This digital story recording was created in conjunction with the Smithsonian's Museum on Main Street program and its Stories from Main Street student documentary initiative, called "Stories: Yes." The project encourages students and their mentors to research and record stories about small-towns and rural neighborhoods, waterways, personal memories, cultural traditions, work histories, as well as thoughts about American democracy. These documentaries are then shared on Smithsonian websites and social media.

Students from the Anderson County School District worked with the Belton Area Museum Association in South Carolina to produce oral history interviews related to the Smithsonian traveling exhibition "Hometown Teams: How Sports Shape America," which toured South Carolina in 2016 and was on view in Belton.

Speaker 1 (00:20): Although small, Broadway Lake provides a lot of recreational opportunities for the people of Anderson county. Built in the late 1930s as one of the projects of president Roosevelt's WPA, the lake opened to the public on June 16th, 1940. Shortly afterwards, people began buying lots and building cabins along the shore.

Mary Yon Alewine (00:40): We had a cabin when I was about six years old. And it was very different from now. There was no running water. We had no bathroom. We had outhouses up the hill. We had a one room cabin and built a sleeping porch around it, but we had a lot of fun growing up that May.

Dickie Anderson (00:57): We'd go out there in the summer. We didn't live there full time. So we'd go out in the summer to a cabin my dad had built, just right after the lake was built. I learned how to walk in that cabin, and I walked when I was nine months old, So that's 75 years ago.

Elliott Holman (01:13): Work on Hartwell Lake was not finished until about 1963. So for about 23 years, Broadway Lake was the lake in this area. It was the center of boating and water sports and fishing and all those kinds of fun things.

Speaker 1 (01:31): Annual ski shows in the 1950s and 1960s were memorable occasions.

Elliott Holman (01:36): The Anderson ski bugs would put on these exciting water ski shows. And probably the highlight of the show was a person named Gene Bobba. And when he would go over a ramp, which we call it a ski jump, but he was fearless and daring, and he would cut hard at that ramp. He'd swing way over on the opposite side of the lake, the jump would be over here, and he would cut hard to gain maximum acceleration. He'd hit that jump and just explode off the top off on his cypress gardens ramp master skis. And the crowd would just gasp because sometimes he would have these spectacular wipe out crashes. Sometimes he'd pull out of them. Sometimes he wouldn't, you never knew.

Elliott Holman (02:26): And then the pyramids were a lot of fun. I don't know if you've ever seen a pyramid before, but you'd have maybe 10, 12, 14 skiers that would get up behind a boat at one time and some of the skiers would drop their skis and climb up on the shoulders of other skiers and you'd end up having three levels of skiers in the shape of a pyramid. It was really spectacular thing.

Asset ID: 2022.23.06

Find a complete transcription at www.museumonmainstreet.org