Second in a series

In January 1972, Earl Slick purchased the Pine Island Hunt Club for $2.75 million.

It was in some ways a steal. The nearly 3,000-acre tract ran from the Atlantic Ocean to the Currituck Sound and included miles of oceanfront, pristine marsh, wooded uplands and interior ponds. A two-story white clapboard lodge straddled a sprawling grass field and freshwater pond built for migrating waterfowl. On blue sky days it was possible to see three miles across the shallow sound to the distant mainland towns of Coinjock and Moyock. Look to the east and the even darker blue ocean limned the sand dunes.

Slick was unsure what to do with the historic property now that he owned it – or if he even wanted to keep it. He wavered between developing it and preserving it. Between building a small arcadia of cottages and leaving the rest alone, a sanctuary.

In 1973, he asked William E. Hollan Jr., who had recently begun working for him, to see if the National Audubon Society, The Nature Conservancy or the federal government might be interested in buying the tract. “He thought at the time he could flip it to a conservation entity,” Hollan recalled. “I spent about a year trying to find some type of nonprofit or government entity to acquire Pine Island at cost. … At that time there was no money or no interest.”

Slick didn’t want the Currituck Banks to be swamped by development the way Kill Devil Hills and Nags Head had been in the postwar building boom that transformed the Lower Banks into a vacation resort. Currituck County commissioners shared his concern and asked for Slick’s help as they scrambled to formulate a plan to manage the expected growth. In a controversial move, Slick agreed to restrict traffic through his property unless developers agreed to cluster-style resorts with centralized utilities. But slowing the wave of development was never going to be easy. Developers and speculators had already acquired 6,000 lots on the Currituck Banks, and another 5,000 were listed for sale. It seemed inevitable that a road would eventually be built.

And it was.

Unable to sell the property, Slick tried to develop it. For help, he turned to his first cousins, Joe and Rex Frates, real estate developers from Oklahoma, and their associate Devane Clarke from Dallas, Texas. The out-of-state trio entered into a partnership with Slick to design and market a modest resort. “They sent out a man and he did a lot of work,” Hollan said. “The idea was to build 50 to 100 cottages around the Pine Island Club House. They would leave the rest of the property open. It would have a low-density appearance.”

But the timing couldn’t have been worse. In 1973, the nation slipped into a lengthy recession after OPEC implemented an oil embargo. Real estate projects dried up everywhere and the Frates brothers and Devane Clark found themselves squeezed for cash. The plan for Pine Island stalled as well. The cousins met with Slick and it was decided to end the partnership. “I think they looked at the plan and said this is just not marketable. We’re not going to get our investment back. We would like to gracefully back out,” Hollan recalled.

Slick turned his attention to the southern portion of his Pine Island holdings, known as the South Mile, near the border of Dare County. He had sold a small tract to the Venture Management Group, which included John C. Whitaker Jr., the son of Slick’s Winston-Salem friend, John Whitaker Sr., the CEO of Reynolds Tobacco. The young developers modeled their Sanderling resort – named for the small, puffy sandpipers that skitter along the beaches – after the restrained, Nags Head style cottages of old, advertising Sanderling as “Life the way it was” on the Outer Banks. There were no pools or tennis courts but lots of trails and quiet, natural spaces.

The group developed two sections of Sanderling but then stopped. Once more, Slick faced a dilemma: find someone to continue building or sell and recoup some of his original investment. Hollan said Slick leaned toward selling but that he convinced his boss to allow him to take over the project. They finished six additional sections and in 1986 added an inn with 29 condominium-style rooms. Over time, more condominiums were added, a spa and tennis facility, and two restaurants, one basically a coffee shop, the other for fine dining. A copy of Audubon’s “Birds of America” was placed in the lobby of the inn.

“Mr. Slick wanted it to resemble a hunting lodge,” Hollan said.

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Earl Slick didn’t run Pine Island like other hunting clubs. There were no memberships, meaning you couldn’t buy your way in. You had to be invited. Slick kept a close group of friends from his Yale days and business dealings. Many were from the Winston-Salem area. But there were also friends from Nova Scotia and a “flying preacher” who likely landed his plane on an airstrip Slick built near the marsh. There was a men’s only trip, trips with wives, a dove-hunting trip in September, trips to fish, and of course opening day of duck hunting season in December – maybe a dozen trips a year, said Hollan.

The guests might hunt for an hour or two, have lunch at Pine Island or The Narrows, play cards (Slick loved to bet and to win), and enjoy a drink before supper. The bar was fully stocked and there was usually a bottle of Aquavit in the freezer. Slick stuck with vodka, gin or light rum, depending on the season and his mood. The upstairs bedrooms were small and spare but comfortable enough. Later, Slick built several cabin-style houses for his wife and family in the upland woods overlooking the fields and marsh. His daughter Phyllis and Paul Mickey Sr., the Steptoe & Johnson attorney, also built cabins nearby.

One of Slick’s favorite guests was Donal O’Brien, a prominent New York City attorney for the Rockefellers and a board member of the Audubon Society. He came every year with his wife Kate. O’Brien was a legendary fundraiser and likely met Slick that way. Slick donated to Audubon and was the recipient of various conservation awards. The duo got along famously. O’Brien was a natural storyteller, discreet, humble, and he could shoot. He quickly saw the value of the Pine Island marshes as a refuge for birds and in March 1977 wrote an impassioned memo to his board following a solitary morning hike.

“There must have been 2,000 birds, mostly Pintails and Canada Geese, but there were others as well – Blacks, Ducks, Mallards and Green-Winged Teal. I was stunned by this spectacle. I know I had never seen so many waterfowl in one place at one time … and in those magical moments of that March sunrise, I knew that this was a property that had to be saved for the ages.”

A year later, in August 1978, Earl Slick agreed to donate half of Pine Island to Audubon and help to endow a fund for the planned sanctuary. As part of the agreement, Slick continued to manage the property for a decade, while also earning a generous tax break, spread over several years. Initially. Audubon agreed to pay Currituck County property taxes on the tract but then reversed itself, fearing the nonprofit was setting a precedent that could affect its other land holdings.

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A decade later, in 1989, Donal O’Brien approached Slick with a new idea. According to Hollan, O’Brien proposed to Slick that Audubon give back most of the oceanfront it had received as part of the original donation. In return, Slick would give Audubon the remaining marsh he owned. Audubon officials described the deal as a win-win. The marsh held more value for migrating birds; it was a safe place for the birds to rest and feed. Slick, on the other hand, would add prized oceanfront. This at a time ocean property was doubling and tripling in value.   

Slick saw the value of the swap. But Hollan said he was concerned how the trade would look. “He didn’t want to be thought of as a slick (no pun intended) real estate developer.” There had to be a net gain to Audubon, so Slick decided to also give the nonprofit the 1,000 acres of mainland marsh he owned as part of The Narrows Hunting Club. After the trade, Audubon controlled about 3,000-acres of marsh, while Slick owned most of the oceanfront from Sanderling to Pine Island.

Slick, now nearly 70, wanted to move quickly. The market for oceanfront real estate had begun to veer toward larger, more luxurious houses from the more restrained cottages that John Whitaker Jr. built as part of the original Sanderling. Instead of passing second homes across generations, investors saw the bigger homes as money machines — a way to generate both sizable tax breaks and profits by renting them to vacationers for up to $10,000 a week. An investor could pay off his or her mortgage in less than a decade and use the profits to buy another house, and then maybe another. Currituck, once a lonely outpost, was fast becoming a source of vast wealth for developers, investors, and county officials.

Slick owned the land. But Hollan turned to a popular local builder, Bob DeGabrielle, to develop and market Pine Island. In a bio, DeGabrielle writes that he developed and sold over $1 Billion worth of real estate on the Outer Banks. After he retired in the 2000’s, he became one of the early entrepreneurs in the emerging cannabis industry, founding the largest outdoor cannabis farm in North America. In 2001, he sold the farm for $67 million.

“Bob is a force of nature, very enthusiastic, the most efficient person I’ve ever met in my life,” Hollan said. “He started at 5 in the morning … and he carried two Dictaphones with him.” 

DeGabrielle built to the new luxury market – houses with six to 10 bedrooms, HGTV-style kitchens, entertainments centers, and pocket pools fronting the sand dunes. On weekends, it wasn’t uncommon to see a dozen cars parked in driveways. But where the oceanfront narrowed along the South Mile, the long rows of houses appeared crowded together. Not everyone was happy. Stories and letters to the editor appeared in local newspapers. The writers complained that Pine Island changed the aesthetics and economics of the Banks. They weren’t wrong. But it was too late to pine for the old days. The Outer Banks were now driven by wealth and that wasn’t about to change. 

Hollan told me that Slick, who passed away in 2007, at the age of 86, was pleased with the houses. “I think the Audubon thing worked out well,” he said. “I think it was what he wanted to see happen and I helped to bring it to fruition.

“Yeah, those are bigger lots than typical lots, but those are bigger houses,” he continued. “They are what they are. It’s not Sanderling. It is a nice community.”

In June 2022, I arranged to visit the Pine Island sanctuary, just a stone’s toss from the oceanfront mega houses. Robbie Fearn, the manager of the sanctuary the last decade, took me on a tour of the century-old lodge before we picked our way through the nearby woods to a pocket beach where brackish water has crept ever higher and created a ghost forest.

In the distance, a car speeding past the mansions left a contrail of noise but then was gone. At one point, Fearn, medium-built and thoughtful, raised his hands as if addressing the sky. “Isn’t it amazing,” he said, meaning the road, the cars, the mansions, and this startling refuge for thousands of migrating birds. “In the summer all of these cars fly by and I don’t think any of them even know we are here. It’s as if we don’t exist.”       

First of two parts

In 1972, between 50 and 100 people called the Currituck Banks home. The actual number isn’t important. It could have been a little more or even a little less. The point is no one really knew or cared. The miles of scrubby sand dunes, low-lying interior flats, and sprawling brackish marsh was largely empty except for birds and fish, and that was how the natives preferred it. 

That it couldn’t stay unspoiled was more or less a given. Currituck, a poor, centuries-old economy based on agriculture, needed money, and developing its 23 miles of unspoiled oceanfront seemed to be the answer. Developers had already purchased thousands of acres and were busy laying out designs for resorts from Duck to Corolla. The county had a rough plan to manage what was coming but needed time and help to pull it off. It was, in a way, an existential moment. No less than the future of the Currituck Banks, so bright yet also so perilous, stood in the balance.

One night that year, Earl Slick, a multimillionaire developer from Winston-Salem, took a surprising phone call from a Currituck duck hunting guide. Carl P. White knew every inch of the sound, sure. But more than that he was a savvy investor who listened closely to the wealthy industrialists who hunted the Banks and used that knowledge to buy stocks and land. A few years earlier, White had steered Slick to purchase the Narrows Island Club, a 1,000-acre strip of rich mainland marsh south of Poplar Branch Landing. Now, White proposed another deal. The longtime owners of the Pine Island Hunt Club, the Barney family from Hartford, Connecticut, were looking for a buyer. The property included nearly five miles of unblemished marsh and oceanfront stretching from the Dare County border north.

Slick knew the property. He had been a guest at the club and enjoyed shooting there. But he already owned The Narrows and planned to build a larger, more accommodating family lodge there. His answer was no. Still, the idea of owning Pine Island nagged at him and over the course of several days, Slick found himself wavering back and forth. Finally, he asked White to find out how much the Widow Barney wanted.

Slick’s decision would have an outsized impact on the future direction of the Currituck Banks, both dramatically preserving and altering its landscape, reshaping the architecture, even helping to shift the economics from an economy based on second homes to an investment-driven market. Not that many of the visitors teeming onto the Northern Banks would recognize these impacts. Most have never heard of Earl Slick or know his history. And for Slick, who died in 2007 at the age of 86, that would have been just fine.

When asked his profession, Slick jokingly called himself a “dog-trainer.” Yet here was a maverick, instinctual investor who owned airlines, cattle farms, wineries, and television stations, among his many and varied interests. And while Slick rarely sought publicity, he built two of the most talked-about resorts on the Currituck Banks – Sanderling, a rustic, nature-themed community, and the sprawling Pine Island resort, with more than 300 luxury-styled beach mansions. In a way, Earl Slick’s story mirrors the larger, complicated story of the Banks themselves, a mix of breathtaking natural reserves, waterways and maritime forests, interposed with a conveyor belt of ever-larger, more exclusive vacation resorts — a cultural and environmental drift that has been playing out now for decades.

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Earl Frates Slick was born in 1920 in western Pennsylvania but grew up in Oklahoma City, where his father moved the family to hunt for oil. Tom Baker Slick was a man of the American moment: independent, hard-charging, seemingly tireless. But he was so luckless at first, locals took to calling him “Dry Hole Slick.” That changed in a heartbeat when Tom B. struck oil at the No. 4 Eakin well, producing 10,000 barrels a day. Another well produced a staggering 43,000 barrels a day. Soon, the same locals were calling Tom B. the luckiest wildcatter around — hell, “The King of all wildcatters,” the most famous wildcatter in the world!

Money spilled all around. Millions and millions of dollars. Earl and his older brother, Tom Jr., grew up in wealth and privilege, boarding at Exeter and attending Yale, with a $10,000-a-year living stipend. But life wasn’t always easy. They lost their father to a stroke at the age of 46. The boys were only 14 and 10. Their mother remarried Tom B.’s partner, Charles Urschel, who continued running the oil business. Years later, Tom Jr., considered a brilliantly esoteric student, became obsessed with hunting the Yeti. He, too, died at 46 when a plane he was piloting crashed returning from a Canadian adventure. Those who knew Earl Slick said he was haunted by the deaths and worried that he was destined to die young as well.

After Yale, Slick flew cargo transports in the war and saw the business possibilities of using planes to haul food and cargo from coast to coast. Shortly after being discharged, in December 1945, he learned that the military planned to auction nine surplus Army Curtus Commandos and headed to Washington. According to a short profile in Time Magazine, he walked into the surplus plane division at 1 p.m. and came out 15 minutes later owning the planes. “After that, things really began to move fast,” he told the reporter.

Slick was all of 25. Clearly, he wouldn’t have been able to buy the planes, which cost $247,000, without family money. Yet, like his father, he was relentless, impatient, and endlessly creative. Over the years, he would build Slick Airways into one of the two-largest air transport businesses in the nation, hauling fresh fruit and vegetables in refrigerated cargo planes from California to the East Coast, later contracting to transport military equipment back and forth to Southeast Asia.

While building Slick Airways, Earl was also on the prowl for other business opportunities. In 1948, he sold two cotton ranches to Lloyd Bentsen Sr., father of the future U.S. senator and candidate for vice president. He also bought a 16,000-acre quail-hunting farm, Mossy Dell, in Georgia, where the boyishly handsome six-footer would shoot from the saddle, and invested in a sprawling cattle ranch in southwestern Australia with the television host Art Linkletter and other celebrities. In time, he would expand into commercial real estate development, building one of the first Thruway Shopping Centers in North Carolina, invest in a vineyard, renovate historic buildings, buy stakes in radio and television stations, build nursing homes, fund a Formula 1 racing team, Slick Racers Inc., collect expensive artwork, and exhibit show horses, including Beau Black, a solid black gelding that, according to newspaper stories, “seldom tasted defeat in the show ring.”

“Earl loved the adventure,” recalled Paul Mickey Jr., an attorney and family friend. “I think he kind of liked the life of Ernest Hemingway. I never got the sense he was a deep thinker so much as a resourceful, canny businessman. Whenever I saw him, he was in fatigues. He was a sportsman.” 

In 1952, Earl moved the operations of Slick Airways to Los Angeles while relocating his family to Winston-Salem, a small but prosperous center of textile and tobacco industries. William E. Hollan Jr., a family friend and longtime business colleague, explained that it was probably so Slick could be closer to Washington, D.C., where he and his air transport business were represented by the powerful regulatory law firm, Steptoe & Johnson. “This was before jets. It was propeller-driven planes … and it was a long flight from San Antonio to Washington. Winston-Salem was a lot closer. He could get up and back in a day,” Hollan said.

Slick also liked the close-knit, genteel culture of Winston-Salem. He quickly became friends with CEOs from Hanes textiles, Chatham Manufacturing, Reynolds Tobacco, as well as Paul Mickey Sr., a managing partner at Steptoe & Johnson, who also was from Winston-Salem. Earl and his wife Jane built a retreat at Roaring Gap, a small, exclusive mountain resort where corporate elites from Winston-Salem socialized. There, they fell into a comfortable rhythm among a small group of friends who valued their privacy and privilege.

“There was a lot of money, yes,” said Hollan, who acted as a spokesman for the family for this article, “but it was not showy wealth, like the Yankees up North. Earl admired that. There was a lot of Southern charm. It was much more his style of things.”

Earlier in his career, Slick spoke to the press and even seemed to enjoy it. But as he aged, he became more discreet, even publicity shy. Pictures rarely appeared in the papers and he avoided interviews. His philanthropy, often generous, wasn’t broadcast. When different rumors and stories circulated, he instructed his employees not to respond. A code of behavior was evolving. His approach extended to hunting on the Currituck Banks, which Slick first appears to have visited in 1952 as a guest of Steptoe & Johnson. When he purchased his own club and had guests down, they discovered there were strict rules. Guests never shot before dawn and once they were given a blind, they weren’t allowed to change. They were provided one box of shells – always copper, never lead because lead was poisonous – and when they were gone, that was it. For Slick, hunting was about the experience and the camaraderie, not how many birds a hunter put in his bag.

There is another possible explanation for Slick’s penchant for privacy. In the 1930s, his stepfather Charles Urschel was kidnapped from their Oklahoma City mansion while playing bridge with friends. The kidnappers were led by the infamous George “Machine Gun” Kelly and his wife Kathryn. Urschel was returned home after nine days. But the family was never the same, withdrawing from public life and hiring armed guards to surround their house.

Now, as he debated whether to buy the Pine Island Club, Slick wavered between his roles as a conservationist who loved the outdoors, and as a developer who made millions buying and selling land. How could he balance these seemingly opposing forces? Should he even try? Or should he just walk away from the deal?

Next in the series: The story of Pine Island