Elise Partin, mayor of Cayce

With a childhood spent on Pitt Street in downtown Charleston and a high school education within walking distance at Bishop England on Calhoun Street, Cayce Mayor Elise Partin has a strong feel for walkable cities and their growth patterns.

Partin was born in Charleston's Roper Hospital. At the time her father was a quality control engineer at Avco and later with Cummins, both national manufacturing concerns with a presence in the Charleston area. She has an older sister Chris, who works with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Her younger brother Brian owns Aquatics Imports, an aquarium supply store in the West Ashley area, facing Highway 17.

After kindergarten at Fishburne Elementary in North Charleston, Partin attended elementary school at Miss Mason's Prep near the Charleston Marina just off Lockewood. Her three middle school years were spent at the First Baptist Church School on Meeting Street.

Partin finished high school at Bishop England, where she was an athletic trainer. By the time she started high school, she had developed a running habit of about three miles a day mostly through downtown Charleston.

She entered USC's Columbia campus with the intention of majoring in pre- med but changed to psychology. She graduated on schedule while she was already accepted to graduate school in public health, again at USC.

As an undergraduate, Partin kept her interest in athletic management, and she helped as a trainer during her four years of college.

As a graduate student, Partin worked with the campus wellness program. After earning her master's degree in public health, Partin worked at USC as the director of campus wellness and as an adjunct professor in public health. She was also USC's assistant director of its pre- professional advisory, helping undergraduates successfully apply for law, medicine, and other professional programs.

Today, she is a full- time mother and a part- time mayor, but she is still an adjunct professor at the Arnold School of Public Health.

Partin and her husband Gene, a Wofford graduate and an environmental project manager with Terracon, met through a USC connection. They have two children, Joseph (5) and Zoe (3). Joseph is to enter the Children's House Montessori School on Woodrow this fall, and Zoe will enter Holland Avenue Pre- School.

Before her recent election as mayor of the City of Cayce, Partin had already served her community as president of the Columbia Museum of Art Contemporaries. She also managed Star Chef, a fund raiser for the March of Dimes.

Partin has taught Sunday School, and she and her family now attend Trenholm Road United Methodist Church.

Partin and her husband are in their seventh year of marriage, and every anniversary is an opportunity to buy art for each other. The art is typically by a South Carolina artist shown at a Columbia or Charleston gallery.

With the former Green Diamond development proposal actually evolving into a realistic golf course community with no need for new levees, and with the arrival of SCE&G and its parent SCANA together as a tax- paying headquarters, all within the city boundaries of Cayce, Partin is a walking optimist throughout her townscape. Even the fund raising for the approved and permitted Brookland- Cayce football stadium on Knox Abbott Drive is coming along. The possibility of doubling the town's population to 26,000 in the near future is very real and very manageable.

According to Partin, the small- town feel, the compact sense of community, is there to stay regardless of future numbers. Cayce's town- planning charrette (covered above) is the beginning of the new Cayce but is also the continuation of what means Cayce today.