Pawleys Island
Town rules take their licks during July Fourth parade
The Pawleys Island Fourth of July Parade was headed north along Myrtle Avenue.
The crowd was headed south, drawn not by the lights, sirens and stirrings of patriotic tunes, but by the music-box tinkling of the ice cream truck.
“That’s just something I remember as a kid, hearing the ice cream truck and trying to scrape up a quarter,” Guerry Green said.
Only they didn’t have to come up with any money to get ice cream from the truck parked across from his house. It was free.
Otherwise it would have violated the town’s prohibition on commercial activity.
In the long tradition of island parades, Green, a Town Council member, staged a protest over the town’s regulations.
“Make Ice Cream & Dogs Great Again on Pawley’s Island,” read the banner.
The ice cream truck belonged to Michael Grant, whose day job is building manager at Waccamaw Elementary School.
But on afternoons and weekends when the weather is warm, he runs G&G Ice Cream.
“He goes to every neighborhood in the whole community. He can’t come to Pawleys,” Green said.
Grant appealed to Town Council a year ago to relax its restriction on vendors, which was adopted in 1988. The ban followed concern about children running into the street to get ice cream from an earlier vendor and about the proliferation of other roadside sales.
Kids and parents ran along Myrtle Avenue to get ice cream before the parade arrived. One man carried a fistful of cash. Green explained there was no charge.
After the parade passed his house, frozen treats appeared in the hands of the grand marshals, the mayor and first lady, and many of the participants.
“It’s a tradition,” Green told his colleagues on the council this week. “Kids love it adults love it.”
He urged them to find a way to bring back the ice cream truck.
“Try something. Try anything. If it doesn’t work we can adjust it,” Green said.
After hearing from Grant last year, council members agreed that the commercial ban hadn’t kept pace with digital sales and home delivery, but took no further action.
The dogs that Green paired with Pawleys Island’s ice cream tradition weren’t the hot ones, but the warm-blooded ones.
He asked the council last month to revise its leash law so that people can have dogs under voice command on the beach if there is no one else around. They are currently allowed off the leash and under voice control from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. from May through September.
Green was cited for a leash law violation last September and again last month, a week before the council meeting, according to court records.
“We’ve always had dogs on the beach at Pawleys Island,” Green said. “A long time before we had a police force, before we had a mayor, we had dogs on the beach.”
Green raises and trains Labs. He likes to work them in the ocean in front of his house when no one’s around.
“Nobody’s being hurt,” he said.
When a dog is disruptive or a threat to people, the owner needs to be cited, Green added.
“You’ve just got to have some common sense about your dogs on the beach,” he said.
Council Member Ashley Carter said he didn’t object to having times when dogs can be off a leash.
Green said those times need to be adjusted.
Council Member Sarah Zimmerman said state law requires dogs be leashed when off the owner’s property. The town started following that law in 2009, but made an exception for dogs in the water.
It revoked the exemption in 2016, but restored a voice control option two years later.
“It’s a state law just like the speed limit,” Zimmerman said, adding that an expert race car driver can’t go 80 mph on town roads when there’s no other traffic.
Mayor Brian Henry said the town needed to wait until after the summer to review the ordinance.
“I have some thoughts on it, too,” he said.
