Catching up with an Oconee figure from the past

Today Walt Belcher is a humorist, a columnist, and a storyteller.  Because of his ability to tell a story and find humor in it, it was good for WGOG to catch up with a long ago newspaper reporter who, while in Oconee County, sidelined as a WGOG news correspondent.  As such he covered stories as the Oconee-Pickens correspondent for the Greenville News during a momentous time in Oconee County such as when a young and rising Hollywood actor named Burt Reynolds would star in a movie centered on the Chattooga River and when a seasoned Hollywood actor, Burt Lancaster, filmed a bowling alley scene in Seneca for a movie in which the Clemson campus became a fictional Jordan College for purposes of a murder-mystery flick.  Belcher also happened to be in Newry on the day that it, in effect, stopped being a mill village and made the announcement that the Courtenay plant of Abney Mills was closing. It was just one more decline of what had been a large textile business within Oconee County and across the South.  That meant something extra to Belcher, for he grew up in the Parker District of Greenville where his dad worked in textile manufacturing.  After leaving Oconee, Belcher enjoyed a newspaper career for a daily paper in Tampa, Florida, which existing until about the middle of the last decade when it got gobbled up by that area’s larger daily.