Month: July 2015

In 1947, my father built a house down the street from Key West High School, which was built in the mid-thirties. Behind the school were two houses and a grocery store and a gymnasium, which was catty cornered to our house. Students had to cross the street to get to the gym. Behind the gym were a few homes, but most of the rest of the block held two abandoned houses and a couple of vacant lots filled with brush. Sometime in the early 50’s, the school board closed the street, and tore down the abandoned houses and cleared the vacant lots. Then they covered the whole area with tar, making tennis courts, basketball hoops, volleyball poles and hopscotch drawings. It was completely enclosed by a 12-foot chain link fence with spikes sticking out of the top. The schoolyard was my childhood playground.

My earliest memory is the day they moved the two houses behind the school diagonally across the intersection. One was a rather large house, the other quite small. The family in the big house had five children, four boys and a girl. They decorated the house every Christmas with Santa and reindeer on the roof, wooden carolers, plaster snowmen and singing elves holding bells ringing the yard. They always won the city-decorating prize. Cars constantly lined up to drive by, making Christmas exciting.

Back to the school. They built more classrooms and a cafeteria where those houses used to be. We often climbed the fence to avoid having to walk all the way around to the entrance. There were lots of children; we always had playmates. We skated on the sidewalk around two sides of the school with our skate keys hanging around our necks, being careful not to step on a crack, sold Kool Aid to passers-by for a nickel a cup, hid on the fire escapes and in the bushes, climbed onto the roof, played baseball and kickball on the Volley ball court using the poles as bases, and played Horse on the basketball courts. All with hardly any adult supervision.

The biggest excitement was the time they filmed part of the movie, “The Rose Tattoo,” with Burt Lancaster and Anna Magnani at the school. It was the fire-escape scene. We kids got to watch all the doings. One day a huge publicity trailer pulled up across from my house. They were giving out 5 inch rose tattoos. All of us kids got two, one on the leg and one on the arm. Must have been henna, as it did not come off too easily, even though my Mom scrubbed us raw. We simply could not go to school that way. There were standards back then.

The Lion’s Club met in a building behind the gym on Thursday nights. They had supper and a meeting and if we kids hung around the kitchen, they would give us the leftover desserts.

We were outside all the time when not in school; no television to keep us home. Always barefoot, we all had either ringworm or impetigo at one time or another. I remember once stepping on a nail. When I went home and told my father, he put me in the car and drove to the doctor’s house. Cleaning the wound and getting a tetanus shot took a half hour. Small town. Simpler time.

We had a 3-foot high concrete block fence around our yard. After lunch the high school students would bring their cokes and sit on the wall, dropping their coke bottles inside the yard. Dad would come home from work and collect the bottles and each week take them to the store and get 2 cents a bottle. The Principal called him one day and told him that the bottles belonged to the school and that he had to return them. My father told the Principal that the bottles were in his yard and were his and that if the School wanted the bottles, he could keep his students off our wall. Well that didn’t happen, so my father continued his nightly bottle collecting.

At the end of every school year, the teachers would put in the trash down the street: old papers, and books, erasers, pencil sharpeners, and other paraphernalia, most of it broken. We would haul it all over to our garage and play school, but now we were the teachers. Of course my father had to haul it back. I don’t ever remember him complaining about it. Well, on second thought, maybe just a little.

One more story. They had Friday night dances in the gym and the boys would go outside and gamble on the dark street outside. On Saturday mornings, I would get up early and go over there and regularly find two or three dollars in change and bills on the ground. Found money, like treasure. My father always said that childhood was the best part of our lives. We didn’t believe it then and only realized much later the truth of it, especially in the halcyon Fifties.

P. S. Now that the old Key West High School is going to be the new City Hall, the adventure continues. And that is probably a whole other story.

When I was about ready to start High School, my father bought me a set of encyclopedias from a door-to door salesman. I think he paid a down payment and $6 a month for two years. It was called the American Peoples Encyclopedia. The books came with a coffee table bookcase with the encyclopedias filed under glass, binding up, on each side. It was quite handsome. It also came with an extra volume of quotes from famous people in history, listed under the subject matter of the quote. I spent many hours reading this book and have loved quotes ever since. Peter’s mother on the other hand went out and bought him a Funk and Wagnall’s volume each week from the A&P Supermarket. I became the President of the Honor Society at my school while Peter was blackballed from his the first year; something about a teacher who disliked him. I wonder why? All this doesn’t matter. It just goes to show that sometimes beginnings can be auspicious and vice-versa. But I digress.

Back to my love of words and quotes. My favorite quotes came from Andy Rooney. I have below Brainy Quotes, a site, which lists some of his quotes. They left out my two favorites. “Don’t believe everything you read in the newspaper, but bare in mind that most of it is true.” And “In a conversation, keep in mind that you’re more interested in what you have to say than anyone else is.”

Another fun site is Heather Carreiro’s “20 obsolete English words that should make a comeback”. It’s on Matador network (website below). Can you make a new sentence using one of the words? I liked the word jargogle meaning “to confuse, jumble.” Ms. Carreiro said “I’m planning on using it the next time my husband attempts to explain complicated physics concepts for fun. Seriously, I don’t need you to further jargogle my brain.“ l also liked twitter-light. Twitter-light is my favorite time of day; sunlight getting softer, city lights coming on, families gathering for dinner, lovers walking in the park, animals settling down for the day, fireflies coming out in the heat of summer, the earth quieting along with us. It’s a time to deliciate in the beauty of the earth. Please forgive all the perissology in that last sentence.

I have to end with my Mother’s favorite saying which I have often used. “ The more you stir in garbage, the worse it stinks.” This means, “Stay right out of it.” Of course, she used a better word than garbage. My Mom was not one to mince words.

Brainy Quote: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/andy_rooney.html

Heather Carriero, “20 Obsolete Words that Should Make a Comeback”: http://matadornetwork.com/abroad/20-obsolete-english-words-that-should-make-a-comeback/

In 1971, Peter brought home the newly released album “Pearl” an LP of Janis Joplin and her songs. Neither of us was that familiar with Janis Joplin or her music. I do remember watching one of the late talk shows one night. She was on and they discussed her blues singing, which to my taste was a little too frenetic, and her drug use. She said she needed the drugs to work herself up to the fever pitch her audience demanded. In retrospect, she was playing at a level of intensity that she couldn’t sustain.

Anyway, her new album featured her song “Me and Bobby McGee” which Peter and I really liked. Kris Kristofferson, who wrote the song, had recorded it as more of a softer and slower folk song. You can find both versions below. Kristofferson said he liked Janis Joplin’s version better. Maybe so, but I understood the lyrics better when he sang it. Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose on October 4, 1970 during the recording of “Pearl” and it was released after her death in January 1971: so many of the pop singers of that generation died of drug overdoses. Drugs were definitely one of the scourges of our time.

There’s a lot about Janis Joplin on the Internet. She was at Woodstock in 1969, the year we were married. Watching all the images on the Internet was a bit of a downer, as I don’t remember it as a happy time. It was also the year we landed on the moon. Peter started grad school that year so we felt the full effect of all the campus angst over the Vietnam War. The ROTC office was fire bombed. William Buckley was invited to speak on campus and was shouted down. It was a turbulent and uneasy time.

My son, when in High School said to us at supper one night, “You two can’t tell me that you were in college in the 60’s and didn’t take drugs.”  Peter leaned over and said, ”You have to face the fact that your parents were nerds.”  We were. Also, we were both in school situations with zero tolerance for mind-altering substances. Then, when Peter was in grad school, we were a little older and newly married and on to other things and kind of skirted ahead of all that.

Janis Joplin sings “Me and Bobby McGee,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7hk-hI0JKw

 Kris Kristofferson sings “Me and Bobby McGee,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-J7mLyD3yc

 

It’s in all our newspaper, the Key West Citizen: Cuba and what will happen to Key West when it opens. How will it affect this little island that depends so heavily on tourism when the new “Oh Wow” place opens up.

I remember that day in 1956 when Batista was deposed and Fidel Castro took over. All the Cubans in Key West were parading in the streets, beeping horns and celebrating. And then it all went sour.

I remember in the early fifties when there was a car ferry that ran from Key West to Havana. I think it went every weekend, leaving Friday night and returning Monday morning. Mostly, It was to gamble, very popular in Batista’s time. My parent’s always talked about it, but never went.

Well, all that came to a halt, as Fidel turned to Russia and Communism, which all led to the Cuban Missile Crisis when I was a junior in High School in 1962. My family always took a Sunday drive around the boulevard and I remember the Marines dug foxholes in the sand on the beach. And here we were doing our normal Sunday outing and staring at all the fuss. It was surreal. I remember the military jets constantly flying there and back, the television showing missiles coming to Cuba from Russia, by ship.

Then there was the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Kennedy Assassination, and all the political turmoil after that.

So, here it is 2015 and Cuba is opening up and change is inevitable. Some think we’ll get bypassed if we don’t have the ferry here. Others think that having the ferry will clog the Overseas Highway, be a big expense to taxpayers here, and the tourists won’t stay, as Cuba will give them more bang for their buck.

So, how can Key West compete with Cuba? Of course, others think change may not come as quickly as thought. But change will come and we’d better think about how our community can thrive in it and maybe even capitalize on it.

I’m including photos of a couple of Cuban landmarks in Key West:

The San Carlos Institute was originally built at a different location in 1871 by Cuban exiles. It burned down in the fire of 1886 that almost destroyed the whole town. It was built at its present location in 1886, and completely restored and reopened in 1992.

The Cuban Club burned down in the 50’s and was rebuilt to original architecture and reopened on December 29, 1983. It was the place to be on Saturday night.