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Doug Wendel Takes Command
Throughout this period, the Burroughs family maintained a benign and paternalistic attitude toward their creation. To direct the moral development of their town, they donated land for the city jail and a number of churches. Simeon Chapin created a foundation that built the municipal library and aided numerous churches and charitable causes.
Myrtle Beach Farms sold land for development, but was largely a spectator to the growth that transformed Myrtle Beach after World War II. But things were about to change at the stodgy old company. In 1990, the Burroughs and Chapin families reorganized their company and other holdings, creating the Burroughs & Chapin Co. Three years later, board chairman Egerton Burroughs went outside the family for the first time to tap Douglas P. Wendel to head the company. Burroughs & Chapin and Myrtle Beach would never be the same.
Fifty years old, Doug Wendel was an unsentimental over-achiever, with a closet full of dark, pinstripe suits, a quiet, conservative lifestyle, a Masters degree in public administration, and more than 20 years in the field. Most of his career had been spent in Horry County, where he knew the culture, knew the players and knew how to work a barbecue or a boardroom.
One of Wendel's first acts as CEO was to announce the creation of Broadway at the Beach, a $250 million shopping, entertainment and restaurant complex on US 17 Bypass. By the end of the decade, Broadway at the Beach was drawing 10 million visitors a year.
Broadway at the Beach was a bottom-line success for B&C, but it was also part of Wendel's bold plan to engineer Myrtle Beach away from its Southern, working class roots, into something Walt Disney might have designed.
Like any resort, Myrtle Beach is for people who seek a respite from reality. For most, that's a vacation from the office or factory. For others, it's a chance to do something they could never do back home -- screw the secretary, go hopping from strip club to strip club, spend days in drunken delirium, or have part of one's anatomy pierced and affixed with a stainless steel ring.
As with life itself, the meaning of the vacation lies in knowing that it is brief and it must end. Yet, Myrtle Beach attracts many people who don't grasp this simple axiom. With little reason to go home, they linger through the season and through the year. Some become involved in the very businesses that attracted them in the first place -- drugs and booze, sex and "body adornment." Many of them are young -- refugees from America's failed families, failed schools, failed churches and social service agencies. They come to Myrtle Beach with their histories of abuse and neglect, with fear in their eyes and demons on their shoulders. They come because they have a memory of a special day -- or maybe it's just a rumor of a day -- when the sun was shining and the breeze was blowing up from the surf and the band organ played from the Pavilion and there was the smell of hotdogs and cotton candy on the air and everyone was happy and they were sure this magic Myrtle Beach day would never end.
But it did end and they lost their way home. Now they roam Ocean Boulevard in their drab, baggy garb, their tattoos flashing defiantly; their pierced lips, ears, noses and eyebrows a statement that few around them can comprehend.
That was the Ocean Boulevard Doug Wendel inherited with the helm of the Burroughs & Chapin Co. It was the center of the family vacation resort his company had established a century before, and now it was overrun with beachwear and T-shirt shops, body piercing pagodas, cheap bars, flop houses and video arcades. This wasn't the Myrtle Beach his company wanted the world to see. And Wendel held the trump card.
In 1996, he announced that he intended to close the historic Pavilion Amusement Park and move it to a site near Broadway at the Beach if the city didn't join his program of social engineering. To appease the CEO, the city agreed to a five-year plan to redevelop downtown; that included cleaning up Ocean Boulevard. City Council went to work to limit cruising on the Boulevard, to ban body piercing, the sale of drug paraphernalia, the display or sale of "indecent" material to minors.
The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal dispatched scribes to report on Myrtle Beach's kulturkampf. "If we were not the magnanimous, loving, caring company we are, we would abandon [the Pavilion]," Wendel told the Times.
