Conch Comments ©

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.

Leaving Saint Paul’s Episcopal at the corner of Duval and Eaton, we go across Duval to the Oldest House. Originally on Whitehead Street before there was a Duval Street, it was moved to Duval Street sometime in the early 1800’s and was there by 1836. Captain Francis Watlington, his wife Emeline and their nine daughters lived there, the youngest, Lily Watlington, never married and lived there until she died in the 1930’s. Someone later bought it and gave it to The Old Island Restoration Foundation, which had it restored.  Admission is free to the public.  There’s a lovely peace garden out back so you can rest after your hectic stroll down Duval Street.

Down the street on the other side is the Women’s Club. Founded in 1915, it has been a major source of good works in the community. They have a beautiful old building that has been lovingly restored and is open to the public. Their cookbook, published in 1949, has been sold around the world. It contains many of the old Key West Recipes, is quite amusing and a delightful read. I have a copy of the original given to my mother. It has been much used but still intact. My “love to cook” friends love to read it. It has been reprinted many times, a real timepiece, and has turtle steak recipes, now a protected species. Peter says they  served turtle steak at the Bachelor Officers Quarters when he first came to Key West in 1968. We used to have it when I was little. It sort of tastes like veal and was served breaded. All the recipes in the original cookbook were handwritten and very conversation-like with very few measurements given, the way people cooked back then, mostly from recipes handed down from female forbears. The newer editions are typed, easier to read but not as charming.

Behind the Woman’s Club on their property is the Red Barn Theater. My first date with Peter was to hear Yehuda Guttman play classical piano at what later became the Red Barn. It is a very small intimate theater, about 150 seats. We go there a lot. They give me a handicap space in their small lot beside the theater.

Further down the street are two restaurants, Hard Rock Cafe and Fogarty’s, both in old mansions and with indoor and outdoor eating. They are always jam-packed. And The Bull, a bar across the street (I’ve never been) with dozens of motorcycles and bicycles out front makes this block very crowded and noisy. The young people love it.

Across the street on the corner of Duval and Greene is Sloppy Joe’s, a famous Key West saloon with an Earnest Hemingway connection. Hemingway patronized Russell’s bar, which was an illegal speakeasy during Prohibition. Joe Russell was a friend and fishing companion of Hemingway’s for 12 years. When Prohibition ended, Hemingway encouraged Joe Russell to rename the bar Sloppy Joe’s. In July of each year there is a Hemingway look-alike contest. The 36^th one will be in July 2016. All the past winners have formed the Hemingway Look-Alikes Society (HLAS), all men with white beards. I’ve never been in there, but when Peter first came to Key West, he remembers that there were three sailors in the place, two playing pool in the back and one hung over the bar. Today when we ride down Duval Street, it is hard not to hit the throngs pouring out onto the sidewalk and street.

On the other side of the street down on the corner of Duval and Front Street is the First National Bank building built in 1926. It is a beautiful red brick building, probably art deco (Photo from State Archives of Florida). I heard from my father that in the bank failures of the twenties, a lot of Key Westers took their money out of the Key West bank and put it in the bank in Miami. The bank in Miami failed, but the First National Bank in Key West didn’t. At, least, that’s the story I heard.

The last place on Duval Street right on the water is the luxury Pier House Resort, built in 1968. It has a spa, bar, restaurant and beach. Key West was a navy town in the 60’s. When the Navy started leaving Key West, the downtown area was dying, a lot of stores boarded up. The Old Island Restoration Foundation had restored the Audubon house and the unique history and quirkiness of the island had always had a certain appeal to tourists and snowbirds. David Wolkowsky grew up in Key West and Miami and received his degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He visited Key West in 1962. His family had some properties in Old Town. In 1963 he purchased the old Cuban Ferry Dock, waterfront property near Mallory Square for $106,000. He built the Pier House Resort and Spa, making a large investment in that part of the island. And the rest followed. In 2002 Wolkowsky created a Teacher Merit Reward Fund, which gives $5,000 to each of nine Key West teachers and $25,000 to a single teacher each year. He is also said to be responsible for no high-rise hotels on the island. I don’t know how he accomplished that. I also don’t know how the infrastructure on the island could have supported them.

 

Duval Street begins for me at South Beach. When I was six and for some years afterward, my father would come home from work, and take my brother and me for a dip in the ocean. We would swim through his legs and jump off his shoulders. He said we didn’t give him a moment’s peace. I remember the day he took me to a rock in the deep water out near the seaweed, and told me to swim back to him. I didn’t think I could, but I did. I never learned to properly swim until I took Swimming for a PE credit in college. Then at the end of the swim, he would drag us up on the beach, and our swimsuits would be full of sand. We would put our towels on the car seats to keep from burning our butts from the hot vinyl seats and ride the eight blocks to our house. No one walked back then if they could possibly avoid it. Dad would turn on the pump and hose us off with cold water. My Mom would put us in our night clothes and we would have supper and then they (my two great aunts, Aunt Nellie and Aunt Emma lived with us) would spend an hour or so on the porch in the big wicker rocking chairs talking and rocking my brother and me to sleep before going to bed. No TV back then. My parents always went to bed at 9:30. And got up at 5:30. They went to the Laundromat on Mondays, and did the grocery shopping on Thursdays. Such regimented lives they lived.

As we start down Duval, the next place of interest is La Te Da, restaurant, cabaret theater, bar and hotel at 1125 Duval. Teodoro Perez, a prominent cigar manufacturer, built the house in1892. The property included a large factory facing Simonton St. and cottages for his workers on nearby Catherine. Perez was known for his political support for Cuba Libre (Free Cuba) in the late nineteenth century and the Cuban revolutionary Jose Marti gave a speech from his large second floor balcony (La Terraza de Marti). A way down on the same block is Flamingo Crossing which sells homemade tropical ice cream. My favorite is coconut, while my father liked Sour Sop (Guanabana).

Next we go past Truman Avenue and head toward Downtown. When I was a child, we always got dressed up and went downtown on Saturday night. Miss Leila and Miss Grace lived in a large two-story house on the corner of Southard and Duval. It is no longer there. It had a large front porch with rocking chairs and some stairs where we kids used to sit. My father would take us to Kress Five and Dime and each week we got to pick out a little toy. We would all sit on the porch talking and watching the parade of people passing by. Next door was the Strand Movie Theater and next to that was a Locker Club, where sailors kept civilian clothes, which they could not keep on ships.

Across the street were the San Carlos Theater and a few doors down from that the Kress store, which later became Fast Buck Freddie’s, which sold high-end clothing, furniture, furnishings and novelties. Visiting the store was an adventure. Internet shopping eventually did them in and the store closed a few years ago, much to the consternation and disappointment of many. A CVS opened up there a year ago, the fourth one on this small island. Not all change is positive.

Across Fleming Street on the same side is the La Concha Hotel. A luxury hotel built in 1926. At six stories, it was then the tallest building in Key West and still is. We used to be able to take the elevator to the roof and have a 360-degree view of the island. But like all good things, that has disappeared. Not the view, but just us being able to get up to see it. The public room at the top is now a private spa. Here is a picture we took of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church from the rooftop of the La Concha number of years ago. The house next door is the Rectory. St. Paul’s is across the street and down the way on the corner of Eaton and Duval Streets.

This is the fourth St. Paul’s on this site, the others destroyed by hurricanes or fire. It is a beautiful church with nineteen magnificent stained glass windows depicting stories of the Bible. Washington National Cathedral and St. John the Devine in New York have windows crafted by Phipps, Ball and Burnham and Charles Connick Associates, the same firms responsible for most of St. Paul’s finest windows. When you enter the church, the beauty of these windows strikes you, particularly the dazzling blue one above the Baptismal font in the back of the church where I was baptized and my son 25 years later. My mother said I screamed the whole time at my baptism. The priest said it was the devil coming out. St. Paul is the patron saint of shipwrecked souls and the church is open to visitors most days.

Next week I’ll continue my stroll from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. When I was growing up, we were not allowed to go past Eaton St. Mostly bars down that way and the shrimp boat fleet. It was a rough side of town. So different now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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