Author: Joanne Nanos

When I was a child we always had a big Thanksgiving Day turkey dinner. My father carved the turkey. The slices were nice and thin. He took a lot of pride in his work. My Mom put the wishbone on the widow sill to dry. Whoever found it the next day pulled it apart with the nearest person and made a wish.

When newly married, we were going away on Friday and decided not to do Thanksgiving. We woke up on Thanksgiving morning and said we have to do Thanksgiving. So I sent Peter out to bag a turkey. You can tell I was new at this. Nothing was open except a little Mom and Pop store he found somewhere; and they didn’t have turkeys. So Peter brought home a couple of Cornish Game Hens. I didn’t even know what they were much less how to cook them. I struggled through with The Joy of Cooking cookbook. We had sweet potatoes and canned peas and gave thanks. The forms were observed. I tell you there wasn’t much meat on those birds.

When I was in college, I lived in a Scholarship House. There were thirty of us and one of us prepared menus and bought food each week and another made up the work list for Saturday mornings when we cleaned the house. It was not a dorm or sorority experience, but it worked. Every Sunday we had a sit-down dinner at one o’clock. We often invited guests. The Sunday before Thanksgiving, we had a Thanksgiving dinner and invited some students from Thailand who lived across the street. They turned us down flat. They said they weren’t going to eat such an ugly bird. In retrospect we should have said, “When you’re a Pilgrim and you’re starving, you don’t care if it’s an ugly bird.” Turned out the dinner was not too bad considering it was mostly a learning experience for the cooks. The meals were never great. We were all new at this cooking thing. Three of us cooked each day. We were provided with the menu and the food but were on our own as to how to cook it. I was a picky eater when I got there, but by the end of four years, I ate just about anything.

There’s a You Tube of Sam Sifton’s Six Thanksgiving Rules to Live by. It has been around for a while. He is a food editor for the NY Times. I will paraphrase them for you:

1. You will have Turkey. No Beef Tenderloin, swordfish or goose. Turkey is why you are here.
2. There will be no appetizers or salad; there is plenty of food. The smells alone will be appetizing enough.
3. If your guests want to watch football, let them. Give them a drink.
4. There will be pie for dessert: pecan, mincemeat, or pumpkin. No chocolate. Chocolate is for nights of depression and anxiety.
5. Clean up after dinner. You have plenty of help. You don’t want to wake up the next morning with a hangover or a food hangover and have to face the mess.
6. Give thanks. That is why you are here.

Everyone wants to be with family at Thanksgiving. Everyone wants to be home. I love thanksgiving afternoons: generations of families out walking together, friends gathering for a meal together. Our church Rector and family cook a turkey and invite all to come and bring a dish.

One Thanksgiving I was making dinner and my son was helping. I asked him to open a couple of cans of creamed corn, put the contents in a bowl, dot it with butter, sprinkle with salt and pepper and put it in the oven. He said, “Mom, is that it? I’ve been bragging to my friends about your creamed corn.” We had a good laugh, which is nice when you’re struggling to get all that food on the table.

Nellie Bly Curry was born in Key West in 1870. In the latter part of the 19^th century, Miami was a small village and Key West was the richest city per capita in the United States. This was due to a large cigar making industry and a lucrative marine salvage business. Travel between the islands was by clipper ship. I have a portrait of my Aunt Nellie, when she about 30 we’d guess. She was a handsome and intelligent lady by all reports, but she never married.

The Key West Census of 1880 lists my Great Grandfather Richard Curry as Sheriff of Monroe County. He had a son and four younger daughters. My Aunt Nellie was next to the youngest and my grandmother, Grace, the youngest. Thomas Knowles, my grandfather, drowned in the 1906 hurricane. Grace was 36, with four small children, my father the youngest at six months. Grace remarried and kept her oldest and parceled her other children to her sisters to raise. My Aunt Emma and her husband Manuel Del Pino raised my father. For the longest time I never knew why all my father’s friends called him Pino. When Manuel died Aunt Nellie moved to live with Aunt Emma.

When my father came back from WWII and built our house, Nellie and Emma came to live with us. It was a three bedroom one bath house, my brother and I were in the front room, Mom and Dad in the middle and Aunt Emma and Aunt Nellie in the back room. Then when Aunt Emma died when I was six, I was moved in to sleep in My Aunt Nellie’s room. She had a big double bed and I had a small single one in the corner. Every night she combed out her hair and plaited it in a long braid down her back. By day she wore two plaits wrapped around the top of her head. She told me that she had never cut her hair. She always wore a dress and black sturdy lace-up shoes. She was 80 and I was five years old.

My memories of her are scattered. I remember one day. It must have recently rained as I was sitting outside the front gate making mud pies. Aunt Nellie came out to put breadcrumbs on the posts for the birds. A lady came by on a bicycle selling Benny Cakes and Coconut Candy from a large basket on the front of her bicycle. I think she came by often as she and Aunt Nellie chatted for a while.

Aunt Nellie had a large treadle sewing machine she operated with her feet. She kept it in our bedroom, no electricity required, just lots of human energy. She made all my and my brother’s clothes when we were very young and even some of my mother’s dresses. She taught my mother to crochet and using fabric scraps, to make circular rag rugs, which were scattered, around our home. She cooked our dinners for which my father rode his bike home from the Navy Yard to eat at noon with us. We had no car. My mother and Aunt Emma cleaned up and complained often that Nellie used every pot in the house. Aunt Nellie also made Queen of all Puddings, and custard in big brown custard cups and she collected guavas from a tree in the yard and made Guava Duff.

She made cushions for the big wicker chairs on the screened porch. She sewed leftover fabric into large squares and stuffed them with an inch thick stack of old newspapers. They made nice padded cushions that were heavy and stayed put. In her younger days she had worked at Applerouth’s children’s clothing store on Duval Street, and at Easter took me downtown to buy my Easter dress, hat and white shoes. Everyone was all decked out on Easter Sunday.

One day I must have talked back to Aunt Nellie and she told me that I was a sassy little girl. I said, “ I don’t care.” I was five. She said, “Do you know where Mr. I Don’t Care lives. Well, he lives in a big house all by himself. No one makes dinner for him, or takes care of him when he’s feeling sad or sick or reads to him at night; he is a lonely man with no friends or family.” I don’t remember answering her, but I thought about it and do remember what she said to this day.

The Secret Ballot is a voting method in which a voter’s choices in an election or a referendum are anonymous, forestalling any attempt to influence the voter by intimidation and potential vote buying. This definition is from Wikipedia, the fount of all defining knowledge.

All this talk on TV about the election in 2016 and Election Day this past Tuesday has got me thinking about the Secret Ballot. I capitalize it because it is that important. My father taught me something when I was about ten years old. I had just become aware that there were Democrats and Republicans and asked him which he was and who he was voting for. He said, “ That’s none of your business.” I was taken aback. Then he said “I tell you, you tell your friend, your friend tells his friend, his friend tells his father who tells my boss at work, who maybe disagrees with me, and my workplace becomes compromised. So that’s why we have a Secret Ballot. It was an important lesson and why I hold my Secret Ballot tight to my chest today.

How did we become such partisan people? I discuss issues with my friends and family, but it is not my point to persuade them to anything. I am interested in their views if they are different from mine. I certainly would not put a “Vote For” sign on my lawn or an electioneering bumper sticker on my car.

My first vote was in 1968. I had just turned twenty-two. Lyndon B. Johnson vs. Barry M. Goldwater. I was living at home, teaching school and paying my father for my car, which he had loaned me the money to buy. I voted Democrat. My father told me that he didn’t know a lot about politics, but he did know that when the Democrats were in power, he didn’t worry about his job. When the Republicans were in, it was a constant worry. He said, “ Most people vote their pocket books.” I even think my dyed in the wool Republican mother-in-law voted Democrat that year. Goldwater was too far out there for some. Now they’re all too far out there, right and left.

I asked Peter if he voted that year. He said he didn’t think so. He had to vote in New Hampshire, his home of record, which meant requesting an absentee ballot and he was doing a UNITAS cruise around South America operating with all the South American Navies at the time and dating all the ambassadors daughters and going to embassy parties and voting was not on his radar, as stressed out as he was by his social life.

We voted for the first time in a voting booth after Peter left the Navy. We were in Los Alamos. Peter and I went to the voting place. Neighbors and friends were there and everyone was meeting and greeting. No placards or politicking. They had to stay 200 feet from the polling place. Everyone exercised his or her Secret Ballot. Peter said this morning, ”I have no idea who you vote for. It could be Attila the Hun for all I know, and I know better than to ask.” It’s the American way. Compromise it we shouldn’t.

I asked Peter this on Saturday. I said, “ Monday is Columbus Day, a federal holiday. It was established so by congress in 1934. That’s why all the banks are closed and everyone who can take the day off does. So what do you know about Columbus?” He said, “Well, he sailed to the new world in 1492. He had three ships, the Pinta, the Nina and the Santa Maria. I think the Santa Maria was the largest and either the Nina or Pinta the smallest. I said, ”I think he was born in Genoa, Italy. Peter said, ”Yes, I think his Italian name was Cristobal Colon.” When he landed in Hispaniola, an island which contains two nations, The Dominican Republic and Haiti, he thought he was in Asia, and called the natives Indians. That area later became known as the West Indies. He is quoted as saying when he started out, ”Following the sun, we left the Old World.”

In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, hoping to reach Asia. Of course, we know now that he only got as far as Hispaniola in the Caribbean where he exploited the native population and generally made a mess of things; however he is credited with discovering the “New World.” The man credited with the “discovery” of America was Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine navigator, who explored South America. Columbus is often credited with proving the earth was spherical, but the Earth was already thought to be spherical. The shape, size, and how much of it was covered by water was, however, unknown.

Columbus was born in Genoa, Italy at a time when Genoa was not part of Italy, but was an independent entity with it’s own language and currency, so actually not really Italian. Anyway, he left early to begin his life of exploration. The Spanish monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand were intrigued by Columbus’s adventures and gave him a stipend to support his exploits. The Portuguese explorers Vasco de Gama and Ferdinand Magellan, encouraged by King Henry the Navigator, and Marco Polo, a Venetian explorer, concentrated more on sailing around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope and discovering new riches in the East. The Spanish on the other hand decided to go West.

So Christopher Columbus set sail in his three boats, the Pinta, the Nina, and the Santa Maria. He made four voyages and it is said that he discovered the true extent of the trade wind circuit and that travel across the Atlantic by sail was not all that hard.

It is now thought that the first “Americans” traveled from northeast Asia some 13,000 years before Columbus by way of the Bering Strait and along the Alaskan and Canadian coasts. They then made their way South and East to settle the two vast American continents.

Hail Columbia

O, Columbia! the gem of the ocean,
The home of the brave and the free,
The shrine of each patriot’s devotion,
A world offers homage to thee.
Thy mandates make heroes assemble
When Liberty’s form stands in view.
Thy banners make tyranny tremble
When borne by the red, white and blue!
When borne by the red, white and blue!
When borne by the red, white and blue!
Thy banners make tyranny tremble
When borne by the red, white and blue!

When war wing’d its wide desolation,
And threatened the land to deform,
The ark then of freedom’s foundation,
Columbia rode safe thro’ the storm;
With her garlands of vict’ry around her,
When so proudly she bore her brave crew,
With her flag proudly floating before her,
The boast of the red, white and blue!
The boast of the red, white and blue!
The boast of the red, white and blue!
With her flag proudly floating before her,
The boast of the red, white and blue!

The Star-Spangled Banner bring hither,
O’er Columbia’s true sons let it wave;
May the wreaths they have won never wither,
Nor its stars cease to shine on the brave.
May thy service, united, ne’er sever,
But hold to their colors so true.
The Army and Navy forever,
Three cheers for the red, white and blue!
Three cheers for the red, white and blue!
Three cheers for the red, white and blue!
The Army and Navy forever.
Three cheers for the red, white and blue!

The Robert Shaw Chorale rendition is on YouTube here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siHfQGn3JTs

 

 

My 4^th and 5^th grade school years happened in the mid fifties. I was nine or ten years old then. My Aunt Nellie was 86 and in ill health and my parents were struggling to take care of her. I was on my own. I was in school at Truman Elementary down White Street about eight blocks. I rode my bike to school. My teacher in 4^th grade was Miss Cochran, She was probably in her 50’s and very as we used to say, strict. Her desk was in the back of the room and we faced forward. When we were unruly, she made us put our heads face down in our arms on our desks. We stayed that way the whole day. The only way I stayed sane was to peep at the large clock in the front of the room, which clicked and moved on the minute. I would count the 60 seconds to see if my timing was on. Miss Cochran did not need to do this often because as with all good punishments, once established, the threat was enough to bring us to our senses.

There were breaks. At ten we all traipsed down to the lunchroom for a glass of juice. My favorite was pear juice. It was probably the juice left in the can after pears were served at lunch the day before. Orange juice would have been a better choice. At recess, we jumped rope to our favorite chanted rhymes. We even did Double Dutch. The boys carried big sacks of marbles and would draw circles in the dirt and played some sort of game I never understood. I did not like the food they served in the lunchroom. So every school day at lunch time I went to the small luncheonette next door by myself and had a hot dog, a bag of potato chips and a coke and listened to ”Sh-Boom, Sh-Boom, ya de da dad a dada da da, Sh-Boom Sh-Boom. Life could be a dream, Sweetheart. Hello, hello again.” I played it on the jukebox every day with my leftover lunch money. I don’t think anyone knew or was concerned about where I was or weren’t.

We went to chorus once a week. The musical Oklahoma was popular then, and we learned several of its songs. I remember “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” and “The Surry With the Fringe on Top.” We also learned how to properly sing our national anthem, “The Star Spangled Banner”. Which when I hear it sung today most anywhere I cringe. Peter always sings it at the football games. He does it right. It is not an easy song to sing.

During Physical Education we would play on the playground equipment. There were swings where we would go so high the chains would buckle and the person pushing would run under the swing to the other side. We were pretty adept at this. We had monkey bars and seesaws and a merry–go-round and a slide. We would put waxed paper under our seats to make the slide go faster. It was even more exciting if there was a mud puddle at the bottom, which there usually was. Someone was always getting bumped or bruised, or wet. Nowadays, playgrounds are much more tame, and safer, but not as much fun. Fun is when you get to push the envelope. You can tell I never got conked on the head. If I had, I probably wouldn’t be so sanguine.

In May we had a May Day Festival. Each class did a dance that we learned during Physical Education and we all also learned how to wrap the Maypole doing a complicated set of maneuvers that plaited the pole. It was a lot of fun. In the final analysis, only the ones who looked like they knew what they were doing were chosen to do it on the day of the festival. I was not one of the chosen. It rankles still.

Every day after school, I made two stops. One was to ride the Rocking Horse at Chapel’s Five and Dime. I knew it was the closest I’d ever get to a real horse, which every young girl of my age wanted. My parents patiently explained to me that we had no barn and could not afford to feed a horse. So I guess I was consoling myself with my daily 10 cents a ride Horse at Chapel’s. The other thing I did was to visit the Ford dealership a little further down White Street. When I grew up and had lots of money, I was going to buy the blue Thunderbird convertible I visited each day. The man there never said a word to me even though I poured through all the literature. My father explained to me that buying the car was just the start. Then there was gas and repairs. Why did everything have to be so complicated?

One Friday night, we were going to the Drive-In Theater and my father told me we couldn’t go because my Aunt Nellie was not well. So I ran away from home. I went down to Bayview Park and saw my cousin there and went and sat with her and watched a baseball game, and eventually went home around 9:30. Needless to say, my father was furious with me. I had to stay inside for a week. When you can’t go outside to play after school with your friends, it’s pretty miserable. And there was no television set yet.

When I was a little girl and lived across the street from Key West High School, my favorite thing to do was watch the cheerleaders practice each afternoon. That began my pursuit of a High School career in cheer leading. It was what I wanted to do. So I was a Barefoot Football Cheerleader in 8^th grade, a Junior Varsity Cheerleader in 9^th grade and a Varsity Cheerleader in 10^th thru 12^th. My husband when he found out I had been a cheerleader, well; it was almost a deal breaker. He thought cheerleaders were stuck-up. I wonder if anyone is ever stuck-up today. Actually he said he was a dweeb. I was a dweeb also, but very focused. I was committed to becoming a cheerleader, my life-long ambition. I would and could not be denied.

Cheer leading back then was very different than today. At try-outs, all we had to do were a few jumps, a cartwheel and have a deep loud cheerful voice. Things have changed. I think cheer leading today is an NCAA sport. Male and female cheerleaders do back-flips, sometimes without even touching the ground. All we could ever manage maybe on a good day were back-bends. The male cheerleaders lift the females over their heads with the females standing on their hands, and then they shift so that they are holding them up on one foot while the female on top holds the other leg in the air; almost painful to watch. Three guys throw the females into the air where they do all kinds of contortions before coming down and safely caught. One time when the football team was doing pretty lousy, the guy in front of me shouted. “Send in the cheerleaders.”

Our football cheer leading uniform when I was a cheerleader was a knee length red pleated skirt with grey insets, a white long sleeve button down shirt, a sweater vest with a grey Key West on a conch shell on the front and, of course, saddle shoes with white athletic socks. We were so cool. And we had pom-poms that we made ourselves. The only chants I remember were, “First in ten do it again” And “Push them back, Push them back, waaay back.” Most of the time we knew what was happening. We were quiet when someone was hurt. One time, it was said that Bobby, the captain of the team told the coach when he was hurt. “I’m fine, but how are the fans taking it.” He really was the best cheerleader we had. He went on to play at Florida State and was well known for keeping the players pumped up.

At the beginning of the game we led the players out on the field singing with the band: “Fight down that field again, men of the crimson and grey. Get on that ball and then we’ll mow them down like new mown hay hay hay hay. Fight on to victory. Fight, fight with all your might; for there’s naught to fear, the Conchs are here, and we’ll celebrate with you tonight.” I think most of us had never seen or even knew what new mown hay was. And we certainly had never used the word naught. The band played during halftime and there were baton twirlers, who sometimes twirled with fire. The Conchettes, a dance team of about 50 girls performed with the band. Each summer, someone came from the Texas Kilgore College Rangerettes to teach them 10 routines. The Conchettes wore short white skirts, boleros with red ball fringe and sombreros also with red ball fringe on the rim. And white boots. Football games on Friday nights were quite a show.

During basketball season the cheerleaders wore short skirts and sneakers, with socks, of course. At the beginning of the game when the team was taking the floor, we chanted, “Jeepers creepers man alive, here comes Haskins Super Five. Do we love them, that’s no guess. Key West, Key West, yes, yes.” Haskins was the coach.

During Basketball season, we would take the Conch Bus, an old yellow school bus painted Red and Grey, to Miami for away games. We would leave school on Friday at One, the players in the back and the cheerleaders up front. We would get to Miami in time to put on uniforms and get to the game. We would stop at a restaurant afterwards for a bite and get back to Key West in the wee hours. This whole arrangement was fraught with fraught. On the way to Miami when nearing Tavernier, about two hours after lunch, the players would start. “Hey Coach, we’re stopping in Tavernier, right.” No. “Come on, Coach, have a heart.” No. Then they would start “Stop over by the roadside. Stop over by the ditches. If you don’t stop over, we’ll do it in our britches.” Coach usually stopped. Those boys would have made great cheerleaders. On the way back in the middle of the dark night, there was a certain amount of fraternizing between some players and cheerleaders and the driver would stop the bus, turn on the lights and order everyone back in their seats. This would happen a few times each trip. It took forever to get back home.

When I married in 1969, I went north, first to New Hampshire, then New Jersey. Life changed. First of all, I was climate challenged. I did not own a coat. The cold weather, which shortly ensued, was a shock. I had never seen snow, ice, or sleet much less driven in it. At first, I was excited. It was beautiful. We made snow angels, had a snowball fight, and took a walk in a winter wonderland. Then reality set in. I had to drive to work in it or on it.

One day I walked out to the car to go to work. Snow lay on the ground. I had my keys in my gloved hand, and of course, I had no keys when I got to the car. I walked back into the apartment and told Peter my predicament. He said you don’t carry keys in a gloved hand. Really? To this day I don’t know why we didn’t have a second set. Peter probably did but wasn’t about to give them to me. Peter left to go to class and I called in stupid. I soon learned to drive in the snow, slipping and sliding. One day I slipped in and out of the middle of a semi on the highway. I really believe you’re not going till your time comes.

I was also map challenged. First, those New Englanders don’t pronounce things very well. My father-in-law nicely told me that Vermont was pronounced with the emphasis on the last syllable, not the first. I learned that Worcester is pronounced Wooster; that Haverhill is pronounced Havril; and I learned how to pronounce Massachusetts Avenue from a young man at a gas station in Boston when I asked if the street we were on was Massachusetts Avenue. No, he said, that’s Mass Ave.

One time, when trying to get somewhere with me and a map in my lap, Peter pulled over and said, “Give me the map. Didn’t anybody ever teach you how to read a map?” Another time, he said “It would be nice if you told me the name of the street we turn on before we actually got there.” That was the time I tore up the map and threw it out the window in a fit of pique. No, I did not know how to read a map. Key West is a two by four mile island and the only direction we needed was straight up Route 1 for four hours to Miami. And we hardly ever even did that.

I was also time challenged. In Key West you could get anywhere you needed to get in ten minutes or less. In the North, it could take hours. Peter was always rushing me and I told him that he had a “Hurry Hurry Ding Ding” complex. We were always late for something. One day he told me. “We’re late and there is nothing we can do about it.” I totally did not understand the concept.

My husband is a Yankee. I’m a Conch; two completely different cultures, but not really. My family is from Green Turtle Key in the Bahamas and the sailing schooners from New England would stop occasionally. The Bahamians were called Conchs and when they migrated to Key West in the 1800’s they brought the name with them. There was a book written about the Conchs called ‘’Wind From the Carolina’s.” In it, there’s a quote. “Yankee sailor marries Conch girl”. That’s what happened.

 

My friend, Deb, asked, “What was Key West like before AC”. Well, it was hot, sometimes brutally so. But we had fans, a couple of large ones we moved from porch to dining room to kitchen as needed and some smaller ones at night. Later, I remember having a little one that I put right on my bedside table. Some nights, even that fan was not enough and I would wet a washcloth and wipe my face and arms, and air-condition myself. That works pretty well. On Sundays, after supper, we would take a drive around the Boulevard, and end up on the White Street pier in the cool of the evening. You could drive onto it back in those days and park. My parents would take out our plastic lattice lawn chairs, set them out in the cool air off the ocean, and visit with friends.

Key West does usually cool off at night, especially if there is a slight breeze blowing. No matter how hot the day, the evenings are usually lovely. The air is soft, warm and caressing. The sky is clear and the moon and stars are bright. A rising full moon sparkles on the water and the constellations are easily identifiable. Of course, you have to leave your air-conditioned home and the television to experience these things.

OK, that is how we coped with those brutal hot and humid and close nights, summer and early fall, and during hurricane season. You don’t even ever want to be caught in a boarded up house when a tropical storm or hurricane comes by and you lose electricity. Stifling.

Back to fans. The good thing is the windows were open. You could hear street noise, but there was a lot less of it in those days. There were no Roosters crowing all hours of the night like there are today. Some would tell you they have always have been in Key West. Well, they weren’t any in my neighborhood and I don’t remember them anywhere else. They were all over the place until recently, but there were so many complaints, the city fathers must have rounded some up. I started passing around stories about bird flu. I don’t know if that helped also. How did I get on this rant about chickens? Oh yes, I was talking about street noise, there not being much of it when we would leave the windows open, back then.

When I married, I took my little fan with the blue blades north with me. I could not sleep without a fan blowing on me and Peter being from New England could not sleep with one. I ended up hugging one side of the bed with the fan blowing down that side, while he hugged the other without the fan. But we soon both adjusted; we bought a very small air-conditioner. Our first apartment was graduate student housing. We lived on the top (ninth) floor and the incinerator flue was right behind the kitchen. It was not air-conditioned and the windows were such that they would only accommodate a very small air conditioner. In the winter you got in the elevator and started taking off your coat, because when you reached the top floor, it was a constant 89 degrees.

OK, These days I’ll admit that it is more livable in Key West in the summer months now with AC and actually during most of the year. It dampens the street noise. It is usually quiet, but there is an occasional burst of noise particularly in March when all the college kids are in town and when the Rolling Thunder descends. There are tourists there year around now, because most all places have AC. Our church is air-conditioned which plays havoc with the pipe organ unless we run the AC all the time which is expensive. Solar panels on the roof might be a good idea to ameliorate the cost of AC, but they are initially expensive. Key West has lots of sun, but the idea of solar panels being on the church roof, although not visible from the street, is a little bothering to some.

All the lower stained glass windows in St. Paul’s Church turn 90 Degrees and there is a nice cross breeze most of the time. Again they cannot be open during the lovely winter months because of all the tourist noise and traffic on Duval Street. When I was a child, they were always open. And even on hot days we had cardboard fans in all the pews. They had advertising on them for the local funeral home. We were glad to have them.

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 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.