Alex Sanders (politician)

"Donald Patrick Conroy, born on October 26, 1945, was the best storyteller of our time- very possibly any time. We will never forget Donald Patrick Conroy. He came to live in South Carolina on orders of the United States Marine Corps. In 1961, his father, Colonel Donald Conroy, a Marine aviator who went by the nickname of the Great Santini- perhaps you've heard of him- received orders to report to the air station in Beaufort, South Carolina. Pat was sixteen years old and received this news with dread. He had been to ten schools in eleven years and Beaufort High School would become his third high school."

"He and The Citadel eventually kissed and made up and became great friends after a rocky relationship following publication of The Lords of Discipline. The Citadel has promised to stop using his books as kindling to heat the barracks."

"Pat told me that The Citadel was one of the big reasons he loved South Carolina and the Lowcountry. While other writers of his generation were going to fraternity or sorority parties, he spent his four college years reading during Evening Study Period. He became a member of the Dock Street Theatre, the Charleston Ballet, and the Symphony. He learned about the beauty and charm of cities by studying Charleston and Beaufort."

"His was a turbulent personality, a complex mixture of joy and despair, but through it all, great love. He loved books and independent bookstores, especially the Old New York Bookshop. Imagine that. He loved his friends, his brothers and sisters, his children and stepchildren, his grandchildren, his legion of readers, who hung on his every word and were enchanted by his characters, the atmosphere of the South Carolina Lowcountry, and his stories- always his stories. But he loved no one more than Sandra, his steadfast wife, Cassandra King. She smoothed out the rough places for him and calmed the turbulence of his life. She loved him unconditionally, as he loved her. She brought him peace at last."

"Pat Conroy may have come to live among us involuntarily, but he stayed among us by choice and enriched us all for more than fifty years. Many of us saw ourselves reflected in his published words. Some of us he entertained grandly. Others of us he outraged greatly. To all of us, he gave a rare gift. He came to us from afar, like Faulkner and like Wolfe. But I respectfully suggest, in ways more real and more loving than either of them, that he gave to us the opportunity, in the phrase of Burns, "to see ourselves as others see us." For this alone, we should be forever grateful to Pat Conroy, our very own prince of tides. "Good-night, sweet prince. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest." Hamlet, Act V, Scene 2."