Rudy Austin: An icon then and now

Editor’s note: Rudy Austin died April 17, 2025, and we are reposting this story about him originally published Dec, 31, 2023. A celebration of life service will be held at 1 p.m. Monday, May 12, in the Ocracoke United Methodist Church. See obituary here. We send our heartfelt condolences to Rudy’s family and friends.

by Connie Leinbach

A lifelong Ocracoke Islander, Rudy Austin has seen a lot of change on this small spit of land.

Some health problems have made it difficult for him to do many of the things he likes to do, but not entirely.

For his many years of doing for the community, the Ocracoke Preservation Society (OPS) in November awarded him with its Cultural Heritage Award, for his dedication to the history and heritage of Ocracoke.

Rudy is appreciative but hastens to add it’s not just him.

“I miss doing it (working for the community) because I enjoyed it because, for the most part, all through the years you had a great group to work with,” he said. “It wasn’t me. It was a group of people.”

And that’s what the community has to do — work together —  the rescue squad, the fire company, the clinic, he said.

“If you work together then you can accomplish something,” he said.

He and his family have decorated the village with garlands, something he’s done for decades as the president of the Ocracoke Civic & Business Association, which pays for the garlands and holiday-themed lights that Tideland Electric Cooperative employees install on the electrical posts.

Rudy started out working as an engineer for the NCDOT Ferry Division, then in the 1970s as an engineer on dredges, one of which was parked in the Hatteras Inlet. He eventually rose to ferry captain, a position from which he retired.

One of the things most associated with him was Ocracoke’s mounted Boy Scout Troop back in the 1950s.

The Ocracoke troop was not the only horse-riding Boy Scout troop, but it was the only one in which the boys owned their horses and equipment, he said.

A troop in Texas were loaned ponies for camping trips and the only other such troop he knew of at the time was in Spain.

All of the “wild” horses were privately owned and when the park service took over most of the island in 1956 and after NC 12 was paved, if a boy couldn’t afford to keep his horse, they gave them to the park service.

Sam Jones donated a number of horses to the park service, Rudy said, and that first group of corralled horses numbered about 25.

Rudy’s horse, Diablo, for which he paid $75, died before that from the “blind staggers,” a condition that blinded a number of them and for which there was no cure.

Although each boy had selected and cared for his own wild pony and had a fenced area, most of the ponies wandered loose on the island.

“They all stayed out there (where the Variety Store is today),” he said. “You could just go out there with a feed bucket and catch them.”

Diablo is the horse on which Rudy was captured rearing up in an iconic photo that was featured in a story by Bob Brooks in the March 1956 issue of Boys Life magazine .

The photo shows that Rudy is bareback.

“Everybody started out bareback,” he said. Saddles were expensive and it took a long time to save enough money to buy one.

When you started out with a horse you had to break him in in stages, he said – learning how to lead, learning how to turn, learning how to make a horse rear up. Other boys taught their ponies different tricks.

“It took a lot to teach a horse to do that,” he said about rearing up. “I always enjoyed riding a horse.”

That famous photo of Rudy touched a young Ken DeBarth, who grew up in Pennsylvania, who has lived on Ocracoke since 1995 and is now president of the OPS.

“I was a Boy Scout,” DeBarth said as he presented the heritage award. “Each month I received Boys Life magazine. I remember reading the article about a troop of Scouts who caught, broke, cared for and rode their ponies on a remote island. Little did I know that someday I would live on that island and participate in honoring the boy in the bucking pony picture I read about.”

In an interview, Rudy discussed other aspects of island life. Explanatory information is in italics:

NC12 overwash hotspots at the north end of Ocracoke:
Back in the 60s it was the same thing–in that same spot. I have pictures of a ’57 Plymouth sitting there on the old steel mats. You drove on steel mats the last three miles because it was so vulnerable. Well, they put up dunes and that took care of it for several years, but now you need beach. It’s pretty shallow there and it wouldn’t take much to get a shoreline built back out and then put a proper dune there. You could buy yourself 25, 30 years.

Rudy thinks Ocracoke’s NC12 problems are not the same as those in Rodanthe.

All your northeasters hit right up on that beach there. But we’re in the lee.

He does not like the idea of moving the South Dock (at the north end of the island) to south of the pony pens.

That area is all a nursery area for drum and grass and mullets. You’re going to try to dig through that?

Moreover, a couple of decades ago, a storm busted through there (at the pony pen area), washed the fence down, washed down the horse pen and drowned one of the horses, and washed out the last bridge (on NC12) before the pony pen.

Ferries:
All I’d like to see is reliable ferry service.

I’d like to see it properly dredged and fixed. It looks to me like all that sand (coming into the Hatteras Inlet) has stopped, like it has not moved any farther to the west and all you need to do is go on the other side of where that sand has stopped and connect up the deep water and you can make a shortcut right there. It would cut off probably 20 minutes of the ferry ride.

There’s no grass in the (Hatteras) Inlet. So, you can remove the sand. You won’t hurt anything because there’s tons of sand in the inlet.

When he worked on the dredge in Hatteras Inlet in the 1970s, sand would move overnight.

On a pretty night, we would cut out (an area) and let the dredge sit outside of the cut. Overnight and with the change of tide, we’d come back the next morning and put the cutter head down and two feet of sand was underneath the dredge. So we had to pull the dredge back and make a clean cut and go ahead and do all the work. But that’s just how much sand moves overnight.

All that dredge spoil could be used to correct the NC 12 hot spots and build more island habitats behind the Outer Banks for birds so these birds have somewhere to go with no predators.

Correction: An early version of this story said Ken DeBarth moved to Ocracoke in the 1970s, but it was in 1995.