corner cafe

A TYPICAL SOUTHERN TOWN I found this interesting segment written by visitors to the Downtown (then all there was to PC) in 1911. The guests have just had their dinner at the Gulf View Hotel (where the Towers in the 1st block of Harrison is now located) and decide to take a stroll around town, "which has a population of about 600. We saw some very nice residences and some that were not so nice. The streets are deep sand and the pigs are running at large - a typical southern town ..."

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Leon Walters posted this wonderful picture yesterday, and it stirred some childhood memories from the late 1930s and early 1940s. I lightened it up a bit for more detail, especially so I could see the cars better, including confirming that the first car is backed up to the curb, but the people at the corner cafe came out a little clearer too.

The corner cafe building appears to be at Harrison Avenue and E. Beach Drive, where Les Gilbert's Bar & Grill was all my growing up years; then I think Bubba Gilbert had a gay bar there for years (Bubba was my classmate at Bay High, 1953); and I think the building now is a store where customers can blow glass items.

I remember a Gulf Something Hotel, okay, Gulf View Hotel, which, as I recall, was a large two story wooden building not facing Harrison Avenue, but with one face to E Beach Drive and the other side facing the Bay. I think it burned down at some point, but I seem to remember going there with my mother, to Jimmy Jones' Studio, a photography studio on the first floor, with my siblings, to have family portraits taken. The photographer, Jimmy Jones, was well known here, took school pictures &c, and as I recall, those pictures were not color, but they were tinted and he did a nice job.

I know Mr Jones came to Cove School to take pictures, and if memory serves me correctly he also took couples' and groups' pictures at our Christmas Balls and Spring Proms when we were at Bay High.

Somewhere around here is a large glossy black & white photograph of our three-couple group at a ball or prom: Phyllis Roll & me, Eleanor Sale & Mandeville Smith, Philip Johnson & Linda Peters; the girls in ankle length gowns and us guys in black pants and wearing white dinner jackets. The picture was fine except that I was looking straight at the camera and my ears were sticking out enormous and flappy like Dumbo Elephant.

But at least I was thin.

That picture would have been December 1951 or spring 1952, my junior year at Bay High, because my senior year Linda was my date for both the Christmas Ball and the Spring Prom. Linda & me, Eleanor & Mandeville, and Philip was dating LaVerne Craig. For the winter balls, Mama always made for my date, a corsage of camellias cut fresh from our yard.. She made the spring prom corsages too, but I don't remember what flower.

The photo above shows dirt roads. By the Time I came along, Harrison Avenue was paved, and Beach Drive was paved, concrete, in fact, from about Hathaway Bridge to DuPont Bridge, and Beach Drive all the way to Cherry Street; and in the Cove, Cherry Street to about MacArthur. Also paved concrete in the Cove, a small section from Cherry Street, Harmon Avenue and Wilson Avenue. Bunkers Cove Road was paved as far as what later was Dr Traxler's home, and Cove Boulevard was paved. The entire rest of the Cove was dirt roads until well into the 1950s. The city had a long, yellow Caterpillar road grader, which we called "the tractor," that made regular rounds scraping dirt roads to some degree of smoothness for a few days, then the washboard roads returned, or you could get stuck. Rainy season and rainy days, the roads were a mess.

The old days weren't best, but they were ours, and they were fine! I did wish that we had sidewalks, so we could roller-skate, like we did when visiting grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins in Pensacola.

As I sit out here on 7H porch typing, H.Ian is still creeping across the Florida peninsula, but at least the red X out in the Atlantic, now a circle with a number, is looking good, eh?