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| S C T E CHN I CA L CO L L E G E S Y S T EM ’ S
F I R S T 5 0 Y EAR S
Kreps fetched a bottle of bourbon. With a bottle in a brown
paper bag, Hollings crossed the street and entered Senator Edgar
Allan Brown’s office.
“Here comes the big governor,” said Senator Brown.
“Colonel, let’s have a little touch.”
“Now what do you want?”
“Let’s have a touch first.”
Paper cups were passed around.
“Now what do you want,” asked Brown.
“You know exactly what I want. I need my technical training.”
“Oh, you don’t want that. That’s for dummies. We closed the
area trade schools down.”
An argument ensued, and Hollings told Brown it was so hard
to lose companies time and again because of workers’ poor skills.
Finally, he said, “Well, you’re going to make me a liar.”
“A liar?”
“Yeah, I promised Jacobs Chuck Company and Jeffreys Man-
ufacturing to pay for their technical training if they would set up
in South Carolina.”
“Well, we can’t make the governor a liar. How much do you
want?”
“$364,000. Just what they’ve got in the House bill.”
“You’ll get $250,000 so you won’t be a liar but don’t start a
program again.”
DIGNITY IN ALL WORK
Four months before the Glendale Mill closed, the General
Assembly established the South Carolina Advisory Committee
for Technical Training on July 13, 1961. Help for beleaguered
workers was on the way. The committee’s budget, true to Brown’s
word, was $250,000. Committee members included representa-
tives from each Congressional district, Jesse T. Anderson, super-
intendent of the state’s Department of Education, and Walter W.
Harper, State Development Board director.
Stan Smith and othermembers came from the business sector.
“Jack Wellman was an Australian bull importer. Alvin Hineson
was a heavy industry man from Charleston. On the committee,
too, were Boone Aiken, two textile men, and Sapp Funderburk,
an entrepreneur who could get things done.”
In their first meeting, the men sat around the table looking at
each other. Someone said, “Well, what should we do?”
“Let’s have a philosophy,” said another.
“Boone,” said Smith, “came up with a two-sentence philoso-
phy. ‘Every South Carolinian shall have the right to seek his or
her own natural destiny. There must be dignity in all honorable
work.’ And that was the platform before we did anything.”
Among the committee’s next actions were appointing an ex-
ecutive director of technical and industrial training and imple-
menting Special Schools. Attention then turned to establishing
the technical education institutions. The goal was simple and
pragmatic: make training available to any adult South Carolinian
who wanted marketable skills.
Stan Smith, the first chairman, remembers thinking the sys-
tem was out of business from the get-go. “We couldn’t have 46
technical colleges or technical centers. The equipment alone was
an enormous investment.” The committee settled on fourteen
technical centers. “No one in South Carolina would have to drive
more than 30 miles to get to a center,” said Smith.
WADE MARTIN THE VISIONARY
Waiting outside the door of that first committee meeting was
an inventive man, Wade Martin. “My first job as chairman was to
The 1960s
M O B I L I Z I N G A G R E A T R E S O U R C E
