St. Andrews Railway Station
It was my good blessing to grow up living in the Cove and going to Cove School while also growing up as a working boy in St. Andrew’s. “Working boy” because my father figured anyone at the breakfast table should work that day not play. It gave me a different work ethic from other boys at Cove School with me, such that my mother used to say I was born 30 years old. Saturdays and summers, from age nine I worked in my father’s fish house on 12th street in St. Andrews. The building is gone and today the location is the parking lot of Uncle Ernie’s Bayfront Grill & Brew House.
There in the same St. Andrews block with us were Mom’s Cafe at the corner of Beck Avenue and 12th Street (full lunch $.75 unless you ordered steak, $1.25), the U.S. Post Office, St. Andrews. Red Baum was a master plumber who built two rows of long two-story apartment buildings for rental income. They are still there, though today quite an eyesore on Beck Avenue downtown. Red Baum was an antique automobile buff, actually a Rolls Royce buff. One car was an early to mid-1920s vintage RR touring car, one of those enormous red machines with loads of brass -- brass headlamps, brass windshield, brass rod running from the windshield corner tips out to the edge of the front fenders to hold the windshield up, an enormous top that folded to hang hugely off the back. When it was outside it was parked on 12th Street next to our fish house and I spent many work hours ogling it. ("Don't you climb on that car, boy"). For his work car, Mr. Baum had the car that fascinated me though, a 1947 DeSoto Suburban. The DeSoto Surburban of that era was a limousine body fitted elegantly with a wood interior and three rows of heavy, sumptuous leather seats that slid back and forth. Red Baum though had ruined this one by making a plumber’s car out of it: a large plumber’s vise built into the rear fender. On the next corner south was the St. Andrews drugstore and I’m pretty sure they had a soda fountain. Behind the drug store was the old railway station. In my day it was long in disuse as a railroad station, but it was one of those classic railway station buildings with loading platforms and boarding ramps and the wide overhanging roof to keep passengers dry in rainy weather. No longer a railway station, it had other uses.
When I was a boy the old railway station was owned (or used) as I recall by Mr. Kelly/Kelley who later built and opened Kelley’s Super Market in the next block south. The supermarket was signed “We Doze But Never Close,” open 24/7, and even had chicken wire at the front instead of windows.
When Kelley had the railway station he used it to warehouse his junk business. Old house parts, furniture, plumbing, electrical fixtures, bankruptcy inventory, ...The only word for the collection of junk that he had for sale might be supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
Neatly stacked very high on the north side loading platform were the mattresses. Hundreds upon hundreds of mattresses, stacked two stories high, from the platform floor almost to the ceiling. As a 10-year-old boy I became slowly aware of the Creator’s gender-difference plan for enabling His commandment “be fruitful and multiply” by overhearing and noticing and wondering about the boy-girl activity on top of the railway station mattresses.
In those days 11th Street from St. Andrews to Panama City was a dirt road, really deep sandy, dirt road. And 15th street was two ruts way out in the boondocks to the north; at the west end of 15th Street was St. Andrews Elementary School, corner Beck Avenue.
Way over in "Panama," at the east end of 15th Street corner Harrison Avenue was the Tally Ho Drive In that is still there. My high school years I had lunch there whenever I could finagle my mother's car.
And a couple blocks south on Harrison, truly
On our city’s northern border,
Reared against the sky,
Proudly stands our Alma Mater,
As the years roll by,
"Forward Ever" be our watchword;
"Conquer and Prevail",
Hail to Thee our Alma Mater, Hail, Bay High! All Hail.
Reared against the sky,
Proudly stands our Alma Mater,
As the years roll by,
"Forward Ever" be our watchword;
"Conquer and Prevail",
Hail to Thee our Alma Mater, Hail, Bay High! All Hail.
Remember to put on your right shoe first.
Shalom.
TW+