April 2021 Issue

Charleston, South Carolina had its own Tea Party incident on December 3, 1773, 13 days before the one in Boston. You learned about the Boston Tea Party in school, did you not? It was no picnic — It was a protest against taxes imposed on the colonies by the British government. No one was hurt, and no property was damaged. Except, that is, for the 342 crates of tea, about 45 tons, that were dumped into the Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773. I wonder whether all that tea turned the water in the harbor brown… We think of food in small portions — a glass of wine, a slice

The morning was quiet, the sun beginning to rise and touch the hills surrounding Jerusalem and the buildings within its walls with soft golden light. Ananias left the inner courts of the Temple, the words of the Shema fading away behind him as he stepped into the Court of the Gentiles. “Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Ehad.” Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. The smell of animals still filled the courtyard from all the beasts that had inhabited it in the days preceding the Passover, and the Pharisee could still hear the tumultuous noise in his memory. But right now the Temple grounds were quiet

Aiken, a town of scarcely 30,000 people, is home to one of only ten court tennis buildings active in the United States. How did this game of royalty and tradition, played by Henry VIII himself, come to these quiet backwoods? It is a story of sportsmen building “a rustic, sporting retreat.” Court tennis, called “real tennis” outside the United States, predates our modern game of tennis (“lawn tennis”). It likely evolved from a game played in medieval courtyards that involved hitting a ball back and forth with a bare hand, later with a glove. By Renaissance times, there were hundreds of enclosed courts in Europe, and the glove had been

Most people take for granted the convenience and “luxury” of shopping in the modern mega grocery stores of today like Kroger, Publix, Fresh Market, and Walmart. Things were not always this way. A Brief History Prior to 1946 most grocery stores in Aiken — the exception would be Hahn and Co. on Laurens Street where Aiken Drugs used to be — were small mom-and-pop operations that just sold basic staples. That all changed in 1946 with the opening of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Co., better known as the A&P, on Park Avenue in what is now the Chesser Building. Augusta University Health and Aiken Dermatology reside in that