January 8, 1918

Heavy overcast, thin ribbon of light between Shell Island and the clouds of heaven, 56F 90% but forecast to be fine in time, up to 70F. We have a funeral this morning, Rich Mathews at St. Thomas by the Sea Episcopal Church, Laguna Beach. I am officiant and preacher, Fr. Chuck is celebrant, we have a pattern together. I hope Deacon Ed will be there to read the gospel in which Jesus promises that “in my Father’s house are many mansions.” 

Ninety-eight years ago this morning, Captain Odom T. Melvin (1893-1975) later remembered in his reminiscence “Sing To Me A Sea Chanty” (Destin History … and the Roots Run Deep, pp. 18-22, 1970 reprinted 1995), it was January 8, 1918. A young fisherman at the time, Melvin was one of two survivors of the twin-masted schooner Annie & Jennie, my grandfather’s fishing smack that was torn to pieces in the storm (my father named it “a squall”) as she left St. Andrews Bay through the pass (the East Pass, later called the Old Pass), headed into the Gulf of Mexico and bound for dry-dock in Carrabelle. There were five aboard including Melvin as mate, and my uncle, my father’s 18-year old brother Alfred. I want to quote Captain Melvin’s vivid memory, his story, with some slight corrections of spelling and date.

“We, crew of five, took her out on January 7, 1918 at 1:00 o’clock in the morning. …

“When we left the dock at St. Andrews, it was quite a bad night -- the wind was blowing and breakers were breaking in thirty feet of water. … Going out of the channel at St. Andrews Bay, we hit the bottom for she drew eleven feet of water. Then there was a lump, the sea picked the Annie-Jennie up and dropped her. She hit the sand bar with a reverberating sound and the impact knocked her keel open. …

“It was a night of horror! In the darkness the waves seemed mountainous as they crashed upon us, and the wind was shrieking in the sails, but the most dreadful sounds of all were the cracking and ripping as the Annie-Jennie began breaking up in the thirty feet of water. The crew, in their fear, began calling for help, but there was nothing we could do to help each other. I can hear their voices until this day. Somehow, Dewey Bishop and I managed to cling to the same piece of deck, and we floated around on it in the turbulent water until late Sunday night. My prayer was affirmatively answered, for we drifted with the tide until we were carried ashore at Crooked Island. The Raffield Brothers found us and accompanied us through the woods and across the peninsula to Panama City. We reported to Mr. Weller that the schooner had gone down, and that we were unsure of the fate of the other three men. I shall never forget Mr. Weller’s face when he heard the news. The expression of shock, disbelief and grief reflected there were heart rending.”

News got round instantly and the press was stopped for The St. Andrews Bay News for that day, January 8, 1918, and the front page re-run to report the disaster. Among other things, it says my grandfather and others immediately set out in launches to cross the Bay and search. Captain Melvin’s reminiscence resumes, 

“I searched the waters and beaches for twenty-two days after the disaster. I found Alf Weller, Jr. on the beach and carried him to his father. It seemed such a waste that one so young and full of promise should have drowned so soon for he was one of the most outstanding young men of Bay County. … The Annie-Jennie, though completely wrecked, sails on in all of her glory in the memory of Captain Odom Melvin …”

She sails on also in my memory, constantly, every time I look across the Bay and see Davis Point, round which she sailed on that last, fatal voyage. I do not mean to be melodramatic, but I’ve said here, and many times, that I owe my life to the death of my uncle Alfred as surely as I owe my salvation to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Five years after the disaster, my devastated and broken grandparents sold the old big house and moved far from the sea that took their oldest son. They relocated in Ocilla, Georgia, where for some years Pop was the Ford dealer. My father, who was six years old when Alfred died, was eleven when the family left St. Andrews. With cages of my grandmother’s chickens strapped to both cars, they left in a Hudson touring car carrying Pop driving, Mom, and Marguerite (who had been born just before Alfred died). In the other, a Model-T Ford touring car, was my aunt Ruth (by then, my aunt Evalyn was at college in Tallahassee), and my father, eleven years old, driving. Through the woods, rutted roads with direction signs nailed to trees. Growing up, I loved to hear my father’s stories of that trip, and of the years in Ocilla, seeing out the school window, and hearing, a huge tornado moving between Ocilla and Fitzgerald, the next town. He said it sounded like a freight train. His walking over to the railway depot to unload knocked-down Model T Fords from boxcars, assembling them, starting them up and driving them to Pop’s Ford garage to be cleaned up and sold.

Why do I have such a sense of debt to Alfred? Because they didn’t stay in Ocilla long. They moved down to south Florida, where Pop tried real estate for a while. They moved back to the panhandle, Niceville where Pop went back into the fish business, then to Pensacola where he worked with E.E. Saunders, a large seafood company, and where my father met my mother at Pensacola High School before his family returned to St. Andrews. Had they not lost Alfred, the family would never have left St. Andrews, my parents would never have met. I don’t know about my father, my mother likely would have married Tom, her high school sweetheart before she met my father. There's a photo of "Tom 17 and Louise 16" around here, that my father likely never knew was in the house. Had the Wellers not moved around, and Louise Gentry and Carroll Weller never met, there would have been other children, but Walt, Gina and I, Thomas Carroll Weller, Jr. would never have been.

Model of the Annie & Jennie built by my son Joe. Now sits over my chair here at 7H. That’s my uncle Alfred in the oval picture to the right, top.

I have not said before, but Captain Melvin's reminiscence always makes me mindful that the place he reported back to my grandfather was right across the road from the old house, where the family lived, and that I later owned and where we lived, the house that was built for Alfred. I always wondered and worried about Pop as he walked across the dirt road and up to the house to tell Mom that Alfred was dead. Oldest son, apple of their eye. In an instant of knowing, life changed forever.

Thos+ in +Time+