died earlier on the very same day the teacher heard the phantom visitor check in. He apparently made it back for one last night. Room D was George’s office during the winter!
But who exactly was George Frost?
When on visits to Sea View Inn during George’s tenure as seasonal manager, guest Gene Roberson and his wife, Sandy, came to know and love George. Gene enjoyed many games of backgammon at Sea View with George before becoming his Sunday-night Internet backgammon partner.
“I know far more about who he was then than about his life before we met,” wrote Gene. “I know that he had a lifetime love of the sea, and that his favorite time was when he was taking transocean cruises. He preferred to hitch rides on freighters. I think he served in a branch of the Navy that kept him at sea a lot. He had fascinating off-seasons from the Sea View, such as volunteering at an orphanage in Guatemala, working on communication research projects in Hawaii, sailing for weeks to Australia, spending a couple of nights ashore and hopping another ship to return, or working at arts festivals in upper New York State, which was his home. Sandy and I visited him there when he was about eighty-four and found that he was just starting to learn to play the clarinet.
“He was working at Sea View as a manager’s assistant in the mid-1980s when we first started going. In fact, he was the first person we met there, and for many years, for us and other guests, he was the face of Sea View. He was soft-spoken and always warm and pleasant. He welcomed each guest as if they had come to visit him. When he wasn’t working, he spent most of his time socializing with guests.
“We never go to Sea View without remembering, appreciating, and missing George.”
Life’s happiest days are the ones we would like most to repeat. That is why some of those who are no longer of this earth choose occasionally to revisit the scenes of some of their happiest days—as George did at Sea View Inn.