My Neighbors 55lb Catfish Caught in the Wambaw

10/26/2007

David A. Windham

My Neighbors 55lb Catfish Caught in the Wambaw

That’s the famous, eccentric, allusive, one and only… Dirty Dan Wheeler.

Update 7/22/2020 – I ran across this post today in my analytics and I was thinking about Dan. A lot of folks called him Dirty. I lived next door to Dirty Dan Wheeler… which in swamp terms is about a mile down a dirt road. He had dropped by my house to show off this catfish he had caught back in the brackish water swamp near where we lived. I moved from McClellenaville back in 2007 or so to take a gig back inland. I know that he had fallen ill around the last I was logging into Facebook because I was friends with his two boys. I have no clue where he is now or if he’s still alive. Dan had an old piece of property out in the swamp of McClellenville. He called it the Moss Swamp Horseshoe Club because he kept some horse shoe pits out back. He had great big parties and like to dress up in tie dye pajamas and sing Mick Jagger and Delbert McClinton songs in a band. He also like to drink beer all day. On occasion, I would catch him day drunk watching westerns with a pair of revolvers on his waist. Quite the piece of work. I liked him. He did plumbing and insisted that ford vans were the way to go. I think he had over 300,000 miles on his. He was from Columbia, SC. Rabid Gamecock fan. Told me once that Vietnam had fucked him up and that the state had repoed his property in Columbia for taxes while he was in the shit in Vietnam. He had some deer skulls and whatnot attached to his front posts and said he like to hang dead animals and tell the property tax man he lived off the land. That old property was something else… the mosquitoes were terrible. It was a swamp. It was littered with snakes. I had a black snake and copperhead fall out of a magnolia in my driveway. I used to paddle the creeks in a kayak alone bumping into alligators on occasion. Ran into a black bear one night in my driveway. Alligators regularly crossed the road. The McClellanville crowd were tough as nails… mostly fisherman and shrimpers. I remember them taking me swimming in the black water swamps and going offshore in a 14ft skiff half drunk some time past midnight ‘rescuing’ another boat who had lost power. Our address was on an old dirt road which originally connected Charleston to Boston on which George Washington travelled and terminates at the Santee Delta near Hampton Plantation. It’s now on the Register of National Historic Places. Archibald Rutledge lived at Hampton. I read two of his books when I lived there. I went to all of Dirty Dan’s parties and on occasion I’d join him drinking beer and watching old westerns out at the Moss Swamp Horseshoe Club.

* I recorded Dan one night back when I was broadcasting. I trimmed it down to just Dirty’s clips: