Write Team: Remembering Eugenia Price, historical novelist

One of our favorite stops when we vacationed on the Georgia coast was the Lee Street Bookshop in Brunswick, Georgia.

I remember our first visit to the shop and a conversation with the charming owner, Cam Ward, when she told us she was a good friend of historical novelist Eugenia Price, who lived on St. Simons Island.

We told her of our meeting with Robert Frost and our photographing of him in the summer of 1962.

“Genie is looking for a photographer – maybe you could help her out.”

Cam made the arrangements, and on our trip to Georgia the next summer, she scheduled a photographic shoot of Eugenia Price for us.

We met Eugenia for lunch at a delightful restaurant called Blanche’s Courtyard on St. Simons Island.

The day of the shoot was perfect. Genie’s idea was to use the back courtyard of the restaurant, which was enclosed with a growth of bamboo trees, several live oak trees, and on the street-side area, a picket fence. I would use these various backgrounds throughout the shoot.

In 1976, Eugenia Price was at her most beautiful as a person. Her health was good and the vitality that it brought shown through every aspect of her lovely face.

And, so it went, that first shoot at Blanche’s Courtyard on the island of St. Simons along the coast of Georgia in 1976.

In the spring of 1979, I received a telephone call from Genie saying, “I need another photograph! Can you make it for me?”

We scheduled the second shoot in her beautiful home on St. Simons Island, which she had designed and built in the traditional fashion of coastal architecture.

We began the shoot on the rear verandah. I sat across from her at a table as she sipped coffee. We visited and relaxed comfortably as I made a series of photographs.

The shoot moved to other parts of the house, and I was able to capture rare views of Genie, from the living room to her study. I created a gallery of rare photographs that no one before me nor after had had the opportunity to make.

As our family moved to various places in my work, during the next dozen years or so, we always kept Jekyll Island as our summer vacation spot. And annually on our trips to the island, we would make contact with Genie and we would have dinner together.

Genie liked particularly well a St. Simons Restaurant called Alfonza’s Old Plantation Supper Club which was owned by a wonderful African American named Alfonza Ramsey, whom we often met.

Our conversations, full of laughter and pleasantries, aimed at solving the problems of the world.

In one conversation, I told her “I am a radical moderate!”

“You can’t be that!” she responded; “that’s an oxymoron!”

“You call yourself ‘born-again’ – isn’t that’s an oxymoron too?” And, we all laughed.

When I find a publisher, I have in mind a delightful book, a photo-essay on our friendship with this dear friend, which I will call “Eugenia Price – Through a Lens Brightly.”

Robert Cotner spent 25 years as an English teacher that include serving as Fulbright lecturer in English at the University of Liberia. He concluded his career as an executive at The Salvation Army and Shriners Children’s Hospital-Chicago. He now lives in Seneca.