Sunrise in St. Andrews
Hot black coffee and one chocolate morsel this morning, reading a couple things while Linda browses Facebook and pauses now and then to call my attention to something, including this morning's sunrise.
Other things this morning, first Alma Littleton’s obituary. I didn’t know her, but the Littleton family have been here and around more than all my life, including seeing their A. C. Littleton Plumbing and Heating signs on trucks for as long as I can remember. But what put me into reminiscence was her obituary’s wonderful discussion of St. Andrews that stirred my own memories and those that my grandfather, aunts and father used to share. The long dock that used to be at the foot of 10th Street, Wallace Caswell, who at various times was my father's business associate and our competitor, had a fishhouse at the end of that dock, a large tin building. Wallace laughed with a loud cackle, and when he laughed we could hear him at our fishhouse on 12th Street. The original Bay High School. The boardwalk that stretched from about Balboa Avenue as I remember being told, or maybe it was Lake Caroline, west along the Bay front shoreline, around here where my condo building is now, and north about to maybe where 13th Street meets Deer Avenue. Born in the early 1900s, my aunts, my father’s two older sisters, remembered the boardwalk as being the way people got around St. Andrews in their growing up years, when people walked everywhere. All dirt roads before any streets were paved in St. Andrews, I remember that except that Beck Avenue (98) was paved before my time. She remembered before Hathaway Bridge was built, so did my father, that going to Pensacola other than by the Tarpon meant a trip north, around the Bay and west along Choctawhatchee Bay. The coastal steamer Tarpon docking at Tarpon Dock where in July 1911, Mom, my grandmother, arrived home from Pensacola with my newborn father. Mrs. Littleton’s obituary a trip through memories. What a great way to share with us old-timers of the next generation.
Next, Carl Melvin Bennett’s FB pic of the Cove School class of 1948, the year ahead of my class, those 13-year-olds are 81 now, all who are still living. And his post of the log building that was the country club on Cherry Street in the Cove. It and the golf course about where Cove Shopping Center is today. It would have been about 1946, 1947 or 1948, my cousin Ann and I took ballroom dancing lessons there from Hugh and Margaret Baird. Right across Cherry Street was a tall stone house where friend and classmate Parker Reynolds lived for a while. He and his family lived in several places while we were growing up, first at the SW corner of Linda Avenue and 2nd Court, then over in the Old Orchard across Glen Bridge on Watson Bayou, then in that stone house on Cherry Street — that was 1948, which I remember because they were living there when Parker’s father, whom he and his brother and sister called Harry not dad or daddy, bought his new 1948 Nash Ambassador. Their last address in my memory was Cincinnati Avenue in St. Andrews. Why is my mind doing all this to me this morning?
From point to point this morning:
After university I married and moved away, stayed away for many reasons. But if I were starting over, instead of the Navy, I might find a way to make a living right here in Bay County, because I’d never, ever wish to live anywhere else.
Thos+ in +Time+