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Rhym Guissé: A quick warning: some of the language and imagery used to describe this period of time may be upsetting. Please take care while listening. Dino Thompson has had a gun pointed at him six times, and he’s been in love 20 times. From these stats, he might seem like more of a lover than a fighter. But at Charlie’s Place, a club on Carver Street, the owner Sarah Fitzgerald only cared about Dino’s capacity to find trouble. She’d heard about his reputation on the boulevard. That’s how people referred to Ocean Boulevard, which was the street closest to the water running parallel to the beach. Back then, Ocean Boulevard was strictly a white part of town. Black people were literally only allowed on the boulevard if they worked there. They had to carry cards to prove it, or they could get arrested. But Sarah knew that if Dino fought at Charlie’s Place, it would have different consequences than on the Boulevard. And that’s what she told Dino when she saw him in her club.
Dino Thompson: She told me on several occasions, she said, I know you’re feisty. I heard you’re a boulevard fighter. I said, well, ma’am, I don’t start fights, we just get—it happens. But she laughed and she said, but you can never have a problem in here. Do you understand? She didn’t want a white boy getting his butt kicked in a Black nightclub, you know, in the ’50s.
Rhym: Ms. Sarah knew that a white boy getting beat up in a Black nightclub wouldn’t just affect Dino. It would be dangerous for every person in there. It could be deadly. Before Dino stepped foot into Charlie’s Place, he was just a Greek kid from the boulevard. The boulevard was his stomping ground. And when he wasn’t getting into fights, he was dancing.
Dino: I was a product of the Boulevard. You know, we grew up on the Boulevard and we learned to dance at a very young age because that was how you met girls. That was very important. And if you could dance, you could always meet the cutest girl.
Rhym: All the white kids in Myrtle Beach got together at the Pavilion-on-the-Boulevard to dance. They called themselves Beach Cats. They danced the Jitterbug, a jittery version of swing. One might call it the white man’s Lindy Hop. If you know, you know. Those who could dance the best were kings out there on the boulevard. But Dino realized they had nothing on what was happening at Charlie’s Place. If Dino really wanted to learn how to dance, he had to leave the Boulevard. He had to enter that other world of Myrtle Beach, The Hill, and go to the club on Carver Street to Charlie’s Place. Once inside, though, Dino would learn that dance was just part of his lesson at Charlie’s Place. Because dance wasn’t just dance. And Charlie’s Place wasn’t just a club. It was where all the passions of life, the tensions, the fears, the anger, the love, the delight, the joy, would come out, would unfurl, and would change the fabric of Myrtle Beach. I’m Rhym Guissé. This is Charlie’s Place. Episode 2: Sin City.
This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.
Rhym: As I continued on my journey to understand Charlie, I realized I had to understand what he built. I needed to get inside Charlie’s Place, the best I could, given that the building the nightclub was in no longer exists. More than who performed there, who danced there, why were music and dance so important to all the people I talked to? Dino, the Greek kid known for fighting on the Boulevard, had a unique perspective on it all. His dad owned a restaurant in town called The Kozy Corner, and that’s where Dino first encountered Charlie Fitzgerald, when Dino was just a little kid.
Dino: My first memories of Charlie Fitzgerald were him sitting in The Kozy Corner at what we called the family table, it was right by the cash register. And there were always a group of kibitzers there, a couple of Jews, a couple of Lebanese, a Greek, a Baptist, and Charlie is joining in. He was quiet, he was a more serious man, but for lunch he’d always eat a club sandwich. Before long he was just one of the guys sitting around the family table with five ashtrays for cigarettes and six cups of coffee, and one of my jobs was to keep emptying those ashtrays back and forth. One day I had my cowboy outfit on, I was about seven, I had two guns on, a little silk cowboy shirt, my boots, and I noticed when he turned, I had two plastic pistols like pearl handles. And I said, well, you’ve got a pistol like mine. And I said, can I see it? Charlie takes the bullets out, I take it, I leave mine there, and I put it in my holster and I go down the street and I shoot 10, 15 people with Charlie’s pistol, you know, with no bullets. And I come back 15, 20 minutes later, I give it back to him, puts the bullets back, puts it back. It was just something he had, but he was the only one I know back then carrying a shoulder pistol tucked neatly under his jacket. So that was an air of mystery to me as a child.
Rhym: People I spoke to talked about the restaurant Dino’s dad owned as a safe zone, a place outside The Hill where Black people would be served without hassle. What I took this to mean was Kozy Corner was less racist than the other places in the area. But even at the Kozy Corner, segregation was still the law, and Black patrons still could only order food to go through a side window. But there was one exception: Charlie. And Charlie defied the segregation norms in broad daylight, in front of a window, for everyone on Main Street to see.
Leroy Brunson: No one told him what to do. What he wanted to do, that’s what he did.
Rhym: Leroy Brunson was close in age to Dino, and they became friends. Leroy’s dad was a cook at Kozy Corner, but Leroy could never visit his dad there on the inside.
Leroy: But we thought it was natural, normal. As a kid, you know, the places that they didn’t want you, we didn’t go. You’d walk the street, they’d ride by some cars and they would throw things at you sometime walking the street.
Rhym: But for a moment in time, Leroy thought the rules had changed. Because one day, he saw Charlie sitting inside the Kozy Corner, eating lunch with Dino’s dad in a booth together.
Leroy: And the first time that I saw Charlie sit down in Dino’s father’s place, he was having lunch. And that’s what I wanted to do. But my brother, you know, he’s a little older than me, so he said no you can’t, no, no, no, no. So we stayed outside.
Dino: There’s nothing I could remember that would affect me like Leroy telling me that story. It stuck with me. I just stared at Leroy a minute trying to imagine what he was feeling, of course. I couldn’t go there. I couldn’t get there.
Rhym: It would be years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would make segregation illegal in public places. The regulars at Kozy Corner were men who smoked and drank and played cards. These were immigrants from European countries finding community in a foreign land. And somehow, Charlie fit in.
Dino: Sitting with a Black man was no big deal to them. They’d seen the horrors of war. So there were bigger things in their life they had dealt with than this segregation thing that was going on in America. So maybe it was, I’m naive to think that things weren’t happening in other places, but in my world, things were okay.
Rhym: From what I heard, it sounds like Dino’s dad and Charlie had a true friendship. Maybe they recognized something in each other, had similar dreams of finding home in Myrtle Beach, even if they were sometimes seen as outsiders. At the end of the night, Dino’s dad would give his staff who lived on The Hill a ride home, and Dino would tag along. Remember, The Hill was where Black people in Myrtle Beach lived and could move freely. After his dad had dropped everyone off, he’d often stop at Charlie’s place.
Dino: I’d wander around and play a pinball machine, and sometime I’d punch up a record on the jukebox. Charlie would actually give me a quarter. And I remember some of the songs I’d punch up were dirty blues, and he would look at me and say, you played that? I’d say, yes, sir. You know, Please Warm My Wiener or some of that. But them dirty blues, there were no dirty words, it was all innuendo. But it was dirty music back then, so I thought it was cool to be able to punch in songs like that. So I got introduced to Black music at a very young age.
Rhym: Charlie’s place was all about Black music, in lots of forms. There was the music on the jukeboxes, the songs Dino sought out for a quarter. But really, what people of this time mean when they say Black music is R&B. This music specifically was banned on the outside. Local radio stations called it race music, or jungle music, and vowed to never play it. When the biggest R&B artists of the time came to play at Charlie’s place, Dino made sure not to miss it. The problem was, Dino was a kid, and Charlie had that rule, no kids after 9:30. So, Dino snuck in.
Dino: I’m walking through a throng of people, Charlie sees me and he says, what are you doing? I said, I’m here to see Little Richard, and he laughed, and he said, where’s your daddy? I said, he’s still working. And he puts me on the end of the stage, and he said, don’t move from here, I want you not to move. And I’m sitting on the end of the stage, and of course, Little Richard plays the piano, but you know, he’s acrobatic, he’s everywhere. I got the best seat in the house, he’s dancing all over me, all around me. I remember he had a pair of blue suede shoes that had metal fronts and a metal back. I’d never seen a pair of shoes like that, so it made an impression. When I got home, my dad said, I thought you were spending the night with Little Richard, and I tried to explain to him, I went to see Little Richard, he’s a singer. It didn’t register with Dad. And I said, he plays piano with his head, his elbows, and his feet, and my dad says, what’s wrong with the man? He’s got no hands? And I said, good night, Dad.
Rhym: Dino loved the music you could find at Charlie’s Place. And as he learned how to dance, he couldn’t stay away.
Dino: All the dancers wanted that Black music. Why? Because it had a danceable backbeat.
Rhym: Music and dance on The Hill was one and the same, and no one could deny the influence they were beginning to have on the outside of the nightclubs in Myrtle Beach and even far beyond. There was something big happening in Myrtle Beach and its neighboring towns along the Carolina coast. White kids were falling in love with Black music. The author Frank Beauchamp wrote an oral history of dance and music in Myrtle Beach during the 1940s and ’50s. He attributes the spread of R&B in white clubs along the Carolina coast to a white dancer who went by the name Big George. Big George collected the most popular records from the jukeboxes in Black clubs and loaded them in the jukeboxes of white clubs on the boulevard. These R&B records were known as beach music, what many in Myrtle Beach still consider the sound of home. Back then, if you wanted to buy Black music, there were two options. You could order it from this one record shop in Tennessee called Randy’s Record Shop, or you could order directly from the label. Most of the great R&B artists of the time were represented by Atlantic Records, and the president of Atlantic Records began to notice.
Dino: White teenagers from this little area from Carolina Beach to Pawleys Island were ordering Black music by mail. And he was wondering, why are so many white teenagers? Because we had it on our jukeboxes. And when you heard it, you wanted it. You wanted it for your little record player. He wanted that little Raspberry 45. Back then, race music was red. So he sent Jesse Stone down, a Black songwriter who wrote Shake, Rattle, and Roll for Big Joe Turner. He sent him down here to see what the heck’s happening. What’s going on down here? Why are so many white teenagers ordering this Black music? This forbidden Black music wasn’t allowed to be played on the radio. So Jesse comes down here. He goes to some of the juke joints, the clubs. He goes to Charlie’s Place, and he says, anything that’s got that danceable backbeat, these white kids dance. And they want it. They crave it. They love it. And he said, they’re actually dancing with each other, Blacks and whites. It was kind of an unusual moment in history.
Leroy: The only white music we had on our jukebox was Elvis Presley and the Four Seasons.
Rhym: Back then, Dino was kind of like Leroy’s shadow. If Leroy and his friends went to the movies, they had to sit in the balcony upstairs because they were Black. Whites sat downstairs. But Leroy remembers Dino snuck up there and sat with his friends.
Leroy: And the ushers would come down, and they would run him downstairs. And when they run him down, he would sneak back.
Rhym: At least once, Leroy says, he got Dino out of some trouble for dancing with a girl who had a boyfriend. He also says Dino used to carry a small gun on him, which feels like an emulation of Charlie. Wherever Leroy went, Dino went. And because of that friendship, Leroy says, no one bothered Dino.
Leroy: You know, because he was friends of the boys, I would say, he understood.
Rhym: And on Saturday nights, the boys went to Charlie’s place dressed up in their suits and ties.
Dino: I remember I was 14, and the place was packed. And I was sitting with Leroy Brunson and Seth King and some of their friends. Leroy said, do you like to dance with my girlfriend? Who later became his wife, Costella. Very, very pretty lady, young lady back then. She was probably 17, I’m 14. I said yes. And so I asked Costella, would you like to dance? And we stepped about four feet away from the dance floor, and she stopped me. I had her hand, and she stopped me, and she said, you better know how to dance. I’ll leave your ass right here on the dance floor. And I said, I can dance a bit. And I could dance.
Rhym: Dance at Charlie’s place was a living, breathing thing. Never static, never stale. The dances were born and shifted into something else so fast, it was like trying to capture the outline of a cloud. By the time you decided what it was, it’s already something new.
Dino: Every time I went to Charlie’s place, every time, they showed me a new dance. Every time. And so I’d go home and I’d work on it a little bit, and the next time I’d go—and Leroy would do this to me. He did this to me 15 times. I had The Wobble down. So I went out there and I did The Wobble, and he said, we don’t do that anymore. We now do The Slop, and he’d show me The Slop. But they were so creative and I’m wondering, who thinks of these dances? I always want to know somebody. Somebody thought this dance up and it just spread like wildfire through the Black community and then it would infect us. We’d soon be doing the same dances. They stayed lower and the whites seemed to stand up straight or so and then when they did the belly roll and the pivot they did it lower and so we used to love watching their style. They kind of dug watching what we did.
Rhym: Sometimes Dino would come ready to impress with a new dance step.
Dino: Because we go home and make up a step and, you know, we always want to show it off, and if we went to Charlie’s we definitely show our new step off and somebody would come up go, show me that, you know? And they’d have it in 10 seconds.
Rhym: The dancers in Charlie’s Club say that they could see something magical was happening there at night. Segregation by day, integration by night. Through music and dance and just love for the movement, Black and white friends could dance together, partner together, teach each other, value each other’s art, break through all the cruel oppressive restraints of the walled world they lived in. No one thought about things like whether a Black girl dipping her toe in the ocean would dirty the white children there. No one made threats over white KKK robes lying on a bed. Because art was letting them move past all that. Art was showing the truth, showing how ridiculous and evil those barriers were.
Dino: And the music, dance, lyrics, the creation of it, more than any judge’s gavel, brought the races together from the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, and all through Jim Crow.
Rhym: A lot of the dancing was a variation of swing, but easily, dozens of dances emerged during this time at Charlie’s Place. The innovation came with the little moves and embellishments, or a new step someone might add into the mix.
Dino: The Frug, The Wobble, the Watusi, the James Brown.
Leroy: The Slop, and then there was The Bump, the Hully Gully, the Boogie Woogie.
Dino: But I saw The Twist three years before the world was doing it at Charlie’s Place.
Rhym: And then there was The Shag.
Patricia Burgess: Yeah, I did The Shag, that was the main thing!
Rhym: This is the dance I heard mentioned the most. I mean, spend five minutes in Myrtle Beach and you’ll probably hear about it. Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, home of The Shag. South Carolina’s official state dance, The Shag. The Shag started right here in Myrtle Beach. I heard about it everywhere, and I wanted to know what all the hype was about. So I looked up some videos, and …
Instructional Video: Here’s how the ladies start, again on the right foot. One and two, three and four, rock, step. We are walking, we are not shuffling, we are actually picking our feet up, but so minimally that it looks like, almost like a glide.
Rhym: I saw a lot of white people over the age of 60. From what I can tell, the shag is kind of like a moonwalk version of swing dance. Like, it’s smoother. At its best, it looks like the couples are gliding, creating an optical illusion of being on skates. The most skilled Shaggers add their own flair, single foot spins, swung out knees, legs that look like rubber as they swivel and twist.
Leroy: Shag dancing takes up a lot of space. So we tried to tailor our music to hugging and belly rubbing dance.
Rhym: I love it! Leroy and Dino and the others who danced at Charlie’s Place remember The Shag emerging. The fast athletic movements of the Jitterbug or the Lindy Hop started to be replaced by a slower halftime speed.
Dino: We wanted to be cooler, smoother. That became a thing. And Billy Jeffers said, one of the great all-time dancers, he said, well, he said, we just started dancing like we talk, kind of slow, and the girls liked it. And a lot of people told me The Shag, South Carolina’s pride and joy, was actually invented at Charlie’s place. I read an interview with the first Black police officer in Myrtle Beach, a guy named Porkchop Hemingway. He was asked about The Shag before he died and said The Shag of today is very different from the version at Charlie’s place. At Charlie’s place, it was called The Dirty Shag. And it was a bump and grind kind of thing, where today’s Shag is a smooth dance. But he said the first person he ever saw do the shag anywhere was a girl from Ellorree, South Carolina. That girl was Cynthia Harroll, and her nickname was Shag.
Dino: I later danced with Cynthia Harroll, who they called Shag. And she was a heck of a good dancer, because she had the old-style swing and Lindy style that she could do, which was fascinating to me. She could shake it down.
Rhym: Everyone at Charlie’s Place wanted to dance with Cynthia. She worked there as a hostess, and even lived with Charlie and Sarah for a time. She made frequent trips to New York, and would bring back new moves she’d pick up at the dance halls in Harlem. Many people believe Cynthia, or Shag, was the inventor of The Shag. And after hearing this a lot, I wanted to see if I could find out whether that was true. What I ultimately found is that it’s pretty impossible to actually say who invented a social dance. And Thomas Defrantz, a dance scholar at Northwestern University, says that’s because that question actually misses the point. He says naming a dance after someone is a way to honor them. It’s not about ownership or invention at all, which he says are more capitalist ideas.
Thomas Defrantz: We want to lift people up, and if we know their names, we say their names. It’s very important to us as Black Americans. It doesn’t mean that they necessarily invented a dance. That’s kind of silly. Dance is invented in the relationship among people and music and the moment and the place.
Rhym: In other words, art is collective. In Black American social dance, a dance is not invented by one person. It’s something that happens on a dance floor among people.
Thomas: We create these things together. Art is not real estate, and we’re not trying to sell a building, so we’re not putting someone’s name on a building and selling it to someone else. We’re a collective kind of culture, and we think of the group as being essentially more important than the individual.
Rhym: When I started asking about Charlie’s Place, the people on The Hill made sure I knew about Cynthia Harroll and the Shag, especially Roddy Brown. He remembers when white people came to The Hill. He says they came to watch them dance.
Roddy Brown: Can we come and watch? I said, yeah, you can come and watch. They want to see what the Black people were doing. They want to see what the Black people were doing.
Rhym: So I guess the Black community here wasn’t bothered by the fact that white people were coming into town?
Roddy: No.
Rhym: Well, into Charlie’s and mixing?
Roddy: No. In fact, you’re welcome. That’s money.
Rhym: Roddy’s dad owned Club Bamboo, next door to Charlie’s Place. I talked with Roddy and a few of his friends in the old club. They sat around me in a circle. And for all the beautiful talk about white and Black people coming together through dance at Charlie’s Place, they also shared frustration about how the history was lost, papered over, and how over the decades, white people seem to have claimed the dance, forgetting its roots.
Roddy: We started The Shag. That’s right. Stole that. Took it down to North Myrtle. We used to do The Shag. Swing dance with The Shag. They took that away. Stole that. They stole that. And lied about it.
Rhym: I thought a lot about what integration at Charlie’s Place meant. Maybe the people who actually benefited from the integration were the white people, not the Black artists and patrons. Dance scholar Thomas Defrantz helped me think about this. He pointed out, you have to recognize the effect of these two groups coming together when one group is actively and violently oppressing the other. What he said is something I’ll always remember.
Thomas: There’s not really a world, especially at the middle of the last century, where whites could generously or innocently watch African Americans in dance practice and think that their presence had no effect on the dancing. When we gather in our difference, but with a power relation that places whites in this supremacist sort of role, African Americans, we change our dancing. Our dancing might get stronger. It might get showier. We might be more femme and more aggressive. We might show off things we didn’t know we could do. And we might dance less. We hide things. We hold things back. We don’t show our best steps. We kind of remove some of the things that we know the dance is for, because in that dynamic things are different. So while the connection of people through dancing is really important, we might all be a bit suspicious of thinking that dancing together means we understand each other. I just hope that the people who remember with great fondness how they were able to dance together can hold on to the fondness of the memory and also consider that that encounter was not the same for everyone who was in the encounter.
Rhym: The Greek kid Dino practically lived on Carver Street. He’d go over there to dance, of course, but also to gamble, play cards, and shoot pool. When he went by Charlie’s Place, he promised Ms. Sarah he wouldn’t create a problem, promised that no white boy would get beat up inside Charlie’s place. But like Dino said, with him, fights just sort of happened. And as Roddy Brown said, things could get rowdy at Charlie’s Place.
Roddy: Totally carnal, I mean, sin city.
Rhym: Dino had to learn his place.
Dino: I remember this one occasion, a fellow was real drunk and he was leaning over and he was kind of spitting on me when he was talking, he was just drunk. And I shoved him back. And when I did, he kind of took a swing, went over the top of my head and I ducked and I got up. I was kind of ready for him to swing again. And all of a sudden, Robert Gore had him by two arms.
Rhym: Robert was a bouncer there.
Dino: Robert was six foot four, 270 pounds. He could pick anybody off the ground, he had him off the ground. And he was hollering as he was being pulled away. He said, you’re chicken shit, you’re hiding behind Ms. Sarah’s skirt.
Rhym: Dino says he turned to Ms. Sarah and told her what the guy had said. He explained that they’d take it out back. No one would know about it. I just couldn’t stand being told I was chicken shit.
Dino: So she told Robert, he searched him and he had a pretty big knife, which would have spoiled my day. And he took it from him. He went out back and he was drinking pretty good. He took a couple swings and I stepped inside and I popped him twice and he went down. The fight was over. She said, that’s it, it’s over. And Robert told him, get the hell off the property.
Rhym: Then Ms. Sarah stepped in.
Dino: She stepped up and she pulled her skirt up to her upper thigh and she said, next time you’ll deal with me. This is what hides under my skirt, and she had a little pistol taped to her thigh. From that day on, I looked at her just a bit different than I did from that time on.
Rhym: Ms. Sarah wasn’t just protecting Dino. She was protecting everyone in that club at a time when any Black person could be lynched. Dino was learning from Ms. Sarah how careful you had to be in this racist time. But he also learned from Charlie that you don’t take things lying down. It was during one of the card games in the back room of the club that Dino says he saw that side of Charlie.
Dino: My dad and I would go sit back there and watch the game and Charlie would wander by and you could see from his facial expressions, he was telling somebody to shut up without saying anything. I never forgot that. He would just say, Glenn, and Glenn would turn around and he would just look at him. That meant you’re running your mouth too much or whatever it was. And I could, even then I could tell the vibe was saying and that they respected him and also feared him. He was not a big man, you know, he was slender built, but there was something about him that made people think, do not F with Charlie.
Rhym: In Charlie’s place, Dino wasn’t just learning how to dance. He was learning how to be in the world, how and when to not be chicken shit, because Charlie was never chicken shit. Two opposite lessons from this couple. There’s a time you fight and there’s a time you don’t. And you have to think hard about which one it’s going to be and when. Coming up on Charlie’s Place …
Herbert Riley: The Klan has been over here and they say they’re coming back and the people are not going to sit back and be slaughtered like dogs. They will fight as they come back and there’ll be some bloodshed.
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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 Forman. Our story editor is Erika Lantz. Our team at Atlas Obscura is Doug Baldinger, Chris Naka, Johanna Mayer, Linda Llobell, and Emily Yates.
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