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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
Smith andMartin approached Jim Smith. “When do you want
us to make our presentation?”
“Come Thursday and we might get to you.”
Thursday arrived, and the men sat on that hard bench all day.
Nothing happened.
“Friday morning I was desperate,” said Stan Smith. He went to
see Jim. “Stan, sit there in the hall, and we’ll call you.” One o’clock
came and Jim Smith opened the door, “My God, I forgot!”
The committee had signed the budget, adjourned, and left
through the back door.
“God,” said Stan Smith, “we’re going to go out of business.”
“Senator Brown’s still here,” said Jim Smith. “Let me talk to
him.” He closed the door. Moments later the door opened, and
he said, “Senator Brown says to come on in.”
Stan Smith and Wade Martin entered the conference room.
Senator Brown lay on the psychiatry couch with his eyes closed
and hands over his head.
“Come on, boys, and tell me what you’re going to do. Don’t
give me any numbers. I’m sick of numbers. Just kneel right here
beside me.”
“We kneeled, Wade and I,” said Stan Smith, who told Brown,
‘There are two tech centers we’ve got approved, and they’ve done
all their homework, got their money, and we need to fund them
and continue to fund Greenville and organize a staff.”
“That sounds reasonable,” said Brown. “What’s that going to
cost?”
“I’d never heard of that much money for a little agency like
ours,” said Stan Smith. “I gulped out the amount and Brown
said, with his hands still over his head and eyes closed, ‘Jim, that
sounds pretty reasonable, let’s put it in.’”
Brantley Harvey, a state board member today, was elected
to the South Carolina House of Representatives in 1958. He re-
members when the system was beginning. “I was excited about
the fact that technical education was going to be available within
a 30-mile radius of every place in the state. I had served [in the
legislature] with Senator John West, and he and Fritz Hollings as
governor were really pushing it. They had done a lot of the study-
ing and research to establish the necessity for it and the practical-
ity of it, and I was just on board from the start.”
Tom “Black Cat” Barton
served as president of Greenville Tech for 42 years
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
