Month: August 2015

When Hurricane Donna came through the Florida Keys near Marathon in 1960 with maximum sustained winds of 115 mph, it created quite a mess. There were large boats and all sorts of debris on the road and telephone poles broken like toothpicks. I remember the day after when people who had lost their homes came to Key West and used the large Casa Marina for temporary housing. At that point, the Casa Marina, built in the early 20’s (photo) for tourists who came down to Key West on Henry Flagler’s train, had lain defunct for many years, had been used by the military and others and was slowly deteriorating.

Flagler started building his railroad in 1906. There was a hurricane that year in the Keys that killed 135 railroad workers and my paternal grandfather, who died trying to secure his boat. It was also the year my father was born. Flagler brought materials from all over the world and employed a large number of men. The railroad was completed in 1912 and there was a big celebration in town when the first train arrived carrying Henry Flagler himself. His luxurious office car had three bedrooms, a kitchen, salon and private bath. My father remembered going to the celebration as a child of six and the population in Key West was then about 10,000. There was a parade, banquet, a letter from President Taft read and a short speech by Henry Flagler. Why did Flagler take it upon himself to do this? Well, Miami was just a backwater back then and a swampy one at that. Key West had a deep-water port and the Panama Canal had just opened. So the railroad was his industrial connection to the mainland. I don’t know if it ever made that connection. Henry Flagler died the following year at the age of 83, but his railroad continued to carry tourists to Key West, most of them staying at the luxurious Casa Marina, which flourished during the Roaring of the 20’s.

Then came the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane, the first of three Category 5 hurricanes that the United States endured during the 20^th century. The other two were Camille in 1969 and Andrew in 1992. The winds were a one minute sustained 185 mph and it hit the upper Florida Keys just below Tavernier where my Aunt Sarah and Uncle Roger lived with their three teenage sons. We used to visit them in the 50’s. Their house was a big wooden structure and had a well water pump in the kitchen. My Uncle Roger told me that during the 1935 hurricane, there had been a 15 to 20 foot storm surge during the night. The house filled with water up to their waists and was lifted off its foundation. They were floating around in the middle of the night with their children and other relatives who had come to stay with them. He said in the morning when the house settled on land, it had moved a hundred or so feet up the property and had turned 180 degrees. Now the front porch was on the back.

The railroad did not survive and Key West was again cut off from the mainland. In 1938, a land road, the Overseas Highway was completed over the old railroad trestles, which had remained surprisingly intact. There were no breakdown lanes over the bridges, which caused massive backups during accidents. During the 70’s and 80’s when we would drive to Key West, particularly over the Seven Mile Bridge, it was pretty tedious. Sometime in the 90’s, the bridges were all rebuilt or redone, still two lane but with breakdown lanes added. The Old Seven Mile Bridge can be seen from the new bridge. Part is used to provide access to the University of Miami’s Marine Research Facility on Pigeon Key. A large section was cut out of the rest to prevent cars using it. It is slowly being taken over with weeds and deteriorating.

Sometime in the early 90’s, J.W. Marriott & Co completely redid the Casa Marina restoring it to its former glory and more. Peter and I when visiting my parents would go down there to their open air bar near the pool, get a couple of brandies at $10 a pop, and go sit out on the beach under a full moon amid the soughing rhythms of the tropical breeze in the palm trees and the gentle murmer of waves as they washed along the rocky shore.

When you arrive at Key West International Airport, you deplane onto the tarmac and walk a bit to get to the terminal. Over the top of the terminal is a sign that says, “Welcome to the Conch Republic”. Conch was the name given to the original residents of Key West who largely came from Green Turtle Key in the Bahamas in the 1830’s. They were Tories who had no truck with those Revolutionaries and moved lock, stock and barrel to the Bahamas in the late 1700’s and to Key West in the early 1800”s. In later years the name was applied to anyone descended from them and eventually to anyone born and raised in Key West.

In 1982, the US Border patrol set up a blockade on US 1, just south of Florida City. This act isolated Key West citizens from the US mainland since US 1 is our only road in and out. This was done to check for illegals, drug smugglers, and other miscreants, but actually just made it a real pain to get to Key West. Because of the impact to the economy of Key West, the city protested. A delegation led by Mayor Wardlow went to the federal courthouse in Miami to get an injunction to stop the blockade. By some, it was reported that after careful consideration of all the legal issues, the court told them to “buzz off.”

After no redress from the court, the city under Mayor Wardlow presented the Conch Republic Proclamation of Secession. This was done with humor and anger. Mayor Wardlow, now the new nation’s Prime Minister declared war on the United States, which entailed entirely of beating some federal agents with stale Cuban Bread. The Conch Republic immediately surrendered to the United States and requested post-war foreign aid. All done “tongue in cheek,” but the point was made. It is said that, “To this day, Conchs maintain a deep and abiding hope that someday, somehow, the U.S. federal government will actually do something helpful.”

In May 1913, Augustin Paria flew a bi-wing seaplane from Key West to Cuba without a compass to guide him. He landed at sea near Mariel, Cuba where sailors rescued him. In 1918, a two-motored Navy Seaplane flew to Cuba. Aeromarine was the first commercial airline to use Key West, followed by mail delivery by Pan American in 1927. In 1953, the city gave Monroe County clear title to Meacham Field and the name changed to Key West International Airport. To my knowledge, the only international destinations have been Cuba and The Bahamas.

Key West International Airport has only one runway and a short one at that. When large planes, like 737’s land, they have to really slam on the brakes. And I’m always a little nervous when taking off that we don’t run out of runway and land in the salt marsh. The airport underwent a much-needed renovation in 2006, which more than doubled its size. It now has three departure gates.

The last time I was there, the gate attendant for one of the smaller airlines announced that there were 24 people on his flight, but only 3 had checked in. He then said, “ The rest of you are in the bar and you need to pay up and get out here. I think he was kidding, but I’m not sure. There really is a bar next to the gates. In the old days, it was the only 24-hour bar in Key West

Years ago, when I used to fly home to see my folks, my father would always wait for me on a bench just outside the front of the airport. One day a man walked out and said “Ah, paradise. “ My father said, in a low voice. “Yeah, well it used to be.” He had seen so many changes that he didn’t much like to his island, all in the name of progress.

When I was in second grade my friend, Danny, lived across the street and was in 10^th grade. He often was outside doing yard work and I would help him. I remember one day sitting on his steps and comparing my second grade self to his 10^th grade self, eight years. It was an eternity. Danny was the youngest of five. He collected butterflies and we often went to vacant lots to collect them. He taught me how to catch, identify and preserve them. He also played the piano and I would often go over to his house to play the piano with him. He taught the bottom part of some duets to me and we would play songs together for an evening. Today, people would look askance on that friendship as “inappropriate”, but I just did what all kids did back then, met their world, played with it and learned from it.

There was a large fishpond in our neighborhood in a yard down the street. We kids spent hours catching pollywogs, which we put in jars and took home to watch them turn into frogs. We also caught them in mud puddles after a rain. Where did they come from? And when it rained, we would go home and put on our swimsuits and go out and play in that tropical sunshine. Often on a rainy afternoon, I would disappear into my tree house and read for hours. No one ever looked for me. The only time we were inside is when we ate or slept.

One time we formed a Rainbow Bat Club. We all went home and got old skirts from our mothers, cut them apart and made capes for ourselves. I don’t remember any meetings, but every night at sunset, we would start at one end of the neighborhood and run to the other spreading our capes and screeching. With about 15 of us, all ages, we were probably a noisy sight to behold. Today we would probably all be in counseling.

We had Circus Mornings. We would make up acts using our swing set, beg our mothers to come and then charge them 10 cents. We had acrobats and clowns and whatever pets we could coerce into doing animal acts.

Often during summers, we would ask my Mom if we could have a Hotdog Party. My Mom would send me to the store for potato chips or hot dog rolls or whatever else she needed. She would boil the hot dogs for us in a large pot and we would sit on our screened porch and all eat lunch together. We didn’t know or care what was in hot dogs then. We know now, but still indulge occasionally anyway.

On the “Fourth of July”, it seemed the whole town lined up their cars on The Boulevard across the water from Stock Island, where the American Legion Hall was. We sat on the backs of our cars to watch the fireworks and lit sparklers and ran around in the dark. My parents used to put us on the concrete porch out front with hammers and rolled up toy gun caps. Well, that’s all gone now. No toy guns, no caps.

On my friend’s porch we played “War” (card game) and Monopoly for hours. No one ever won, we just soon drifted off to something else. We Played Amazon Jungle in the vacant and overgrown lot on the corner. We made costumes from palm fronds, which were accessible and plentiful.. We sucked nectar from Hibiscus, ate Barbados cherries and climbed the trees for Spanish Limes, which our Moms hated because the juice stained our clothes horribly.

In the summers we made the rounds of all the church Vacation Bible Schools, usually a week at each, all different denominations. No one seemed to mind, kept us urchins off the streets. We went to the movies on Saturday afternoons. My father gave my brother Richard and me 50 cents, 35 for the movie, 10 for popcorn and a nickel for gum. My favorite was Juicy-Fruit.

We spent hours at the beach. We were “brown as berries.” We ruined our skins. We made fun of my Aunt Rose who never went outside without a parasol over her head. She would often say, “I can’t believe your mothers are letting you ruin your skins that way.” She was right. We have paid the price for all that fun in the sun. She had beautiful skin into her nineties.

Our play in those days was free. We made our own amusements, played games with no adult supervision, stated our own rules, had fights, fell down, went crying home to Mom who put Iodine on our skinned knees, which burned like the dickens and made us howl even more. My Mom used to tell me that it would get better before I got married, which didn’t help and only made it worse.

When a little older, I would go over to the tennis courts and hit balls against the practice wall. One day one of the boys I knew from school stopped by on his bicycle and was talking to me. My father must have seen us, and when I got home told me that if I wanted to talk to boys, I could invite them to my home. I said WHAT? But I knew then that my freewheeling and carefree childhood was over.

 

 

When I first found out I had MS, I saw a therapist to get my arms around it. She said, “Look at it this way, no one can ever importune you again. “Will you collect money in your neighborhood for underprivileged crocodiles.” You say, ”Oh, I’m sorry, I wish I could but I have MS and can’t walk too well.” The person then says, “Oh, you just have to phone around.” You say,” “Oh, my hand doesn’t work too well either.” These people are persistent, because someone’s importuning them. Finally she says, ”I’m so sorry to have bothered you. Please forgive me.” Which is a polite way of hanging up on you. And you go back to your crossword puzzle, which the doctor suggested I do to keep my brain doing its best job, ”Thinking.”

I was visiting my friend Sally a few years go and we were doing the crossword puzzle together. A young Tibetan Buddhist monk was also visiting and curious about what we were doing, Sally asked him to look up some things from her reference books, so much more fun than messing with an I-phone. We finished the crossword and Sally scrunched it up in her hand and walked over and threw in in the trashcan. The young monk immediately said, “ What a supreme waste of time.” Sally immediately said, “No, it wasn’t. We all had an hour or so of enjoyment. We maybe learned something. It was relaxing and fun. So no, not a waste of time.” I don’t think he was convinced.

I used to think that people who did crosswords were very smart, but as with everything, it is a learning process. So I started buying Easy Crosswords magazines from the rack at the local drugstore. You soon find out that most of those short words that are used over and over are full of vowels. Some examples are: Oahu, Ames, Oman, Agra, Etna, Laos, Peru, Erie, and Oslo. You get the idea. So, there’s a good start. Vowels are the key in other answers also, so words with lots of vowels are used a lot. The rest you can fill in with what you learned in school, or on the job or in the newspaper. Also, I got a Crossword Puzzle Dictionary. Actually I worked through to tatters a number of them. That was before “The Internet”, which has replaced all those reference books, which bears repeating since it should scare us all silly, all that stuff out there in the ether somewhere. What happens if it goes away and we have no books?

I have done acrostics for many years. A good friend told me that her three daughters got up early Saturday morning to get the acrostic from the newspaper. The first one to call her with the answer won. There was no prize. Being the first was the prize. I told her that if her daughters could do it, I certainly could. She was that kind of friend that I could say that, the kind of friend that if you called her at three in the morning to come get you stranded on the beltway, would say “What in the dickens are you doing on the beltway at three in the morning?” but would come and get you. So I learned to do acrostics. You end with an author and quote. It’s usually interesting and worth the hours it took.

Peter does Sudoku puzzles. He does the Super-duper Hexagonal Samurai Sudoku he gets I don’t know where. I think he picks it up on the Metro. I do the ones in the Post. They start out Monday (lay-downs,) Tuesday (doable), Wednesday (challenging) Thursday (try, but often fail), Friday (only once), and Saturday (never).

At this point, you’re wondering if I have a life. I do. I do puzzles.