Off the coast of Georgia, the marsh and sand mix to make the 7-mile piece of land called Jekyll Island. This land holds the words “picturesque” and “quaint” close to its heart with its giant old oak trees burdened with Spanish Moss hanging over the streets and bustling club hotel. But past the hubbub at the front of the island, where the chic club hotel caters to its guests, stretched 3,700 feet of runway. Inside the airport's main building, “Jekyll Island Airport, Cessna 3264 Tango, Left Downwind, Runway 18, Jekyll,” blurts through a radio on a desk. Above the desk, small toy airplanes hang from the ceiling next to a sign that reads “Red Bug Motors”.
In the late 90s, Rich Van Iderstyne, a Delta airline pilot, and his wife Lynn were living in Atlanta and flying to Jekyll Island’s little airport on their days off. These days off were spent hiking, biking, and playing the Great Dunes golf course. When Rich noticed a house for sale on the island, he promptly bought it, making his luxurious Jekyll vacation days far from over. “One of the main reasons I moved here is because of its little airport,” says Rich, recalling his retirement journey, “but I found out they were going to bulldoze it to build hotels or condominiums. And that made me very, very upset.'' Instead of saying goodbye to the airport, Rich rallied the troops. He reached out to flying buddies and pilot organizations and requested them to write to the governor of Georgia in a request to save the airport. And it worked. “After the governor left office,” Rich recalls, “he told me that he had never received more letters about a subject that no one had ever heard of.”
With the airport to remain standing, the island authority reached out to Rich, “Now what? What did it need?” “A bathroom,” Rich had answered, “if you give me the key to the terminal building, I'll clean everything up. Well, they gave me a key to the little terminal, I cleaned it up and we got that going. And then they said, ‘What does it need next?’” The next goal, Rich explains, was getting ground transportation.
In the early 1900s, when Jekyll was owned and only visited by millionaires, there was an ordinance that did not allow real cars on the island. For a few years, many of the islanders would use small electric and gas-powered golf-cart-looking cars to get around the island until the trend died off. In 2004, around the same time that Rich was fighting for the airport's survival, Jekyll’s neighboring island, Sea Island, hosted the G8 Summit convention. A small North Dakota company donated a few small electric cars to the convention for the convenience of its high-profile leaders. Inspired, Rich realized that they were both street-legal and insurable and promptly bought ten of them. But he lacked the permission to rent them on the island. With the way that the small island worked (and continues to do so), any disliked business on the island would get booted off by public demand, even when the island authority had permitted it. Attendance at Jekyll Island authority meetings quickly showed Rich both the problem and the solution. With the very mention of any type of scooter or cart on their roads, the retired residents would reel at the idea of roaring Harley Davidson motorcycles on their quaint landscape.
Rich devised a 6-month trial plan and distributed his little cars to his neighbors and the island authority with instructions for them to drive them at their convenience for two weeks, pass them on to the next neighbor, and report back to him. He knew things were going well, he says, when he would ask one of his neighbors to let another have a turn and they would refuse, “No, make someone else give their car to them, I like mine!’” After the 6 months ended, the island authority agreed to a year-long trial of the business, but where would he operate it out of? The idea arose that Rich could operate the business out of the airport building while also running the airport. And that, Rich says, “was like a dream come true” and was really his hope all along. The business officially began in 2005 with the original vision of the old motor cars of days past as the inspiration for Rich’s new “Red Bug Motors.”
The best part of Jekyll, Rich says, is that it remains free of overdevelopment. “We have very little traffic. It's a great place to come and relax and meditate, it's a very, very comfortable place to be.” The little Red Bug cars only add to the experience, allowing tourists to truly appreciate the still beauty and quiet joy of the island. In the front window of the airport building, which doubles as the home of Red Bug Motors, is one of the original Red Bugs from the early 1900s. A yellow lab named Peaches, sprawls under it, looking very friendly and sleepy for being titled “airport security”. All over the island, little red motorcars meander past the golf course, the bike bridge over the marsh, and the airstrip with its planes parked in the back and Red Bug cars parked out front.
"He told me that he had never received more letters about a subject that no one had ever heard of."
Above the desk, small toy airplanes hang from the ceiling next to a sign that reads “Red Bug Motors”.