THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 1, 1995 TAG: 9509290213
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 04 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY JOHN RAILEY, CORRESPONDENT
LENGTH: Long : 241 lines
NEWS OF Mike Hayman's death rode the beach grapevine, the chilling words bouncing from fishing boat decks to jamming restaurant kitchens.
It was May 20, 1995. Michael Dewey Hayman, the owner/operator of the Seafare Restaurant, had died of a heart attack at his Nags Head home. The third-generation Outer Banks restaurateur was only 51.
Mike Kelly was at his namesake restaurant in Nags Head when the news hit him that Saturday.
``I got back to thinking about him being a survivor,'' Kelly said later.
Kelly, 45, got his start working for Hayman. Kelly and hundreds of other former Seafare employees had figured nothing could topple the guy they knew as ``Cap'n'' or ``Hayman.''
Riding the wild currents of his beach dream, the big man with the brown hair and boyish face had soared as high as any of his former employees and fallen further than many.
He'd lived through the loss of his first wife to breast cancer. While still in his early 30s, he'd molded renegade surfers and spacey college boys into crack waiters and chefs and steered the Seafare to the top of the Outer Banks restaurant world, only to lose the restaurant to financial hard times and a subsequent fire.
Rescued by one of his waiters who'd become a lawyer, Hayman in May was climbing back with a new, though different, Seafare.
Hayman's death meant one more living chunk of the old beach was gone.
``He was Nags Head itself, and his kind will not be seen again on our shores,'' North Carolina Senate President Pro Tem Marc Basnight said from Raleigh in a statement that was read at Hayman's packed funeral.
Shortly afterward, Hayman's friends and family described his odyssey.
Picture a summer night in the late 1960s.
Hayman, dressed in khakis and a sport coat, glided between tables in the tiny Seafare, greeting diners by name and putting them at ease. Many of the diners knew Hayman through his parents' establishment, the Arlington.
The diners knew that Hayman's grandfather was Nathaniel Gould, a sea captain from Cape Cod who settled on the Outer Banks at the turn of the century and married Eliza Midgett from Rodanthe.
The Goulds ran the Tranquil House Inn, a Manteo bed and breakfast. Their daughter, Phoebe, married Dewey Hayman, who came to the Outer Banks to help build the Beach Road.
In 1944, Phoebe and Dewey founded the Arlington, a white-frame hotel and restaurant with the feel of a classic resort such as the Homestead or Greenbrier.
The Arlington was on the Nags Head oceanfront directly across from the Seafare at Milepost 13, and many of the diners had trickled across the street from the Arlington to try the Seafare.
The Seafare customers knew that Mike Hayman and his sister, Gloria, grew up helping their parents with the Arlington. Mike attended McDonogh Military Academy in Baltimore, then North Carolina State University, where he was a champion swimmer and member of the Lambda Chi fraternity.
After college, Hayman spent two years in the U.S. Coast Guard. By 1967, he was back on the beach. That year, Hayman began running the Seafare for his parents.
The Seafare began as a small oyster bar his parents had started for Arlington guests. The diners spoiled by Arlington service didn't know how Mike Hayman would stack up against his parents in the restaurant business.
They didn't know that the son, trying hard to ignore the shadow cast by the venerable Arlington, was already planning his own restaurant kingdom.
Hayman began adding rooms to the Seafare, ending with the sprawling Dome Room that featured a dance floor of polished wood.
``He was always growing. He knew he wanted a big restaurant,'' said Steve Brown, 45, a Kitty Hawk craftsman. Brown, nicknamed ``Zero'' by his Seafare mates, worked for Hayman almost from the start, becoming his chef.
By the early '70s, the Seafare was known for elegance. Seen from the outside at night, it was an exotic vision, a long, one-story oasis of cool pink stucco on blond sand.
Inside, each night was a show. Crisp white or red tablecloths blanketed antique wooden tables, each with an oil lamp that emitted just enough soft light to catch the sparkle in a date's eyes. Vintage beach paintings and photos covered the walls.
Suntanned waiters in trademark short red coats and black bow ties weaved and dipped through the rooms, balancing on one hand trays packed with sizzling steaks and steaming seafood bubbling in butter. The rich smell of she-crab soup and sweet rum rolls drifted through the air-conditioned chill, and the sound of popping corks punctuated talk and laughter.
The sweltering kitchen often was a chaotic war zone of flying curse words and hungover nerves rubbed raw, but Hayman mandated that grace ruled in the front of his restaurant.
Hayman ruled his rowdy subculture like a drill sergeant, channeling the energies of frustrated intellectuals and partiers, some running from family and broken romances, others just pushing off adulthood and ``real-world,'' daytime jobs.
Discipline, Hayman-style, became legendary.
When Hayman blew, waiters and cooks secretly called it ``the blunt'' or ``the big eye'' for the way a disciplined employee's eyes tended to expand. It was like a northeaster rolled through the Cap'n, twisting his grin into a sneer, puffing his chest and rolling right down to his Topsiders.
Hayman would verbally deep-fry his target until the employee shriveled like a burned shrimp.
But Brown and other employees noted that Hayman never back-stabbed his help, and usually took back repentant workers who had laid out of work to party.
Hayman was always learning. In the early '70s, he and his wife, Rachel, wintered in Florida, leaving Kelly in charge of the restaurant. In Florida, Hayman worked as a chef for the Valley's restaurant chain.
The most lucrative idea Hayman brought back from Florida was the smorgasbord, or buffet line. In the early '70s, Brown said, Outer Banks restaurants weren't featuring buffets. Hayman's weekly smorgasbord, anchored by mountains of fried soft shell crabs and a steamship round of juicy roast beef, soon became the restaurant's busiest night.
Hayman buttressed the good food with entertainment. Dick Jordan and his band played torch songs Saturday nights, drawing a regular crowd of dancers and brown-baggers.
By the mid-'70s, the Seafare was known nationwide. Ford Times had featured its recipes for lemon chess and chocolate pecan pies, along with a brief biography of the establishment. Hayman had also built a fat banquet business.
Andy Griffith spoke at restaurant banquets, as did Dean Smith, Bill Cosby and others.
``It was the only place that could accommodate sizable banquets and do it in a first-class style,'' said local historian David Stick. ``The Seafare was a pioneer in quality food service and banquet service on the Outer Banks, no question about it.''
Hayman branched out, starting the Seafare Jr. beside his flagship restaurant and the Seafare III at Seagate North Shopping Center in Kill Devil Hills.
When a storm in February 1973 toppled the Arlington into the Atlantic, Mike Hayman became the Hayman of the Nags Head restaurant business.
In the late '70s, Rachel Hayman learned she had breast cancer. Hayman spent as much time with her as he could, and bought a yacht, the My Lady Rachel, as a tribute to her.
After his first wife's death in 1978, Hayman spent a year away from the restaurant, grieving and caring for his two young sons, Todd Michael Hayman and Shaun Russell Hayman.
The Cap'n returned to work in 1979. In February of that year, he met Elizabeth ``Libbi'' Burnett on a blind date. Burnett, with big emerald eyes and blonde hair, had just graduated from Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Va.
It was one blind date that worked. The following December, Mike and Libbi were married.
Hayman and Kelly kept pushing their staff. Hayman's sister, Gloria Thomas - with her husband Bill and several members of their large family - began working in the restaurant, adding to its family tradition.
By 1982, Hayman's boom years were over. He was in trouble, facing increasing competition, the recession, medical bills from Rachel's death and costs from his yacht, which he was forced to sell.
That year, Hayman took out two loans totaling $300,000 on the restaurant, according to North Carolina Court of Appeals records. Business continued to decline, the records show, and Hayman closed the restaurant in January 1983.
Believing he was facing foreclosure proceedings, the records show, Hayman in February 1983 transferred the Seafare deed to a mortgage broker on the oral agreement that it would be sold or managed for Hayman.
The next month, Hayman heard on the street that the Seafare had been sold, according to Everett Thompson II of Elizabeth City, a former Seafare waiter who became Hayman's lawyer. But by the summer of 1983, Thompson said, Hayman still hadn't seen a penny from the sale.
``All of a sudden, we were on the outside looking in, literally overnight,'' Libbi Hayman said.
The restaurant's new owners changed the name to the ``Seafarer'' and opened for business in the summer of 1983. They converted the Dome Room into a large bar and remodeled the restaurant, aiming for a safari atmosphere.
Fire on the night of Aug. 23, 1984, woke the Haymans, as well as everybody else who lived near the restaurant. Douglas Pirkey, a former Seafare chef who was renting one of the apartments next to the restaurant, stumbled out into the blaze-lit night and saw his old boss.
``I can remember seeing Hayman just walking around kind of in shock,'' said Pirkey, 36, of Rocky Mount. ``There were flames 25 to 30 feet high.''
The restaurant burned to the ground. Officials never established the exact cause. Hayman could never get it back, but he could pursue the elusive sale proceeds.
On Hayman's behalf, Thompson initiated legal action in September 1984. Just as any legal action, it moved slowly, and months soon became years.
Hayman worked as an electrician and antique restorer and hunted restaurant jobs across North Carolina and Virginia, frequently hearing that he was overqualified.
The Seafare Jr. had long been closed, but the Haymans took over management of the Seafare III in the leased spot at Seagate North Shopping Center. Libbi Hayman sold her diamonds and furniture as they struggled to survive.
Thompson, 48, remembers Mike Hayman hitchhiking to Elizabeth City, where Hayman would borrow a battered Jeep Wagoneer of Thompson's and drive to Fork Union Military Academy in Virginia to see his sons. Thanks to Social Security payments from his first wife's death, Thompson said, Hayman was able to keep his sons in the private school.
The Haymans had one bright spot during that troubled period: the birth of their son, John-Michael Dewey Hayman, in August 1986. But in their economic hole, they worried about their new child's future.
In 1987, just as the Haymans were considering declaring personal bankruptcy, they won their case in Dare County Superior Court. An appeals court set the judgment at just more than $1 million.
Hayman paid debts with the judgment and opened the old Seafare Jr. building as the Seafare. He perfected the smorgasbord, the idea he'd brought back from Florida 20 years before. Customers were soon packing the new Seafare.
The Friday before his death, Hayman took John-Michael to the dedication of the new bridge over the Currituck Sound.
``He probably didn't realize that he himself was a bridge, spanning the traditions and culture of the Outer Banks and passing them on to a new generation,'' Sen. Basnight said.
Chunks of Hayman's dream sparkle like stars over a night sea. There is Kelly, who has his hands in several restaurants and a catering business. There are Kelly's former employees who have started their own restaurants.
There are guys like Jimmy Ngeonjuklin, the owner/operator of the Thai Room, who once waited tables at the Seafare III. There are the doctors and lawyers and carpenters on the beach and former employees across the country who learned from Hayman that if you work hard enough, things might just turn out all right.
And there are Libbi, Todd and Shaun, who continue to run the new Seafare.
One afternoon earlier this summer, they sat down with a visitor for a few minutes in their Nags Head home and talked about Hayman's legacy. Like their father before them, the boys grew up working in the restaurant business.
Todd Hayman, 26, mirrors his father, right down to the military bearing. He occasionally turns to Kelly, his godfather, for advice, but tries to do things his way.
Todd Hayman ended his visit to prepare for the night's business.
``It's good to look back and remember,'' he said, ``but you've got to keep the legacy moving forward.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photos by AYCOCK BROWN/Courtesy of Libbi Hayman Collection
The Seafare Restaurant, which Mike Hayman's parents opened as an
oyster bar, was expanded and turned into an elegant dining spot
under Mike Hayman's leadership.
Mike Hayman helped his parents with the Arlington hotel on the Nags
Head beachfront. The structure was heavily damaged in the Ash
Wednesday storm in 1962.
Hayman spent two years in the Coast Guard after attending college.
Mike Hayman and his son Todd poses for the camera with their catch
from a Gulf Stream fishing trip in the 1970s.
Mike Hayman, whose parents owned the successful Arlington hotel,
worked at becoming the Outer Banks' premier restaurateur.
Mike Hayman and his son Todd pose for the camera with their catch
from a Gulf Stream fishing trip in the 1970s.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE BIOGRAPHY by CNB