As a native South Carolinian, I know we tend to regard newcomers with skepticism. Can you truly understand this place unless your roots are established deep in our dirt?
I was recently reminded of how wrong that perspective can be.
I’ve known Broad River Electric Cooperative trustee Anita Whitney since I started working for the electric cooperatives more than 20 years ago. Throughout that time, I assumed she was born and raised in Union County.
That, too, was wrong.
It turns out that Anita Pecko was born in Arkansas, the seventh of nine children in a Catholic, military family. They bounced from the United States to Europe and back again before settling in Sumter when she was in the fourth grade. There, she excelled as a star student and athlete at St. Anne Catholic School, earning academic and athletic scholarships to Columbia College, where she graduated with a degree in math.
In graduate school at USC, she met Jimbo Whitney, a fun-loving, country boy who soon brought her to his family’s home and farm on Whitmire Highway, outside of Union. She fell in love. Not just with Jimbo, but with the place.
She appreciated the beauty of the land around her and the sounds and feel of nature in that part of South Carolina. She drew comfort in the instant embrace of Jimbo’s parents. “Mr. Bill” Whitney drove her through his pastures to show off his cows. Jimbo’s mother, Dorothy, made her the first plate of scrambled eggs and grits she’d ever eaten. They advised Jimbo to hold on to this woman who was a combination of “looks and brains.”
Throughout the spring and summer of 1984, the young couple returned to the Whitney family farm. On those trips, Anita says, she’d touch the windshield as they drove through Whitmire and could feel that the temperature was cooler than the heat they’d left in Columbia.
By the end of that year, Jimbo—having just attended the community’s annual male-exclusive, day-after-Christmas hunt—proposed to Anita in the Whitney den. By 1989, they were living in the cabin next door to Jimbo’s parents with their first child, Eva. The Whitneys soon hosted their own version of those community hunts—skeet shoots and paintball for the whole family.
Over the next 35 years, this exotic transplant who attended a British school in Germany and travelled through Europe in a Volkswagen bus became firmly rooted in the Union County soil. Those roots have been nourished in part by Anita’s servant spirit and her devotion to doing what’s right. When family members neared the end of their lives, she took care of them. For some, Anita’s loving face was the last they saw on this earth.
As Anita brought new Whitneys into the world, her roots took hold. In her 30s, while raising her young ones, she took a sabbatical from her career as a systems analyst and became CEO of the Union County YMCA, where she led efforts to build new facilities and programs. In 1993, Anita became the first woman to serve on the Broad River Electric Cooperative board of directors. During that same decade of her life, she also served as a magistrate.
Anita and Jimbo raised four children: Eva, Bo, Ann and Julia. She worked as a substitute teacher, launched the Union County volleyball club and started USC Union’s volleyball program. Jimbo owned and operated Whitney Asphalt. They worshipped at Hebron Baptist Church, making Anita a self-proclaimed “Ba-tholic.”
Anita still goes to her backyard with her prized possession, the Bible her mother-in-law left to her, and does a morning devotional in the peaceful midst of God’s creation. In the afternoon, she’s often on her front porch, where she can see her grandkids come up the long drive. She also likes watching the trucks go by. They remind her of Jimbo, who died in 2022 on Christmas Day.
I’m so glad that I got to learn more about Anita and her journey. Her story proves that being from a place is different than being of that place. Anita Whitney may not have been born and raised in Union County, but her commitment to her community and its people have made it a part of her.