This is my post for #freehousewrite #maynia hosted by @kaelci
My Grandparents came to Florida in the late 1800s. They came by ox and wagon with two children. My Dad was born here in 1922, he was a commercial fisherman like his father. He was also in WW2, in the Air Force. When he got out of the service he started fishing in the Everglades and shrimping. He had three kids by his first wife but they got a divorce, he remarried and while he was offshore the new wife gave the kids up for adoption but only one was adopted because the oldest two hid in a closet. When he heard of this he got rid of that wife but could not find who had his youngest son. Twenty years ago my oldest sister, who hid in the closet, found who adopted him but he was killed in Vietnam. Dad met and married my mother not long after that the Everglades were closed to commercial fishing he moved back to his hometown and leased a piece of land that ran on the south side of the inlet for 48 dollars a year. This was in 1954.
They did not have a house to live in so they lived in a tent. The road to get there was all sugar sand and you had to let some of the air out of your tires to get to the inlet. He built the house himself but for the longest time, there was only a canvas for the roof. Later he put the roof on. He did not want a storm to blow the roof off because on all four corners was a cable going from the roof to the ground. It was a flat roof and at night I could hear the raccoons running across it.
In 1956 My Mother was pregnant with me and she had gotten a bad sunburn which put her in labor, she said I was so small that they had to hold me on a pillow also I fit in a shoebox.
Dad had built a bar and I can still remember everything about it, there was a live band every Friday and Saturday night. The cooler he kept the beer in was kept cold by blocks of ice, there was one pool table. The restrooms were at the end of two docks that went out on what we called the Muddy water. One time my older brother and I waited till we saw a man walk out to the restroom and we waded out and when he sat down we poked him in the ass with a stick. He told my Dad what had happened and of course, with us being the only kids there, Dad knew who did it.
We had no electricity, Dad had a big generator that ran everything and trying to wake him up on Saturday morning after he had been in the bar all night was a hard thing to do. We wanted to watch cartoons, there were only three tv channels and cartoons only came on Saturday.
Any time a storm was coming our way, Dad sent us across the river to stay at our Aunt and Uncles house. After a storm passed the only way back home was by boat until the road could be cleared. I remember coming home one time and there was knee-deep water in our house. I remember one time before a storm someone left their car on the road to our place and the sand had covered all except the roof.
With having only the sand road to our house the schools would not come to pick us up so Mom had to drive us to school and pick us up. One morning as we were going to school I saw workers near the south end of the road, they were building a new road with tar on it. I remember Mom going across it and me looking back at our tire prints in the tar. That road is what is now known as A1A, it was not long after A1A was put in we got electric and the school bus would come to us.
The sixties is the time most of my memories are from. Mom and Dad were separated but Mom still lived there but not in the house, she moved into a trailer. Dad baked a banana cream pie and brought it over to her and they started arguing and Dad ended up taking the pie and smearing it all on the inside of Mom's car, the dashboard, windshield, and seats were covered in banana cream pie. Mom took us to school that morning and I remember running my finger through the pie pieces and her telling me to stop eating it. Not long after this Dad dressed us up in our best clothes and he sat me up on the bar counter and said "who are you going to tell the judge you want to live with" I said, you Daddy. We went to court and Dad got custody of all five of us.
Dad had bought a swingset for us and he cemented it in the ground. One day we were jumping off the top of the slide and the sister younger than me jumped and landed on the cement busting her head open, she had to get stitches. Dad made our oldest brother dig it up and haul it to the middle of the muddy water and dump it. We could look out there and see all the legs sticking up. But Dad thought the zipline he built was safe. I can not count the times I would get halfway across it and my hair would wind up in the pulley and I would be stuck until someone came or I could get all of my hair pulled out of the pulley. He also tied a rope that was about three inches around to two trees and one person would sit on it and the others would be on each side swinging it until they threw you off. I would land on my back knocking the breath out of me. There was a big pepper tree and we use to love to climb to the top of it and ride the limbs back to the ground, that is if you chose a good limb and not one that broke and you went to the ground faster than you wanted to do it. Those things were safer than a swingset.
Kip Wagner had found out about the 1715 storm that sunk the Spanish ships off of our coast and asked Dad if he could keep his Dive boat tied to his dock. Of course, Dad said yes. My oldest brother dove with him. They brought up several neat things, my brother found a silver sword that belonged to some child prince. They found cannons and anchors, pieces of eight, gold, jewelry, and pottery. They brought in a chest of coins, pieces of eight is what they are called. It looked like a rectangle rock, not what you think a treasure chest would look like. Later Mil Ficher bought out Kip Wagner and he kept his boats at our dock. When he left he owed my Dad five hundred in dock rent, every time someone said his name Dad would say that.
My Dad had started letting people come there to camp I think he did this in the late 1950s. In the 60s there was a family that wanted to camp and they made leather purses and wallets, Dad bought some to resell in his store. The family went to what we called the point of the inlet. The little boy got too far out in the tide and was struggling to get back to shore, the little girl tried to help but got in trouble herself. The Father not knowing how deep it was, ran and dove in from the shore, breaking his neck. The little boy had gone under, the mother was trying to save the little girl but she got in trouble. By this time Dad had heard what was going on and he was able to bring the mother and girl to shore and was giving the little girl CPR, the mother was in shock, I later heard him telling someone he had to slap her to get her to come around. The mother and girl made it. They dragged the inlet for three days looking for the little boy. Which I thought was wrong because the tide was ebbing and he had to have gone out the inlet into the ocean.
The same time all of that was going on, I was with this elderly couple who came to fish off our dock when the old man tried to cast out his rod while setting in his chair the chair folded on him and he fell off the dock. He could not swim and Dad had sunk in our heads to never jump in with someone who was drowning, the tide was ebbing so I ran down the dock getting ahead of him and climbed down a pylon I stuck my leg out and he grabbed it and was able to climb back on the dock. His wife was yelling get his hat, get his hat. It was a long way from the dock but I dove in and swam to it, it must have been a special hat because they were happy to get it back. Then I dove down and brought up his chair and fishing pole. The next time they came to the inlet, he gave me a dollar for all I did. A month later he was mowing his yard and his wife found him laying with both legs cut off by the mower, he had bled to death.
The County took my Dads' license to sell beer because he was selling to underaged people so the bar closed down and he built a bait and tackle store. He hung big shrimp nets off the dock and it was up to us kids to run them. we would put the shrimp in a tub and carry them to the store to be put in the live wells. One time we did not want to pull them so we left them longer than we were supposed to. Only once we did this, they were so full of seaweed, it took all we had to lift them onto the dock then we had to sort through all the junk to get to the shrimp. When shrimping was good we would sell to the shrimp trucks when it was bad we bought from the shrimp trucks.