Boys Farm

About the Book

When the interviewer said, “"It's going to be hard for a reader to believe . . .," Celia Shealy interrupted, "that we were that crazy. Everybody thought we were crazy." What Walter and Celia Shealy had done was to prepare a place for them. Some had parted tearfully from a single parent who could no longer afford to maintain them. Some were taken from parents who had abused them. Some of them had even been found going through garbage cans. One was used to drinking out of a toilet bowl. In some way, all who came up that driveway near Newberry, South Carolina, had been abused, neglected, abandoned, or given up. And all of them were, as one has put it, "flat scared." Some got out of the car half-starved, with uncut hair, wearing worn-out, torn, or ill-fitting clothing. Some spouted vile language. Looking back to his arrival as an eleven-year-old, one of them writes, " I came from a family torn by divorce, illiteracy, alcoholism, and trouble with the law. My teeth were in an advanced state of decay. I was hungry. I had been sexually and physically abused. My only pair of shoes had big holes in them. I squinted due to severe near-sightedness. I knew that I was no good and that my life would never amount to anything." Years after Walter and Celia Shealy’s impossible sacrifices and improbable successes in beginning Boys Farm, the chairman of their Board of Directors asked a Founders’ Day gathering, "Why in the world would a man and a woman give up a life of comparative ease and security and start a place like Boys Farm? Why would they be willing to give their money, their time, their work--fixing meals, drying tears, solving problems, sharing problems--for the life they could have had?" Standing at the same place and on the same occasion the previous year, their own son Walter, turning toward his mother, had put it this way: "It is still amazing to me today that you and my father were willing to walk away from your wealth and success--the rich lifestyle you had--and, at the age of thirty-six, give it up for a different type of life." Big Oak Island, a vestibule for an ocean playground, is covered with many large and beautiful homes of the wealthy; but in 1950, W.D. and Celia Shealy had it all. When they had moved to Big Oak Island, they had been running the Coastal Ice Cream Company since 1939. They had their manufacturing plant in Charleston; ten ice cream stores and twenty-six ice cream carts in the city; and numerous franchises in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia under a partnership called "Dairy Delight." They had a nine-year-old daughter, Louise, who would soon be attending a fashionable "white glove" academy; they had a son, Walter, who was almost two; "They had everything,” says a close friend. “They had everything in the world they could ever want. They had beautiful children. They had a beautiful home. And they had all the money they needed." And looking back to that time, Celia Shealy quotes her husband as frequently musing, "No tellin' where we'd been or what we'd be doin' if we had kept on growin'." It was then, she says, that "he felt that he was going to try to go to school somewhere." W.D. Shealy wanted to act on a matter that he had been brooding about for years. During the Depression he had had to quit high school to go to work for a dollar a day, seven days a week, in order to help his father support a family of nine children. By 1950, with his business a success, he had begun to dream of completing his education. Behind and driving W.D. Shealy's decision to further his education was a growing religious commitment. When speaking of such commitments, many people of deep evangelical religious faith use the word "burden." The use of the term in the English Bible is an attempt to render a Hebrew word that means "lifting up," or "utterance," or "oracle." The implication is that a burden comes from God and that it carries with it an obligation, an obligation that began to weigh heavil

About the Author

James L. Skinner is a native Georgian who has been an English professor at Presbyterian College in Clinton, SC, since 1965. He has been named the Professor of the Year for the State of South Carolina by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education and has received Governor's Award as the State Professor of the Year. He has also earned the History Award Medal of the Daughters of the American Revolution. His publications include his editorship of The Autobiography of Henry Merrell: Industrial Missionary to the South (1991); and his co-editorship of The Death of a Confederate (1996).