Synopsis:
After competing in the business arena for over 50 years, much of that time organizing and facilitating employee/management development seminars in over a dozen countries, I documented the best ways for someone to get ahead and put it in my book, Jumpstart Your Career. The target audience is first and foremost those just beginning in business at or near the entry level and those that are contemplating doing so. Others may find the book a refreshing reminder of those theories that have worked (with omission of those that do not)
Facilitators will find the book is a good substitute for a syllabus supporting training and development programs. Readers can: Improve their writing, listening and presentations skills, learn how to get in tune with their bosses and others learn how to shine in interviews and how to make smarter decisions. Following the wholly empirically develop guidelines in this book will jumpstart your career; I guarantee you will find it the best $12.95 you’ve ever invested!
Order directly from me at: emercer2@tampabay.rr.com (Quantity discounts available)
Also available from: Amazon.com
My Biographical Information
After high school, I served an enlistment in Naval Intelligence during the Korean Conflict. After an honorable discharge, I spent the next thirty years climbing my career ladder in IBM. I’ve earned a Bachelor of Professional Studies and a Master of business Administration along the way. Following my tenure with IBM, I served as a consultant for American businesses in Hong Kong, China, South Korea before taking a teaching position at Webber International University where I was conferred a Doctor of Business Administration for my work in Webber’s MBA program. After five years, I retired from Webber and have been writing ever since. Jumpstart Your Career is my third published work of nonfiction.
For more information, visit my WEB site: earnestmercerbooks.com
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
The Old Yellow House
The Old Yellow House
The old eucalyptus tree stood between the old yellow house and the street curbing built during the great Florida boom of the ‘20s. The street, itself, was black asphalt, cracked and bumpy after the years in the hot Florida sun. I don’t know how old the tree was when I lived in the old yellow house, but it appeared ancient then. It didn’t look like the eucalyptus I saw in Australia in later years—the one’s that koalas like to hang out in—but far more eye-catching. I loved that old tree with its soft, spongy brown-pinkish bark and the tiny pungent fruit shaped like miniature mushrooms. Even today, I can close my eyes and smell the pleasantly astringent odor. The tree is gone now, except in my memory. Nowadays, when I have occasion to pass where it once stood, I’m engulfed in a wave of nostalgia that gives rise to the sadness of my bygone youth.
The intriguing old behemoth stood squarely in front of the house. When the wind blew, one of the three major boles bumped against the tin roof of the porch. During the storms of the annual hurricane season, the groaning of the huge limb rubbing against the rooftop and the wind whistling eerily through the shiny elliptical leaves usually sent chill bumps up my spine, and the younger us kids scurrying for the company of grownups or under the four-poster beds.
The porch that spanned the full length of the house was my domain, my retreat, my library. During the lazy days of summer, I spent hours sprawled in a porch-swing reading funny books that I traded with other boys in town. About once a week, I loaded up those that I’d finished reading and made the rounds swapping them for some I had not read. It was not wasted time as, we learned a lot from our funny books; we learned respect for the heroes and heroines that always did the right thing, about patriotism from the WWII themes in some, and about history (a lot of real history was mixed with the fiction). We indulged in the sci-fi fantasies that in many cases proved to prophetic; we saw futuristic jet-planes, helicopters, ray guns (lasers) and souped-up cars that could travel twice as fast as any we knew about. And we dreamed that one day we would drive, or least ride, in one of these amazing machines.
The old house was made of un-planed southern pine painted a dull yellow. The inside walls were bare. Frequent summer rains beat a tattoo on the corrugated tin roof that reminded me of the “Tommy-guns” gangsters used on radio programs and in the movies. There was just one floor divided into a living room, a dining room, a kitchen and two bedrooms, one large enough for three or four beds. The smaller one was where my brother and I slept. When my sister was born, she slept in the big room with my mother and dad. Then, when my youngest brother came along there were three of us in the small bedroom.
After dark, we kids listened to radio programs on a battery powered Sears and Roebuck radio and studied our school lessons by kerosene lamps in the large living room. When the weather turned cool, my dad installed wood burning stove in the middle of this room. There were only two warm places in the drafty old house during winter months, crowded as close as we dared to the wood-burner and near the kitchen stove when Mother was cooking.
Housing was hard to find. Few houses were built during the depression; nobody had any money to buy them anyway. All out effort to support the war effort delayed housing construction even more. Finally, my dad was able to bargain with a local lawyer for low rent on the old yellow house. I don’t know, maybe nobody else wanted to live in the shabby old house, but we did, and we loved it. And we got it for $10 a month!
The walls were made of one-inch thick slabs of southern yellow pine, a wood that was almost impervious to rot and insects. Batten boards covered the cracks between the upright timbers on the outside, but left gaps on the inside. The floor had been milled a little smoother. We covered it with linoleum. A lightening bolt zapped a window sill in the kitchen sometime in the past and left a circle of charred wood which we never bothered to repair. Whether we couldn’t afford to have it fixed, or let it be because of a subconscious awe, I’m not sure.
The loft was a place of intrigue and mystery. Fascinating, albeit strange, noises muffled their way from the loft through the ceiling and floated around eerily in my bedroom. At night I often lay in my bed listening to ghostly emanations from the musty space overhead. Small animals lurked in the bushes and orange grove near the house and probably some took up residence, or at least visited the loft, but in imagination, poltergeists contributed as well. My dad tried everything he knew to get rid of the vermin. He put out terrible smelling poison, set traps and even tried to shoot some with a 22-rifle. Nothing worked and I reckon the invaders were still there when the house was finally torn down.
The windows had screens! Considering the plethora of flying insects making Florida their home, screens were dearly welcomed; malaria bearing mosquitoes were fairly common in those days, and a lot of people contracted the disease. Many of the Auburndale-ites had migrated from Alabama farms where their houses rarely had screens and relied on smudge pots of smoldering rags beneath the beds to combat the hordes of nightly insects. We considered it a luxury to be rid of the stink of smoldering rags. Quinine tablets were a common household antidote. Kids were administered Groves Chill Tonic in the spring---a foul tasting liquid with clouds of quinine particles that floated about when the medicine was shaken.
Mother cooked on a kerosene stove with portable oven placed over two of the five stove burners. She baked the ubiquitous biscuits--syrup without fluffy biscuits was like Amos without Andy--to go with the home-brewed cane syrup we traded from other migrants and visitors. Actually the cook stove was fairly efficient and served many functions; not the least welcomed was to heat water for our baths during the winter. What time we didn’t spend in the living room, we spent in the kitchen, warmed by the cook-stove and enveloped in the aroma of country cooking.
Our furniture was mostly discarded or homemade hand-me-downs from kinfolk in Alabama. It was just fine though, and suited the rest of the “décor” in the rough hewn interior of our castle.
We never missed what we never had---electricity and indoor plumbing---so when providence provided them, the old house took on elegance like it had never had before. The electricians put a drop-cord from the ceiling and attached a socket to house a naked light bulb. It was switched on by pulling a string that dangled beneath the bulb. City water was brought to the back porch and no farther.
****
I think there were ten grapefruit trees in our yard. These mammoth old trees not only gave us plenty of grapefruit, deep shades during the hot Florida summer days, but were fantastic climbing gyms on which we could sit and eat fruit, swing like monkeys from limb to limb, or build tree houses copied from “Tarzan of the Apes” movies and comic books.
I built my first woodworking shop beneath this spreading canopy of leaves. It wasn’t much of a shop in the true sense, as I only had two tools—a cheap pocket knife and a small hammer—and the workbench was nothing more than a four-foot, two-by-eight board with small compartments for various sizes of nails. Nevertheless, it served my purpose just fine; the only problem was when it rained the tools and nails rusted requiring repetitive cleaning and greasing with lard from my mother’s kitchen. After several months of saving and scrimping from my pitiable earnings from various chores, I was able to buy a coping saw that opened up a whole new world of woodworking.
Mrs. Mattie Van Fleet Dickey, the diminutive sister of a WWII four-star general, taught her third-grade-boys woodworking. We begged for empty apple boxes from the All-American grocery store and used the soft white pine wood for our projects, usually consisting of animal toys. At home, I often whittled wooden guns, which were verboten in Ms. Dickey’s room, and airplanes patterned after the WW II war planes in the comic books. I continued to scrounge the apple boxes for my hobby for many years afterward. The smell of northern white pine wood still stirs my nostalgic memories of Ms. Dickey and those childhood days.
****
When I was about five, a couple of my buddies and I decided to plant a garden. Each of us managed to wheedle a nickel from our parents to buy some seeds from Hancock’s Dime Store. The only problem was that when we got to the store, my buddies decided that we would swipe the seeds and keep the money. I was against the idea, but was overruled and we pocketed some seed packets without paying for them. We planted our garden, but I couldn’t keep the theft out of my mind and my conscience finally drove me to confess a few days later. I couldn’t sleep. One morning about 3:00 a.m., bawling like a baby I owned up to stealing the seeds. One thing all of us kids had was a conscience. We figured that it was God’s punishment that our garden never sprouted anything.
****
A four-acre citrus grove came with the house, mostly orange trees, but there was one row of tangerines, and as I mentioned earlier, grapefruit trees grew in the yard. A Japanese persimmon, a hybrid grapefruit/lemon and a mulberry tree rounded out our fruit orchard. I’ll write about the persimmon tree in a minute, but just in passing I’ll mention that I used to climb up the mulberry tree and eat the fruit. I don’t know if I was supposed to do so, but I did after shooing away the birds and brushing away the ever present worms that loved the fruit as much as I did. And, the huge, bumpy-skin hybrid lemon was so sour my mouth still draws up thinking about trying to eat the fruit. My favorite fruit was the Japanese persimmons that grew on a scrawny tree at the edge of the yard. It was an integral part of the old yellow house aura. For the reader not familiar with a Japanese persimmon tree, let me explain its unique features. It does not resemble the native persimmon trees at all, and the fruit is as different as a tangerine and grapefruit. The tree itself is, as I said, was scrawny, and when the limbs were laden with the fleshy fruit drooped almost to the ground and seemed continually in danger of breaking off. In some years, when the fruit crop was plentiful, I had to scrounge up something to prop the lower branches.
The persimmons were scrumptious and those that could be salvaged from the hungry birds, opossums, raccoons, and marauding teenager thieves were savored by us or sometimes sold to the All-American grocery for a nickel apiece. During the height of the season, I had to hurry home from school to protect the fruit from kids passing by on their way home. Without my protection, they would strip the persimmons in just a few days. Though I threatened the potential filchers with my slingshot and bellicose language, I never actually shot at any of them. I still miss the emaciated little tree and look for any sign of it as I pass the area these days. Of course it is long gone, but I look anyway.
Another basis of pride and joy on our property was an outhouse built under President Roosevelt’s Works Projects Administration (WPA). This toilet sat regally on a slab of concrete about thirty yards from the house. Its solid structure was a source of awe for all of us as it contrasted mightily with the somewhat haphazard construction of the old yellow house. Visitors often asked how we rated such a fine outhouse. I could never answer them, but I remember that during the lean depression years of our early life in Auburndale, my dad took a job with Roosevelt’s reconstruction project called the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) The CCC was responsible for building bridges, forest ranger cabins, state and federal parks and campsites, and many other projects that are still used today. Not the least of these undertakings was the fine WPA toilets that dotted the rural areas of the U. S. It is well worth the reader’s time to “Google” “CCC” and read about this army of men desperately needing work during the Great Depression and their wonderful contributions.
****
Well, I’ll admit up front that the “treasure” I’m about to tell you about, is not a treasure in the usual sense of the word. No gold, silver, jewels, etc. But in my mind and that of my younger brother what we found in the back yard of the old yellow house was nonetheless a treasure.
The afternoon was warm and sunny; the ubiquitous single-engine airplane was droning above. Although I seldom fell into the miasma of boredom, I had no really pressing activity. I spied a rusty shovel with a broken handle leaning against the yellow wall, wondered what it was doing there, and ambled over to where it was lazing. My juvenile brain turned over what interesting activities I might put the shovel to use doing. I guess I was about eight years old and had not yet conceived of the cave in the vacant lot. That came later. I leaned on the instrument and decided that despite the intrinsic dangers of my mother’s ire, I’d dig a hole in sandy soil just back of the house.
After dragging the shovel around for a while, I decided on just the right spot---right in the middle of the clearing that was our back yard. We didn’t have a lawn and our foot traffic had pretty much rid the area of any weeds to contend with. As soon as I was sure that Mother was not watching from inside the house, I hopped on the shovel as I would a pogo stick. Being a bit chubby, my weight was enough to push the instrument into the soft dirt, after which I reached up the handle as far as I could and used my weight to lever out a spade full of earth. As I stood looking at the small hole, I thought,”Well this isn’t going to be so difficult.” So, I repeated my last maneuver in the same pit.
That’s when my adventure began! The edge of the spade clanked against something hard. “Wow” my eight-year-old brain thought! “That’s got to be a treasure!” I dropped to my knees and began to scratch away the lose soil. There it was! A mottled brown and tan “thing” was just barely visible. I was as excited as only an eight-year-old can be. An hour later, sweat dripping off my naked upper body (most boys wore neither shirts nor shoes in those days) my mother stepped out on the back porch to check on my brother and me. I forgot to mention that when my younger sibling heard the clank, he dropped his examination of a ladybird crawling on a dog-fennel at the edge of the yard and started digging in my hole with me. Mother yelled at both of us, not very politely, and demanded to know what in the world we were doing digging up our yard.
“Come on over Mother, I’ve found something I think is a buried treasure.” When she saw the beginning outline of some kind of ceramic urn, she granted permission to continue.
When we finally stopped finding any more “treasure”, my brother and I had uncovered six whole jugs and a dozen or more shards of broken urns and jugs. The smallest was a gallon jug, and the largest was an urn big enough my brother could fit inside!
When Dad came home, he and Mother studied the matter and proclaimed we had found the remains of an old moonshine whiskey still. We kids weren’t sure just what a still was, but it sounded both intriguing and a little scary when we found out that a still was illegal and subject to raids by the police and rival moonshiners. There was nothing in the urns, jars and jugs so we didn’t worry very long about being thrown in jail. We used the intact earthenware for several years and reburied the broken pieces. In later years, with youthful embellishment, we told and retold the exploit over and over.
The earthenware jugs were not the only treasure we found at the old yellow house. The corrugated tin roof I mentioned above did not have gutters and during rains, the water gushed down the steeply pitched roof via narrow troughs inherent in the sheets of tin, and gouged small holes in the ground below. After a downpour, my brother and I searched these holes for pennies. Yes, pennies. And, we often found coppers uncovered by the raindrops. I never found out where the pennies came from, possibly from my mother or dad throwing them on the roof to be washed down, but neither of them admitted to doing so. One reason we believed them was that money, including pennies, was so scarce that we couldn’t imagine them throwing money around like that. The source of the “Lincolns” remains a mystery to this day.
One day a couple of weeks later, I was whiling away the time beneath the hybrid lemon/grapefruit tree mentioned earlier. The hot Florida sun was bearing down on the tree and shooting beams that streamed through the few spaces between the leaves. I had been unsuccessfully hunting birds with my slingshot and at present was at loose ends, no immediate plans for any venture. The sun caused wafting heat eddies to rise from the reflective sand around the tree, but I was relatively cool sitting in the shade. After a while, I began to feel drowsy, so I decided to get up and move around. As I prepared to stand, I felt something hard against my knee. Relatively fresh from finding my treasure in the back yard, I thought, “Wow, another treasure?” I scratched away the topsoil and uncovered a rusty pistol! My heart started thumping and my hands shook at the prospect of actually holding a real pistol. I looked in the revolver’s cylinder for bullets; there were none. Judging from its condition, it had lain hidden away in the sandy soil beneath the tree for a long time. I let my imagination run wild as I turned the weapon over in my hands. I saw right away it didn’t look like a cowboy’s six-shooter, like those we saw in the free motion pictures in town, and like replicas some of the kids slung from their hips in fancy holsters. I figured it must be a gangster’s gat.
When I tired of examining the old gun, I took it home and scraped off the rust and crusted sand as best I could. As soon as Mother saw my find, she ordered me to get rid of the thing even though it was obvious it couldn’t be fired. She said it was probably a murder weapon that was hidden by a killer and would no doubt have a curse or something attached. Or, maybe it was hidden by the same person that ran the moonshine still. I liked the latter conjecture best.
I often sat under in the shade and made up stories in which I was either a revenue agent, or sometimes a moonshiner. I could picture an overall clad “moonshiner” with a long beard, floppy felt hat and my rusty pistol tucked in a belt around his waist and a snarl on his face. I never did find out any more about the weapon and eventually reburied it where I found it. Still, every now and then afterwards, I’d retrieve my secret treasure and fantasize some more. I wonder if it is still there waiting for another kid to find. So much for the great mystery of the moonshiner’s buried six-shooter.
****
The landlord approached Dad one day and asked if we would be interested in a joint effort with a cow. The proposal was that the landlord would buy the cow and we would tend her and share the milk with him. The proposition sounded like a good deal, so Dad built a cow pen using scrap lumber and pieces of corrugated tin salvaged from a wrecked building. He did a pretty good job, at least I thought so. It seemed that Dad could do just about anything with his hands when he set his mind to it even though he only went to the seventh grade in school and could barely read and write.
About a week later the cow arrived much to our delight that is except maybe Mother who knew she would end up doing most of the tending since Dad worked all the time and my brother and I were a bit young for most of the chores. Besides, she knew as soon as the novelty wore off, we kids would lose interest anyway. Nevertheless, we thought the cow was really neat. She was a small timid red jersey that had big beautiful eyes and stood about as high as I could reach. I don’t remember if we gave her a name or not. I think we just called her “red cow”. Maybe her name was “Bessie” since all milk cows in Alabama where we came from seemed to be called Bessie.
The duties regarding the little red cow shaped up thusly: Mother did the milking, my brother and I staked her out in the nearby fields to graze and Dad took care of the feeding after he got home from work. We boys drove a stake into the soft sand and fastened a chain to the red cow’s neck. She could cover an area of about 20 yards radius, then we had to move her to another spot. At first it was an exciting, controlling a large (to us) beast, but after a few weeks the chore of leading her to a grazing spot and then moving her after a few hours became, well, a chore. My brother grew to hate the cow, claiming that she was his personal enemy and would attack him at every opportunity.
The sad part of this story was when the little red cow developed a blockage in one of her stomachs. It was a Sunday and Dad was home. I’d been indulging in my usual fantasies in the orange grove. When I heard the cow bawling, I returned to reality and started home. I emerged from the grove just in time to see a sight I never forgot. There was Dad with another man who was sticking a garden hose into the jersey’s rear end. (We had recently got city water to our back porch) The cow was bucking and howling, and occasionally striking out with one of her feet at my dad who was trying to hold her still while the other man wielded the hose. They were unsuccessful in unstopping the little heifer. She died anyway.
Dad buried the little red cow in the middling of the orange trees. (…couldn’t do that today) All else was forgotten as I cried over the passing of the little red cow. With the death of the cow, we lost our fresh milk and butter. I was glad to get rid of my chores associated with the red cow, one of which was to “churn” rich cream in a quart Mason jar until the remaining milk separated and the cream coagulated into butter. After the Jersey’s death, we had to use our scarce funds to buy milk and butter. I sadly missed the little red cow, but not the tending chores or the “churning”. We never got another cow.
****
Before the city installed a water line to our back porch, we had to get water from a hand pump located about 30 yards from the old yellow house. Drinking water was delivered to the house in a bucket and rested on a shelf attached to the back porch. Alongside the bucket, Mother placed a washpan and a family towel hanging on a nail. Whoever used the last of the water was supposed to lug another bucketful from the pump, but it was mostly my job.
The cool well water was a refreshing summer drink, but cold enough to raise goose bumps during our baths, and unbearable during the winter months. So, in the winter, I’d haul several bucketfuls to a No.4 washtub set in the kitchen by the kerosene stove. Mother would pour a kettle of hot water in the tub to take some of the chill off the pump water. After bathing we would stand near the stove to keep warm until we could dress.
During warm months, I often took baths near the pump in a washtub, usually taking a towel with me to dry and wrap around my nudity until I could get to the house. One day I forgot to take a towel and reluctant to put my soiled clothes back on, I decided to dash to the house naked. After all, I was just a kid, it was dusk, and the run would dry me. So I bundled my soiled clothes under my arm, studied the surrounding area for any living creature and finding none struck out with my privates flapping in the breeze.
I had taken only a few steps when to my everlasting mortification, two young girls happened to walking past on a sidewalk about 15 or so yards away. I don’t know how they escaped my scrutiny unless they had been walking behind a bush when I looked. They froze in their tracks at the sight of a naked boy about their age running just a few yards away. They covered their mouths, trying to stifle their laughter, but were unsuccessful. That’s when I heard the giggles; I also involuntarily froze for a few seconds, not sure whether I should cover my privates or my face. I stood, like an anatomically correct Greek sculpture, goose bumps and all for what seemed to me an eternity. Now anyone never having been a nine-year-old boy might not fittingly evaluate the level of utter chagrin I felt at the sound of the tittering. Ten seconds ticked off before I could gain my senses and hightail it to the shelter of my house. That three-minute dash home seemed to take at least a half hour!
****
People in today’s environment may wonder why my mother would allow me to learn how to smoke a pipe, especially since she was against smoking in general and strongly opposed to me starting. In the days of my youth, almost every man and most boys beyond the age of 12 smoked tobacco. Many women did too, mostly in the movies. Mother hated the smell, but tolerated it as practically all the other housewives sharing her distaste were bound by custom to do.
At a very young age, I started mimicking grownups by constructing make-believe cigars, cigarettes and pipes. After a few years, I surreptitiously graduated to actually smoking a wild weed known as “rabbit” tobacco, but that’s another story.
One day, after nagging my mother for permission to smoke one of my dad’s pipes, she said, “Fine go ahead.” I should have suspected there was something I didn’t know that caused her to relent, but I was too eager to worry about that.
I swaggered up to the shelf where my dad kept his pipes, dragged up a stool and began to examine them. I deliberated for several minutes, trying each one in turn to picture my image. I sniffed them one by one and settled on what appeared to be the oldest and most used of the lot conjecturing that it must be my dad’s favorite. Teetering on the stool, I managed to retrieve the tobacco cans. Then I grabbed several “stove-wood” strike-anywhere matches.
Clutching my treasures, matches, a can of Half-n-Half and one of Prince Albert., I hopped down from the stool and strode out to the front porch. I had already decided that the porch would be my venue of triumph. I was hoping there would be some passers-by, but nobody was in sight to witness my manly exhibition.
I pulled a rocking chair close to a post and sat down with my feet propped on the upright, packed tobacco in the bowl and tamped it down just like I’d seen my dad do many times. I was ready. I scraped the strike-anywhere matches on the post with a masculine sweep and fired up the Prince Albert my pipe. The aroma was so familiar; it was almost as if I had been smoking forever. The blue smoke curled up from the pipe in gentle whirls (It was a hot summer day with no breeze.) Before very long, the smoke wasn’t the only thing blue. My face began to turn green then an ashen blue. I found in later years that smoking a clean, dry pipe with good tobacco took a bit of getting use to, and the challenge of an old pipe corroded with years of accumulated tobacco tar was a mountain too high for many men and certainly too high for a nine-year-old boy trying to show off. I was so sick I missed my dinner. I hoped Mother wouldn’t tell my dad about smoking his pipe as I had intended to do, but didn’t because I became nauseated each time I thought about the escapade.
****
I’d never heard of Guinness Book of Records when at about ten I decided to set a record I thought I would be the most grapefruit eaten in one sitting. Big beautiful grapefruit trees shaded the yard and provided hundreds of grapefruit. Each tree’s spreading branches touching one another providing a huge canopy, not unlike a cavern. The deep shade was a respite from the hot Florida summer sunshine. This oasis was my province. It is where I spent a lot of my play-time; where any passerby would likely find me either at my workbench or perched on a sprawling limb.
That’s where I was, when I decided to set the record. I balanced in the crotch of two large limbs and began eating the big yellow Dunkin grapefruit. My legs were dangling down and my back was resting against the main bole so my hands were free. I could just reach out, grab a grapefruit, peel off the thick skin, separate the bitter membrane and eat the soft juicy meat inside. Each “plug” as we called the sections, could be separated easily and one by one I kept devouring them, creating a mound below of rind and other parts of the grapefruit I didn’t like. I consumed eighteen grapefruit before I couldn’t eat anymore! Yes, I crammed eighteen grapefruit in one sitting on a tree limb. Incredibly, I didn’t get sick, though admittedly I didn’t crave anymore for several days afterwards. I boasted a lot of my achievement, but nobody believed me. I even threw down the gauntlet and challenged my doubters totake me on in a grapefruit-eating contest. Nobody took the challenge, so as far as I’m concerned, I still hold the record.
****
When I was married, many years after living in the old yellow house, my wife and I lived in Johannesburg, South Africa. While there we noticed that the woodcarvers used a red seed with a black tip that was a good representation of an eyeball, though it gave the carved animal a look of rage or malevolence. I purchased several such carvings and took note of the similarity of the eyes to a seed that grew in Florida, that we called black-eyed-suzies. I don’t know why we called them that as I readily admit that they bore no resemblance to the flower with the same name.
When I returned to the U. S., I looked up the seed in an encyclopedia and discovered that they could be lethal when ingested! I had held dozens in my mouth over the years of my youth, so how could they be so toxic? Further reading revealed that if swallowed, they usually passed through the alimentary canal intact because of their tough outer covering.
When we were kids, we picked the seeds from their dried pods and used them in our peashooters. They were perfect and plentiful. Not only is it remarkable that the same seeds grew in both Africa and Florida, but that they served an important role in both places.
When ensconced in my secret hideout under a tangerine tree covered with the vines that produced the black-eyed-suzies, I could see out well enough to spot any marauders that might pass. And, if they did pass, I’d have a tremendous vantage point for launching my peashooter missiles.
It never crossed my mind that these pretty little seeds were poisonous, and neither did any of the other kids, I suspect. I never heard of anyone getting sick or dying from them. I guess a whole lot of youngsters owe their lives to indigestible covering. Sixty years after last shooting these little missiles through my peashooter, I still get goose pimples just thinking about it. It was just pure dumb luck that I never decided to chew any of them.
****
This section should probably carry the caption, “Don’t Try This at Home”. Leave this activity to an indestructible seven-year-old kid. I’m talking about the caves I dug in the vacant lot across from the old yellow house.
First, let me tell you about the vacant lot itself. My earliest memory of the lot was the smoking remnants of an old sawmill. In the old days, nobody could think of any use for the sawdust that was generated from sawing the trees into lumber, so it just piled up until it became too high to manage. When that happened, the sawmill owners just set it afire. Sawdust burns slowly with hardly any flame, and can smolder for months, even years.
The sawmill that operated in the vacant lot at one time was long gone when I began my forays, but smoking sawdust could still be found in spots. The only danger, as far as I know, was to barefoot youngsters, such as I, accidentally stepping on the hot ashes. The rest of the lot was covered by various weeds, including our prized rabbit tobacco. Yes, I even tried crumbling the dried leaves, wrapping them in paper torn from a grocery bag dispensed by the All-American store, and puffing the smoke. My cowboy heroes seldom smoked, but their arch enemies did, and I mimicked them by sucking in the smoke and blowing it out through my nose, but in the immortal words of President Clinton, “I didn’t inhale.”
Prickly pears grew everywhere. These small flat-growing cacti permeated the lot, and with their long sharp spikes were far more frightening to the barefoot boy than the hot ashes. The prickly pears have two kinds of thorns; one set is the kind already mentioned, the other small flexible ones that didn’t hurt when stepped upon, but could bury into the skin and fester over time. Since they didn’t hurt much, they were hard to pinpoint and extremely hard to grasp and pull out. Many youthful hours were spent in plucking these pesky little devils out of my feet, one by one.
The other plentiful flora was the wild guava bushes. In the days of my youth, guava bushes grew almost everywhere around town, and many people tried to eradicate them as weeds. I didn’t. I love to eat the fruit and the bushes provided really neat hiding places. I’ll come back to the guava bushes later.
Florida soil is sandy and can be spaded easily, so we kids often dug holes just because it was easy. One day I began to shovel near a stand of guava bushes. By the time I finished, I had created a series of small subterranean rooms and tunnels. During the digging the loose soil kept caving in. I knew that if I was caught in one of my caves by a cave-in, I could be trapped, so I shored up the walls as best I could and reinforced the roof with some scrap metal left over from the tin roof of the sawmill. As if hiding in the caves wasn’t dangerous enough, I sometimes built small fires in the main room and stuck embers in the wall to provide light. I loved my cave even if I was constantly leery of cave-ins. (I wasn’t aware of the dangers of carbon monoxide buildup from the fires.) But what the heck, nothing serious could happen to a nine-year-old.
The part of my secret cave I prized most was the tunnel that snaked off from the main room with an exit inside a clump of guava bushes. This passageway allowed me to disappear into my hole and emerge several yards away hidden from prying eyes by the dense guava bushes. Some may not realize that clandestine activity was the essence of a nine-year-old kid’s escapades.
I could, and did, dream up all kinds of fantasies associated with the cave, tunnel and bushes. I knew from my extensive research in comic books that Batman and Robin kept their paraphernalia in a bat-cave, and Superman’s parents lived in some sort of mysterious cave. Even the Green Hornet was known to store his “hornetmobile” (or whatever he called it; I don’t remember.) in a secret cave. But fantasizing was not the only enjoyment I got from the tunnel-bushes setup.
There was a sandy lane that connected downtown to the old yellow house’s lot. Not many people had cars in those days and most walked everywhere. People going to town used the lane and cut across the edge of our lot going to and from the settlements beyond. One of the uses of the tunnel was to emerge under cover of the guava bushes and make unearthly noises to scare the people walking home after dusk. My favorite targets were the drunks that staggered by the thicket. I still chuckle at some of their antics when I let out an eerie cry. The funniest times were when I pulled this stunt on one that had stopped to relieve his bladder.
****
The street that ran in front of the old yellow house was named Center Street. It got its name from the huge boarding house on the corner. The old rooming house had a sign with glass marbles spelling out the name, “The Center House”. I marveled at both the unique sign and the immensity of the frame house. It dwarfed the old yellow house and every other building near it.
The Center House had a porch that wrapped around the corner of Lake Avenue and Center Street. It had a tin roof like the old yellow house. I often wondered if I could find pennies in the rain-holes below the eaves, but the owners didn’t like us kids hanging around and besides we were a bit leery of the itinerant citrus workers who lived there. They were probably honest, hardworking men trying to survive during the Great Depression, but they looked sinister (as did most strangers) to my brother and me. On Sunday’s, some of them would sit and rock on the wrap-around porch and play a musical instrument, mostly harmonicas or sometimes guitars, stopping from time to time to roll a smoke from a sack of Bull Durham tobacco. Others chewed wads from Brown’s Mule or Bloodhound plugs. They didn’t have much spare time for rocking or playing though as they worked from before sunup until after sunset, except on Sundays.
****
Everybody knows that hurricanes are a part of the Florida scene. Not many people know the thrill (brain numbing fear?) of enduring a full-blown hurricane in an old wooden house.
The family battery-powered Sears & Roebuck radio had been warning of an impending hurricane for two days—it was due to hit us this very night! Some might ask what preparations we made, but in those days nobody knew what to do. After all, it was an act of God. A few people sought shelter in whatever concrete block building they could find. There were few of these structures so most family stayed put and hoped for the best.
Winds picked up about dusk, gusts began hitting 70 plus miles per hour (officially hurricane force) and Dad came home from work to weather the storm with the rest of us. The Eucalyptus tree began to sway and bend perilously, one of the main trunks banging against the porch roof. The small funny-shaped fruits began to mix with the rain and beat a loud tattoo on the tin roof. We “battened down” as much of the outside as we could and gathered in the living room to sweat out the onslaught. By this time, we had electricity--one light hanging by a cord in the middle of the room--but we lost power right away and resorted to our familiar kerosene lamps for light. We didn’t have to worry about drinking water or meals for that matter as we still had our hand-pump and Mother cooked on a kerosene stove. The radio, of course, continued to ominously chart the path of the oncoming storm, thanks to the enormous battery that powered the receiver.
About 7:00 p.m., the full fury of the hurricane hit town. The sturdy old pine boards began to creak and groan joining the symphony of the pelting rain and Eucalyptus fruit, now bombarding the window panes as well, since they were being driven almost horizontally by the wind.
Though nervous, we kids drew on the stoic nature of our mother, and were holding up fairly well. But Dad was a nervous wreak; maybe because of the innate psyche of men to be the family protector. Anyway, with the walls shaking violently, the noise from the elements beating on the tin roof, and the howling of the wind was too much, and Dad decided we would abandon the old yellow house for a neighbors concrete block house about 100 yards up the street. Getting there proved to be an ordeal, with the wind almost carrying me away before my mother grabbed me by my collar and dragged me into the safety of the better constructed house.
When it was all over, the old yellow house stood just as we had left—no damage whatsoever—though the trees in the yard took a beating; debris everywhere. We weathered other storms while living in the house, but none more frightening.
****
The old yellow house was ugly, drafty, cold in the winter, hot in the summer (tin roof that radiated heat from the sun) and had the barest of amenities, but we kids loved it, and I still miss it. My siblings might argue that the house wasn’t really ugly as it was not much different from others around town. Besides, ugliness, as well as beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Still, others might argue that the whole town was ugly as it had burnt down twice and reconstructed after each fire without much city planning. About 2,500, mostly Alabama emigrants, lived around the settlement and they were all dirt poor, grubbing out a living in the citrus industry or closely ancillary businesses. So the argument goes that the old yellow house was a fitting example of the times.
The old eucalyptus tree stood between the old yellow house and the street curbing built during the great Florida boom of the ‘20s. The street, itself, was black asphalt, cracked and bumpy after the years in the hot Florida sun. I don’t know how old the tree was when I lived in the old yellow house, but it appeared ancient then. It didn’t look like the eucalyptus I saw in Australia in later years—the one’s that koalas like to hang out in—but far more eye-catching. I loved that old tree with its soft, spongy brown-pinkish bark and the tiny pungent fruit shaped like miniature mushrooms. Even today, I can close my eyes and smell the pleasantly astringent odor. The tree is gone now, except in my memory. Nowadays, when I have occasion to pass where it once stood, I’m engulfed in a wave of nostalgia that gives rise to the sadness of my bygone youth.
The intriguing old behemoth stood squarely in front of the house. When the wind blew, one of the three major boles bumped against the tin roof of the porch. During the storms of the annual hurricane season, the groaning of the huge limb rubbing against the rooftop and the wind whistling eerily through the shiny elliptical leaves usually sent chill bumps up my spine, and the younger us kids scurrying for the company of grownups or under the four-poster beds.
The porch that spanned the full length of the house was my domain, my retreat, my library. During the lazy days of summer, I spent hours sprawled in a porch-swing reading funny books that I traded with other boys in town. About once a week, I loaded up those that I’d finished reading and made the rounds swapping them for some I had not read. It was not wasted time as, we learned a lot from our funny books; we learned respect for the heroes and heroines that always did the right thing, about patriotism from the WWII themes in some, and about history (a lot of real history was mixed with the fiction). We indulged in the sci-fi fantasies that in many cases proved to prophetic; we saw futuristic jet-planes, helicopters, ray guns (lasers) and souped-up cars that could travel twice as fast as any we knew about. And we dreamed that one day we would drive, or least ride, in one of these amazing machines.
The old house was made of un-planed southern pine painted a dull yellow. The inside walls were bare. Frequent summer rains beat a tattoo on the corrugated tin roof that reminded me of the “Tommy-guns” gangsters used on radio programs and in the movies. There was just one floor divided into a living room, a dining room, a kitchen and two bedrooms, one large enough for three or four beds. The smaller one was where my brother and I slept. When my sister was born, she slept in the big room with my mother and dad. Then, when my youngest brother came along there were three of us in the small bedroom.
After dark, we kids listened to radio programs on a battery powered Sears and Roebuck radio and studied our school lessons by kerosene lamps in the large living room. When the weather turned cool, my dad installed wood burning stove in the middle of this room. There were only two warm places in the drafty old house during winter months, crowded as close as we dared to the wood-burner and near the kitchen stove when Mother was cooking.
Housing was hard to find. Few houses were built during the depression; nobody had any money to buy them anyway. All out effort to support the war effort delayed housing construction even more. Finally, my dad was able to bargain with a local lawyer for low rent on the old yellow house. I don’t know, maybe nobody else wanted to live in the shabby old house, but we did, and we loved it. And we got it for $10 a month!
The walls were made of one-inch thick slabs of southern yellow pine, a wood that was almost impervious to rot and insects. Batten boards covered the cracks between the upright timbers on the outside, but left gaps on the inside. The floor had been milled a little smoother. We covered it with linoleum. A lightening bolt zapped a window sill in the kitchen sometime in the past and left a circle of charred wood which we never bothered to repair. Whether we couldn’t afford to have it fixed, or let it be because of a subconscious awe, I’m not sure.
The loft was a place of intrigue and mystery. Fascinating, albeit strange, noises muffled their way from the loft through the ceiling and floated around eerily in my bedroom. At night I often lay in my bed listening to ghostly emanations from the musty space overhead. Small animals lurked in the bushes and orange grove near the house and probably some took up residence, or at least visited the loft, but in imagination, poltergeists contributed as well. My dad tried everything he knew to get rid of the vermin. He put out terrible smelling poison, set traps and even tried to shoot some with a 22-rifle. Nothing worked and I reckon the invaders were still there when the house was finally torn down.
The windows had screens! Considering the plethora of flying insects making Florida their home, screens were dearly welcomed; malaria bearing mosquitoes were fairly common in those days, and a lot of people contracted the disease. Many of the Auburndale-ites had migrated from Alabama farms where their houses rarely had screens and relied on smudge pots of smoldering rags beneath the beds to combat the hordes of nightly insects. We considered it a luxury to be rid of the stink of smoldering rags. Quinine tablets were a common household antidote. Kids were administered Groves Chill Tonic in the spring---a foul tasting liquid with clouds of quinine particles that floated about when the medicine was shaken.
Mother cooked on a kerosene stove with portable oven placed over two of the five stove burners. She baked the ubiquitous biscuits--syrup without fluffy biscuits was like Amos without Andy--to go with the home-brewed cane syrup we traded from other migrants and visitors. Actually the cook stove was fairly efficient and served many functions; not the least welcomed was to heat water for our baths during the winter. What time we didn’t spend in the living room, we spent in the kitchen, warmed by the cook-stove and enveloped in the aroma of country cooking.
Our furniture was mostly discarded or homemade hand-me-downs from kinfolk in Alabama. It was just fine though, and suited the rest of the “décor” in the rough hewn interior of our castle.
We never missed what we never had---electricity and indoor plumbing---so when providence provided them, the old house took on elegance like it had never had before. The electricians put a drop-cord from the ceiling and attached a socket to house a naked light bulb. It was switched on by pulling a string that dangled beneath the bulb. City water was brought to the back porch and no farther.
****
I think there were ten grapefruit trees in our yard. These mammoth old trees not only gave us plenty of grapefruit, deep shades during the hot Florida summer days, but were fantastic climbing gyms on which we could sit and eat fruit, swing like monkeys from limb to limb, or build tree houses copied from “Tarzan of the Apes” movies and comic books.
I built my first woodworking shop beneath this spreading canopy of leaves. It wasn’t much of a shop in the true sense, as I only had two tools—a cheap pocket knife and a small hammer—and the workbench was nothing more than a four-foot, two-by-eight board with small compartments for various sizes of nails. Nevertheless, it served my purpose just fine; the only problem was when it rained the tools and nails rusted requiring repetitive cleaning and greasing with lard from my mother’s kitchen. After several months of saving and scrimping from my pitiable earnings from various chores, I was able to buy a coping saw that opened up a whole new world of woodworking.
Mrs. Mattie Van Fleet Dickey, the diminutive sister of a WWII four-star general, taught her third-grade-boys woodworking. We begged for empty apple boxes from the All-American grocery store and used the soft white pine wood for our projects, usually consisting of animal toys. At home, I often whittled wooden guns, which were verboten in Ms. Dickey’s room, and airplanes patterned after the WW II war planes in the comic books. I continued to scrounge the apple boxes for my hobby for many years afterward. The smell of northern white pine wood still stirs my nostalgic memories of Ms. Dickey and those childhood days.
****
When I was about five, a couple of my buddies and I decided to plant a garden. Each of us managed to wheedle a nickel from our parents to buy some seeds from Hancock’s Dime Store. The only problem was that when we got to the store, my buddies decided that we would swipe the seeds and keep the money. I was against the idea, but was overruled and we pocketed some seed packets without paying for them. We planted our garden, but I couldn’t keep the theft out of my mind and my conscience finally drove me to confess a few days later. I couldn’t sleep. One morning about 3:00 a.m., bawling like a baby I owned up to stealing the seeds. One thing all of us kids had was a conscience. We figured that it was God’s punishment that our garden never sprouted anything.
****
A four-acre citrus grove came with the house, mostly orange trees, but there was one row of tangerines, and as I mentioned earlier, grapefruit trees grew in the yard. A Japanese persimmon, a hybrid grapefruit/lemon and a mulberry tree rounded out our fruit orchard. I’ll write about the persimmon tree in a minute, but just in passing I’ll mention that I used to climb up the mulberry tree and eat the fruit. I don’t know if I was supposed to do so, but I did after shooing away the birds and brushing away the ever present worms that loved the fruit as much as I did. And, the huge, bumpy-skin hybrid lemon was so sour my mouth still draws up thinking about trying to eat the fruit. My favorite fruit was the Japanese persimmons that grew on a scrawny tree at the edge of the yard. It was an integral part of the old yellow house aura. For the reader not familiar with a Japanese persimmon tree, let me explain its unique features. It does not resemble the native persimmon trees at all, and the fruit is as different as a tangerine and grapefruit. The tree itself is, as I said, was scrawny, and when the limbs were laden with the fleshy fruit drooped almost to the ground and seemed continually in danger of breaking off. In some years, when the fruit crop was plentiful, I had to scrounge up something to prop the lower branches.
The persimmons were scrumptious and those that could be salvaged from the hungry birds, opossums, raccoons, and marauding teenager thieves were savored by us or sometimes sold to the All-American grocery for a nickel apiece. During the height of the season, I had to hurry home from school to protect the fruit from kids passing by on their way home. Without my protection, they would strip the persimmons in just a few days. Though I threatened the potential filchers with my slingshot and bellicose language, I never actually shot at any of them. I still miss the emaciated little tree and look for any sign of it as I pass the area these days. Of course it is long gone, but I look anyway.
Another basis of pride and joy on our property was an outhouse built under President Roosevelt’s Works Projects Administration (WPA). This toilet sat regally on a slab of concrete about thirty yards from the house. Its solid structure was a source of awe for all of us as it contrasted mightily with the somewhat haphazard construction of the old yellow house. Visitors often asked how we rated such a fine outhouse. I could never answer them, but I remember that during the lean depression years of our early life in Auburndale, my dad took a job with Roosevelt’s reconstruction project called the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) The CCC was responsible for building bridges, forest ranger cabins, state and federal parks and campsites, and many other projects that are still used today. Not the least of these undertakings was the fine WPA toilets that dotted the rural areas of the U. S. It is well worth the reader’s time to “Google” “CCC” and read about this army of men desperately needing work during the Great Depression and their wonderful contributions.
****
Well, I’ll admit up front that the “treasure” I’m about to tell you about, is not a treasure in the usual sense of the word. No gold, silver, jewels, etc. But in my mind and that of my younger brother what we found in the back yard of the old yellow house was nonetheless a treasure.
The afternoon was warm and sunny; the ubiquitous single-engine airplane was droning above. Although I seldom fell into the miasma of boredom, I had no really pressing activity. I spied a rusty shovel with a broken handle leaning against the yellow wall, wondered what it was doing there, and ambled over to where it was lazing. My juvenile brain turned over what interesting activities I might put the shovel to use doing. I guess I was about eight years old and had not yet conceived of the cave in the vacant lot. That came later. I leaned on the instrument and decided that despite the intrinsic dangers of my mother’s ire, I’d dig a hole in sandy soil just back of the house.
After dragging the shovel around for a while, I decided on just the right spot---right in the middle of the clearing that was our back yard. We didn’t have a lawn and our foot traffic had pretty much rid the area of any weeds to contend with. As soon as I was sure that Mother was not watching from inside the house, I hopped on the shovel as I would a pogo stick. Being a bit chubby, my weight was enough to push the instrument into the soft dirt, after which I reached up the handle as far as I could and used my weight to lever out a spade full of earth. As I stood looking at the small hole, I thought,”Well this isn’t going to be so difficult.” So, I repeated my last maneuver in the same pit.
That’s when my adventure began! The edge of the spade clanked against something hard. “Wow” my eight-year-old brain thought! “That’s got to be a treasure!” I dropped to my knees and began to scratch away the lose soil. There it was! A mottled brown and tan “thing” was just barely visible. I was as excited as only an eight-year-old can be. An hour later, sweat dripping off my naked upper body (most boys wore neither shirts nor shoes in those days) my mother stepped out on the back porch to check on my brother and me. I forgot to mention that when my younger sibling heard the clank, he dropped his examination of a ladybird crawling on a dog-fennel at the edge of the yard and started digging in my hole with me. Mother yelled at both of us, not very politely, and demanded to know what in the world we were doing digging up our yard.
“Come on over Mother, I’ve found something I think is a buried treasure.” When she saw the beginning outline of some kind of ceramic urn, she granted permission to continue.
When we finally stopped finding any more “treasure”, my brother and I had uncovered six whole jugs and a dozen or more shards of broken urns and jugs. The smallest was a gallon jug, and the largest was an urn big enough my brother could fit inside!
When Dad came home, he and Mother studied the matter and proclaimed we had found the remains of an old moonshine whiskey still. We kids weren’t sure just what a still was, but it sounded both intriguing and a little scary when we found out that a still was illegal and subject to raids by the police and rival moonshiners. There was nothing in the urns, jars and jugs so we didn’t worry very long about being thrown in jail. We used the intact earthenware for several years and reburied the broken pieces. In later years, with youthful embellishment, we told and retold the exploit over and over.
The earthenware jugs were not the only treasure we found at the old yellow house. The corrugated tin roof I mentioned above did not have gutters and during rains, the water gushed down the steeply pitched roof via narrow troughs inherent in the sheets of tin, and gouged small holes in the ground below. After a downpour, my brother and I searched these holes for pennies. Yes, pennies. And, we often found coppers uncovered by the raindrops. I never found out where the pennies came from, possibly from my mother or dad throwing them on the roof to be washed down, but neither of them admitted to doing so. One reason we believed them was that money, including pennies, was so scarce that we couldn’t imagine them throwing money around like that. The source of the “Lincolns” remains a mystery to this day.
One day a couple of weeks later, I was whiling away the time beneath the hybrid lemon/grapefruit tree mentioned earlier. The hot Florida sun was bearing down on the tree and shooting beams that streamed through the few spaces between the leaves. I had been unsuccessfully hunting birds with my slingshot and at present was at loose ends, no immediate plans for any venture. The sun caused wafting heat eddies to rise from the reflective sand around the tree, but I was relatively cool sitting in the shade. After a while, I began to feel drowsy, so I decided to get up and move around. As I prepared to stand, I felt something hard against my knee. Relatively fresh from finding my treasure in the back yard, I thought, “Wow, another treasure?” I scratched away the topsoil and uncovered a rusty pistol! My heart started thumping and my hands shook at the prospect of actually holding a real pistol. I looked in the revolver’s cylinder for bullets; there were none. Judging from its condition, it had lain hidden away in the sandy soil beneath the tree for a long time. I let my imagination run wild as I turned the weapon over in my hands. I saw right away it didn’t look like a cowboy’s six-shooter, like those we saw in the free motion pictures in town, and like replicas some of the kids slung from their hips in fancy holsters. I figured it must be a gangster’s gat.
When I tired of examining the old gun, I took it home and scraped off the rust and crusted sand as best I could. As soon as Mother saw my find, she ordered me to get rid of the thing even though it was obvious it couldn’t be fired. She said it was probably a murder weapon that was hidden by a killer and would no doubt have a curse or something attached. Or, maybe it was hidden by the same person that ran the moonshine still. I liked the latter conjecture best.
I often sat under in the shade and made up stories in which I was either a revenue agent, or sometimes a moonshiner. I could picture an overall clad “moonshiner” with a long beard, floppy felt hat and my rusty pistol tucked in a belt around his waist and a snarl on his face. I never did find out any more about the weapon and eventually reburied it where I found it. Still, every now and then afterwards, I’d retrieve my secret treasure and fantasize some more. I wonder if it is still there waiting for another kid to find. So much for the great mystery of the moonshiner’s buried six-shooter.
****
The landlord approached Dad one day and asked if we would be interested in a joint effort with a cow. The proposal was that the landlord would buy the cow and we would tend her and share the milk with him. The proposition sounded like a good deal, so Dad built a cow pen using scrap lumber and pieces of corrugated tin salvaged from a wrecked building. He did a pretty good job, at least I thought so. It seemed that Dad could do just about anything with his hands when he set his mind to it even though he only went to the seventh grade in school and could barely read and write.
About a week later the cow arrived much to our delight that is except maybe Mother who knew she would end up doing most of the tending since Dad worked all the time and my brother and I were a bit young for most of the chores. Besides, she knew as soon as the novelty wore off, we kids would lose interest anyway. Nevertheless, we thought the cow was really neat. She was a small timid red jersey that had big beautiful eyes and stood about as high as I could reach. I don’t remember if we gave her a name or not. I think we just called her “red cow”. Maybe her name was “Bessie” since all milk cows in Alabama where we came from seemed to be called Bessie.
The duties regarding the little red cow shaped up thusly: Mother did the milking, my brother and I staked her out in the nearby fields to graze and Dad took care of the feeding after he got home from work. We boys drove a stake into the soft sand and fastened a chain to the red cow’s neck. She could cover an area of about 20 yards radius, then we had to move her to another spot. At first it was an exciting, controlling a large (to us) beast, but after a few weeks the chore of leading her to a grazing spot and then moving her after a few hours became, well, a chore. My brother grew to hate the cow, claiming that she was his personal enemy and would attack him at every opportunity.
The sad part of this story was when the little red cow developed a blockage in one of her stomachs. It was a Sunday and Dad was home. I’d been indulging in my usual fantasies in the orange grove. When I heard the cow bawling, I returned to reality and started home. I emerged from the grove just in time to see a sight I never forgot. There was Dad with another man who was sticking a garden hose into the jersey’s rear end. (We had recently got city water to our back porch) The cow was bucking and howling, and occasionally striking out with one of her feet at my dad who was trying to hold her still while the other man wielded the hose. They were unsuccessful in unstopping the little heifer. She died anyway.
Dad buried the little red cow in the middling of the orange trees. (…couldn’t do that today) All else was forgotten as I cried over the passing of the little red cow. With the death of the cow, we lost our fresh milk and butter. I was glad to get rid of my chores associated with the red cow, one of which was to “churn” rich cream in a quart Mason jar until the remaining milk separated and the cream coagulated into butter. After the Jersey’s death, we had to use our scarce funds to buy milk and butter. I sadly missed the little red cow, but not the tending chores or the “churning”. We never got another cow.
****
Before the city installed a water line to our back porch, we had to get water from a hand pump located about 30 yards from the old yellow house. Drinking water was delivered to the house in a bucket and rested on a shelf attached to the back porch. Alongside the bucket, Mother placed a washpan and a family towel hanging on a nail. Whoever used the last of the water was supposed to lug another bucketful from the pump, but it was mostly my job.
The cool well water was a refreshing summer drink, but cold enough to raise goose bumps during our baths, and unbearable during the winter months. So, in the winter, I’d haul several bucketfuls to a No.4 washtub set in the kitchen by the kerosene stove. Mother would pour a kettle of hot water in the tub to take some of the chill off the pump water. After bathing we would stand near the stove to keep warm until we could dress.
During warm months, I often took baths near the pump in a washtub, usually taking a towel with me to dry and wrap around my nudity until I could get to the house. One day I forgot to take a towel and reluctant to put my soiled clothes back on, I decided to dash to the house naked. After all, I was just a kid, it was dusk, and the run would dry me. So I bundled my soiled clothes under my arm, studied the surrounding area for any living creature and finding none struck out with my privates flapping in the breeze.
I had taken only a few steps when to my everlasting mortification, two young girls happened to walking past on a sidewalk about 15 or so yards away. I don’t know how they escaped my scrutiny unless they had been walking behind a bush when I looked. They froze in their tracks at the sight of a naked boy about their age running just a few yards away. They covered their mouths, trying to stifle their laughter, but were unsuccessful. That’s when I heard the giggles; I also involuntarily froze for a few seconds, not sure whether I should cover my privates or my face. I stood, like an anatomically correct Greek sculpture, goose bumps and all for what seemed to me an eternity. Now anyone never having been a nine-year-old boy might not fittingly evaluate the level of utter chagrin I felt at the sound of the tittering. Ten seconds ticked off before I could gain my senses and hightail it to the shelter of my house. That three-minute dash home seemed to take at least a half hour!
****
People in today’s environment may wonder why my mother would allow me to learn how to smoke a pipe, especially since she was against smoking in general and strongly opposed to me starting. In the days of my youth, almost every man and most boys beyond the age of 12 smoked tobacco. Many women did too, mostly in the movies. Mother hated the smell, but tolerated it as practically all the other housewives sharing her distaste were bound by custom to do.
At a very young age, I started mimicking grownups by constructing make-believe cigars, cigarettes and pipes. After a few years, I surreptitiously graduated to actually smoking a wild weed known as “rabbit” tobacco, but that’s another story.
One day, after nagging my mother for permission to smoke one of my dad’s pipes, she said, “Fine go ahead.” I should have suspected there was something I didn’t know that caused her to relent, but I was too eager to worry about that.
I swaggered up to the shelf where my dad kept his pipes, dragged up a stool and began to examine them. I deliberated for several minutes, trying each one in turn to picture my image. I sniffed them one by one and settled on what appeared to be the oldest and most used of the lot conjecturing that it must be my dad’s favorite. Teetering on the stool, I managed to retrieve the tobacco cans. Then I grabbed several “stove-wood” strike-anywhere matches.
Clutching my treasures, matches, a can of Half-n-Half and one of Prince Albert., I hopped down from the stool and strode out to the front porch. I had already decided that the porch would be my venue of triumph. I was hoping there would be some passers-by, but nobody was in sight to witness my manly exhibition.
I pulled a rocking chair close to a post and sat down with my feet propped on the upright, packed tobacco in the bowl and tamped it down just like I’d seen my dad do many times. I was ready. I scraped the strike-anywhere matches on the post with a masculine sweep and fired up the Prince Albert my pipe. The aroma was so familiar; it was almost as if I had been smoking forever. The blue smoke curled up from the pipe in gentle whirls (It was a hot summer day with no breeze.) Before very long, the smoke wasn’t the only thing blue. My face began to turn green then an ashen blue. I found in later years that smoking a clean, dry pipe with good tobacco took a bit of getting use to, and the challenge of an old pipe corroded with years of accumulated tobacco tar was a mountain too high for many men and certainly too high for a nine-year-old boy trying to show off. I was so sick I missed my dinner. I hoped Mother wouldn’t tell my dad about smoking his pipe as I had intended to do, but didn’t because I became nauseated each time I thought about the escapade.
****
I’d never heard of Guinness Book of Records when at about ten I decided to set a record I thought I would be the most grapefruit eaten in one sitting. Big beautiful grapefruit trees shaded the yard and provided hundreds of grapefruit. Each tree’s spreading branches touching one another providing a huge canopy, not unlike a cavern. The deep shade was a respite from the hot Florida summer sunshine. This oasis was my province. It is where I spent a lot of my play-time; where any passerby would likely find me either at my workbench or perched on a sprawling limb.
That’s where I was, when I decided to set the record. I balanced in the crotch of two large limbs and began eating the big yellow Dunkin grapefruit. My legs were dangling down and my back was resting against the main bole so my hands were free. I could just reach out, grab a grapefruit, peel off the thick skin, separate the bitter membrane and eat the soft juicy meat inside. Each “plug” as we called the sections, could be separated easily and one by one I kept devouring them, creating a mound below of rind and other parts of the grapefruit I didn’t like. I consumed eighteen grapefruit before I couldn’t eat anymore! Yes, I crammed eighteen grapefruit in one sitting on a tree limb. Incredibly, I didn’t get sick, though admittedly I didn’t crave anymore for several days afterwards. I boasted a lot of my achievement, but nobody believed me. I even threw down the gauntlet and challenged my doubters totake me on in a grapefruit-eating contest. Nobody took the challenge, so as far as I’m concerned, I still hold the record.
****
When I was married, many years after living in the old yellow house, my wife and I lived in Johannesburg, South Africa. While there we noticed that the woodcarvers used a red seed with a black tip that was a good representation of an eyeball, though it gave the carved animal a look of rage or malevolence. I purchased several such carvings and took note of the similarity of the eyes to a seed that grew in Florida, that we called black-eyed-suzies. I don’t know why we called them that as I readily admit that they bore no resemblance to the flower with the same name.
When I returned to the U. S., I looked up the seed in an encyclopedia and discovered that they could be lethal when ingested! I had held dozens in my mouth over the years of my youth, so how could they be so toxic? Further reading revealed that if swallowed, they usually passed through the alimentary canal intact because of their tough outer covering.
When we were kids, we picked the seeds from their dried pods and used them in our peashooters. They were perfect and plentiful. Not only is it remarkable that the same seeds grew in both Africa and Florida, but that they served an important role in both places.
When ensconced in my secret hideout under a tangerine tree covered with the vines that produced the black-eyed-suzies, I could see out well enough to spot any marauders that might pass. And, if they did pass, I’d have a tremendous vantage point for launching my peashooter missiles.
It never crossed my mind that these pretty little seeds were poisonous, and neither did any of the other kids, I suspect. I never heard of anyone getting sick or dying from them. I guess a whole lot of youngsters owe their lives to indigestible covering. Sixty years after last shooting these little missiles through my peashooter, I still get goose pimples just thinking about it. It was just pure dumb luck that I never decided to chew any of them.
****
This section should probably carry the caption, “Don’t Try This at Home”. Leave this activity to an indestructible seven-year-old kid. I’m talking about the caves I dug in the vacant lot across from the old yellow house.
First, let me tell you about the vacant lot itself. My earliest memory of the lot was the smoking remnants of an old sawmill. In the old days, nobody could think of any use for the sawdust that was generated from sawing the trees into lumber, so it just piled up until it became too high to manage. When that happened, the sawmill owners just set it afire. Sawdust burns slowly with hardly any flame, and can smolder for months, even years.
The sawmill that operated in the vacant lot at one time was long gone when I began my forays, but smoking sawdust could still be found in spots. The only danger, as far as I know, was to barefoot youngsters, such as I, accidentally stepping on the hot ashes. The rest of the lot was covered by various weeds, including our prized rabbit tobacco. Yes, I even tried crumbling the dried leaves, wrapping them in paper torn from a grocery bag dispensed by the All-American store, and puffing the smoke. My cowboy heroes seldom smoked, but their arch enemies did, and I mimicked them by sucking in the smoke and blowing it out through my nose, but in the immortal words of President Clinton, “I didn’t inhale.”
Prickly pears grew everywhere. These small flat-growing cacti permeated the lot, and with their long sharp spikes were far more frightening to the barefoot boy than the hot ashes. The prickly pears have two kinds of thorns; one set is the kind already mentioned, the other small flexible ones that didn’t hurt when stepped upon, but could bury into the skin and fester over time. Since they didn’t hurt much, they were hard to pinpoint and extremely hard to grasp and pull out. Many youthful hours were spent in plucking these pesky little devils out of my feet, one by one.
The other plentiful flora was the wild guava bushes. In the days of my youth, guava bushes grew almost everywhere around town, and many people tried to eradicate them as weeds. I didn’t. I love to eat the fruit and the bushes provided really neat hiding places. I’ll come back to the guava bushes later.
Florida soil is sandy and can be spaded easily, so we kids often dug holes just because it was easy. One day I began to shovel near a stand of guava bushes. By the time I finished, I had created a series of small subterranean rooms and tunnels. During the digging the loose soil kept caving in. I knew that if I was caught in one of my caves by a cave-in, I could be trapped, so I shored up the walls as best I could and reinforced the roof with some scrap metal left over from the tin roof of the sawmill. As if hiding in the caves wasn’t dangerous enough, I sometimes built small fires in the main room and stuck embers in the wall to provide light. I loved my cave even if I was constantly leery of cave-ins. (I wasn’t aware of the dangers of carbon monoxide buildup from the fires.) But what the heck, nothing serious could happen to a nine-year-old.
The part of my secret cave I prized most was the tunnel that snaked off from the main room with an exit inside a clump of guava bushes. This passageway allowed me to disappear into my hole and emerge several yards away hidden from prying eyes by the dense guava bushes. Some may not realize that clandestine activity was the essence of a nine-year-old kid’s escapades.
I could, and did, dream up all kinds of fantasies associated with the cave, tunnel and bushes. I knew from my extensive research in comic books that Batman and Robin kept their paraphernalia in a bat-cave, and Superman’s parents lived in some sort of mysterious cave. Even the Green Hornet was known to store his “hornetmobile” (or whatever he called it; I don’t remember.) in a secret cave. But fantasizing was not the only enjoyment I got from the tunnel-bushes setup.
There was a sandy lane that connected downtown to the old yellow house’s lot. Not many people had cars in those days and most walked everywhere. People going to town used the lane and cut across the edge of our lot going to and from the settlements beyond. One of the uses of the tunnel was to emerge under cover of the guava bushes and make unearthly noises to scare the people walking home after dusk. My favorite targets were the drunks that staggered by the thicket. I still chuckle at some of their antics when I let out an eerie cry. The funniest times were when I pulled this stunt on one that had stopped to relieve his bladder.
****
The street that ran in front of the old yellow house was named Center Street. It got its name from the huge boarding house on the corner. The old rooming house had a sign with glass marbles spelling out the name, “The Center House”. I marveled at both the unique sign and the immensity of the frame house. It dwarfed the old yellow house and every other building near it.
The Center House had a porch that wrapped around the corner of Lake Avenue and Center Street. It had a tin roof like the old yellow house. I often wondered if I could find pennies in the rain-holes below the eaves, but the owners didn’t like us kids hanging around and besides we were a bit leery of the itinerant citrus workers who lived there. They were probably honest, hardworking men trying to survive during the Great Depression, but they looked sinister (as did most strangers) to my brother and me. On Sunday’s, some of them would sit and rock on the wrap-around porch and play a musical instrument, mostly harmonicas or sometimes guitars, stopping from time to time to roll a smoke from a sack of Bull Durham tobacco. Others chewed wads from Brown’s Mule or Bloodhound plugs. They didn’t have much spare time for rocking or playing though as they worked from before sunup until after sunset, except on Sundays.
****
Everybody knows that hurricanes are a part of the Florida scene. Not many people know the thrill (brain numbing fear?) of enduring a full-blown hurricane in an old wooden house.
The family battery-powered Sears & Roebuck radio had been warning of an impending hurricane for two days—it was due to hit us this very night! Some might ask what preparations we made, but in those days nobody knew what to do. After all, it was an act of God. A few people sought shelter in whatever concrete block building they could find. There were few of these structures so most family stayed put and hoped for the best.
Winds picked up about dusk, gusts began hitting 70 plus miles per hour (officially hurricane force) and Dad came home from work to weather the storm with the rest of us. The Eucalyptus tree began to sway and bend perilously, one of the main trunks banging against the porch roof. The small funny-shaped fruits began to mix with the rain and beat a loud tattoo on the tin roof. We “battened down” as much of the outside as we could and gathered in the living room to sweat out the onslaught. By this time, we had electricity--one light hanging by a cord in the middle of the room--but we lost power right away and resorted to our familiar kerosene lamps for light. We didn’t have to worry about drinking water or meals for that matter as we still had our hand-pump and Mother cooked on a kerosene stove. The radio, of course, continued to ominously chart the path of the oncoming storm, thanks to the enormous battery that powered the receiver.
About 7:00 p.m., the full fury of the hurricane hit town. The sturdy old pine boards began to creak and groan joining the symphony of the pelting rain and Eucalyptus fruit, now bombarding the window panes as well, since they were being driven almost horizontally by the wind.
Though nervous, we kids drew on the stoic nature of our mother, and were holding up fairly well. But Dad was a nervous wreak; maybe because of the innate psyche of men to be the family protector. Anyway, with the walls shaking violently, the noise from the elements beating on the tin roof, and the howling of the wind was too much, and Dad decided we would abandon the old yellow house for a neighbors concrete block house about 100 yards up the street. Getting there proved to be an ordeal, with the wind almost carrying me away before my mother grabbed me by my collar and dragged me into the safety of the better constructed house.
When it was all over, the old yellow house stood just as we had left—no damage whatsoever—though the trees in the yard took a beating; debris everywhere. We weathered other storms while living in the house, but none more frightening.
****
The old yellow house was ugly, drafty, cold in the winter, hot in the summer (tin roof that radiated heat from the sun) and had the barest of amenities, but we kids loved it, and I still miss it. My siblings might argue that the house wasn’t really ugly as it was not much different from others around town. Besides, ugliness, as well as beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Still, others might argue that the whole town was ugly as it had burnt down twice and reconstructed after each fire without much city planning. About 2,500, mostly Alabama emigrants, lived around the settlement and they were all dirt poor, grubbing out a living in the citrus industry or closely ancillary businesses. So the argument goes that the old yellow house was a fitting example of the times.
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