Written by Michele Roldán-Shaw
Photography by Donna Huffman

Eccentric: a person whose behavior is habitually unusual or whimsical
Eccentricity: the quality or habit of deviating from what is usual or customary
Bluffton Eccentric: any Blufftonian known about town for their endearingly quirky behavior.

PART III

uring my first two months of investigation into the current state of Bluffton eccentricity, I have followed the threads of several different themes. First and foremost has been the realization that unless you place total faith in the lifeless words of a dictionary (see above), there is no one single definition of the term eccentric. Rather, a variegated rainbow of local personalities collectively defines the ever-shifting concept of Bluffton eccentricity.

Beyond that central idea, I have been formulating a number of theories and testing them in the field, weighing them against evidence provided to me by real Bluffton Eccentrics during highly serious, meticulously conducted interviews. (Yeah right.) One of these theories is that eccentricity is at least in part hereditar, or if it cannot be ascribed to genetics, it is surely the result of the unique upbringing given to children by their eccentric parents. Either way, it makes the offspring of eccentrics more prone to carry on this trait.

Case in point is Babbie Guscio, owner of The Store on Calhoun Street and her daughter Catherine “Tat” Guscio. These two, when interviewed independently of one another, made a remarkable number of similar statements, effectively confirming what the other had to say. I first spoke to Babbie, who when asked if she considered herself an eccentric, replied, “Yes I do, in the sense that an eccentric is an eccentric is an eccentric is an eccentric. Eccentric four times squared.”

Undeterred by this unfathomable opening line (I long ago learned that it can be difficult to follow an eccentric’s train of thought, but just stick with them because they may end up making sense), I continued with my questioning. Where did Babbie place eccentricity along the spectrum of Nature vs. Nurture?

“I think children have to be in an environment that seduces them into feeling they can do something out of the ordinary,” said this matriarch of local whimsicality, who can easily be identified by her uniform of choice: black hangover glasses and denim overalls with a big, floppy cloth flower pinned to the front. “I tried to let my children know that they could take whatever path they felt they needed to. Of course, they had to go to bed at 6 o’clock when they were babies. I didn’t let them stay up all night screaming and yelling. But I tried to let them do their own thing as much as possible.”

When Babbie first came to Bluffton, there were just 700 people living in town. The simple lifestyle they led—fishing, crabbing, living off the river and feeling utterly content to be “backwoods”— had a profound impact on Babbie. She especially loved talking to the older people, who seemed to be totally unaware of how wonderfully abnormal they were.

“They would be amazed to know we called them eccentrics,” she said. “They thought they were just people.”

Back then, Babbie was in the habit of throwing grand parties and inviting the eccentrics, making sure they had ample opportunities to influence her children as well. The lessons learned from them Babbie is able to distill into this essence: “You don’t need a whole lot of money to have a hell of a good time. If they had a broken down bike and it would take them to Scott’s Meats, they were happy as clams. Bluffton and the river was all they needed.”

Now, she says, people sacrifice this simple life in the name of “ambition,” even if it lands them in jail. “If ambition is swindling stocks, who needs it?” said Babbie. “Ambition can also be making sure you have food to eat and shoes on your feet—well, no shoes in the summertime, but shoes in the wintertime—and making sure the dog is fed and all that.”

Was Babbie’s willingness to allow her children to explore their own interests, combined with exposure to the older generation of eccentrics enough to steer them down the path of eccentricity?

“I don’t think they fit into a mold of any sort,” said Babbie of Tat, Will and Jamie. “They are all very interesting and creative, and they do a lot of other things besides just sit at a desk—they can cook and write and take in a border, and they’re interested in the world around them, which I think is nice.”

Okay, so let’s compare these assertions with what I heard from Tat. First off, she defined eccentricity as being “a curious person interested in the world around you”—exactly what Babbie said she tried to cultivate in her brood. Secondly, when asked if she herself was eccentric, Tat replied, “I definitely think differently than other people sometimes. I have ideas that pop up in my head and people don’t always get what I’m saying right off the bat. But when I explain what I’m thinking, they often say, ‘That’s a different way of looking at things.’”

Isn’t that just what I noted when talking to Babbie? Stay with them because their wacky words might actually be an oddly isolated portion of a valid thought process. But most telling of all was the way Tat described her upbringing. She credited her mother with giving her and her brothers a lot of creative freedom, letting them make their own decisions and making sure that they would have plenty of stimulation in their environment.

“She threw a lot of parties with interesting people,” said Tat. “My siblings and I were always included, and she especially encouraged us to talk to the older people because they had a lot of experiences.”

Tat eventually grew into a person with many different interests and activities. She likes to do a lot of artwork, often around bits and pieces of things that she finds, whether beads and vintage clothing from the flea market, or shark’s teeth and seaweed from the sandbar. The verbs she uses to describe her activities—hunting, discovering, collecting—reveal the underlying spirit of creative adventure that Babbie worked hard to instill. Tat represents not only a new generation of eccentrics, but also a link between the eccentricity of yore and the eccentricity of tomorrow. When asked if she thinks a new generation of Bluffton Eccentrics can thrive in the 21st century, her reply is overwhelmingly affirmative.

“Definitely,” she said. “The more eccentric you are, the better survivor you’ll be. I feel fortunate to have known the eccentrics before, and it’s important to me to know the history of the area and the older generation. So I try to take from that and have an interesting life.”

Another point that Babbie and Tat both made (which has been noted by a significant number of other eccentrics as well) was that a fairly certain sign of an eccentric is the wearing of hats. When it comes to funky hats, the first person that comes to my mind is Mr. Scratcher. This gentleman can frequently be seen riding his bicycle around Old Town, sporting uniquely stylish clothing and crowning-glory hats that put him in a class by himself. He is often carrying crabbing apparatus; in fact, the first time I ever interacted directly with Mr. Scratcher, he offered to sell me some live crabs from a five-gallon bucket. He was so soft-spoken that I could barely make out what he was saying; yet when a broad, charming smile lit up his face it spoke volumes. From then on, I began to derive a simple, genuine pleasure from seeing Mr. Scratcher and his hats around Bluffton. He just had a special dignity about him, a certain calm, self-assured demeanor that is a dead giveaway to an experienced eccentric- hunter like myself. I decided to have a conversation with Scratcher about his hats, and possibly something more.

To begin with, he identified his real name as Isaiah Mitchell. everybody around here knows me. Most of them are my family.”

Mr. Scratcher was born at Buckingham, the son of a man who made his living from the river, and he has lived in Bluffton his whole life. He does not like travel. It was unclear whether or not he was familiar with the term Bluffton Eccentric, but then again, some of the best characters are the least self-conscious. The main thing is that he’s not afraid to go out on a limb, as evidenced by his headgear.

“I like to wear hats because my mom, she always wore pretty hats when she was livin’,” said Scratcher. “When she passed, I got all her hats and when I wear them, it reminds me of her, and makes me feel like she still livin’.”

Sometimes, he said, he wears a do-rag and then a hat over it. Of course, he has acquired a number of hats on his own, including the black beret studded with little gold rivets that he was sporting on the day I interviewed him. But he certainly has no qualms about wearing any of his mother’s hats, despite the fact that they were made with women’s fashion interests in mind.

“It can be a lady’s hat but it don’t bug me ‘cause I look cool in it,” he said. “A lot of people like me when I wear it and it makes me proud ‘cause it was my ma’s.”

In my mind, it surely takes an eccentric man to risk the ridicule associated with wearing lady’s hats out in the street, for the sake of honoring his mother. But Scratcher obviously values authenticity—which he terms “being real”—and even if he would never think to apply the term eccentric to himself (or anyone else for that matter) the closest he came to defining his own eccentricity was his assertion that he’s not afraid to do something different.

“I read them things in the paper and the people say what they believe in,” said Scratcher, who seemed to have a vague association between newspapers and the concept of eccentricity, possibly because he remembers his town’s first newspaper, the Bluffton Eccentric. “It could be whatever you believe, whatever you were born to be. If you feel like you want to do something and you can, I’m not against that. But not wrongness.”

Indeed, Scratcher hopes to be remembered as a good man who told the truth, liked to sing and dance and play sports and have fun, and loved to be in the river getting shrimp, crab and oysters.

“I’m not afraid,” he said of the time when he will one day pass on. “I’m ready right now.”

And so we see another of the many faces of eccentricity, the humble, smiling countenance of a man who is not afraid to live or die, and who has gained local notoriety by simply doing what he felt compelled to do. In fact, as he rides his rickety bike to the mini-mart and takes his daily joy from a dose of crab caught in the river, he is enacting several of the things that Babbie loved about the older generation of eccentrics. So there is hope yet, my friends. If only we all spent more time riding bikes! Be sure and pick up next month’s Bluffton Breeze for yet another installment of THE ART OF ECCENTRICITY.