Land.
After family and friends, after his long career in medicine, after the University of South Carolina and everything that entailed, land might have been Eddie Floyd’s greatest abiding interest.
There was the land he grew up on. Born in Lake City, South Carolina, raised in Florence, he was shaped as much as anything by the place he called home. The Pee Dee region. Pine forests. Small farms. Tobacco country.
And then there was land to acquire — and not necessarily for himself, though he acquired and even farmed his share of Pee Dee soil. When he and his fellow USC Board of Trustees members talked about land acquisition, or when he and wife Kay talked about it at the kitchen table back in Florence, they meant land for their beloved alma mater, the state’s flagship public university.
When Floyd saw the right parcel in USC’s backyard, and that parcel came on the market
at the right time
for the right price, he saw it as opportunity, a synonym for wealth, an investment
in USC’s future.
He hated that USC sold Bell Camp, the university’s recreational retreat for faculty and students, in the 1980s. He may have pushed harder than anyone for the purchase of the old State Farmers Market, which is now home to the Football Operations Center and serves as tailgating’s ground zero.
Kay Baker and Eddie Floyd met at USC, hit it off and enjoyed a long and happy marriage.
And he played a huge role, of course, in the med school’s imminent move from its current home on Garner’s Ferry Road to a 16-acre site in Columbia’s booming BullStreet District.
For Eddie Floyd, ’56, land held value simply as land. Because there’s only so much of it. And you can’t grow without it.
“One of Daddy’s loves was land. Land, land, land. Just land in general. He always thought land was wealth,” says his son, Bubby Floyd. “And what he brought to the university was he got the university to start buying up land. He said the only way to expand is you’ve got to have land.”
We’re sitting in the den at the Floyds’ country home outside Pamplico, a small 19th-century farmhouse where the Floyds have hosted large family outings for years. This was Kay’s family land, a quiet retreat between a couple of bass ponds 20 miles southeast of their home in Florence. Pamplico gets buggy in the summer — they mostly use it around Thanksgiving — but Eddie sometimes liked to sit on the dock and fish.
The house is set back in the woods, relocated years ago from a site closer to the highway. Bubby sits by a window that looks onto the wraparound screened porch; sisters Coleman and Sissy share the sofa. Between them, the siblings are explaining their parents’ deep love for their alma mater and for one another, but you don’t have to listen closely to know both ran deep. There are photos and mementos everywhere — from USC and from the life Eddie and Kay built after meeting there as undergrads in the 1950s.
There’s also a shovel. The ceremonial kind people pose with at a groundbreaking. Gold finish on the blade. A white hard hat perched on a gold handle. It leans against a bookcase, a token from a big day. The lettering on the hard hat reads “The University of South Carolina Kay and C. Edward Floyd, M.D. School of Medicine.”
Land again, but not only. When the Floyds made their planned $30 million gift to USC’s
medical school —
kept private until after both Eddie and Kay had passed — they were thinking about
the new health sciences campus, anchored by the school of medicine that now bears
their names.
Eddie Floyd enjoyed a long and celebrated career as a vascular surgeon.
But they were also thinking about less tangible things, from academic reputation to the med school’s role in South Carolina’s welfare and prosperity. And as with pretty much every decision Eddie Floyd made, or had a hand in making, during his four decades on USC’s board, he was thinking about the next generation.
“He always felt the University of South Carolina is here to serve the students of South Carolina, first and foremost, and that anybody who is qualified should be able to get an education here,” says daughter and current USC board member Dr. Coleman Floyd Buckhouse, ’81. “When issues related to that came before the board, that was going to be his stump speech, over and over: ‘Listen, we are first and foremost the state’s public university. We’ve got to make it about access and affordability.’”
Eddie Floyd studied medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina and did his residency at Louisiana State University School of Medicine in New Orleans, but as a fourth-generation Gamecock, his heart was always with his undergraduate alma mater (which didn’t open its own medical school until 1977). And his heart was also, at least partly, in business.
That was his undergraduate major, after all. And he had a head for it. His grandfather owned a Dodge dealership, and he grew up in tobacco country, surrounded by the tobacco business. He went to medical school because his mother’s family tree was thick with physicians. Her philosophy, according to Coleman (who became an anesthesiologist herself and worked alongside her dad for many years), was that if you went to college and didn’t study medicine, you were wasting your time.
“Basically, he went to medical school to prove to his mother that he could do it, and then when he got out, of course, he loved it,” Coleman says with a laugh. “But I think his background was unique. Not many people who have a business background go into medicine. I think it’s probably why he became so successful as a. businessman and a physician.”
Eddie Floyd loved Gamecock sports. Here, he and daughter Coleman Floyd Buckhouse talk football with Head Coach Shane Beamer.
Well, that and one other big factor: The other Floyd on the medical school’s new signage, Eddie’s wife Kay, ’56.
The daughter of a tobacco warehouseman and a schoolteacher in Timmonsville, South Carolina, Kay inherited a knack for numbers and cultivated her own business savvy. She grew up less than 30 miles from Eddie, but the two didn’t meet until USC, where she majored in education. When they did meet, though, their similarities — and differences — combined to make them one of the most formidable power couples in the university’s history.
By the time Eddie Floyd stepped down from the board in 2024, he had been involved in the university’s guidance, decision-making and growth for a record 42 years, including four as chair in the 1990s. But Kay Floyd, whose own commitment to the university dated all the way back to her Tri Delta pledge class, was a steady presence behind the scenes.
“It was like the perfect storm, those two,” says Sissy. “He had the global, big picture, and she did the details, she got things done. And they were a team. You could see it when they came together, clicking on stuff. Not just personal stuff, but like, ‘Let’s do this … for the university,’ and ‘We can get this … for the university.’”
Kay and Eddie Floyd are buried side by side on a small family plot at Pamplico, just off the narrow dirt road that winds back to the highway. It’s quiet, definitively off the beaten path. The couple that carpooled to and from Columbia when they were dating in college would travel the world together, meet heads of state, shape university policy and strike deals that changed the face of their alma mater and their state, but in the end, they weren’t interested in fanfare.
Eddie Floyd joined fellow Board of Trustees members at the groundbreaking for the new med school building at Columbia’s BullStreet District.
The gift establishing the Kay and C. Edward Floyd, M.D. School of Medicine was formally
announced at
an Alumni Center luncheon May 22, which would have been Eddie’s 92nd birthday. The
couple’s children and most of their 10 grandchildren were there. President Michael
Amiridis was there, and Gov. Henry McMaster, and Eddie’s fellow board members, including
his old college roommate and close friend Mark Buyck, who passed away just a few weeks
later at the age of 91.
It was a significant moment in USC’s history, but it was also purposely low-key. (As appetizers, guests enjoyed Eddie’s two favorite foods: chili dogs and barbecue sliders.) What really mattered, according to the family, was the impact of the gift itself, which will fund scholarships for medical students and endow faculty positions in surgery, neurosurgery, neurology, sports medicine and the basic sciences.
“Daddy knew this was going to happen and the university wanted to make the announcement before he passed, but he absolutely refused,” Coleman explains. “He didn’t want to make it a big deal. He was very humble about things like that. I know he would be very proud and honored, but he also didn’t want the light to shine on him like that.”
