This week’s Spotlight features Jerry Immel. A longtime resident of Colleton County, he has a very interesting history. Immel grew up in Wisconsin on a dairy farm. He explains, “I was born at home, I was a "blue baby". My mother's cousin was there acting as the midwife. The doctor had given me up, because he couldn't get me to come to, and she made him do the maneuvers again. The third time I came to so God has a plan. I was dyslexic in school before they even knew what it was. I was the dumbest kid, and if I could see it, I could remember it, but if I had to read it, I couldn't. I went to a one room schoolhouse. There was only 13 of us. In the first grade we had one teacher for two years, and in the third grade, we had a new teacher that year. She convinced my mother that I was probably a little mildly mentally challenged, and if she could keep me in the third grade again, maybe I'd have a chance to catch up.”
Immel continues, “My 17th birthday, I was milking cows and I told my father., ‘I'm going to be 18 next year, and I'm going in the Navy. I am not milking cows the rest of my life.’ So, he took my mother, and they went all out west, because he had arthritis so bad in his hands, and they moved to Pueblo Colorado, and I went in the Navy. Within six months, everything was gone, the farm, the cattle, the hogs, the chickens, all the machinery was sold at auction.”
He said, “I joined the Navy in 1958, and they took me on the first day of 1959. It was wintertime, and they gave me a choice of doing boot camp, either in Great Lakes or out in San Diego. I chose San Diego. I had never been outside the state of Wisconsin and had never flown on a big airplane. It was something for me at 17. When I finished boot camp, they put me in a school in Key West, which was secret in those days.” This assignment was not a good fit, so he was transferred to Norfolk to pick up his ship, but it had already left to the Mediterranean. “I waited a week or two, and they flew me from Norfolk to Greenland, to the Azores, to Morocco, to Greece, and I caught the ship. I was 18 years old with a camera in the Mediterranean for six months. It was fantastic. I went all over Island of Crete. We went everywhere.”
Immel met my wife, Jane, in Richmond, Virginia, while he was stationed at Norfolk as a Third-Class Petty Officer. “She was a city girl, but she had grandparents out in the country, so she was familiar with country life and a country boy, what a team we made.” He got a job at the fire department making minimum wage, three days a week and also worked for a yacht company repairing yachts. The company was building a boat yard and marina complex, and he got a chance to run it. “Here I am, 25 years old. I wanted that chance to learn management, and they paid me, I was cheap for the first year, while we were building everything. Then they didn't pay me like they told me they were going to, so I went back with a fire department for the Coast Guard training center in Yorktown, Virginia, and worked there for three years. I was also working a part-time job for boat builder that was building steel yachts, mostly sail boats.”
Immel is an experienced diver, “I went to school for hard hat diving, even though I'd been doing scuba diving for years, and I hung my shingle up. It's too cold in the Chesapeake Bay to do much diving, I didn't have the cold-water equipment, so I stayed in Florida. I worked all winter building houses at Boynton Beach, Florida. I went back to Virginia is the spring, and I started doing the yacht interiors. I bought the Dixie Diver and converted it into a pusher tug and was busy after that. Once you start diving, fishermen say, ‘Come raise my boat that’s sunk here at the dock.’ You raise it, and before you know it, the jobs get bigger and bigger. Now you have to tow them to the shipyard, and pretty soon you need a tow boat, at that point we bought the Dixie Diver. The tugboats just gradually grew and grew.”
Immel custom built his boats himself, “The first big one was Amazing Grace, using the process called lofting. We took plywood that we were going to use in the boat for floorboards and the walls, laid it down, tacked it in the corners, painted it white, and then that was our drawing board. You start with a baseline and that's the keel. You then draw what you want. When you do it full scale, you can see any imperfections. At that point, you take the measurements and build your frames out of steel. When you're building a boat flat like that. You can have everything perfectly level and then you put the skin on, and that was quarter inch plate steel.” In addition to building his own boats, he worked in diving, salvage, and towing. In 1982 he took the Amazing Grace to the Virgin Islands and lived there 21 years.
Immel is self-taught. “I've been blessed. I never finished high school, and God's given me these gifts. I do all my own wiring. There's not much I can't do. Growing up on the farm, we were so poor, we could never hire anyone so we had to make it work and can't, wasn't in our vocabulary.”
After 21 years in the Virgin Islands, he sold the business and eventually settled in South Carolina, “When we moved, we still had our house in Virginia. That's where I built the Amazing Grace at our own place. We were planning on going back there, but then we decided that it was too cold up there in the wintertime. We lived in Mount Pleasant. We had the house for three years, but we were in the Virgin Islands. We bought it for a spec house, and our daughter wanted it.” The family wanted to stay close together, so they looked at property in Holly Hill, St. George, St. Matthews, and Cottageville, eventually settling on property near Walterboro.
One of Immel’s hobbies is collecting classic tractors. He has owned 18 of them over time and traveled to purchase and show them all over the country. “We had a wide variety equipment, so that every tractor show had a feature tractor for that year. The feature tractor changes every year, there'll be six or eight different years of different tractors. They get spot up front to feature the tractors. We always we had a tent, a big 20 by 20. We'd set up and park our tractor under there to display and also distribute religious materials.” He recalls how it started, “We were in Colorado visiting my folks, and I picked up one of those papers they call them the Thrifty Nickel out there, it's nothing but ads. People sell anything you can imagine. And here's a man selling his antique tractors, his collection. He had six tractors, I said to Jane, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun if we had a tractor?’ We had been going to these antique tractor shows since the 60’s. We went out to see him in Canyon City. He didn't give them to us, but almost, two of them, including a John Deere, was the first ones I bought. We had to come back to South Carolina, get our truck and trailer, go back out to Colorado, pick up two, and while we were there, buy two more.” Some of his favorite tractors are the Empires, but he also has additional Johne Deere, Oliver, and Farmall tractors.
He also founded what he calls his Penny Ministry about 15 years ago. “We had been giving away Bibles and tracts. We knew giving away Bibles and tracts at the tractor shows that was going to be a ministry, that's why God gave us the tractors. We've given away hundreds and hundreds of Bibles. The tracks that we make is basically the Roman Road, but it tells everything you need to know to be saved. We've been giving away Bibles and then the pennies. Somebody gave me some pennies, and I found out where to get them. We order them in bags of 1000. I'm in my fourth bag.”
Immel also has an impressive collection of sawmills. “I actually have three of them, I have one that's a Bellsaw, Sears sold them mainly to the farmers. They could build it from a kit, and they could back the tractor up to it, run it off the power, take-off. I’ve got one of them hanging in the shed, and I'm building a building down in the woods so that I can put the sawmills under it to preserve the wood. I have a modern one, a band sawmill, and that's a Timber King. It's made in the same place that the old one from Sears. They quit making the circular saws in the early 1990s and went strictly to the band sawmills.”
Jerry Immel has had a fascinating life, and together with his wife, he has had many adventures. To this day, he is able to travel and share his message with the world.
