My dad’s family is from eastern North Carolina and essentially grew up at Long Beach, now known as Oak Island. As a result, I’ve been going there almost ever Summer since I was born in 1974. Every year we went during the 1980s, there were two things that signaled that we had arrived at the beach.
The first glimpse of what dad called “The Big O” came at the top of the G. V. Barbee Sr Bridge when you could see the ocean in the distance as you topped the bridge. The second was “Buddie.” “Buddie” was an ancient, bearded man who sat outside his ramshackle shack at the island end of the bridge, and waved at passers by.
“Wave to Buddie!” my dad would say and we waved, and he always waved back. And he was there, year after year, sitting on his porch, until in the late 80s, and one year he just wasn’t there. After that, just his house was there, but we still waved at “Buddie.” His shack fell into disrepair into the 1990s and it finally disappeared into the weeds.
The view from Crossroads porch, looking at where Buddie Brown’s shack used to be.
At some point probably in the early 2000s, Buddie’s house was razed and a furniture store was erected there. In 2023, it was turned into a coffee/art house called Crossroads.
Yesterday, I found myself there, on the porch, looking into the seagrass and weeds where Buddie’s house used to be.
The view from Crossroads porch, looking at where Buddie Brown’s shack used to be.
An old newspaper article on Buddie Brown from 1988 said that he was considered the island’s first resident. Born just after 1900, he ended up on the island in the 1920s or 1930s, building his home. “No one can remember when Buddie’s white shack did not rest among the honeysuckle and grape vines at the foot of the waterway bridge.”
When my dad and grandfather came to live at the beach in the 1950s to help rebuild homes after Hurricane Hazel in 1954 (which somehow didn’t wash Buddie’s house away like it did most), Buddie was already a local legend.
“When he got older, he quit shrimpin’ and started working on small engines for people – lawn mowers and chain saws. Everyone was a friend to Buddie. Everyone would stop and talk to Buddie,” another newspaper article said in 2012.
The 1988 newspaper article says that he first left the house by the bridge that year, after breaking his arm as winter approached. He moved into a nursing home temporarily, but later built a sturdier home on the main road, Oak Island Drive, where he lived with his wife who passed away from cancer. Eventually, he went to live at Ocean Trail Convalescent Center and passed away on April 10th, 1993 at 89 years of age.