George askew biography

Visits by President Franklin Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, to the Carolina coast inspired their son, Elliott, to pen the 1986 novel Murder at Hobcaw Barony, in which the first lady discovers a mysterious death during a trip to financier Bernard Baruch’s Lowcountry estate.

The Baruch Mansion graces the cover, a second-floor window encircled where the titular murder occurs.

But for the vice president of Public Service and Agriculture (PSA), George Askew, the window wasn’t the scene of a crime — just the window to his office.

“President Roosevelt spent a good bit of time there, so that’s where Elliott set his book,” Askew says.

“It was my office they circled on the cover.”

By the time the book was published, Hobcaw Barony — located in Georgetown, South Carolina — was a privately owned research reserve and home to what is now the Baruch Institute of Coastal Ecology and Forest Science, where Askew worked for 28 years before returning to Clemson’s main campus and taking his curren