Mile for mile, St. Simons Island-one of Georgia's Golden
Isles-boasts as much history as any community on the East Coast.
Originally an Indian hunting ground, it has been occupied or
invaded by Spanish missionaries, British settlers, planters and
their slaves, the Union army, the United States Navy, and
developers and tourists. The seventeen narratives in Voices from
St. Simons represent an "oral archaeological dig," writes editor
Stephen Doster. Many of those interviewed are descendants of
masters and slaves. Surprisingly, they speak of racial issues with
greater compassion than bitterness. But the volume encompasses much
more than that. Here, the people of the Golden Isles recall waving
farewell to Paul Redfern when his airplane took off from a sandy
beach on his ill-fated attempt to outdo Charles Lindbergh. They
describe jumping into a fast boat and riding to the rescue of
merchant sailors torpedoed by a German U-boat. They tell of playing
childhood sports-and dominating the competition-alongside future
NFL legend Jim Brown, who was raised on St. Simons. They remember
piloting the ship that, due to a helmsman's error, hit the Sidney
Lanier Bridge, causing one of the worst such disasters in American
history. "In some respects, the narratives reveal a plot of ground
that time forgot," Doster writes. "They present the reflections of
a cross-section of ordinary people who lived during extraordinary
times." Stephen Doster was born in 1959 in Kingston-Upon-Thames,
England, and moved with his parents and four siblings to St. Simons
Island, Georgia, in the early 1960s. His ties to the island date to
the early 1900s, when his father's family vacationed there before
the construction of a mainland causeway. His grandparents
permanently moved to St. Simons in the 1940s, building on the
grounds where a Spanish mission once stood. Growing up on the
island, Doster remembers the place as a "Mayberry with tides,"
where he and neighborhood kids played baseball on the beach,
sneaked into a resort hotel pool after football practices, and
explored the island's woods and tidal creeks. His early
recollections include seeing navy hurricane hunters fly over the
Atlantic in search of storms before the days of satellites, viewing
open Indian graves during an archaeological dig, evacuating the
island at Hurricane Dora's approach, and returning to the
destruction left in its wake. After graduating from the University
of Georgia with a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in
1983, Doster headed to Nashville, Tennessee where he has lived and
worked since. Though he has been a resident of Nashville for over
20 years, St. Simons has always been close to his heart. In 2002,
John F. Blair published his debut novel, Lord Baltimore, about a
young man's journey on the Georgia coast between Savannah and St.
Simons. Voices from St. Simons is essentially Doster's effort to
preserve the legacy of the area. For decades, he heard "local
residents utter the famous sentiment that someone should have
recorded so-and-so's recollections before she died." Reading the
obituary of a former elementary school teacher inspired him to set
up face-to-face and telephone interviews that began his oral
archaeological dig. Doster works at Vanderbilt University and lives
in Nashville with his wife, Anne.
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