The Remarkable Ted Stern: Charlestons Compass

Ted Stern Jack Alterman

Robert R. Macdonald

How did Ted Stern, a Jewish kid from New Yorks Upper West Side, help transform Charleston
and make it the city we know today? Joe Riley, Jr., Charlestons mayor for the past 40 years has
said, Ted was the most amazing person I have ever known. By the force of his energy and
leadership; he positively changed our community in so many ways. No person of this last half
century, or maybe in our entire history, did more for the benefit of Charleston than Ted Stern.
South Carolinas legendary Senator Fritz Hollings added, Everything Ted touched in Charleston
blossomed.
Theodore Sanders Stern celebrated his 100th birthday on Christmas 2012. He passed away a
month later. His headstone at Beauforts National Cemetery reads, The Readiness is All, the
motto Ted used when he commanded Charlestons Navy Supply Center in the mid-1960s. It is
taken from Shakespeares Hamlet and is a fitting epitaph to a man who was ready for all that fate
brought him.
Ted, as he was universally known in Charleston, lived through a century of change that spanned
two World Wars, the inauguration of commercial radio and passenger flight, womens right to
vote, Charles Lindberghs Spirit of St. Louis, the atomic bomb, the end of segregation, men on
the moon, and Charlestons revival from a shabby Southern city to a world renowned urban
model.
Ted was a spirited teenager; a scholastic swimming champion involved in everything but
academics. He was a student leader at Johns Hopkins University where he attended from 1930 to
1934, but did not graduate because of failures in the classroom. Ted spent the years after his non
graduation as a strikingly handsome Baltimore bachelor tooling around with a bevy of girl
friends in his Chrysler convertible. He became engaged and disengaged, held a series of nondescript jobs, worked at summer camps in New York and Maine, and involved himself in politics
as president of the Young Maryland Democrats. He was a member of the Variety Club which
held weekly smoked filled poker games at Baltimores swanky Belvedere Hotel. One of his
poker cronies was Frank Durkee whose daughter Alva would become Teds wife. Alva, known
for her dry wit, would tell startled Charlestonians that, Ted won me in a poker game.
As it often did during Teds life, fate intervened to give Ted a chance to escape his fruitless and
disappointing life in Baltimore. In late 1939, as war overtook Europe, Ted joined the Navy, was
called up for duty the very next day, and sent to the Panama Canal. There, as a newly minted
Ensign Stern he was Officer of the Day on December 7, 1941 when the teletype clanked out,
This is not a drill. The Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.

Twenty-nine year old Ted, with no formal Navy training, I saluted everything that moved, was
promoted to Lieutenant Junior Grade, and sent in command of 400 men to establish an air patrol
base in Salinas, Ecuador. Teds completing the base ahead of schedule brought him to the
attention of the Navy brass in Washington. He was transferred and appointed chief of staff to the
Admiral responsible for building what at the time were the largest American bases outside the
continental United States. For his four years of service in the Pacific Ted was awarded the
Bronze Star Medal with a V for valor.
In August 1945 Ted was back in the United States planning bases to be built on the Japanese
mainland after what was expected to be a bloody American invasion. He was listening to a
Brooklyn Dodger baseball game on the radio when the announcer broke in to report the Japanese
surrender. Ted was relieved and at the age of 33 decided to make the Navy his career. He
became an officer in the Navy Supply Corps and for the next twenty years advanced to become
one of the Navys oil and computer experts, talents that eventually brought him to the command
of the Navy Supply Center at Charlestons Navy Base. Teds appointment was approved by the
powerful chair of the House Arms Services Committee, South Carolinas Mendel Rivers.
In three years Ted transformed the Navy Supply Center into a model for similar facilities
throughout the country. When it came time for Captain Stern to be promoted to Rear Admiral
Stern it was discovered that Ted was too old by five days. Fate again intervened when Rivers
arranged for Ted to be appointed president of the then, small, private, almost bankrupted College
of Charleston.
In September 1968 Ted took over the historically all white, 480 student school with a rundown
campus of barley more than one city block, a dispirited faculty of twenty-nine, and an uncertain
future. When Ted retired a decade later in 1978 the College of Charleston was a state school with
an integrated student body of 5,000 and a faculty of 181. The schools annual budget had gone
from $800,000 to $13 million. There were ten new building and 75 restored and adapted historic
buildings, three of them National Historic Landmarks. If saving the College was Ted Sterns
single accomplishment, he would be numbered among the Charlestons most important
benefactors. But fate once again intervened.
While Ted was saving the College, Charleston elected 32 year old Joe Riley, Jr. mayor. Like
Ted, Joe Riley had a vision for Charleston. The two collaborated publically and privately to
advance their dreams. The rejuvenated College of Charleston was a key to Charlestons
renaissance. There was also Teds role in creating the Spoleto Festival USA. The young Joe
Riley turned to Ted to save Spoleto when it was about to be still born. Ted serve as the founding

Spoleto chair for ten years and was called on by the Mayor to save Spoleto a second time in the
early 1990s.
But there is more. With a $9,000 Rotary grant, Ted was instrumental in creating what is today
the $125 million Coastal Community Foundation where he also served as board chair. He helped
found Palmetto Goodwill Industries, was instrumental in the creation Charleston Place,
Waterfront Park, and the South Carolina Aquarium. In one of his last public roles, the 93 year
old Ted chaired a successful private fundraising drive for the Colleges Addlestone Library.
Teds famous greetings were Hows my boy? Hows my girl? Almost everyone who met him
wanted to be one of Teds boys or girls. Joe Riley in his eulogy at Teds funeral on the Colleges
Cistern said, We all wanted to be like Ted. Ted came to a city more focused on its pastconservative about change and seeing our differences as barriers not gifts, not ready to believe in
our collective capacities to excel. Ted touched us, led us, and loved us. He put us on a new
course; reset the needle of our community compass. The new heading was Ted Sterns way.
With Teds passing and Joe Rileys retirement, Charleston seeks new leaders that are ready with
similar visions and energies. They will be wise to look to Ted Stern as an example of integrity
and public service and follow the needle of his compass.
Robert R. Macdonald