Join Me in My Time Machine

I, like many of you, have been saddened and troubled by recent events and the condition of our body politic.  It has affected my psyche with negative thoughts and (caution 60’s jargon ahead), bad vibes.  I thought I would take a break from all of this and jump in my mental time machine, while it still works, and revisit happier memories.  Certainly, anyone who has seen over 26,000 sunrises has experienced many things that are worth reliving.

120th street Neighborhood

Growing Up on 120th Street, My front yard

I grew up on a dead end street with at least a half a dozen other kids my age.  We played ball in the street, played board games on living room floors, and aggravated the adults during regular backyard barbecues and parties with the neighbors.  It was the 50’s, everyone knew everyone else, and we all got along. Except Mr. Moore of course.  Every neighborhood has a “Mr. Moore.”  You know the type.  He is the miserable, unhappy, grumpy neighbor who wants everyone else to be just a miserable and unhappy as he is.

My House

Mr. Moore was the guy who would walk around with a tape measure to make sure your hedges hadn’t grown higher than the zoning regulations permitted.  He would yell at kids playing in the street.  If your ball ended up in his yard, you played paper-rock-scissors to see who would have to retrieve it.  Mr. Moore was obviously made very nervous on Halloween, as he was the target of all of our pranks.  This is why he is included in my recollection of happier times.  

Classic Dog Poop in Flaming Bag Prank

We even tried the Halloween Classic, “burning paper bag of dog poop on the front step.”  As I remember, it didn’t go as planned.  The dog poop was too “fresh” and the paper bag burned itself out before “old man Moore” answered the door.  He never saw the bag and we never got to see what happened when he finally found it.  The bag just disappeared sometime the next day.

What We Hoped Would Happen

I had a basketball hoop and backboard attached to the frame of our swing set.  We dribbled on the grass.  As kids, we climbed ficus trees for fun and would swing on the larger hanging root vines pretending to be Tarzan.  Eventually, a group of our fathers joined other fathers in our Village of Biscayne Park, to build a large brick-and-mortar recreation center on land set aside for that purpose.  We had basketball courts, tetherball poles set in concrete inside old tires, and shuffleboard and hopscotch could be played on the open-air pavilion concrete slab.  The recreation center was easy to reach by bicycle from anywhere in the village.

Typical Saturday Afternoon Flick

I'm sure this 1948 movie would have a different title today

On most Saturdays, kids went to the movies.  Here we would watch newsreels, seemingly endless cartoons, and two feature films.  We could do this while drinking Coke, eating popcorn, and gobbling Junior Mints, Necco Wafers, Chuckles, Good & Plenty, Milk Duds, and Tootsie Pops.  I was obviously gone long enough for my parents to find time to make my little brother.

Movie Time Candy from the 50's

Eventually, the movies got some competition from the neighborhood’s first television.  Tommy lived across the street and just down past Mr. Moore.  He had the first TV on the block.  We would watch The Lone Ranger, Sky King, Adventure Time, The Dungeon with M.T. Graves, and old movie serials.  After a year or so, my parents bought our first TV in an attempt to lure me home.  I think they missed me.

"Modern" Western Sky King

The family would drive down to Key West several times a year to visit my aunt and our cousins.  We would leave on a Friday sometime after my dad finished work.  It was a long drive down Miami Avenue and Biscayne Boulevard to US1 heading south.  It would be dark when we arrived.  As kids, we would sleep in the back seat and I would see the shadow of the rear view mirror on the headliner and watch as it raced forward when oncoming headlights passed.  There were two things to do in Key West, drink and fish.  I did both.

All Trips to Key West crossed the 7 Mile Bridge

I would fish in the canals and on boats and would drink when any adult would set their alcoholic beverage down within my grasp.  When they weren't looking, gulp.  Beer or whiskey with ginger ale (aka hi-balls), it didn’t matter to me; I found I liked them both.  I tried cigarettes a couple of times but luckily found them disgusting and never took up the habit.

Type of Push Mower I used on my Grandmother's Lawn

My grandmother was living back then on 31^st street one house east of Biscayne Boulevard, US1.  We would trek to her place and I had to cut the grass with her old push lawn mower.  My dad would then take us downtown for lunch.  There were several places on the Miami River.  We could watch the sea cows (manatee) feeding on grasses at the bottom.  This was long before the water got polluted from commercial industrial dumping and runoff.

I remember my first AM transistor radio with its 9-volt Ever-ready battery and white earpiece.  The radio was small, about the size of a pack of my dad’s Pall Malls.  I could take it to Haulover Beach and listen to static-filled music from either of the two local stations playing that demon-inspired heathen “rock-n-roll.”  We enjoyed swimming in the Atlantic, playing in the surf, and using cheap goggles to watch fish, and eventually girls swimming in bikinis.  We lay on the beach and got too much sun.  The 1950s were a happy time growing up in South Florida.

In 1959, my family built a new home 4,076 feet away from our original home on 120^th Street.  We were still in Biscayne Park.  We were outgrowing the tiny 2 bed 1 bath house of my youth.  Sharing a single bathroom with a family of four was the biggest problem.  We each took bathroom turns on a schedule; I think my time was Wednesday.  My mom always wondered why her roses never grew.

The new home was huge.  I had my own bedroom for the first time.  My brother was OK, but sharing a bedroom when you are 14 is a drag.  The new house had 4 bedrooms, 2 ½ baths, a den, living room, Florida room, dining room, patio, and (drum roll here) a swimming pool where I would spend the rest of my life.

Life on Griffing Blvd. was fun but different.  We couldn’t play in the street.  The street had too much traffic.  We could play in the vacant lot next to my house but the odd triangle shape of the property and the fact that it was covered with sand spurs and small cactus didn’t bode well for inflatable ball sports.  We could still bike over to the rec center.  My friend Tommy had already moved to a house just down the street and he backed up to the canal.  Tommy had a small boat with a tiny outboard.  We would fish in the canal and take his boat out into Biscayne Bay.  We caught mullet and mudfish, but sometimes we actually hooked something edible.  You could actually see the bottom of the bay back then.  We would stop at the spoil islands in the bay and go swimming.

Cooked in a Steel Beer Can and Dipped in Butter, Nothing Better

One of my fond memories is from the times, later in my late teens and early 20’s when we would go diving for Florida lobster (crawfish).  We would bring back our catch to one of the spoil islands in the bay and we would take empty beer cans and use a “church key” to punch out the top.  The cans were still made of steel and zip tops, pop tops, and aluminum cans were a few years down the road.  We would fill the cans with salt water from the bay, drop in a crawfish tail, and place the cans in a circle around a fire.  One can was used to melt a couple sticks of butter near the fire.  When the tails were cooked, we would dip the meat in the melted butter and dust the top with salt from a little cardboard Morton salt shaker. Eating that lobster with cold beer on a hot summer’s day was what growing up in South Florida was all about.

Made in Miami, the Worst Beer on the Planet, but cheap

"Church Key" Punch holes on opposite sides;
2 holes on the drinking side if you were really thirsty.

We had polio, car wrecks without seatbelts, and cigarettes to kill us.  We had to worry that we would need to duck under our classroom desks and bid a fond farewell to our posteriors because someone just dropped an atomic bomb in the vicinity.  However, we didn’t worry about some kid walking into the room with a semi-automatic rifle or handgun and shooting everyone in sight.  It was a different time, my time.  Those are the memories that get me through current events.