old was real
The part of me that others see is not real. The real me, who is inside, stops and goes in to look at the new 1949 Nash cars on display every time I leave Bay Hospital crossing MLK heading west on East 6th Street the few blocks to where it ends at Hamilton Avenue and you have to turn right or left. I turn left toward the traffic light at Hamilton and US98, park by the side of the dealership and go inside to admire the cars and collect another brochure. The "bathtub Nash", the cars are frankly ugly, a roach comes to mind. But they are long and roomy.
I tried to see them beautiful in their day but even then it didn't work, ugly is ugly, and those cars are ugly as sin and gone. In later years, early Navy,
StAndrews, I still and always love StAndrews,
but it's way different from the eternal small town fishing village where my grandfather A D Weller was mayor just over a hundred years ago, largely unchanged in my Time, but people seem to think "growth" is needed and "bigger is better", which it isn't, quit messing up, leave things like they are when most loved. Like the rest of The Old Ways, original is best, or at least original to me. America wasn't greater, We were innocent and so solidly convicted blind that we knew we were right and good when the opposite was the truth, whatever truth is. Small towns were everywhere and Life was Good, but only for those of us who were white. About the time I started university, which was fall 1953, our innocence started falling off like the scales from StPaul's eyes, and we began to see - - that we had been blind and selfishly evil. Only the most evil of evil would long to return to that sort of Great Again. Selfishness, Greed and Certainty are a class of evil unto themselves.
In my earliest memories of StAndrews there's a motor court at the south end of Beck Avenue. A filling station that's most recently Thai Something oriental restaurant; I've enjoyed eating there now and then, a hot curry dish, always the same dish loaded with seafood, and the same table, booth looking out on the back parking lot. With the new owners I've seen no flies wandering the window by my table, a blessing.
Here in StAndrews, where my grandparents lived and my father lived from birth until about eleven, there's a hardware store and a barbershop. I get my haircuts here now, either here in StAndrews; or at Frank Sorrentino's barbershop by the Marie Hotel on Harrison, Warren gets his hair cut there too, one time we laughed that because we were too young to get over our ears trimmed with lather and straight razor, the barbers trim over our ears with the sharp pointy end of scissors. Sorrentino's has five chairs, all always full and men waiting in chairs, reading magazine or newspaper or talking with the barbers, and there warn't no gardenia "take a number" neither, you kept track of who was ahead of you and who came in after you or you'd miss your turn. The only women allowed in a men's barbershop are young mothers with small boys. For a small boy, the barber laid a board across the chair arms for you to sit on. I remember when I suddenly and proudly was too big for the board and was allowed to sit in the chair for the first time.
Windham's Fish Market and Ice Plant across the street from Kelley's Super Market "We Doze But Never Close", heck, I didn't know at the time, but that building was ruined years later, well into the next century, by a Category 5 hurricane that blew and swept through, and now it's gone altogether, a fence up so you can't even see the hole where the store was, just wooden planks. Maybe that's Progress, I like some progress and hate other progress, which makes either me or mankind an anomaly. When Better Automobiles Are Built, Buick Will Build Them, and the best car ever made was the 1948 Buick Super sedan, it was as modern and up to date as anybody needs, NomeSain? Fully equipped, with heater, WSW, and Selectronic radio. If you get a Roadmaster it'll probably have a Kleenex dispenser, but WTH you don't need that.
StAndrews Drug Store at the next corner on the west side of Beck Avenue, our Main Street here. StAndrews Post Office. The other end of the block from our fish house, Mom's Cafe at Beck and 12th Street, a good lunch sitting on a stool at the counter, for 75¢ you get two pieces of fried chicken, peas or green beans, and French fries. I mean, why pay a buck and a quarter to upgrade to a piece of steak when the chicken is good? Please pass the butter, and are you not going to eat your biscuit? Free ice tea and refills. Coke 5¢.
Sometime early in the 21st century they'll make it into a museum of sorts, but right now Lillian West's printing company is across the street, Lillian in her wide brim hat, and driving that old Willys car from the thirties. She lives in that log cabin on West Beach Drive near Frankford, comes in our fish market now and then, visits with my father.
We never go into Mattie's Tavern!! Lifelong and generations of heritage as Episcopalians, it never occurred to me that my parents were Puritans,
but going into a place that sold liquor was never. I mean, a "tavern", are you kidding me? We were pure, maybe we were Puritans! For years, that same bottle of Seagram's Seven sat behind the center bar of the built in glass front cabinet in the dining room of our house in The Cove where I grew up, and far as I know no one ever touched it except the time or two I sneaked a taste as a teenager when nobody else was home. Maybe three or four times, in a glass of cold milk into which I'd beat up an egg to make "egg nog". Not good, and that little white thing
One morning half dozen or so years ago while we were out for our walk, Robert and I were given a tour of that house in The Cove where I grew up: dining room floor cabinet was gone, replaced; but the glass front wall cabinet was still there. I didn't notice whether the bottle of Seagrams was still hiding. I did notice that the dining room was a lot smaller than when I was a boy.
My favorite place to play is the beach across the dirt road, 12th Street, from our fish market where I work and where I learned to clean fish. Thousands, millions of fiddler crabs, and they move in a swarm as one, shape of the swarm bending this way and that like a flock of birds. When I go over there, which I'm not supposed to do during work hours, but what the hey, I'm a boy, they instantly panic and all head for the nearest hole and suddenly there are none. If you want to catch one, go for a female, the males will pinch you, and that big pincher is sharp and can break the skin.
Where have all the fiddler crabs gone, long time passing?
Where have all the fiddler crabs gone, long time ago?
Where have all the fiddler crabs gone?
Shrimp Boat scared them everyone
Oh, when will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?
Oh, even better than the beach that was blasphemed by Shrimp Boat back about 1951-or-two is playing under Pop's fish house across the dirt road from our fish market. In the water's edge underneath the loading dock. Catch oyster cats, a minnow size fish that looks like a tiny catfish: carefully, slowly you move your cupped hands under a bunch of them, slowly up, then SCOOP and sometimes you catch one. Also playing on the dock and on the no longer active fishing boats tied up there eternally, heck, they're still there, maybe this really IS Heaven. Stay off of Old Chris Christensen's boat, the white boat showing her stern, gray trim and gray rudder. Chris, a leathery, gnarled fisherman who died about 1953 or four while I was away at UFlorida, came to America from Norway well before WW2. Alone all the years I knew him while I was growing up, Chris was a kind and gentle man who was very patient with Walt and me.
We never had a Hudson, but now and then driving on west 6th Street I stop to go inside and admire the new 1948 Hudsons in the showroom.
The showroom is small and only holds one car at a time, I like the Commodore Eight or Six, fancier than the Super, a beautiful low, wide car with the new "step-down design". Only problem is the step-down has an inch or so ledge around at the door bottom floor line, and they won't want to sweep it out when you stop at for gas at a filling station like they do other cars, swept out and onto the filing station pavement, then the attendant sweeps it up after sweeping out several cars. He cleans your windshield too.
Rather than all this religious stuff I've morphed into in my ancient age, the real me likes to drive by and be wherever car dealerships were in my Time. Kaiser-Frazer
out on Highway 98 West in Little Dothan, the large building with the Art Deco design
front, and the large round window. Nice cars there.
In the top photograph, just to the right of Chris's boat stands the OutHouse. For small boys, no inside toilet could equal the thrill of a hole over the water five or six feet below, and the cooling breeze coming up. This has been told here before, but the OutHouse had two compartments, each with its own door onto the dock. One door was general, public, whatever, with a newspaper to tear if when needed. The other door was into our grandfather's private domain; the lock on the door was fake, no key needed, just pull it and it opened. Not wanting us to use the nasty public side, Pop showed us, just pull down on the lock but be sure to push it back "locked" when you left. Even a roll of toilet paper in that side. The watercolor, Linda's mother Lucy Peters painted that for my parents about 1950: it's the way we were, it's my treasure, but Lucy left out the OutHouse.
If I were offered the opportunity to be a boy again, it'd have to be in StAndrews again. As it was again.
W
pic of Mattie's Tavern from "Ole St Andrew" thanks, Carl Bennett!