Tuesday, July 7, 2026

 

At Beck Avenue and 12th Street, this is how the downtown area of St Andrews now known as Smith's Yacht Basin was when I was a boy, the sheltered little "harbor" opened into St Andrews Bay; far across the way you can see the Magnolia Beach shoreline. In the photo's background, the pine trees made good shade for getting cool, but cars and trucks parked under them got pine resin dripped on them, difficult to get off and quickly dried to solid lumps ruining any vehicle's paint. There are four pine trees in the photo, but in my Time the little one was gone, and there was that wonderful line of three large pine trees, as I say, cool shade on these hot July days.

The two-masted schooners are fishing smacks like the Annie & Jennie that took my father's brother Alfred to his death when she broke up in a storm while transiting the Old Pass the night of January 8, 1918. 

To the right of the schooners, the smaller white boat was owned by an old Norwegian fisherman whom we knew as Chris Johnson (or it may have been Johnsen). The boat was his live-in home. Chris was also a skilled craftsman who built a boat for my father, a sixteen-foot skiff that was our first boat, a row-boat with oars and open top oar locks, in which I learned to row, sitting backwards and developing the skill of keeping the oars in the oarlocks while also watching over my shoulder behind me as I rowed. We powered the boat with an old-fashioned Johnson outboard motor. 

The years we had that boat, I learned how to caulk a wooden hull, and to paint to a line, white paint perfectly meeting the red bottom. 

On the white sand beach that was where the now defunct "Shrimp Boat Restaurant" is today, Chris built the skiff from scratch, keel up and ribs, bending board by board, caulking between boards, finally painting the hull white, with a red lead bottom and green inside the boat. Sundays after services at St Andrew's Episcopal Church, we used to go down and admire the progress as our new boat took shape. I'm talking 1947-1949.

In the photo, the fish-house was pink (IDK, perhaps long-faded barn red) with a tin roof. Its long wooden dock for unloading fish from the fishing boats was about eight feet above the water level. 

In the photo it all appears to be an active place; a few years later when my brother and I came along as boys, the place, which we called "Pop's Fish House" because our grandfather A D Weller was in charge there, was inactive and quiet, and two of the fishing boats were tied up at wharf side. Although Pop repeatedly told us to stay off the boats, we could not resist going aboard to play.

The fish house set six or eight feet above the beach, with plenty of room underneath leading down to the water, where within three or four feet, it instantly dropped off into deep water for docking the fishing boats. The beach was loaded with fiddler crabs to chase, and the water's edge was alive with tiny minnow-size "oyster catfish" that we could trick into swimming over our hand and scoop them up. As far as I know, the fiddler crabs and oyster cats are long gone from our Bay.

Memories include getting splinters in our hands and feet (in those days, no boy ever wore shoes from the late May day that school let out for summer vacation until school started again the Tuesday after Labor Day in September, so splinters, nails, and sand-spurs

were constantly to be dealt with) from the wooden wharf deck, and going inside to Pop's office. He would take out his tiny razor sharp pocket knife, hone it a bit sharper, slice open the skin above the splinter, take the splinter out, then open a little bottle of iodine, pour a bit of the stinging antiseptic just above the new cut, and tilt our hand or foot so the iodine ran down into the cut. 

Another memory. In his ancient age (Pop was born in Jacksonville, Florida in February 1872), Pop was somewhat hard of hearing. He was a baseball fan who listened to baseball games on the radio in his office at the fish house. Pop listened, and all downtown St Andrews with him, as the radio was always turned up full volume.

Pop had two cars in those days. Both black: a 1936 Plymouth coupe that he called his going to work car, and a 1937 Chevrolet town sedan (two door sedan with a trunk on the rear instead of a spare tire) 

that was his Sunday car, and the car that he and Mom, and someTimes my cousin Ann and I, rode to Pensacola to visit my father's sister Ruth and Pop's brother Charles (Uncle Charlie was a retired Episcopal priest, married to Mom's half-sister Grace), and over to Grand Ridge to visit Mom's sisters Nell and Alice, who were married to brothers named King. I don't remember Aunt Nell's husband, but Aunt Alice's husband, Uncle Ike, was a farmer whose Sunday dinner table was always groaning with fresh, hot dishes when we were there for Sunday dinner. 

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Cutting it off there. This morning we are "housecleaning" prep for Joe's arrival from Louisville tomorrow and Joe's Lauren and family from Apex, NC on Thursday, then TJCC from Tallahassee on Saturday for Linda's birthday celebration. Seafood restaurants here in St Andrews, then here in 7H for lemon ice box pie.

Robert's funeral at two o'clock this afternoon.

For life itself, all of life and love, and for 84 years of friendship with Robert,

RSF&PTL

T90