The case wound up in the New York Times, which said Tupper was “known for dispensing justice in cases of minor offenses with a puckish, lighthearted humor.” “My goal is to make sure the people think I’ve listened to them,” Tupper says. “If they don’t like the way I rule, I get that, but I like to make certain they feel that the system was fair and they get a chance to tell their side of the story.” His offbeat approach in the courtroom is a perfect fit in Beaufort, so much so that it’s hard to believe he almost never landed here.

Tupper grew up in New York and New Jersey and didn’t always apply himself in school, so a high school guidance counselor suggested he join the Army. Tupper liked the idea of college a bit better and began looking for a school to attend. “I picked the South because I think I’d read ‘Gone With The Wind’ that summer and thought it was interesting,” he recalls. He wound up at Newberry College — “Go to New York City and take a left, and it’s someplace below Richmond,” his father told him — and loved it from the first day. His college roommate was Lee Atwater, who went on to political prominence.

After college, Tupper was drafted, but he was discharged due to high blood pressure and returned to Long Island to work as a probation officer before applying to law school. He insists the only law school that would admit him was the University of South Carolina, and only because he had graduated from an in-state school. Things kept falling into place in Columbia, where he worked in the admissions office all through law school, but when he graduated he figured he might never see the Palmetto State again. But his mother suggested he take the bar exam in both New York and South Carolina, just in case, and he obliged.

The contrast in the two experiences gave him second thoughts. The New York bar exam was held in a huge, rundown ballroom at Grand Central Station, and a gruff administrator suggested failure was imminent for most of the aspiring lawyers. Tupper spent $13 of his $20 per day food allowance on breakfast. The next week he was back at the Supreme Court building in Columbia, where he knew everyone in the room and a friendly female proctor offered Cokes and snacks and told all the aspiring attorneys she was praying for their success. “I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing? I need to rethink this thing,’ ” Tupper recalls.

Shortly thereafter, the decision was made for him. The dean of the law school at USC called and asked Tupper to become his director of admissions — a lofty position for a 23-year-old fresh out of school — and he gladly accepted. In that role, he met U.S. Tax Court Judge William H. Quealy, who asked him to become clerk in Washington D.C. Quealy became a second-father figure to Tupper, only to be outdone by Joab Dowling, who asked him to come work for his firm in Beaufort in 1978.

Forty years later, it’s hard to imagine Beaufort without Tupper. In addition to his role as a municipal court judge, he was appointed a Beaufort County Magistrate in 2010, and he serves on the boards of numerous organizations. “I’m in jail every morning, setting bond. I go there every morning, even Christmas,” Tupper says. “I love the people who work there, and 99 percent of the inmates are people just like you and me who just screwed up that night for whatever reason. … I try to be compassionate with them, because I could be on the other side.” At this point, he can’t imagine living anywhere else. “I have nightmares that I move to New York or someplace — literal nightmares where I think, ‘God, why did I ever leave Beaufort?’ ” Tupper says. “I can’t tell you something I don’t like about Beaufort. I’m sure there’s something, but I can’t tell you what it is.”