SFA | Oral History | Bowen's Island Restaurant

“I started working shrimp boats out of Bowen’s Island. And there was a girl that I met that was living here, and she worked for Ms. Bowen. And we wound up getting married, and I lived here for a while. I was renting what we called a little shack that was here at Bowen’s for, I think it was $35 a month at the time. And I got to know Mrs. Bowen and Mr. Bowen through the unloading fish and whatnot here.”

– Jack London

A native of Georgia, Jack London ended up in Charleston when his father retired from the Army sometime in the 1960s. Jack had always heard of Bowen’s Island but never visited until he finished his own stint with the Army in 1977. Soon after his return, Jack and his brother began fishing for snapper and would tie their boat up there. Later, Jack worked on a shrimp boat that was docked at Bowen’s Island. Eventually he married a woman who worked in the restaurant and lived on the island with her. While they ultimately divorced, Jack has remained married to the island ever since. Today, Jack still calls Bowen’s Island home and is the de facto manager of Bowen’s Island Restaurant.

Listen to this 2-minute audio clip of Jack London talking about roasting oysters using a wood fire, before they switched to gas. [Go here to download the player for free.]

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NOTE: What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

Edited Transcript

Subject: Jack London
Date: January 17, 2007
Location: Bowen’s Island Restaurant - Charleston, SC
Interviewer: Amy Evans

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Amy Evans: This is Amy Evans for the Southern Foodways Alliance on Wednesday, January 17, 2007, and I’m in the new kitchen here at Bowen’s Island Restaurant with Mr. Jack London. Jack, if you wouldn’t mind saying your name and your birth date, too, if you don’t mind, for the record.

Jack London: My name is Jack London, and I was born May 22nd of ’54—born in Augusta, Georgia. Dad was in the Army; he was in Charleston, bounced around a little bit and came back to the Charleston area after he got out of the Army in—probably the early ‘60s, I reckon. Spent a lot of time on and around Folly Beach—not a whole lot back then at Bowen’s Island. I knew about the place but never really made it out here that much. We used to go to the beach and mess around fishing and whatnot. After I got out of the Army in ’76—’77—January of ’77, my brother and I started fishing for snapper, and we’d tie up at Folly Beach and wound up tying up here at Bowen’s Island. There was a commercial dock out here now, but we’re getting ready to put a dining area, I’d guess you’d call it. After [Hurricane] Hugo took the dock out [in 1989], Robert rebuilt it, and we use it pretty much for parties and whatnot. It’s no longer a commercial dock, other than the oyster harvesting we do. But from working in the snapper boat, I had to start working shrimp boats out of here—Bowen’s Island. Ralph Massenburg had the dock at the time. And there was a girl that I met that was living here, Susanne was her name, and she worked for Ms. Bowen. And we wound up getting married, and I lived here for a while, but we wound up moving onto a bigger place. I was renting what we called a little shack that was here at Bowen’s for, I think it was $35 a month at the time. And I got to know Ms. [May] Bowen and Mr. Sanka—John Sanka—and Mr. [Jimmy] Bowen and whatnot, you know, through the unloading fish and whatnot here…Ms. Bowen used to like the real small flounder, the little 12-inch and under flounder. They’re illegal now but she liked—she’d call them pats—butter pats—and I used to save—when we were shrimping, I’d save her what I could. It might be a half a basket one day or a third of a basket or just a couple of them, and I’d bring her those and she’d kind of—it’s kind of hard to get her to know you and get her to go out with you, but I’d bring her those little small flounder when I could it kind of—I don’t know what you’d say—it made her smile, you know. But she was hard to get to know. Either she liked you, or she didn’t.

Can you describe what the physical restaurant was like when you first started coming here?

It was pretty much a clutter of all kinds of antiques. And I remember she had a little dog, Susie, a black Cocker Spaniel—looked as sweet as she could be, but if you reached down to pet her or scratch her ear or something, she’d bite you. She was just—that was Susie. And there used to be a bunch of cats around, and Ms. Bowen would be sitting out there in the rocking chair. She’d be here from eight in the morning until ten at night, daily. I know at night she used to walk home at night and where I lived, she walked right by my house. And I remember one particular night we were in there and had our—we had the music a little bit too loud and had the lights on, and she banged on the window with her flashlight and asked us if we were having an orgy in there and to turn the music off, and it’s time to go to bed. And she was pretty strict, pretty—pretty much on top of everything that happened on the island. I know that if you were late with your rent, you tried to hide behind trees and everything, so she didn’t make eye contact with you because she would make you feel pretty bad.

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Are you [living] in the same place that you were when you first got here or moved around?

The place has been bulldozed. I’m in—I don’t know—we call it one of the sharecropper houses but, you know, because they’re—[Laughs]. I think this is supposedly from the ‘50s—the house I’m in right now. It’s actually a pretty small place, but it’s got a big porch around it, so it looks a lot bigger than it is.

It sounded like you rented here first and then you kind of got to know the family and everything. When did you become a part of the restaurant?

I started shrimping—fishing and shrimping and did—worked on airplanes and drove trucks with a bunch of other stuff—logged for a while. We always came back to shrimping. And I’d go—might drive a truck for a year or two and then get—get the ocean to calling me again, and I’d get back on a boat and go shrimping again and fishing and whatnot. And the shrimp season, anyway, in this area anyway goes normally from May till November or December, when it starts getting cold and either head—head south or we’d jump off a boat and tie the shrimp boat up and go in the creek and pick oysters. And this is oyster time now, this time of year. So I was renting an apartment from Robert [Barber], because I’d come off the boat and get a shower and go to the Sand Dollar and crash out and get back—go back on a boat for week or 10 days or two weeks, and this used to be my little home port, I guess you’d say. But I started oystering after shrimp season ended and was selling oysters to the restaurant and the fellow, Steve Shore, that was—he was a real dear friend of mine and was—used to cook the oysters and pretty much do what I’m doing now, and he started getting sick. He had some problems with his liver and whatnot, I guess because of the stills that were around here; I don’t know. And I was picking oysters and started helping him cook oysters—and this has been oh, back in ’95, I guess, something like that—and got to where I worked more and more cooking oysters and picking oysters and gradually just got stuck in the restaurant. And I haven’t been in a river in a boat myself for probably two years, I guess. I pretty much am there in that little joint there, but that’s how I got in there, anyway. I was picking oysters and shrimp and started cooking oysters and gradually worked from cooking oysters to working in a kitchen and running the kitchen and doing the whole mess. We started doing a lot of private parties out here, and up until the fire we just had in October we were—it was pretty much rolling daily—a seven-day-a-week thing almost.

Can you describe the process of cooking oysters and if you’re doing that, if that’s your role, you know for the day—how you get started and what it’s like interacting with the customers and that kind of thing?

Well back when I first started doing it with Steve [Shroyer] and whatnot we used to—this—without—you haven’t been in the restaurant—what’s left of it? Has Robert—has he showed you?

Yeah, Robert walked me through.

He showed you where the oyster pit and whatnot? Well we used to cut wood everyday to build a fire to cook oysters and we’d cut wood, build a fire, get the plate hot—a four by—I guess four-by-four sheet of steel on—on a pit that we’d get hot and throw the oysters on and cover them with wet burlap. And as oysters would crack open, we’d shovel them up and throw them on the table and had a lot of fun. But as I guess you can tell, there’s not a whole lot of trees left on the island that—that aren't—because we were cutting anything we could to—to light a fire to cook oysters. And you know sometimes we’d almost have to burn the furniture to get a fire hot and be looking around for old table legs or something to burn, especially when it would rain or whatnot. That was pretty much the struggle, trying to keep wood—or a few years back we started using natural gas and there for a lot of different reasons. Several times we’ve had crowds of people and new cars parked outside in the—and they’d be burning cardboard and palmetto branches, and the soot and the ashes would land on the brand new white Lexis or whatever, and they’d be all upset because they had black ashes on their cars or—. We’ve gone to the gas, and it’s been a little cleaner and a little easier and there’s—the trees have started to come back on the island and [Laughs] whatnot. But it’s still a lot like it was.

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So can you talk about kind of the timing [used in roasting oysters] and what different people like and how that works?

It kind of depends on—it kind of depends on how good you were at collecting your firewood up to that point and how hot your fire is, you know. And when you get the plate hot it—anywhere from five—five, eight, maybe ten minutes you can have two or three bushels ready to eat. You don’t want to cook them until they crack open and dry out and turn to a little gray raisin. You want to still have some of the juice and whatnot with them. But you want to cook them long enough to make sure you’ve killed any kind of a virus or whatnot, you know, that might be—some people are pretty allergic to some of that stuff and it’s—raw food you don’t want to mess with that much. We try not to serve them raw, you know.

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Well with I guess like a 30-year relationship with this place and the restaurant and the family here, what kind of changes have you seen over those years?

Oh, what kind of changes? I’ll tell you, we pretty much kept it an awful lot like it was up until, I’d say, the fire. We tried to—Robert really stressed to try and keep it as much as possible like his grandmother [May Bowen] had it, so when you walked in the place it was some people would walk in and turn around and leave because they were—weren't used to anything like that, you know. We kept the kitchen in real good shape. You know, we pretty much kept an “A” [grade from the Health Department] on the door for the most part. As far as changes, awful lot more business and a whole lot more volume than back in the day when Ms. Bowen and John was running it. The availability of the fresh shrimp—there’s—back then, I imagine there was 15, 20 shrimp boats tied up in this—in this inlet—Stono between here and Folly and Sol Legare and whatnot and the others only two boats that—in this area that work part-time, so you don’t really have the volume of fresh—fresh shrimp and fish that we had back then. But we—we do try and use an American wild—wild-caught shrimp and whatnot as much as possible but it’s a—it’s almost impossible to get that stuff fresh off the boat daily, like some people advertise. I don’t know—I don’t know how they can advertise that, but it’s not possible. The oyster lease, however, is a—that’s been—that’s been the same lease since, I think—I found a tag from ’50-something from Ms. Bowen’s that was tagging oysters off the same lease.

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Is the lease—is that state bottom or is it a privately held lease?

A private—Robert has it. It’s—they call it culture permit. We do use state grounds when we can but they—they’re pretty much over-harvested. There’s a lot of people that use that. The lease that we have we—I think it’s supposed to be about 14 acres of bottom; I’m not sure what they change it yearly as the bottom here—pretty sure it’s about 14 acres is what they consider but it goes all around the island here—the front down the river and the run and back.

Were you got here was Ben Richardson [one of the first men to pick oysters for the restaurant] still alive and working here?

Back when I was here, I was pretty much offshore. I stayed out in deep water. I was a snapper fisherman and we’d go out to the—we’d go out to the shelf, we’d go out to 600 feet, and so I didn’t do all that much. I actually started claming, first and this was back in the ‘70s we’re talking about. I did some oystering but it was—they were paying us $2 a bushel. But you could pick them like opening a book I guess, like taking the pages off a book. You’d just peel them off and load your boat, and they were all big old pretty oysters. But it’s been many years without being re-seeded like the wildlife has been doing the last few years. They put 10,000 bushels out last year—shell and it’s coming back, I reckon, the oysters are.

Can you talk about picking [oysters]?

Different places, they use tongs and dredges and whatnot. Here, we have a six-foot tide and at low tide, oyster bottoms are pretty much exposed, and you bring your boat up to the bank and jump out and physically pick up the clumps of oysters and use a knocker of some kind. Some people use a tire iron, and some people use a big wrench or a hammer or whatnot. And you knock off the babies and you—supposedly—supposedly, I think you’re supposed to have a three-inch—the oysters got to be three inches—you’re supposed to have one three-inch oyster on each cluster and there’s a certain number of—of babies that can be attached to that one. Try and knock all the small stuff, so that it can mature, and once you do break them down like that they have a—the—they’re not bunched up and can feed better, so they tend to grow faster and it—it helps the—it actually helps the beds to harvest them like that because you’re breaking them down, and they’re not all like weeding out a flower bed or something and taking out the—.

What does an oyster picker make for a bushel these days, do you know?

Around twelve bucks—twelve, twelve-fifty, thirteen dollars for the clusters, and they can go up into selects. Select oysters are—three or less oysters to a cluster and then single—and selects, I guess, are going twenty to twenty-five dollars a bushel. And singles—deep water singles are around thirty bucks they’re getting a bushel from—. Like I said, I haven’t really been doing that much myself in the last few years, so I’m not too up on it.

Well what did—if we can talk about it for a minute—the fire and the restaurant burning, what did that mean to you and everybody here that’s associated with the restaurant? I know it’s devastating, but if you could describe that a little bit.

Well, honestly, I don’t think it really—it still hasn’t sunk in. It’s still surreal really because we always knew that if it ever got into that old wood—some of the wood and stuff was, I guess, from the ‘40s when they originally built the restaurant—supposedly ’46 is when they started. It was before my time. We knew if it ever got up in that and got burned, it wouldn’t be any stopping it, and that’s what it did. Once that heart pine—like burnt kerosene or turpentine—once that heart pine got lit, it just went. I know we still go in there to see all the time—you start heading in there to grab something, and go in there and grab a screwdriver or whatever and walk in there and the roof is gone, and there’s nothing left, and it’s pretty surreal. It’s—I don’t know if it sunk in yet for any of us so—.

Before the fire, would you have—what would you have described your role in the restaurant as? Would you maybe be considered like a manager or any kind of title that makes sense for your relationship just before it burned?

It was probably—it was a manager. I pretty much did everything in there that needed to be done. A lot of times myself and another cook would be in there and we’d run the whole mess. I had a pretty limited staff. Everybody pretty much did everything in there, as far as—it wasn’t limited to just one job, like a cook didn’t just cook. He cooked and mopped and swept and cleaned the bathrooms and everything else, you know. It wasn’t like your average restaurant.

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Do you have a favorite memory or a memory that stands out from your experience here over the years?

Oh, gracious, there are many, many, many but I’d have to—I’d have to think about that one. Hmm, I don’t know. Mr. Bowen, he—one thing that you can't see, I guess, would be the stack of TVs that we used to have in the back. I imagine we’ve got some pictures of it or somebody does, but there were probably oh, I don’t know, easily 20 TVs that were stacked up. And I remember Mr. Bowen used to love to sit down and watch and sit in his old recliner and be watching TV, and then one particular night I remember coming in and he was watching—I believe it was Gunsmoke. He had one TV that the picture worked on and the other TV the sound worked on so he’d tune—he’d try to tune them both into the same channel. And he was watching Gunsmoke, and had Dragnet on the other TV. So Hoss Cartwright was talking on the TV, and Joe Friday’s voice was coming out, and Mr. Bowen was sitting there scratching his head trying to figure out why Hoss Cartwright was talking like Joe Friday, not realizing that he had one TV set on Dragnet, while he was watching Bonanza. And you didn’t touch his TVs. If he was watching TV, you didn’t adjust anything; you stayed away, or he’d wop you with his cane and don’t touch his TV. I do remember that night. That was—that was pretty precious, I thought, because he was scratching his head trying to figure out why Hoss was talking about “This is the city” or whatever it was. [Laughs]

What do you think it is about—I mean, if you’re talking about Mrs. Bowen and Mr. Bowen and how she was hard to get to know and, you know, either liked you or didn’t; but, you know, I hear stories about kind of gruff characters around here at Bowen’s Island. What do you think that added to people’s experience here? Do you think it was something was a specific draw for people or anything like that?

Oh, boy, I don’t know. It—the people—the guys would bring their date out here. Back—back in the day, the road, like I said, the road went around the island and went—went around the front side. It went across the marsh, basically, so at high tide you’d have a foot or two, depending on what the level the tide was. On a flood tide you might have a couple feet of saltwater you had to drive through with—if the tide was in. And guys would bring their date down here, and there weren't that many lights or anything. It was pretty much a dark bumpy dirt road that it—they’d come down with their date and their date would be going, “Uh-huh, sure. Next you’re going to run out of gas, right?” And so it—it was kind of an experience to—almost like, I don’t know, camping or something to come out here.

Has the clientele changed a lot over the years? Like in the early days when you were here, was it mostly young kids and then it changed to something else at all or—?

Probably a whole lot more Yankees down here than there used to be. There’s still people that—that have been coming in that came here when they were children. And, you know, they’d be in their 50s and 60s now, so there’s an awful lot of locals that have been coming here since they were kids, and their kids are coming here and their kids are coming here. Citadel Cadets—College of Charleston and whatnot every year—every year there would be a new batch of parents that would come in with their kids and tell them about how they met their—met their mama here and met their, you know—how they came here when they were in school and whatnot. It’s pretty traditional, I guess, among the college kids and whatnot.

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Can you talk about how the oyster room was strictly the oyster room, and if you weren't having oysters, you couldn’t be in there?

Yeah. That—that was very true. I know I used to like her fried chicken, and she really didn’t like frying chicken too much. She’d cut her eyes at you. But again, I used to bring her those small flounders, so she kind of gave me a break when it came to ordering fried chicken. But there used to be a booth—old church pew that we—she would set up as a booth and it used to be my favorite place to sit but it was right by the door in—into the oyster room. And I know if I’d be sitting there eating my fried chicken and that door—oyster room door would open, I’d look the other way just so she wouldn’t even see you looking in the—in the room. Because if she saw you getting up and heading toward that door and you hadn't ordered oysters, you were in trouble. So I wouldn’t even look in there. I’d look away. When the door opened up, I would look away. “Uh-uh, no, Ms. Bowen, I’m not going in the oyster room. I didn’t order oysters.”

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Do you remember last spring when Robert went up to New York to get that James Beard Award?

Absolutely.

I wonder what that meant to y’all when he went up and did that and when he wore the white boots up on stage to get the award.

I was kind of proud of him, myself. I don’t know. I thought it—I thought it was pretty cool. We had just lost one of our oyster pickers, a really good friend of ours [Josiah Smalls] and—just a matter or days before he had to go up there—so it was a little bit in tribute to him—a tribute to Josiah Smalls. He told me he was going to do it. I didn’t think he would. I kind of dared him to and damn if he didn’t do it. [Laughs]

But to think that—that Bowen’s Island Restaurant was recognized as—as an American Classic and meant—means so much to so many people, to get recognized from that far away, is that something that ever factored into what you were doing on a daily basis, or does it mean something more to you now?

It—honestly, it kind of just blew—it blew my mind. It still blows my mind the amount of people that—that come here to eat and they just—it’s hard to believe. It blows my mind, you know.

What has it meant to you, personally, to be connected with this place all these years?

Awful lot of work; it’s aged me. I got gray hairs I didn’t have when I first started here. No, I pretty much love the place myself like Robert does and anybody—I’ve got a lot of the high school kids and whatnot that have started working here. One or two of them has gone to be chefs and stuff and they still—they hold—they hold a special place in our heart for the place, and so—.

Well and with this rebuild, everybody who was connected to the place beforehand seems to be out here with a hammer. Can you talk about that?

Well, to a point. What we’re doing right now, we’re just trying to—to keep it moving until we can get back in the restaurant itself and do it. Robert, he doesn’t want to rush into it and bulldoze everything and turn it into an Applebee’s [chain restaurant] or anything. He’s trying to make it—which it will never—it’s nothing but a memory there now. It will never be—there’s no way to even try and you know re—re—bring it back like it was. But he’s—he’s trying to ease into it without getting too dumb and maybe save what we can one way or another, you know.

So what about your future here on the island and with the restaurant? Are you going to be here till the bitter end?

Good Lord and Robert Barber willing, yeah. You know, I don’t have any intentions of leaving right now—not, not until we get it—we had—had everything working pretty good when we had the fire. We had everything pretty efficient and we could—we could throw some food out and—I don’t know. I’d like to see it back kind of like it was before—. I’d like to get back in the river, myself. I—really, this is not me. I’ve just got somehow into it. I’m much happier in the ocean or the river, myself. But I want to see this place back at some point like it—kind of like it was, anyway, you know. It’s a special place, so I remember one of the old fellows—I’m not sure but I think it was John Sanka that said this was the vortex of the universe, this area. Sometimes it makes you feel that when you get people lined up out the door in the parking lot and—yeah, it’s scary.

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How would you describe the place to someone who has never been here before, if we were talking about the restaurant before it burned?

Oh, it ain’t no Applebee’s that—that’s one thing…I’d worked in there pretty much every night for 10 years and still up until the end there, I’d still walk around to see things that I had never seen before. There were so many antiques and signatures on the walls and whatnot, it—every—every night you could walk around and look around and see something you’d never seen and wonder what in the world that was. Some of it was from back in the, you know, ‘20s and ‘30s and stuff and—. I don’t know. We had—we had good food. I don’t know if it was because of the—the smell of the thousands and thousands of seafood platters that had been cooked in the place just permeated everything, you know. And you’d walk in and get—get the smell and—smell and the character and the—I don’t know, it was just—just had its own personality, its own life or something, you know. And again, either you liked it or you didn’t, you know. It’s—some kids—sometimes a child would come in there and start crying and there’d be a it’s okay because they had never seen anything like that before, you know—kind of—kind of dark and a lot of—some people call them antiques and some people call it junk laying around you know and—. We had a—we had a—an old hair curler from the ‘30s that had cables hanging off of it—little clips and stuff that it still worked. When I was cooking oysters, my beard was pretty long, and one night I had some girls who bought me a little too much beer and sat me down and hooked the hair curler up into my beard and I—not realizing that it—it was a permanent machine and it—it did make permanents, so I walked around for about a week-and-a-half with my beard—I looked like Yosemite Sam because my beard was all curled up and kind of weird looking. Just things like that, like the hair curler and little jukebox and old things that—that the older people would know what they were and the young—younger people would be going, “What in the world is that? That’s how they used to do it back in the ‘30s and the ‘40s.

Did you have a favorite song on that jukebox?

Hmm, probably The Yellow Rose—that was a good one, The Yellow Rose of Texas. That one played—was played a good bit and it was—oh, there were some pretty neat ole stuff on it. Frosty the Snowman, I remember that one; Burl Ives that was—yeah, some of that kind of stuff that I remember from when I was a kid. It was kind of temperamental. At—at the end we were getting—we had to leave it unplugged. We’d have to get in there and beat it with a hammer sometimes and make it work, and it would get stuck on things and whatnot.

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Well I know you’ve got some rebuilding to do out there, so I can let you back at it, but I appreciate you sitting with me a lot. I’ve enjoyed it.

No, problem. I wish I could come up with a whole lot more. There’s more and more that I wish I could think of but, you know.

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To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

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