A behind-the-scenes look at Hillbilly Clan No. 2

Written by Michael O’Hearn; Photos submitted by Henry Reynolds, Claire Sachse and Mark Schmerling

There are two rules, according to Henry Reynolds, to becoming a member of a Hillbilly Clan. First, you must be a member of the Masonic Lodge. Second, you must join a Shrine Temple. The Shriners participate in parades throughout our area and donate all profits, according to Reynolds, to one of the country’s Shriners Hospitals.

Reynolds is one of the longest serving members of Hillbilly Clan No. 2, being in the group since 1980. The group meets monthly at the Hejaz Temple in Wellford, S.C. He and his fellow Hillbillies call this temple the Mid-City Shrine Club, and the clan brings in 30 to 40 members each month to their meetings.

If the Hillbillies sound familiar to you, it’s because their eye-catching, old-fashioned country pickup trucks have been featured prominently in parades across the Foothills and Upstate since the clan’s inception in 1970. Most notably in our area, they have been featured at the Coon Dog Day festival in Saluda and the Columbus Christmas Parade in downtown Columbus.

“This whole thing started about 40 years ago in Pikeville, Ky., but Clan No. 1 started before that,” George Ledford, member of Hillbilly Clan No. 2, said. “There were three gentlemen up there in Pikeville who started the Hillbilly Days in Kentucky 40 years ago.”

According to the history of the Grand and Glorious Order of the Hillbilly Degree, Jim Harris created the national organization in the 1960s with the help of a few Shriners of El Hasa Temple in Ashland, Ky. Harris documented copyrights and a charter for the first Hillbilly clan because he said he felt he needed a “side-line degree,” complete with “Hillbilly Hats” and “Hillbilly Tuxedos” (overalls) worn at each meeting as uniforms.

Hillbilly Days is an annual festival on the third weekend of April founded by Howard “Dirty Ear” Stratton and “Shady” Grady Kinney in 1977. It has been one of the events that has helped the Hillbilly Clans grow and raise money for Shriner Hospitals.

“That’s the one thing with all the hillbilly clans, the motorcades really, is that all of the profits — because you do have to pay expenses — go to the hospital,” Reynolds said. “That’s what we dedicate ourselves to.”

Following the initial work in getting the new Hillbilly Degree started at the Imperial Shrine Convention in Miami in 1970, the Hejaz Temple wanted authorization as a chapter in the name of their own clan, according to this history. A charter was drafted for the Wellford chapter, and 60 chapters of the organization were created within the organization’s first decade of existence.

“Each Shriner pays their own way, builds their own car, pays for their own gas and their own rooms and their own insurance,” said Teddy Edwards, another member of Hillbilly Clan No. 2. “The temple has insurance so if there’s an accident in a parade, everything’s covered, and we pay that per year to be able to run these parades, to run Christmas parades and Shrine parades. There’s a Hillbilly Clan at just about every Shrine temple in North America, about 187 clans, and a lot of them are still active today.”

Edwards said that some clans can also be found in Canada, but regardless of origin, all the clans merge in Pikeville for the Hillbilly Days festival each year, which will celebrate 40 years in 2017. South Carolina has three temples, North Carolina has six temples and each state has their own jurisdictions.

According to Wilbur Pye, clan member, the clan had a haunted house in Spartanburg on Howard Street in the 1970s that would make as much as $3,000 a year for the Shriners Hospital at one dollar a head for entry. The house has since been demolished.

“That place ran for years and years, I couldn’t tell you how long,” Pye said. “We charged a dollar a head and when you went in, some people would go out, turn around, and the next day come back again. We had really racked some money! We had 13 stations there and a guy in front and a guy in back and we would run from 7 o’clock until that last person goes through, maybe at 5 o’clock in the morning. If you didn’t get your dollar’s worth, you’d run through it and do it again.”

Reynolds said “dabbling” in things like that and parking cars at some events is how he and the unit make money for the Shriners Hospital in Greenville, the only one in South Carolina. The clan joins more than 30 parades a year, according to Edwards, and the group can do three to four parades a day if requested.

Clan member Terrell Martin added when he and the clan members hear the stories of patients who have been to the Shriners Hospital, it reminds them of the importance of performing in the parades.

“This lady comes up to the Farm City Day in Hendersonville about five years ago and she was probably in her late 20s,” Martin said. “She said this girl, who was about 4 years old, running around playing and having a good time, was born without hip sockets. She was a patient of the Shriners Hospital and she was walking because of them. Like Ted said, there’s no way to put a price on what we do so we do it for nothing.”

During the Veterans Day parades, the clan members stop to salute the flag, even if that means backing up the traffic of the ongoing parade. Pye added the unit stops and prays prior to every event and parade.

“The first year we did that was during a Spartanburg Veterans Day parade at the post office, and we had done discussed it that we would stop and salute the flag before we started,” Martin said. “This lady was in the crowd watching and she wrote a nice article in the Spartanburg paper that we were the only unit to have stood and done that in the whole veterans parade by stopping and showing respect to the flag, the hillbillies. The next year, they knew we would hold the parade up a few minutes, so they took the flag down and then they put it back up. If they’ve got a flag flying, our unit stops and salutes the flag and the crowd will go absolutely berserk.”

Martin said hearing the stories of people with children who have been through the Shriners Hospital validates the unit’s work as the Hillbillies.

“If it’s legal, maybe sometimes a little illegal, and we can get by doing it for the Shriners Hospital, some time or another we have done it or we will do it,” Martin said. “When you’re visiting the hospital or you’re at the parade, these people will come up and tell you about my child and stuff like that, it makes you want to work that much harder.” •