the blue house

 

When we were growing up, June 11 was our father's birthday. 1911-1993 he lived to age 82, today would mark the 114th anniversary for him. That's a lot of candles for a birthday cake. Our parents were married on our father's birthday, June 11, 1934, ninety-one years ago, and I was born fifteen months later. 

When our father was born, his father was the owner and manager of Bay Fisheries, which was located out on a pier, where Landmark Condominiums is today. 

Another shot:

His parents were living at the location of the Old Place, but in a different house - - which to make room for construction of the Old Place was rolled across Calhoun Avenue on logs and installed at the southeast corner of Calhoun and 9th Street, the blue house that's there now. Our father joined the family of Alfred and Carrie Lee Weller and their children Alfred, Jr., Evalyn (yes, that's how they spelled her name), and Ruth. So, four living, he was their fifth child, the first, a daughter Carrie had died as an infant about 1898.

For medical concerns, my grandmother went to Pensacola to give birth to my father. When he was a few days old, they returned to St Andrews aboard the SS Tarpon, which, as I recall, plied the Gulf Coast between Mobile and Carrabelle.  

My father's earliest memory was of being in the "blue house" as it was rolled on logs, and watching the light over the dining room table swing back and forth as the house was moved. That would have been 1912-1913, he was old enough to have a clear memory of it.

I don't remember whether my father said the light was electric, but I expect it was a kerosene lamp. 

Somewhere around here is a photograph of my grandmother sitting on the top step that went down into the lower part of the front yard, holding my father as a tiny infant, with the "blue house" in the background.

My father shared with me any number of his childhood and growing up memories. 

One included falling out of an upstairs bedroom window of the Old Place. 

His sister Evalyn used to joke that he'd landed on his head and had never been right since.

Another was that as a boy he was given the responsibility to make sure the water pump kept the cistern filled, but there was the Time the pump didn't work, and he was afraid that he had caused the malfunction and feared telling his father, and the cistern went dry - - no water for the house. He remembered that his father was not angry as he had feared, but helped him take a lesson out of the episode.

There was the Time a wild fox was under the house and my father took rocks and "chunked him out." 

As a first and second grade schoolboy my father walked from the Old Place to St Andrews School and back each day. What's that, a mile? A mile and a half? He said the schoolhouse was a wooden building that later burned, and was replaced with the brick school building that's there today - - at the southwest corner of Beck Avenue and 15th Street.  

My father remembered, after the wreck of the Annie & Jennie, his brother Alfred's coffin standing in the living room of the Old Place. That would have been February 1918.

A few years after Alfred's death, his parents were still so desolated that they sold the Old Place and moved up to Ocilla, Georgia and lived there a few years. It was 1924, the family had two cars, a Model T Ford and a Hudson touring car. Both cars had chicken coop cages loaded with all my grandmother's chickens, strapped to the cars' running boards.

My father said that he and his sister Ruth drove the Model T (by then Evalyn was at college in Tallahassee), and Pop drove the Hudson, as they made their way on winding, rutted dirt roads through the woods, driving from St Andrews to Ocilla. 

In Ocilla, Georgia, my father's father was the Ford dealer. My father worked in the Ford garage as an early teenage boy. One of his jobs was to meet the train that stopped at the railway depot, help unload the Model T Fords, and, as they were "CKD" (completely knocked down), reassemble them at the train depot and drive them the few blocks to the Ford garage.

Ford Motor Company was operated as something of a tyranny in those days, and a story was that one day a box car loaded with Lincoln car parts arrived for my grandfather's dealership to pay for and load into inventory. My grandfather surmised that there wasn't a Lincoln car within a hundred miles, so refused the shipment of Lincoln car parts and sent it packing back to Detroit. Shortly thereafter, two FoMoCo stooges arrived in a Lincoln car that needed repair parts, demanded that the Ocilla dealership do the repairs with the repair parts that would have had had they not refused the shipment; shortly after that, my grandfather's dealership was cancelled.

After that, the Weller family moved down to Lake City, near Live Oak where his sister Hallie Weller Helvenston and her family lived. There, my grandfather tried his luck selling real estate for a bit, then they packed up again and moved back in this direction, to Valparaiso on Choctawhatchee Bay, where my grandrfather was in the fish business again. They lived there a while, then 

the family moved back "home" to Pensacola, where they had lived when Carrie, Alfred, Evalyn, and Ruth were born. There, my grandfather was associated with E E Saunders & Company fisheries. And there my father was a student and football player at Pensacola High School. While living there, he made friends with my mother's brother Wilbur Gentry, stole Wilbur's sister Louise away from her boyfriend, whose name was Tom (a fact that made a difference in my life all my growing up years, a story told on this +Time blog any number of Times). 

A family story is that one day my mother, on roller skates, hitched a ride on the bumper of a car driving east on Gadsden, down the hill toward the bridge that in those days went across Bayou Taxar to East Pensacola Heights. Not knowing my mother was holding on to the rear bumper, the car speeded up, my mother slipped, continued for a moment to cling to the bumper, dragging the skin off her knees down to the bone. A teenage hero of the day, my father was there, picked Louise up and rode her home to her house on his bicycle. That story was told as a high point, a pivoting point in the now budding relationship between my father and my mother.   

My father, Wilbur Gentry, and Louise Gentry were friends as students together in Pensacola High School. Before my father's senior year (my mother's junior year), my grandfather and his family packed up and returned to St Andrews, where he managed the E E Saunders fish house that was where the Shrimp Boat building is today. 

Another shot:

The family rented a house on Baker Court from the Bennett family, who lived next door. 

My father finished high school with the Bay High class of 1928, then signed on as a seaman on the seagoing dredge Benyaurd. He visited Pensacola to see my mother as often as possible, with them marrying on my father's 23rd birthday, June 11, 1934. The wedding took place at my mother's parents' home, 1317 East Strong Street in Pensacola, and they moved to St Andrews to settle down. By then, my father was a bookkeeper for a local firm.

When I was born on September 14, 1935 my parents were living at a house on Frankford, one door north of the house on the northwest corner of Frankford and 11th Street. Directly across the street was a ballpark, where my mother said she took me to watch the ballgames. Over the next several years my parents tried to buy waterfront property in St Andrews where they could get financing to build a house; that failing, they settled for the lot on Massalina Drive, where they built the house where Gina, Walt and I grew up. That house was finished in January 1938, and we moved in a few days before Gina was born in January 24, 1938. 

There're a lot more stories and facts, but maybe anther Time. I just wanted to get this posted before the day ends. 

For life and love and blessings, right shoe first and praise the Lord.

T89&c

pics: SS Tarpon. Twin masted fishing schooner Annie & Jennie sailing in St Andrews Bay off Cromanton

sorry, read but not edited!!