Wessinger continues husband's labor of love

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Wanda Wessinger said her late husband, Richard, never really wanted her to learn how to cook his famous peanuts.

 “Until he got sick, he was very hands-on, and didn’t really want me to have anything to do with it,” she said. “After he got sick, he would watch me like a hawk when I tried to help him.”

 Wessinger continues to run the spot on Greeleyville Highway each Saturday where her husband enjoyed most weekends selling everything from his renown peanuts to drinks, produce and country ham.

“I’m only out there on Saturdays now, and the focus is on the peanuts,” Wanda said. “It’s too much to sit out there like he did. He went no matter what: rain, heat, he didn’t care. He’d go out there in 100-degree weather and just sit all day. He loved going out there. I never thought he’d do something like that.”

Wessinger has committed herself to her husband’s work to help raise money for charitable causes, including Clarendon County Relay for Life. She plans to commit funds raised from sales in April to the charity, and she will be at Relay on May 9 at Manning High School’s Ramsey Stadium.

 “Richard died with lung cancer, and we’d always gone to Relay,” Wanda said. “So, in memory of him, in April I’m going to donate proceeds to Relay. And table rentals at the spot if people want to have a yard sale will go toward Relay as well.”

Wanda said her husband began cooking peanuts after retiring from UPS, where he worked more than two decades. Starting Country Style Peanuts shortly thereafter gave him something to do, Wanda said.

 “He had a friend who was cooking the, and he’d retired and needed something to do,” Wanda said.

 Retirement, it seems, didn’t fit well on Richard, whom folks from throughout South Carolina would come to call “The Peanut Man.”

 “He had the trailer built and designed the cookers and created the recipe,” Wanda said. “And he guarded that recipe, you wouldn’t believe how much he guarded that recipe. He’d say, ‘I could tell you the recipe, but then I’d have to kill you.’” Wessinger began parking the trailer at Party World and “built a heck of a business out of it,” Wanda said. They moved the operation to the sheds out on Greeleyville Highway in 2008.

“It became produce sales and yard sales, and he had tables put under the sheds for yard sales,” Wanda said. The produce sales meant a weekly trip to the Farmers Market in Columbia.

“He didn’t do anything by half,” Wanda said.

 Though her husband was never known as a people person by family or friends, Wanda said she believes God gave him the peanut business to bring that out in him.

 “You know, he really did love that part,” she said. “He wasn’t what anyone would call a people person, but he loved the people that came to see him and buy peanuts.”

 Wanda said in the four years since her husband’s death she’s been most impressed by the adults that come to the stand, the same ones her husband once presented suckers to when they were children.

“He would always give out those suckers to children,” Wanda said. “And they come back and tell me they remember ‘Uncle Richard’ giving them those suckers.”

 It’s the people – and the children – that kept her husband going right up until the end. Wessinger continued going out to his spot on Greeleyville Highway as much as he could, even after starting chemotherapy and radiation in 2008.

 “He’d still get up and go sell those darn peanuts,” Wanda said.

 And Wanda and daughter, Charlotte, will do the same in his memory from about 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. each Saturday.

 “He always said, ‘Give ‘em a good peanut, and they’ll keep coming back every time,’” she said. “I guess that’s true, because they keep coming back from all over the state. It’s a wonderful memorial to him, really.”