St. Andrews

My father used to tell me that as a boy he walked seven miles to school, seems to me it included barefoot in the snow. He exaggerated a bit: it’s exactly one mile from my house, where he lived as a boy, to St. Andrews School. Of course there’s no snow, but barefooted is credible to me, who shed shoes the first week of May each year and didn’t put them on again until Tuesday morning after Labor Day to head for school. 

In his day St. Andrews School was a wooden building, two story, apparently, two classrooms up and two down. His brother Alfred would have gone there too, and likely sisters Evalyn and Ruth. Alfred did attend a private school in Anniston, Alabama for awhile, reportedly not his best experience. We have one of his textbooks here: he wrote his name inside the front cover, Alfred Daniel Weller, Jr.

St. Andrews was dirt roads then, what roads there were, woods behind our house, my grandmother’s cow grazing free, ambling home at milking time. And there was a water tank for the house. My father said an engine ran the pump to fill the water tank on a tower. It was his chore to start the engine and keep the water tank filled.

My grandmother always kept chickens here, for eggs, and I remember watching her ring a chicken’s neck. It ran round in circles briefly then dropped. Mom picked it up, plucked it in a flurry of feathers, scorched the pinfeathers, cut it up and fried it for dinner. Alfred drowned in January 1918 and a couple years later the family picked up and moved to Ocilla, Georgia. We drove through there once, about 1948, and my father pointed out the garage where Pop had been the Ford dealer. After two or three years in Ocilla, about 1923, they picked up again and moved down into Florida, where Pop tried real estate. My father remembered that whenever they moved, Mom had chicken coops sitting on the running boards and tied to the car fenders. Leaving Ocilla, they had a Model-T Ford and a Hudson touring car. Eleven years old by then, my father drove the Model-T that trip. No highways, just hilly dirt roads, two ruts through the woods. Chicken coops strapped on again.

Pop didn't like real estate, or was not successful in it, and they eventually moved back up to Valparaiso, where Pop was in the seafood business again, then to Pensacola. After some ten years away they returned home to St. Andrews. It's all reasonably dateable in that my father attended Pensacola High School, where he met my mother, but graduated from Bay High, class of 1931.

TW