MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. - On an ice-cream- liquefying July afternoon, the lead car of the Hurricane Category 5, with Egerton Burroughs in the front seat, launches from the gate, lunges around a sharp left bend and lurches toward the top of the highest hill on what is billed as South Carolina's biggest roller coaster, in Myrtle Beach's oldest amusement park.

In the half-second it takes for the train of cars to crest the hill and begin the steep descent, the 60-year-old Burroughs just has time to see the track he's headed down.

That half-second of suspense, filled with anticipation and regret, could be a metaphor for the Myrtle Beach Pavilion's 2006 season, which will be its last.

After Sept. 24, the Hurricane, the Tilt-a-Whirl, the hot dog concessions, the Skee-Ball machines, the Attic nightclub -- 11 acres of summertime fun -- will all come down, down, down. It's the result of a business decision Egerton Burroughs hoped his family would never have to make.

"It's been a hurting thing," said Burroughs, whose great-grandfather started the company that developed Myrtle Beach and later built the Pavilion to entertain the people it attracted. "I have a lot of memories here."

Response to news of the closing suggests that many others do, too. Since Burroughs & Chapin Co. held a news conference in March to announce the closing, it has been deluged with calls from disbelieving vacationers who thought that, after 58 years, the Pavilion was a permanent part of Myrtle Beach, like the sand and the surf. Some didn't even realize it was private property, imagining it more as a town commons, a central square that happened to be a repository for some of their favorite memories.

Stepping off the boardwalk into the cool shade of the arcade isn't just a respite from the heat. It's a relief from 180 days of school or the daily grind of a job that earns middle-class wages. We may not have been to the Pavilion in 10 or 20 years, but we can hear the pinging of the pinball machines, smell the salt air and the popcorn and the cotton candy, feel the sand on the concrete floor under our flip-flops and know, for a few seconds, what it was to be 15 years old, driven by adrenaline and worried about nothing more pressing than whether we had enough change for a cold Coke.

If they tear down the Pavilion, we worry, maybe some part of our own history will disappear with it.

Myrtle Beach is born

The Pavilion's history dates to the 1870s, when Franklin G. Burroughs began buying up cheap Horry County acreage for its timber and to extract pine resin for the manufacture of pitch and turpentine. More than two decades later, he had accumulated about 100,000 acres, from swamps to sand dunes, and began constructing a rail line to haul the naval stores to market.

After Burroughs died in 1897, his sons completed work on the railroad. Recognizing that the soil wasn't even good enough to grow tobacco, they began turning the place into a summer resort, Egerton Burroughs said. They laid out streets, built a three-story hotel and added a passenger car to the rail line. They sold oceanfront lots for $25 each and named the place Myrtle Beach, a nod to the wax myrtle that grew in the area.

In 1912, the Burroughses joined up with Simeon Brooks Chapin, a Chicagoan who saw the potential for development of the coastal strand. The new company, then known as Myrtle Beach Farms, built a motel in 1901 with the first oceanside pavilion where bands could play and guests could dance. That one was replaced in 1923 with a larger structure, which burned in 1944, according to The South Carolina Encyclopedia. The current Pavilion building, built in 1948, looks like a World War II-era military hangar -- a masonry structure with an arched roof and walls the color of bleached sand.

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