Conch Comments ©

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.

’The wind was a special wind this night and the darkness took on a special feel because it was All Hallows Eve. Everything seemed cut from soft black velvet or gold or orange velvet. From kitchen windows drifted two pumpkin smells; gourds being cut, pies being baked.” From ‘The Halloween Tree”, by Ray Bradbury, one of Peter’s favorite sci-fi and short story writers.

In the paper this morning there was a whole page article on spooky sports costumes. One was Tom Brady and Deflate Gate. Tom Brady at a news conference in his ski cap and a toddler dressed like a deflated football. The next was two siblings dressed like National baseball players who engaged in a little strangulation tussle in the dugout during the team’s September slump. They said it helped if the siblings didn’t like each other. How horribly cute.

In Elementary School, I used to stop at Chapels Five and Dime and look at all the costumes, but I knew my father wasn’t going to spring for any of them. So when I went Trick or Treating, I usually ran into the house about dusk and quickly pulled together one of three standard looks: ghost, witch, or hobo (no princesses or superheroes) and got a big brown grocery bag; quality of the loot not as important as quantity. Then we set out to scour the island: no parents in tow. We were in large groups. Kids usually traveled that way. One lady always invited us in for cocoa and popcorn balls. And there were a few haunted houses along the way. At the end of the night, we went home and spread out all our candy on the floor and gloried in our night’s take. And there were always some pennies from houses where they had forgotten to buy candy. No one dares not leave his or her lights on.

In Mexico, they have a lovely and related tradition. November 2nd is El Dia de los Muertos (The Day of the Dead), a day on which the living remember their departed relatives. In the afternoon, families meet at the cemetery, clean up grave sites, play cards, listen to the village band and tell stories about their departed loved ones. In our church, we have All Saints Day when we similarly honor our elders.

When I was a child, my mother and father always took my brother and me to the family gravesite at Easter and Christmas. Mom always put flowers on the graves. There was a well to get water from at the edge of the plot. Now they have all been sealed up for safety. The oldest graves were my great-grandfather’s and great-grandmother’s graves: Richard Curry and Matilda Jane Lowe born in the 1830’s. The graves were unmarked, but my mother had told me who was buried there. Peter and I put headstones on their graves with the dates that had been recorded at the Monroe County Library. My mother always looked for her father’s grave, but never found it. He was buried in Potter’s Field somewhere. He was a night watchman in his elder years and was knifed by a burglar and died soon after. I remember seeing my mother just staring out the window on the day he died.

At Christmas, I’m going to invite all the family to go whitewash the graves, make the writing on the headstones more visible, and clean the yard. Wish me luck.

I have been called a Luddite. Maybe it’s my age, but I think it’s more likely my nature. Hence, I am being dragged into the Information Age. The Internet and the calculator have replaced encyclopedias and the slide rule. Life has changed. I once told my mentor that I had no interest in learning to operate these new informational tools. She said, “Joanne, life is going to pass you by.“

I mostly think of the computer as a tool, rather than as an entertainment device. I do business stuff, email and my children and grandchildren are driving me into texting, which I am slowly grasping. Email is a bygone thing; they hardly look at it anymore. At my age I am finding that things are out before I know they’re fully in. I first noticed this years ago when the newspaper on New Year’s Day listed all the ins and outs. I barely knew what half of them were, in or out. And the things that were out, I had never even known to be in. And I was just getting into the outs.

I do not do Facebook or Twitter, nor do I Tweet or anything else they’ve invented in the last hour. But I do write a blog, which I suppose is entertainment. My Luddite self is being compromised. So I am here to enlighten us on the verbiage of the Internet. I know my granddaughters could do a better job, but right now I’m all you have. I looked up all this stuff on the informational Internet.

Let’s start with blog. It is a truncation of Weblog, which is a discussion or information site, published on the worldwide web or WWW. From that comes bloggers and blogger sphere and blogging. OK, now that we know what we’re about, let’s delve further.

My crossword Saturday had the word emoticon. It is a keyboard representation of a facial expression. There are lots of them. Here are two useful ones:   🙂 and 🙁   made with colons, dashes and parentheses (although this program won’t display them like that, substituting smiley faces instead). There are lots of emotiwords, also, but the only one I liked was emotibabble, sort of like psychobabble.

I looked up Internet expressions on Google. There were about 320 of them. There were 15 of these that started with I. Here are a few of them: IC (I see), IDC (I don’t care), IDGI (I don’t get it?), IDK (I don’t know), IDTS (I don’t think so), IIRC (If I remember correctly), ILY (I love you) and my favorite, IMHO (In my humble opinion). There were three that began with U: U (You), U2 (You, too) and UR (You are). It’s the me generation showing its ugly head.

Cyberspace is full of information, videos and, yes, peril. As Obi-Wan said in “Star Wars” about the Mos Eisley Spaceport. “You’ll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” Yes it is untamed and perilous; yet it is as full of opportunity and as free as the Wild, Wild West. As dangerous as it could be, do we really want it censored? It’s a tough call. I think we just have to be very, very careful in its use.

In the seventies, when the possibilities of the Internet first came to light, I tried to think of ways it could be used. My brain could not get around it. It is more far-reaching and changing our lives in ways we could not imagine then. In my first year Biology Class when in college, the professor put up a graph on the board showing the growth in information or knowledge through the centuries. It was a fairly constant line of growth of about 30 Degrees. Then in the 1960’s it spiked to nearly 90 degrees. It was a harbinger of things to come.

County beach is what we called it back when I spent my summer days there. It was our water playground. My first memory of it was my mom taking me to a small carnival there when I was about five. There was a ride with little rowboats in a circle of water. I remember being a little scared because that water was ten feet deep in my mind. It’s interesting which memories stick in our brains and are brought up occasionally.

I remember during summer vacation time in early elementary school years, all we neighborhood children would gather early in the morning and rather than going to County Beach, we would walk to Miss Louisa’s Beach. I assume Miss Louisa lived there, but it is an assumption since we never saw her. There were a lot of rocks along the beach, which had tidal pools. When the tide was out, we would pour over all the interesting little water creatures, which harbored there. We went swimming and I remember schools of fish swimming about our legs. It was right next door to the restaurant, Louie’s Backyard. Of course Louie’s Backyard wasn’t there then.

When in our younger teens, we went to County Beach. There was more entertaining stuff there. It had a beach concession stand, serving hot dogs, hamburgers, and sodas. It also had a pinball machine and a rifle game that we fed quarters into when we had them. Now it is Salute, a restaurant right on the beach, where you can have a nice dinner, enjoy the evening sunset and watch young men and women play beach volleyball. Later when in high school we used to go in the evenings to the pavilion on the beach and bring our ukuleles and guitars and play and sing folk songs, a very cool thing to do in the Sixties.

Now, Peter and I often go to Monroe County Beach, renamed Clarence Higgs Beach when the county transferred the beach to the city of Key West. The sunsets are breathtakingly beautiful there when reflected in the calm waters. One rainy and overcast day, we were sitting on the beach lamenting the lack of a sunset when the sun broke through the clouds and we walked out on the pier and sat to watch. There was one other man standing behind us taking one photo after another. There was a cloud that partially covered the sun so we wondered why he was taking so many photos. Then Peter started laughing and said, “We’re watching a partial eclipse. See, the shadow is going down with the sun.” And we had no camera with us.

At certain times of the year there are swarms of birds that fly in formation and swoop and turn and are fun to watch. One evening a wet osprey landed on the top of the mast of a sailboat pulled up on the beach. He ruffled and shook his feathers and smoothed them out with his beak. He was fun to watch as he made himself presentable to the world. He had just had his meal and was making himself ready for a night on the town.

Another evening we were walking out on the pier and saw a large blob about six feet long moving in the water under the dock. It left the pier and started swimming out to sea. There was a young man on the pier and he told us that it was a Manatee and that there are lots of them out on Stock Island near the fishing boats. They are usually found in Middle Florida near the Tampa area and until the last number of years not seen in Key West. They are mostly herbivorous, and sometimes known as sea cows.

In the beach area there is a playground and tennis courts and a Dog Park and Bocce Ball courts, and an AIDS Memorial; and coming soon a new running and exercise course for all those buffed millennials. Also, there are beach chairs and umbrellas to rent for us more sedentary bookish types. West Martello Towers, a Civil War defensive fort is on the beach and the Key West Garden Club has quarters there; inside the walls there are lovely gardens. Peter, a Yankee, says that it serves as a reminder that Key West remained in Union hands during that war.

One New Years Eve we were at my parent’s house and there was a fireworks display at midnight off the White Street pier. We went down to the beach where we usually go to watch the sunset. It was a warm evening and we were dressed for summer. They don’t do that anymore. Now a popular female impersonator in Key West named Sushi (Gary Marion) descends from a bright red glittered high heel shoe eight feet long with a four-foot heel above the Bourbon Street Pub. This year will be her 17^th time celebrating the New Year in a very stylish Key West way.

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.