"The Pad"
excerpts from
"SHAG: The Dance Legend"
by Bo Bryan, 1995

........In Ocean Drive, just fifteen miles north, the crowd found a home. One of the old beach houses that miraculously withstood Hurricane hazel was converted into a beer joint. The original dance floor was hard-packed dirt. the jukebox sat on a sheet of plywood. Cold beer was passed through a hole in an exterior wall. The dancers lounged on junk car seats probably gleaned from the hurricane's wreckage.

    The Pad opened with all the earmarks of a first rate rhythm-and-blues clubhouse, scaling paint, low ceilings; the dance floor was upgraded to wooden planks that
sagged when the crowd got thick.

    The Pad would become a fortress of the Shag. The dancers made the place famous. In North and South Carolina, The Pad gained a recognition factor as high as McDonald's Golden Arches or Holiday Inn's "Great Sign". Almost no one in the region, who achieved the legal drinking age of eighteen, could fail to hear of it. The sleepy village of Ocean Drive became almost exclusively synonymous with one Shag bar. At times, the crowds were so thick, the dancers only had room to hold hands and shuffle. The empty beer cans piled up like drifting snow, knee deep in the corners. Behind the bar, the ice used to hold the beer turned to tepid water from the body heat. After ten o'clock at night it was impossible to buy a cold brew, and so the dancers drank it hot.

    The overflowing crowds at The Pad came to be regarded by authorities as a public nuisance, an affront to civil dignity and a traffic hazard. The Chief of Police in Ocean Drive, Merlin Bellamy, nicknamed "The Wizard", handcuffed more boisterous kids on the sidewalk in front of The Pad on an average Saturday evening than the jailhouse could hold.

    Spending the night slammed down in the Ocean Drive drunk tank became a rite of passage, a sort of "must have" experience. All in all, The Wizard was a fair man. If a kid was caught drinking in public and couldn't make bail, he'd let the boy work it off gradually, washing patrol cars and fire trucks or picking up garbage. If a kid deserved a break, he usually got one.

    The inner most circle of The Pad's aristocracy called themselves K.M.A.'s, The Knights of Many Abilities, or Many Adventures, both titles fit the members. Their inner sanctum was a back room at The Pad, lined with mattresses. Only the knights and certain damsels of extreme coolness were allowed to lounge there. The K.M.A.'s were the barons of cold beer and beach fever. And to the cops and to the touristy spectators, those unlucky, unwashed souls who could neither dance nor exhibit a proper suntan, the K.M.A.'s were the knights of "kiss my ass."