Scott Graber

By Jeff Kidd
There was a time when Scott Graber imagined he’d marry that girl he followed to Baltimore. He imagined that after graduating from George Washington University Law School, he’d bring her back to South Carolina, and that he would become one of the seersuckered attorneys with an office on Charleston’s Broad Street.
And he imagined that, by now, he would have long ago made his fortune practicing law and retired to a second career as a best-selling novelist. None of that quite turned out as planned. Rather, it turned out better than Graber imagined.
“I have work that I really enjoy. I’ve got enough money to live, and I’m never going to go hungry,” said Graber, who has practiced law in Beaufort since moving here in 1971.
“I’ve also made wonderful friends. Beaufort has been a great place to raise a family.” Born in Florence in 1945 to a well-traveled Army doctor, Graber earned his bachelor’s degree at The Citadel, where he was a contemporary of future novelist Pat Conroy. Like Conroy, he graduated as a private. Unsure what to do next, he enrolled at George Washington — not so much because he aspired to be an attorney, but because the girl he was head-over-heels for lived in nearby Baltimore.
The girl had other plans. And a second boyfriend. Graber didn’t find out the detail until after he was enrolled, so he decided to stick it out.
In the end, he indeed brought a girl back to the Palmetto State. Shortly after his breakup, he met his future wife, Susan, who grew up in Connecticut and also was attending George Washington. They married not long after Graber earned his jurisdoctor. A former classmate told him big things were happening on Hilton Head Island, so he started looking at law firms in Beaufort County.
Graber was hired by the Dowling Law Firm, which was based in Beaufort but did a lot of legal work for Charles Fraser’s burgeoning Sea Pines Company. Brothers Joab and G.G. Dowling were community pillars, and Graber said both were very kind to him. However, he said early in his time at their law firm, he did something to offend another of the practice’s partners. G.G. took him aside one day and leveled with him: Graber was doing good work and would always have a job at the firm, but he would never make partner.
Soon after, Graber departed for a job as a Penn Center attorney. Most of his work there entailed helping African-Americans of modest means secure clear title to the heirs property on which they lived. He then went into private practice, working for many years in partnership with Ralph Baldwin. Graber did occasional criminal-defense work but focused mostly on litigation, real estate and probate. Susan worked with him as a paralegal for many years, until leaving to focus on her work as a portrait painter in the early 1990s. Graber served as the town of Port Royal’s attorney for many years and represented the S.C. State Ports Authority, as well. However, his most famous client was Conroy, his former Citadel classmate.
Though they were not particularly close in college, their friendship bloomed along with their professional relationship. In fact, Conroy trusted Graber to review an early draft of “The Lords of Discipline,” the novel that essentially got Conroy excommunicated from The Citadel fraternity. Graber was still providing counsel and friendship two decades later, when Conroy’s relationship with his alma mater finally thawed. During that span, Graber’s ambition to become a writer himself was both inspired and frustrated by his relationship with Conroy. “To some extent, I despair because I see the way he turns a phrase or the way he describes a person, and I know I can’t do that,” Graber said. “His descriptions are so marvelous and seem to flow so easily, writing for him might seem to be effortless. Of course, what most people don’t realize is how hard Pat worked at writing. It did not come easily. He would spend an hour writing a paragraph.”
Graber has written two novels — one self-published and a second published in serial form in the now-defunct Beaufort Today newspaper. He also penned a weekly column in The Beaufort Gazette for more than two decades. Initially, his focus was state and local politics, but when he ran out of things to say on those matters, editor Jim Cato urged him to expand his subject matter to observations about other facets of his adopted hometown and the people who live there.
“I enjoyed the thrill of publication,” Graber said. “I got to open the Gazette every Sunday and, wow, there was my byline.” More recently, Graber shared his heartfelt reflections in a review of Conroy’s posthumously published “A Lowcountry Heart.” The collection of essays and eulogies bears witness to Conroy’s love for “the American South, with all its imperfections and idiosyncrasies,” Graber wrote in The Washington Post.
Graber said he did not feel pressure to write something great about a great writer. Neither did he experience any anguish from recounting the last days of a dear friend. To the contrary, the review practically wrote itself. The exercise evoked bit of what Graber loved so much about using his Gazette columns to profile other Beaufortonians: “This is just such an interesting place with so many fascinating people to write about.”