HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!

Robert turns 90 years old, today is his birthday. May 15, 1935. We were at each other's seventh birthday parties in 1942, and I'm wondering, besides the two of us, who else is still living who was there. Members of Cove School class of 1949 together, we grew up on Massalina Bayou. Robert was our sports star those Cove School years, and somewhere around here I have a picture of him sinking a basketball shot as he jumped, that I snapped maybe ten years ago on one of our early morning walks around The Cove. Our walks stopped early in the covid pandemic.

Decades after our Cove School years, Robert located all our living classmates and organized our first class reunion with a fish-fry, and we gathered to reminisce, tour the school building, and have supper in the auditorium (later cafeteria that is now the Beverly McDaniel Building at Holy Nativity Episcopal School). At one of those reunions, we elected Robert our leader and he is President for Life.

Robert and I are two of just a few people still living who remember the loud lumbering sound that thundered down the bayou as automobiles rolled across 4th Street Bridge and Tarpon Dock Bridge back when they were wooden bridges. 

He will also remember, as I do, the days when you could tell which city district a fire was in because the fire siren on city hall at E. 4th Street and Luverne Avenue where the fire truck was, wailed out loud and clear to count the district number, and from where we lived on Massalina Drive we could hear the PCFD's bright red American-LaFrance fire engine start up as its motor roared to life. We were always anxious when the siren wailed twice, our district number for The Cove, and we could pinpoint the fire engine's location as it crossed the 4th Street Bridge then turned south and sped south down Cove Boulevard.

Robert may also remember the scary Times when a siren alarm went off to warn us that there'd been an escape from the county jail, which was on Massalina Bayou right where the new court house is today. As I've reported here before, at our house, all windows open in those years before air conditioning, we could hear the bloodhound dogs start their howling bark to track the escapee, and my mother would run out in a panic of fear, order us into the house, and close and lock all the windows. 

My memory is increasingly faulty, but seems to me that it wasn't unusual for a jail escapee to get no farther than to be recaptured under our east end of the bridge. Which would have been up the bayou for us, but right down the road less than a block from Robert's house, the green house with the matching green structure over their dock. 

Robert may correct me that I'm wrong, but I have an early memory of those days, a bunch of us boys being driven somewhere by Robert's mother in their car, a light blue 1936 or 1937 Dodge sedan. And I remember Robert telling all of us about the Time when they were living up near Bay High, just a block from the stadium on Grace or Jenks Avenue, Robert playing with matches and starting a fire in the brush on an empty lot, and the fire department being called to put the fire out. Robert told me the fire story again many decades later, and to me, the most moving part of it was Robert hiding under the bed and his daddy, a kind and loving father, being so gentle about it and hoping that Robert had learned his lesson about playing with matches! 

I remember Robert's father as Panama City Postmaster, and Robert told me that his father's brother was the Postmaster in Marianna, where the family was living when Robert was born.

We had favorite teachers at Cove School, one of Robert's favorites was Mr Sandilos, who came in as another fifth grade teacher, and Robert was one who was moved there from Miss Ruth Martin's fifth grade class. Her class was a year of terror in the fires of Hell for me, may she rest in peace anyway; but Mr Sandilos was a great teacher who even took his class out deep-sea fishing. I think Robert caught either a red snapper or a grouper that trip out. 

Our universal favorite though was Miss Virginia Parker, our beloved eighth grade teacher, whom we then reconnected with and she attended one of our reunions those later years.

Along about now would be our seventy-sixth reunion, but I reckon we'll have to put it off and see how many of us can gather around the throne together in May 2049 and sing "Golden groves and crystal waters ... Cove, Cove, ... ."

Friends now for eighty-three years and counting since that early birthday party, Robert and I sort of lost touch in high school and later. A basketball star our years at Bay High, Robert was in the, to me, rarefied company of sports heroes, whom I, an extraordinarily clumsy player in every sport, could never live up to. But I was surprised and delighted to hear from Robert about organizing that first reunion to get our Bay High Class of 1949 back together, was it our 50th in 1999, Robert, that long ago?

Our class of 1949 was a happy class, and I remember songs we sang in class over the years, though for the most part I only remember one or two verses. Some were goofy songs, some we sang as part of our daily devotional of Bible reading, prayer, and song. And patriotic songs during WW2.

"There's a church in the valley by the wildwood, ... O come, come, come, come, come to the church in the wildwood, O come to the church in the dale. No place is so dear to my childhood as the little brown church in the vale."

"Let's remember Pearl Harbor, as we did the Alamo, let's remember Pearl Harbor, ... . We will always remember how they died for liberty; let's remember Pearl Harbor, and go on to victory."

"School days, school days, dear old golden rule days, ... "

"O, where have you been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy, O where have you been, charmin' Billy? - - Can she bake a cherry pie, Billy Boy, Billy Boy? - - How old is she, Billy Boy, Billy Boy? Three ties six and four times seven, twenty eight and eleven; she's a young thing and cannot leave her mother."

"I been workin' on the railroad, all the livelong day. I been working on the railroad, just to pass the time away. Can't you hear the whistle blowin'? Rise up so early in the morn ..."

"My gal's a corker, she's a New Yorker, I buy her everything to keep her in style. She drives a Buick Six, I ride a mule that kicks! Yes, boy's, that' where my money goes." My puzzle with that song at the Time was that I'd only known Buicks as having Straight Eight motors. But a Buick Six was made for model years 1914 to 1930, which then dates, or at least brackets, when that verse of the song came along. We do that kind of logic for dating Bible books too!!

"Over there, over there, send the word, send the word over there; that the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming, the drums drum drumming everywhere. So prepare, say a prayer, we'll be over, we're coming over, and we won't be back til it's over over there."

Some, most or all of our teachers read to us, aloud from books, usually for a few minutes right after lunch. For sure, I remember Mrs Bowen (6th grade) reading, and Miss Edwina Parker (7th grade), and Miss Virginia Parker. What? what did we hear? Nancy Drew mysteries. The Hardy Boys. "Parasols Is For Ladies." "Tom Sawyer" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn". In eighth grade Miss Parker read "Gone With the Wind" to us.

At Cove School, a first thing you saw on the wall the first day of the fall semester every September was a large poster showing Bible verses to be memorized - - verses at the head of columns across the top, and down the first column each child's name. Once you stood and recited a verse in class, you got a star licked and stuck in that column of your name. 

What else do I recall this early morning as Robert turns ninety years old? The first room on the north end of the building, on the back side, was our lunch room for some years. There were steam tables, and their plumbing left deep scars in the floor that were there all the years, at least until Hurricane Michael damaged the building in October 2018, it was for years a reminder to me. 

When the Cove School building was early opened, 1937 or 1938, each classroom was heated by a "stove" that was vented to the outside above. Then one fall during the 1940s when we returned to school, we found that a steam heating system had been installed over the summer, and each room was heated by iron radiators; all that was removed at some point decades later, but I saw the evidence of it during the major repairs and renovation after the hurricane. 

There was a Time doing World War 2 when the school was so overfilled with students that the student body was divided in two. Half of us went to school mornings and half of us went to school afternoons; alternating every two or three weeks.

Also, during WW2, the air raid drills, when we marched out into the center hall and sheltered under long tables that were lining the hall. The air raid drill alarm bell was different from the fire alarm bell, when everyone marched out and stood by Hamilton Avenue until the bell rang to return to class. 

In those good old days, we went back to school after summer vacation to begin each fall semester on the Tuesday after Labor Day. 

And there was a Time in my very dim memory, that our school year was eight months instead of nine; I'm as certain of that memory as I am the sun will rise this morning. It was peculiar to Bay County and I remember that my first cousins in Escambia County schools in Pensacola used to be jealous of our long summer break. Someone will challenge me on this, but I'm sure it's true.

When we started at Cove School in September 1941 (Robert did first grade at Panama Grammar then came to Cove School starting second grade September 1942), the school was a short building; one September we returned to school to find that the building had been roughly doubled or more in length to add classrooms. If you stand out front and look at the building, it's easy to tell the old original section in that those classrooms have five windows; the classrooms in the new section have six windows and a cloakroom window. There's also a "sway" in the roofline that shows where additions were made; actually there were two additions, a short one then the later longer one that made the, now Bill Lloyd Building, the full length it is today.

After we graduated in 1949, a new section consisting of the auditorium and the additional classrooms along the north end of the property were added. At first, the auditorium was like a theater, with a floor that slanted down toward the stage; at some point that was changed by pouring concrete floor to get rid of the theater slanting floor and level it out as it is today.

What else? Well, in those days all the roads in The Cove were dirt roads, the only paved streets were Beach Drive, Cherry Street as far as where the Cove Shopping Center is/was, Cove Boulevard, a couple of blocks just north of Cherry Street and east of Beach Drive, and Bunkers Cove Road as far as the park is now, where Bonita Avenue meets BCR. All the rest of The Cove in those days was woods where boys played cowboys and Indians, and dug through Indian mounds for bits and pieces of pottery. And there was a standard fear of getting too close to wherever you could smell a moonshine still, where squatters lived in tarpaper shacks. My father warned me more than once that if I was seen there, I could get shot.

Anyway, it's Robert's 90th birthday, Happy Birthday, dear old friend! 

Carroll

T89&c

 

  

     

“Billy Boy” Lyrics

Oh, where have you been,
Billy Boy, Billy Boy?
Oh, where have you been,
Charming Billy?
I have been to seek a wife,
She’s the joy of my life,
She’s a young thing
And cannot leave her mother.

Did she ask you to come in,
Billy Boy, Billy Boy?
Did she ask you to come in,
Charming Billy?
Yes, she asked me to come in,
There’s a dimple in her chin.
She’s a young thing
And cannot leave her mother.

Can she make a cherry pie,
Billy Boy, Billy Boy?
Can she make a cherry pie,
Charming Billy?
She can make a cherry pie,
Quick as a cat can wink an eye,
She’s a young thing
And cannot leave her mother.

How old is she,
Billy Boy, Billy Boy?
How old is she,
Charming Billy?
Three times six and four times seven,
Twenty-eight and eleven,
She’s a young thing
And cannot leave her mother.