Jaw-widge
Most of the pictures I bother snapping are from the Bay door here in 7H, above is from the Beck door, on the sidewalk outside the bedroom window. Captain’s Table is at the right, their parking lot where the ice plant was, Texaco sign to the north, can’t really see Hunt’s. To the left, north of Harbour Village, St. Andrews Marina.
Center is the Shrimp Boat complex where Pop’s fish house was seventy years ago and where I practiced backing up, driving one of the trucks or The Pontiac to the ice plant for a block of ice, or crushed. In my mind when I look out, a white sand dune stretching half a block from our fish house ramp to the edge of Bayview Avenue, all dirt roads. We kept our supply of empty fish boxes stacked up semi-orderly out on the sand dune. Or not so orderly. My main memory that comes when I stand here looking across over there is the fish boxes, wood, thin wood planks, they must have measured, what, a 24 inch square on each end, maybe 48 inches long, wood sides and bottom. I don’t remember a top, for a top we used brown burlap sacks. The practice was that a fish box held 100 pounds of fish of one kind, red snapper or mullet or trout or sheepshead or white snapper, well iced with a layer of ice in the bottom, ice between layers of fish, ice on top. That’s how we packed fish to be loaded onto our trucks.
My recollection is that we didn’t pack grouper in the boxes, they and the large red snapper we cut into steaks and packed in large round tins that held, as I recall, ten pounds each. The grouper were skinned, snapper were scaled, producing piles of quarter-size scales. Except for mullet, fish were gutted immediately they arrived from the boats, I've gutted a hundred billion fish. Dick McCaskill, who had worked for Pop early in the 20th century, and Crab (his name was Naaman) did most of the gutting (we called it "drawing", a gutted fish had been "drawn"), and the skinning, scaling, steaking and packing. For the steaking operation we had a huge green band saw with long loop blade, maybe six feet around. When a saw band broke, the operator jumped back to avoid being cut, turned off the power, and fetched a new band saw blade and installed it. Fish steaks about 3/4 of an inch thick, not an inch. Beautiful fish steaks, red snapper steaks were prettiest because they still had the red skin. We sold all those fish in our retail market too, and the snapper and grouper steaks were popular sellers.
Growing up, starting age nine, almost ten, it was summer 1945, the end of WW2, I worked at the fish house six and a half days a week, starting at $2 per week; and every Saturday during the school year. My years at Bay High I worked there after school most days, and Saturday. Bus from Bay High to St. Andrews, or my senior year caught a ride with Cynthia Maxon when she had her mother’s car. OK, it was a 1950 Dodge Diplomat 2-door hardtop coupe, two-tone silver and gray, very elegant.
At the younger end of all this, when I could grab a few minutes to play — which my father did not appreciate at all, but he was in his office in the back corner of the large building, and the scolding to come didn’t stop me, and Walt when he was there, we’d go across the street to chase fiddler crabs on the beach where the Shrimp Boat is now, or go under Pop’s fish house to scoop minnow-size oyster cats from the edge of the water, or play on the two old fishing boats that were docked there all my growing up time, two boats long years out of use. The “Tommy” was the name of one boat, I can’t remember the name of the other, maybe Walt can. They may have been similar to the Annie & Jennie, or identical, I never thought to ask.
When we were working in the retail fish market, we had to be alert to customers arriving, and if we were out playing, dash back in to serve them. God help you if you didn’t see that a customer had come and heard the father shouting for you, though God never seemed to help a boy who sneaked off the job to play.
The other play area was the sand dune and the fish boxes. But take care: the boxes were havens for enormous spiders. A fish house neighborhood draws flies, and the spiders that come to feast grow large. They were usually huge black creatures, or dark brown, some striped with gray. In particular I remember one gargantuan blond colored spider that, looking at it, Clentis (his father drove one of our fish trucks those years, and Clentis, my age, worked with his father and was often around) remarked about the spider, “He could do much damage.”
Two large pine trees on 12th Street gave some shade, and our fish trucks were often parked under them. Beyond that, where 12th curved round to Bayview, for some years a small blue trailer was permanently parked, a travel trailer, I guess, or you might say house trailer. It was a regular trailer-park trailer, where lived a family of three. The husband and father was blind, his wife — whom one might reasonably in those days have called a “fish-wife” I reckon, being honest. And their son George. George was younger than Walt and me, seemed always to be in trouble of some kind. I hope George is still alive and had a life he enjoyed. My memory is of George's mother stepping out the trailer door and screaming over and over at the top of her lungs, “Jaaaaw-widge. Jaaaaw-widge. Jaaaaaaw-wiiiidge. JAW-widge” until either George came scampering home for lunch or supper, or his mother went back in the trailer and slammed the door.
One of my jobs was Saturday mornings washing all our fish trucks, back from their week’s “Route” up into Alabama and Georgia to peddle fish, oysters, shrimp, scallops, to fish markets and grocery stores. For washing, I got a dollar a truck, and when Walt was finally old enough to start coming too on Saturdays, he scrubbed the trucks’ wheels and was paid, seems to me, either a quarter a wheel or, which was more likely, a quarter for each truck of wheels he washed.
Summers from 1946 through 1953 (except 1947 after Mom died and to help ease our sadness my aunt Ruth took my cousin Ann and me to Washington by train to visit EG and Phyllis for a couple of weeks) I went to church camp for two weeks, first Junior Boys with Father Tom Byrne, and then Youth Camp, then eventually getting a job at camp as a counselor, Choir Camp with Father Fred Yerkes and his brother Francis, then as dining room manager for the summer, then on the camp theater group directed by Mimi and Joe Hull from Quincy, and staying most of the summer, which my father did not like at all. In our father's house, boys who lived there worked if you wanted to be housed, fed, clothed, and tolerated, and both Walt and I worked starting early in life. Even though I was always homesick in the early years, going to camp was an escape from the fish house routine, and when I’d return home to Panama City and St. Andrews, and back to the fish house, I’d wander round among the stacked fish boxes with my melancholy, wishing I was back at camp. Comes to mind when I look out from 7H. Fish boxes and spiders.
When I came home from Gainesville after my sophomore year at UFlorida, 1955, age 19 almost 20, my father had closed the seafood business and bought Kelley Press at Beck and 12th. That summer, I stood in front of a Kluge hand press feeding paper into it, and learned to print, cut, and bind ticket books with carbon copies. Toward the end of the summer I worked marking timber out in forests for the paper company.
Thos+ way out in +Time+