Alfred, Pop, Dick McCaskill

Slightest drizzle of a Saturday morning. Slept until nearly walking time... It’s beyond me how I can think or write about anything else. Unspeakable is a word that has been used, shooting down MH-17, a passenger liner. Remember USS Vincennes (CG49) mistakenly downing an Iranian civilian passenger jetliner, Iran Air Flight 655, over the Persian Gulf on 3 July 1988, killing all 290 civilians on board (including 38 non-Iranians and 66 children). Today the scene on the ground is unbearable, especially when the eye lights on a child’s toy or book. The individual stories will be coming out now, Karlijn Keijzer the Indiana University student from the Netherlands, and Laurens van der Graaff, her sweetheart. 296 stories to go, I can’t stand it. And Israel’s morally rationalized actions in Gaza, the Palestinian children murdered. My answer, my solution: I won’t go there. Why not muse and blog about that: because there’s nothing to do but weep.

The dehumidifier wants emptying twice every 24 hours, morning and bedtime. It holds the humidity at 45%, which is astonishing. We should have bought it years ago.

We have two enormous fig trees. The lower one produced not even nubbins this summer, the one up by the front porch is full of nubbins that will not grow and ripen, we got two figs from it. Why? I cut them too far back, their green growth is lush but no fruit. We have picked some fruit from the fig tree in the back yard of the church office building, my supper last night was four figs and a glass of Australian shiraz, the box. Speaking of which I learned this lesson at G Foley’s on Linda’s birthday. Delicious, including soft shell crab and superlative crab cake; but I did stupid with the wine. Recognizing an old favorite, I ordered a glass of the Australian Wolf Blass shiraz. I thought to have them bring out the bottle from which my wine would be poured so I could taste it, but didn’t. Big mistake: it had been opened days. Or weeks. Nasty. To order by the glass, view and taste it first, eh?

Linda and I walked Friday morning, down to St. Andrews, park and marina. At the marina I bought shrimp from the, I suppose, Vietnamese woman. Fresh. Delicious. We boiled them, easy to peel, totally unlike the previously frozen shrimp I’ve given up buying at Gandy’s. Which brings me here: St. Andrews, place of my heart and heritage.

More from the newspapers Dr. McKenzie sent me. St. Andrews Bay News, January and February 1918.

January 29, 1918. 

$500 REWARD

The above reward will be

paid for the recovery of the

body of my son, Alfred Well-

er Jr., who was drowned on 

the morning of January 7th,

at the entrance of St. An-

drews Bay.

A.D. Weller

St. Andrews, Fla., Jan. 24th,

1918.

I calculated the present value of $500 dollars in 1918, about $9,000. For comparison, in 1918, this American Four-Square house that I’m living in, Alfred’s house, was available on order from Sears Roebuck for about $2,500, delivered and finished.

Alfred’s body missing was an agony for Pop, my grandfather. He told me that if he had not found his son’s body and brought him home, he would never again have been able to look the boy’s mother in the eye. My aunt told me that Mom blamed herself for waking Alfred to make the voyage, but especially blamed Pop as Pop blamed himself for sending him on the boat. My aunt, my father's older sister, said the tension of blame and remorse never left them the rest of their lives. Alfred's body was not found until into February, as I recall my father and aunts telling me. Pop told me he found it on the barrier island. Exactly forty-five years later, January 1963 as my father and I worked on this house, my father pointed to the space in front of the livingroom fireplace, "was where my brother’s casket stood.” My father was six years old at the time, six and a half. 

There’s more.

St. Andrews Bay News

February 5, 1918

TO OUR FRIENDS

During the terrible anguish and

suspense of the past weeks, much

comfort has come to us through the

many kindnesses and sincere sym-

pathy of our friends. Words fail us

in the effort to express our apprecia-

tion, but we wish to assure all of you

that we are deeply grateful for all

that has been done for us.

A. D. Weller and family

And just below that, same paper

GRIEF DRAWS NO COLOR LINE

Colored Employees and Friends

of Alfred Weller Pass Re-

solutions of Condolences

    Indicative of the high esteem in which Alfred Weller was held by all who knew him, is the following resolution passed by his colored friends through a committee consisting of Willie Walker, at one time employed by Alfred, and Richard McCaskill, an employe of the Bay Fisheries Co.”

    WHEREAS, The Great and Supreme Ruler of the Universe has in His infinite wisdom removed from among us one of our worthy and esteemd friends, A. D. Weller, Jr., it is eminently befitting that we, the colored citizens, record our appreciation of him;

    That the sudden removal of such a life from our midst leaves a vacancy and a shadow that will be deeply realized by us;

    And, that with deep sympathy for the bereaved relatives, we express our hope that even so great a loss to us all may be overruled for good by Him who doeth all things well.

Committee,

A. R. Walker,
Richard McCaskill.

To the best of my recollection, I never knew Willie Walker. But I did know Dick McCaskill, and I'll bet my brother Walt remembers him too. Dick McCaskill worked for my grandfather for years before and for years to come, as long as Pop was in the seafood business here in St. Andrews. After Pop’s retirement, Dick worked for my father in our fish house on 12th Street in St. Andrews in the middle to late 1940s. I remember Dick, and Crab Long (Naaman Long, he later had a grocery store on 15th Street) scaling enormous red snapper, and skinning huge grouper, and cutting them up into seafood steaks, then packing them in large tins for our trucks to carry up to grocery stories and fish markets in Alabama and Georgia. I remember Dick well, a tall, strong, dark mahogany man of infinite kindness and patience with me as a little boy playing around the fish house as a child. I grew up knowing him.

Especially do I remember a couple of things. Dick and Annie McCaskill lived in a little house on The Hill at the southwest corner of 15th Street and Frankford Avenue. It’s a vacant, wooded lot today, the house has long years been gone. With my father, I visited Dick about, maybe 1949 or 1950, at his home as he was on his death bed. That was the last time I saw him, a beloved and faithful family friend of many, many years.

I remember this too. One Christmas during the depression of the late Thirties, it would have been 1937 because we were living in a rented house belonging to J.Will Brown at the corner of Frankford and 11th Street, my parents were very poor, practically destitute. My father was making $7 a week working at the ice plant that many long years ago was on the Bay at the foot of Mercer Avenue, down beyond the post office behind where Paul Brent Gallery is now. I've looked there and can find no trace of it, but I claim to be the only Panama City resident who remembers it. That Christmas there was no money for a special Christmas dinner. Dick and Annie McCaskill came to our house with a feast of roast chicken, stuffing, carrots, potatoes, rice and gravy. Dick had killed and cleaned the chicken, Annie had cooked our Christmas dinner for us.

Oh, one other thing. Years later, probably December 1962 or January 1963 when my father and I were working on the inside of this house while Linda, Malinda, Joe and I were home from the University of Michigan on Christmas vacation, probably as my father was telling me about Alfred’s casket. I told him what Pop had said about never being able look Mom in the eye unless he brought Alfred's body home. My father corrected the story. He said, “Pop may remember it that way, but that’s not what happened." My father said Dick McCaskill searched the barrier island, walked and walked, searching until he found Alfred’s body, and Dick brought it home. 

Tom Weller, in Alfred's bedroom
looking out across St. Andrews Bay

Population of St. Andrews. 1910: 675. 1920: 1361.

http://books.google.com/books?id=rn0zAQAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PA137&lpg=RA1-PA137&dq=population+St.+Andrews,+Florida+1910&source=bl&ots=BosK3ZihLq&sig=d2PiELgf7l7n_wchJ8131zE9K00&hl=en&sa=X&ei=WsTJU8TMJYuXyASX6IGQBg&ved=0CFAQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=population%20St.%20Andrews%2C%20Florida%201910&f=false

St. John's Cemetery, Pensacola, Florida

I regretted in the 1980s when my father's sisters replaced the original tombstone with this new one. Behind Alfred is the grave of his sister Carrie, who died in 1898, age 11 months.