James (Jim) Lynah Palmer, Jr. was born in Savannah, Georgia in the early 1950's to Jim and Pat Palmer of Wadmalaw Island, South Carolina. Their home was just outside of the coastal rural hamlet of Rockville, twenty some odd miles south of Charleston. When he was old enough to ask, Jim (Jimmy, as called by his momma and daddy) was told that his mother's grandfather, Dr. William Barron Crawford, had been at that time the director and chief surgeon at a prominent hospital in Savannah and would not hear of his granddaughter having her first born anywhere else. Several weeks there after, son, mother and father moved back to their home on the coastal Carolina island. On that ground he was raised into his early teens.
It was there that his life was molded among the fields, woods and tidelands shared by his father and father's father alike. So too, all those he came to meet and know there made an indelible impression on his life. It was in those times that his broad range of artistic talents and imagination were cultivated.
Over the years, Jim has expressed his artistic nature, more than occassionally with success, through music, painting and sculpture (see >www.jlpalmerart.com<) and over the past four years in written stories published within The Bluffton Breeze, a widely read regional South Carolina magazine. Now he has come out with his first book, GOING COASTAL; Twelve Months and Then Some of Stumblin' Jimmy Watermelon.
His efforts can perhaps be best summed up in a poem of his, published within this book's pages.
From the book, GOING COASTAL
"THERE"
I have dream't that I could fly. Now wake to find myself standing on the edge of a cliff named Unknown. With all my will and self belief, thrown myself off. Occassionally I soar. . .
