Month: December 2015

Having grown up in Key West, it was inevitable that I would occasionally find myself on a boat and seasick: many more times than once. Of course I have also been airsick, and carsick. Unexpected motion and I are not friends.

My first boating trip was with my cousin Bill. He was home from USNA in his last year. He took my brother and me out on a charter boat. I guess we were about eight and ten years old. I don’t remember getting sick and have a picture of me on the boat, windblown hair askew, broad grin, and proud me holding up the fish I’d caught, which actually was not too small.

When a teenager, I was invited by my friend’s family to go out to the Dry Tortugas where Fort Jefferson is located, the last and most isolated of the Florida Keys. I remember that it took us 6 hrs. to get out there. It is about 68 miles west of Key West. Remember, Dr. Samuel Mudd, implicated in President Lincoln’s assassination, was imprisoned there and played a large role in tamping down a Yellow Fever epidemic. When we visited that weekend in the sixties, I remember seeing stored in the Fort a large stock of canned goods, part of emergency supplies in case of nuclear war stored there in the fifties. It is now a National Park. You can get there by seaplane ½ hr., fast catamaran 2 hrs. and slow boat 6 hrs. I haven’t been since that trip in the sixties. I suspect it’s much more touristy, but still very popular if only for the snorkeling alone, which is amazing.

When I was in my early twenties, five of the Navy guys I knew had gone together and bought a broken down 28 ft. sail boat for $5000 and lots of us would go out on it for a day of sailing fun. The sails were weak, due to inexpert handling or no wind I don’t know, but they had to run the motor all the time. So one night two of the guys invited my friend and me to go on a moonlight sail. The boat was kept in a slip out on Stock Island. The guys picked us up and when we got there, the boat was gone. The guys were peering at the slip but the boat was not there. As callow young women will do, we started giggling saying to each other, it’s a good thing we knew they had a boat. What if they had invited two girls who had never seen the boat and probably never would? The giggling was noticed and not much appreciated. They asked the caretaker and he said a group of partyers had boarded at about 4 in the morning and left. We went down to the Coast Guard to report the theft, but I don’t think the boat was ever found. Of course, they kept the key on the boat next to the helm.

A number of years ago, we had some friends visiting and we all decided to go out for a sunset sail. I told Peter that we needed to go back to the house to get my seasick medicine. He said it was a fairly calm day and I wouldn’t need it. He lived to regret those words mightily. When we got out of the lee of the island, it was not too rough, but there were swells and the schooner was heeling so that standing was difficult. Well it wasn’t long before I was sick and Peter took off his cap, which soon overflowed. To say that we were not the most popular people on the boat, well, Peter told me I could at least raise my head to look at the sunset. Right. I could say after that he always heeded my dire words of prediction, but that probably wouldn’t be true.

Peter took the family out on a Charter boat on Christmas Eve. It was a morning half-day trip. The one on the boat from Indiana was not sure she was up to going, but when morning came she decided to go. It wasn’t a rough trip; they stayed inside the reef, just a half hour ride out. Two were sick or queasy, one not too interested. Two really got into it, especially the one from Indiana. She wants to go deep sea fishing next time and catch a sailfish and have it mounted on the wall. I of the iron stomach, of course, stayed home.

Many years ago when my son was a teenager, we were visiting my parents and were out bicycle riding one afternoon a few days before Christmas. It had been raining and somehow that added poignancy to my Christmas story. We were heading down South Street to the Southernmost Point and stopped as some commotion was going on there. Someone had put up a ragtag Christmas tree and there were several men playing Christmas carols badly. They had probably had very little practice time, but they were doing a creditable job. The Conch Tour Train had stopped and the people. on the train had got off and were dancing in the street. It was quite a joyous scene. Olde Sol in the west was about to sink into the ocean. As the tip of the sun dipped into the water, the band started playing “Silent Night, Holy Night, All is Calm, All is Bright.” Everyone got very quiet and watched as the sun sank slowly into the ocean until out of sight. Then the band and Conch Train quietly left as evening descended and the lights came on. I turned to my son and said I don’t expect you’ll ever see anything like that ever again.

One Christmas when very young, my father took my brother and me to buy a tree. We went down the street to the little Cuban Store a few blocks away. Now, my father, always careful with his money, told us that we were going to find the worst tree on the lot and take it home and make it beautiful. Of course, the worst tree was also the least expensive, my father not about to spend good money on something he was going to throw away in a few weeks. I remember it cost $2.50. This was in the early 50’s. We took the tree home and Dad cut some branches off the bottom and tied them into the bare spots, trimmed the top a little, put the star on and the lights after we had untangled them. They were always a mess. The bubble lights were my favorite. We decorated the tree with round and bell shaped ornaments and put silver tinsel on it. When we finished, it was beautiful. In those days when a bulb burned out, the whole string went out and you had to try a new bulb in each socket until you found the burned out one. Very tedious, but my Mom turned on the tree each morning as we awoke and made sure it was brightly lit.

Today in Key West, there is a children’s Christmas Parade in early December, and a bicycle ride in mid December. The kids and a number of adults decorate their bikes with lights and ride around the island. They went right past our house the other night. A police car with Santa, led the parade. Peter went out and waved to them and most waved back. There must have been hundreds of bikes. They met at Bayview Park and went to Mallory Square and back to the park. They took a route that was easy to get around if you were in a car and in a hurry.

As a child growing up in Key West, I had never seen snow and we had no chimney, but Santa came each year in his sleigh with eight tiny reindeer. I remember waking up as a child and seeing my parents bringing toys into the house. My mother saw me and told me they were helping Santa, but I mustn’t see him or he would go away, so I should go back to bed and go to sleep. The innocence of five year olds must be kept for as long as possible.

There are some pictures of this year’s city lights interspersed in this post (notice how many snowmen there are in a city that hasn’t ever seen frost).

One night in February, Uncle Fred who was a Harbor Pilot in Tampa invited Tommy, my cousin, and me to go with him when taking an Israeli freighter out of Port Tampa. I didn’t think this through nor ask too many questions. What an adventure. We boarded at the pier, had dinner in the ship’s mess, lox and kippers I think. We toured the ship and everything was fine until my Uncle Fred said it was time to leave the ship and led us out onto the deck. I envisioned an isle with a pier. I don’t know what I thought. As I said before I hadn’t thought this through. I said to Uncle Fred. Isn’t the ship going to stop? He said, “No, we’re going to climb down this ladder to the pilot boat below. I looked over the side at the pilot boat bobbing up and down in three-foot waves. It was forty feet down the side of the ship on a rope ladder. I said, “I’m not going to do that.” That’s when Uncle Fred said. Then you’re going to Venezuela. That’s when I realized that I was going to do that. When I got down I said to Tommy, “Well, that wasn’t too bad.” He said, “Yeah, they held the rope tight for you. They just let me bang around on the side of the ship.” He was not happy. Then we got to Egmont Key and overnighted. All the pilots had houses there and we stayed at Uncle Fred’s. When I looked in the bathroom mirror, I was black from head to foot. The house had heat but no hot water. I washed out my jeans and shirt in cold water and in the morning when we went over to the bunkhouse for breakfast, I put on my cold wet clothes. Then we took the boat back to Port Tampa.

This was my Uncle’s life. The pilots bought their jobs; the house on Egmont Key came with it. The pilots were on call night and day for two months and had the third month off. My Uncle Fred loved it. We spent many summer vacations on Egmont Key. The turtles would come and lay their eggs in the sand and my Mom and Aunt Sarah made Turtle Egg Soup. I remember that there were two large canvas hammocks on the front porch. We kids were always falling out of them onto the hard wooden floor. Not pleasant. We fished with adult help until the adult said, “If you’re going to fish, you have to bait your own hook and take your own fish off of it.” That just about did it for me. I started hunting for seashells.

Uncle Fred and Aunt Sarah always played cards on Sunday afternoons and if someone knocked on the door, Aunt Sarah would grab all the cards and shove them in a drawer in case it was someone from church. Made everyone furious. One day, all we kids were in the car with her and a fire engine passed us. She immediately followed it and we went to the fire. She told us not to tell Uncle Fred because he hates it when she does that. Another time she sat me down and said, “I’m your godmother, and I’ve been negligent in that department. So how is your religious life going? ” Well at the time it wasn’t. We talked about it a little, because I didn’t have that much to talk about. Aunt Sarah always asked me about what was going on in my life, and never talked about hers. And I was too wrapped up in my own little world to ask.

Uncle Fred used to take me to the bus station for my 3-hour trip back to Tallahassee. He would buy me magazines and snacks and tell the bus driver to keep an eye on me. It was nice. Uncle Fred was a speed demon in a car and when the new Sunshine State Parkway opened, he came to Key West on it for the first time. When he got to the end, they ticketed him for speeding, since he could not possibly have made that distance in so short a time if he was obeying the speed limit. It was his first taste of Big Brother watching him. He was incensed. We all soon learned that you have to stop and have lunch when speeding on the turnpike.

After I met Peter, he invited me to Newport to meet his parents. I was twenty-two, teaching school and living at home. I told my father and he expressed strong disapproval; something about chasing halfway across the country after some man Very tawdry. I remember feeling mixed-up and uncertain about what to do and going into my bedroom and sitting on the side of the bed. Aunt Sarah came in and sat down next to me. She had heard my father. She said to me. “Listen, if that’s your man, you go get him and if you need the money, I’ll loan it to you.“ So I went and a few months later, Aunt Sarah had a stroke and died. She never got to meet Peter. I still to this day wonder about it all.

Uncle Fred was born in New Jersey. His parents were immigrants from Estonia. In the 1920s he was a young merchant marine man on a ship bound for places further south when he got Appendicitis and was taken in to the Marine Hospital in Key West. While recuperating, he was invited to dinner at the Curry home on Elizabeth Street. Fred was a handsome man, blond hair he wore in a crew cut, blue eyes and a personality bigger than life. All the young girls were dazzled and then shocked when he chose my Aunt Sarah to marry. Sarah had broken her hip as a child and it had not been set properly and one leg was decidedly shorter than the other and when I knew her she wore black lace-up shoes, her right shoe with a 2-inch platform on the sole and with a four-inch block heel. She walked with a decided limp. Boy would I love to know the story of that courtship. The family arranged for them to buy a house in Key West for back taxes when Fred got a job at the port in Ft. Lauderdale and Sarah went with him, and later to the port in Tampa Bay. The family was not happy about it.

Uncle Fred and Aunt Sarah were my godparents. I have so many stories that this will probably take two blogs. My first memory of Uncle Fred was when he and Aunt Sarah were visiting during one of our downtown Saturday nights and we went to Kress with my father to get our toys my brother and I got each week. Uncle Fred went with us and wanted to buy me the biggest doll in the place. My father wouldn’t let him. I was not privy to the conversation but my father didn’t want me getting used to more than he could provide. I don’t remember being disappointed.

My Uncle Fred and Aunt Sarah took me to the New Year’s Eve Orange Bowl parade in Miami. I was maybe seven. It was my first time away from my parents and I remember crying the night before we left. I was scared. Cathy my cousin went with us to the parade. It was fun.

My next memory was when I was nine; they took my brother and me fishing. We took a few sandwiches and went up the keys to a place underneath the start of the Bahia Honda Bridge. We used hand lines and when throwing the line out one time, I caught the hook on the back of my pants. Ouch. Despite my lack of fishing skills, I think we even caught a few small grunts that Uncle Fred took the hook out of and threw back into the ocean.

Then one summer when I was fourteen, Aunt Sarah took me to Washington, DC, where I went to the Washington Monument where I walked down the few thousand stairs. Whew, bad move. And to the Library of Congress and Mount Vernon, and later caught fireflies with my cousins, and was out playing in the twilight well past nine o’clock. We went next to Lakehurst, NJ where we stayed with Uncle Fred’s family and went to a Music Hall and I learned to do the Polka, and went swimming in a lake for the first time. Then we traveled to New York, and to Radio City Music Hall, the Empire State Building and to an Automat for lunch. We did this all by train and staying with family. For a young teenager who had only gone as far as Miami, that trip with my Aunt Sarah gave me a view into a bigger world. Speaking of bigger worlds, next week I will tell you about how on a dark night in February I almost went to Venezuela.