‘Cecil was the backbone’: Myrtle Beach golf, tourism pioneer dies at the age of 91
Without Cecil Brandon, Myrtle Beach may have never become the Golf Capital of the World and as popular a tourism destination as it is.
Brandon, who was a driving force behind the development of the Grand Strand golf market, the golf package business, and the promotion and marketing of the area, died this past weekend at the age of 91.
“Cecil was the backbone of making the Myrtle Beach golf industry what it is,” said George Hilliard, who was the executive director of the Myrtle Beach Area Golf Course Owners Association for 26 years from 1988-2014. “It’s hard to express what he did and what he has done for this area, and I’ll miss him greatly.”
Brandon founded in 1959 what is now The Brandon Agency, and the firm has advertised and marketed for and on behalf of the Myrtle Beach area for the decades since.
He helped form the marketing cooperative Myrtle Beach Golf Holiday in the 1960s that brought hotels and golf courses together to create golf packages and promote the area, and he spent 30 years as its volunteer executive director to shepherd the cooperation among competitors within the market that separated Myrtle Beach from other markets.
Few have loved Myrtle Beach more or done more for the area than Brandon.
“He thought this was paradise,” said Brandon’s son Scott, who runs the agency. “He loved this area.”
Brandon was a visionary who knew what Myrtle Beach could become, and he helped it get there.
“In those days [in the 1960s and ’70s], Myrtle Beach was totally famous for golf and not for a whole lot else. That’s really what drove all the growth,” Scott Brandon said. “Obviously over time it has become more famous for being a family beach destination, but he saw all that in the early ’60s.”
Scott Brandon said his father was surrounded by friends and family for days before passing away peacefully. Services were held for Brandon on Tuesday at First Presbyterian Church of Myrtle Beach, followed by a gathering of friends and family at The Dunes Golf and Beach Club, where he was a longtime member, past president and past club champion.
Building the golf market
Brandon lettered in golf and football at Davidson College, entered the U.S. Army as a Second lieutenant and served as an Army Infantry Intelligence officer in the Korean War. He began his professional career selling insurance and transitioned to a job with Wachovia Bank in Charlotte, N.C., before moving to Myrtle Beach.
Awaiting the start of another bank job, Brandon came to Myrtle Beach at the behest of his father, a former Air Force photographer during World War II who asked him to take pictures of Myrtle Beach and create postcards to sell in his gift shop.
Brandon saw a greater opportunity to sell the postcards to area hotels, which would in turn sell them to guests at their front desks.
“My dad always told that story,” Scott Brandon said. “He said, ‘I made more money in three months selling postcards than I did working 12 months at the bank. I figured I’d come down here and work three or four months a year and I’d play golf, hunt and fish the rest of the time.’ That was kind of in a way what he did. He loved to hunt and fish and play golf and he did that in those early years quite a bit.”
That was the start of Brandon Advertising. It expanded when hotels wanted Brandon to create brochures and magazine and newspaper ads.
Prior to the Internet, Brandon had guests fill out index cards with their mailing addresses so he could create a direct-mail database of past customers, and he engraved metal plates with the addresses for mass mailings.
“He used to hate it when I went in there [as a child] because I’d pull the metal sleeves out of the drawer and I would drop them all and they were in alphabetical order,” Scott Brandon recalled. “He had hundreds of those drawers with metal plates.”
The Brandon Agency now has more than 100 employees with offices in Charleston, Charlotte and Orlando in addition to Myrtle Beach.
“The greatest thing to happen to me was to find myself in Myrtle Beach,”’ Brandon told The Sun News in 2002.
With the help of Herb Forrester, Clay Brittain and others, Brandon started Golf Holiday in 1963 and became its executive director. Golf Holiday merged with a similar company started by George “Buster” Bryan called Golf-O-Tels, for whom Brandon also advertised, to become Myrtle Beach Golf Holiday in 1967.
“He started to see how it was not good to have two, they needed to have one, and that’s when he convinced them to both come together and just be one organization,” Scott Brandon said.
Myrtle Beach Golf Holiday began with eight courses, 10 accommodations and a budget of $43,000, and Brandon was the perfect man for the volunteer executive director job with his ability to bring people together.
“We live among the most unselfish people on earth,” Brandon told The Sun News in 2002. “They were willing to stay there and pool their money together and promote Myrtle Beach as an area. That’s why some people have a hard time understanding it, getting one started and keeping it going.”
The Myrtle Beach golf market from Georgetown to Southport, N.C., grew to include 120 golf courses in the early 2000s and still has nearly 90.
Golf Holiday transitioned in 2018 into the Golf Tourism Solutions marketing and technology agency that promotes the Myrtle Beach market.
A community leader
In 1972, Brandon was asked by Brittain to become a founding member of the Myrtle Beach National Company and he served on its board of directors for 49 years.
He had a friendship with the late Arnold Palmer dating back to their college golf playing days — Brandon at Davidson and Palmer at Wake Forest — and he helped convince Palmer to design three signature courses at Myrtle Beach National Golf Club. The Myrtle Beach National Company would eventually own and/or operate a dozen Grand Strand courses and several hotels.
In 1974, Brandon became a founding organizer of The Anchor Bank in Myrtle Beach and served on its board of directors until 2000.
In 1982, Brandon pushed for an exhibit for Myrtle Beach at the World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee at a time when only countries were allowed to host exhibits, Scott Brandon said. Brandon raised $350,000 from the local community to fund the exhibit, which is credited with helping Myrtle Beach become more of a year-round resort destination.
Following Hurricane Hugo in 1989, Brandon formed the Myrtle Beach Area Recovery Council with other business leaders and it raised more than $5 million to promote that Myrtle Beach was open and ready for business.
Brandon was instrumental along with former Golf Holiday executive director Mickey McCamish in convincing the PGA Tour to bring the Senior Tour Championship to The Dunes Golf and Beach Club in 1994 for a seven-year run on the Grand Strand that included national television broadcasts. Brandon traveled to Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida to meet with tour officials during negotiations.
In 1995, he created with several partners a website development company that would eventually become the digital advertising agency Fuel Interactive.
Brandon held many local offices including president of the Myrtle Beach Junior Chamber of Commerce, the Board of Directors of the Greater Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce, president of the Myrtle Beach Elementary Parent Teachers Association, president of The Dunes Club, the Congressional Tourism Advisory Caucus Board, and Elder at First Presbyterian Church.
He received numerous accolades for his contributions to Myrtle Beach and South Carolina tourism.
Among them are the 1996 Order of the Palmetto, which is the state of South Carolina’s highest citizen honor, 1996 Habitat for Humanity Award, 1997 Palmetto Patriot Award, 1982 South Carolina Tourism Award, 1985 American Advertising Federation Silver Medal for lifetime achievement, 1994 Myrtle Beach Citizen of the Year Award, 1995 Jason Ammons Free Enterprise Award, 1996 South Carolina Tourism Ambassador of the Year Award, and 2003 Jimmy D’Angelo Golf Writers Association of America award.
He is also a founding member of the Myrtle Beach Golf Hall of Fame, is in the Carolinas Golf Hall of Fame along with fellow Myrtle Beach pioneers Jimmy D’Angelo and Carolyn Cudone, and was voted along with D’Angelo one of South Carolina Golf’s 10 Most Influential People in history by the South Carolina Golf Course Ratings Panel.
Brandon is survived by his wife of 46 years, Evelyn Sawyer Brandon, daughters Beverly Nichols (Robert) and Donna Dellinger (Jay), sons Scott Brandon (Lisa) and Donnie Todd (Sarah), grandchildren Dalton Dellinger (Lauren), Madeleine Stoneman (Grayson), Donnie Todd, Ellison Todd, Robert Todd, Hunter Brandon (Lawson), Haywood Brandon and Haley Brandon.
This story was originally published May 26, 2021 at 9:32 AM.
