S.C. statesman, storyteller Alex Sanders dies at 88

MORNING HEADLINES | Alex Sanders, whose gift for spinning a good yarn was celebrated almost as widely as his six decades of public service as a Palmetto State legislator, judge, university president and professor of law, died Tuesday. He was 88.

A Columbia native, Sanders served in the U.S. Army and earned undergraduate and law degrees from the University of South Carolina before entering the S.C. legislature in 1966, where he served as a Democrat in the House and later the Senate until 1983.

Sanders, whom novelist Pat Conroy called “the greatest storyteller to ever come out of the South” and the Charlotte Observer once dubbed “Mark Twain in Robes,” went on to serve as chief judge of the S.C. Court of Appeals and president of the College of Charleston from 1992-2001.

“Judge Sanders transformed what was once a small school into a university with national reach and universal appeal,” College of Charleston President Andrew T. Hsu said Wednesday. “His contributions made a profound impact on the College’s trajectory, helping lead us to where we are today.”

Sanders also lectured at Harvard’s Kennedy School and co-founded the Charleston School of Law, along with fellow attorneys and jurists Edward J. Westbrook, Robert S. Carr, George C. Kosko, and Ralph C. McCullough.

Perhaps the best known of Sanders’ many famous stories was one he both lived and told — the tale of his 1971 boat trip with environmental supporters through the Santee Swamp, playing a recording of the mating call of the then-thought-extinct ivory-billed woodpecker.

Sanders and the local Audubon Society members accompanying him swore they then heard the return call of a living ivory-billed woodpecker — and by the time national outlets like The New York Times were through telling the story, a timber company’s plan to clear-cut the area was dead, and federal funding was set aside for S.C.’s first national park: Congaree Swamp National Monument.

Asked years later whether the bird was actually there, Sanders said, “He was there when we needed him to be.”

If national parks could talk, one imagines the Congaree would say the same of him.

Sanders is survived by his daughter, Zoe. Leevey’s Funeral Home in Columbia is handling the arrangements.

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