I have a sometimes walking partner in the mornings. We don’t plan anything but while walking, we sometimes bump into each other and will continue walking together. We usually catch each other up on the news of the neighborhood. In short, we gossip. I know some things she doesn’t and vice versa. Lately the topic has been Covid-19.
As of this writing there are 10 Covid cases within a block of me affecting five families. To my knowledge, none were vaccinated at the time of their testing positive. Four became very sick.
In some of the cases, either the vaccine had not been developed or they were not eligible at the time of their infection. However, several were eligible and chose not to get vaccinated for one reason or another. I certainly don’t know their specific reasoning and it’s not for me to judge but I find it pretty significant that there are that many cases within one block of me.
In my own extended family, I have eleven relatives who have tested positive, some vaccinated, some not. Some have had severe cases and others have not, even within the same family.
A friend who still teaches was notified by a student she tested positive for Covid. She was tested on a Monday, received the results on Wednesday, yet attended three classes while positive. The entire class was masked and my friend was vaccinated but the CDC has no specific guidelines on that particular case. She’s being trying to get tested but she teaches most of the day and the testings sites are closing by 1 pm.
The college does not offer rapid testing on campus, probably because they are afraid the governor will cut funding to the college if it even acknowledges the threat of Covid. The college encourages students to be tested and encourages them to wear masks but doesn’t mandate either. I think professors can require masks but not testing and vaccination.
It seems there is no end to this pandemic. I’m getting to the point that I am thinking of going back to the stay-at-home scenario and stop going out in public. I become eligible for a booster shot on September 29th and I intend to get it as soon as I am eligible.
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I still wear a mask anywhere indoors or anywhere I can’t get six feet of distance from other people.
It seems people have decided they have to live with the idea of Covid and have adjusted accordingly. I dined al fresco with Michel and Nancy on Sunday night at the Boathouse at the Riverside Hotel on the riverfront. The hostess wore a mask but the waiter did not.
About half the people wear a mask when I shop Whole Foods on Sunday. All the employees wear masks but some of them have them below their noses.
The media is full of stories of people who chose not to get vaccinated, developed Covid and said they wish they had it to do over – on their deathbed.
The giant Sturgis, SD motorcycle rally has resulted in South Dakota reporting a 312% increase in cases. What is even more scary is that that is only South Dakota reporting. The majority of the supposedly 450,000 participants come from all across the United States.
Florida’s governor has changed the way statistics are reported to CDC and in some cases the CDC has to guess at the number of new cases, particularly on weekends when the state doesn’t report data. Now the state simply reports a seven day trend. As of yesterday, the seven day trend in Florida was 21, 208 new cases. Even with my poor math skills, that seems to be over 7,000 new cases daily in the sunshine state. In August we’ve been accounting for anywhere between 16-20% of Covid cases nationwide.
Even with that, he’s also about to withhold pay from administrators that put mask requirements into effect in the K-12 system. He’s adamantly opposed to schools requiring (1) masks (2) tests or (3) vaccinations for students and faculty.
At least we now have a fully approved vaccine by the FDA and the military will now require everyone to get vaccinated and some businesses are beginning to require vaccinations.
Still, there is a significant part of the population of the U.S. that will never agree to be vaccinated. We may not stick together but we may all die together.
I was at dinner with Michel and Nancy last night when the conversation turned to the construction of their new house. It’s going to be a beautiful home and it’ll be finished probably before December rolls around. In any case, it got me to thinking about my experiences renting homes through the years and upon reflection, I realized there were quite a few weird things that happened up until I bought the house I’m now living in for the past 27 years.
My first location in south Florida was the Lincoln Chateau apartments on, you guessed it, Lincoln St. in Hollywood, Florida. I found the apartment after quite a bit of searching. Most of the places I could afford either didn’t have central air nor did any have any form of heat. I was told at one place that “This is Florida, you don’t need a heater.” By the way, that was 1985 and it snowed a few flakes that year and water puddles froze over.
Lincoln Chateau Apartments in Hollywood, Florida.
I was on the second floor of the Lincoln Chateau and had a U-Haul of furniture I needed to offload. I simply pulled up as close to the building as I could and began to unload with the help of my brother Archie. We had no more gotten started that someone pulled up very angry and explained I was in their parking place. I asked if they would consider parking in my spot until I got unloaded. Nothin’ doin’. I pulled the U-Haul over to my space and doubled the distance Archie and I had to move things. This should have been an omen.
“Dining Room” at Lincoln Chateau
It seems parking in Hollywood, Florida is at a premium. I realized it when I finally got time to explore the downtown area and every parking spot had a sign or stencil indicating which stores the spots were for. If you parked at one spot and went into a different store than marked, the store manager would call a towing service to have your vehicle removed. That’s when I noticed the proliferation of signs advertising towing companies.
Back to Lincoln Chateau…. I had a neighbor on each side of me. The couple to the east was very quiet. The one to the west was a gentleman of about 50 years old who lived alone. He was friendly enough and me, being a southerner, was friendly right back. It was only later that I learned the neighbors had called the police on him because he had a habit of having young kids in the complex crawl into his lap while around the pool area.
One afternoon I came back late from campus and found my door wide open. There was a distinct smell of tear gas in my apartment. I had noticed the police in the parking lot so I walked back down and asked what was going on. I was informed my neighbor had gone off the deep end. He’d reported to the police someone had shot at him while he was in his car. Later the police learned he had shot his own car up and that’s when they called out the tactical unit to storm his apartment. He apparently had barricaded himself in his apartment and the police had to break down the door after shooting tear gas through his window. The tear gas had leaked into my apartment and the police were airing my place out – without any guard on the place.
Lincoln Chateau was not too good with maintenance issues. His window and door remained un-repaired for several months. Actually, my air conditioner was down for six months and even though I walked over to the office every day to report it, they did nothing. They finally gave me a break on the rent but not retroactively.
Later, I asked for a month to month lease – I was looking to get the hell out. They agreed. It’s law in Florida that landlords must return deposits after a specified time. My time was one year and it was up. When I moved out, they refused to refund my deposit until I threatened legal action.
My next place was a little garage apartment off Funston Street, exactly 1/2 block off US1. It had a living room, a large kitchen/dining area and a tomb of a shower. The back door of the place opened up into a 4×8 space that was my bedroom.
My garage apartment just off Funston Street in Hollywood.
My landlady was an 80 year old Italian lady – who had an 80 year old Italian boyfriend. I was notified of the vacancy because the person who moved out – and told me about it – was my department chair at the time. The rent was perfect, $300/month. It had one window air conditioner in the living room and it fit me perfectly.
The kitchen on Funston was quite large.
I would frequently host department parties and there was a law office just off US1. I called the attorney and asked if my friends could park there after hours. He gladly gave me permission and so there was always easy parking for guests.
One party got a little loud when, gasp, teachers overimbibed! I realized it and quickly cut the volume down on the stereo. About an hour later the police knocked on my door and said they had received a complaint. After talking with me a minute, the police realized they couldn’t even hear the stereo and let it go.
I reported it to my landlady and she let loose with a stream of Italian curses about one of her neighbors who had nothing better to do than phone in complaints. It was then I realized that in Hollywood, everyone hated everyone else. She talked badly about the Russians (who I got along with) the Jews (who I got along with) the Blacks (who I got along with), etc., etc. The truth is every ethnic segment of Hollywood seemed to have something against the other.
My landlady always used to feed my department chair when he lived there so she decided to do the same to me. She thought I needed fattening up. She was constantly bringing over dishes and soups and breads. It was great until I realized her sight was failing. I think she had some dishwashing detergent sitting next to the salt because the next time she fixed me Pasta e Fagioli it was sudsy. After that, whatever she brought me ended up in the garbage and I returned her clean dishes the next morning with profuse thanks.
A friend of Mississippi came down one weekend and he asked me to take him around to all the gay hotspots. He accumulated a good bit of gay “literature” from the bars and he was looking through it while I read the Sunday paper. Then he wanted to read the paper while I cooked breakfast. After we ate, I asked if he was through with the paper and he said yes. I always took my newspaper, after I had read it, to my landlady and her boyfriend. I gathered it up and about an hour later, he asked where his reading material was. It dawned on me he had mixed his magazines in with the Sunday paper. I had to rush over and ask for the paper back. The boyfriend was in the middle of reading it but he didn’t say a word as he handed it back over with all the gay magazines in it.
In the spring I used to sleep with the windows open since the air conditioner didn’t cool too well anyway. One night about 2 am I awoke to someone standing over me going through my bill fold. I shouted “Hey!” and sat up in bed. It was dark but he pointed something at me and said “I shoot you! I shoot you!” I got less brave at that point. He literally jumped out of the bed room window. I called the police. They actually nabbed someone and asked me to identify but I couldn’t because I only saw the outline of him. For the next 10 years I would wake up exactly at 2 am.
Robbery Central – my bedroom where I awoke to a robber.
The strangest thing that ever happened was someone knocked on my “front” door one day and asked if my name was Searcy. I said yes and he handed me a wad of my mail. I asked what was up and he said the postal carrier consistently delivered my mail to his address two blocks over on a different street. I asked why. He said the mail carrier told him that someone used to live at that address five years ago by the name of Searcy so that’s where he delivered it. Every piece of mail the guy handed me said clearly Funston Street, not the street the guy lived on.
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After three years, my little Italian landlady got greedy and wanted to raise the rent. I went apartment hunting. I found another garage apartment on SE 9th Avenue in Fort Lauderdale in the swank Rio Vista neighborhood. Enough of the Hollywood hate! The owner had taken the garage/carriage house and decided to redo it and live in it and rent out the big house. At least that was the plan until he met his girlfriend who took one look at it and said uh uh.
The main house is to the left and the garage apartment is to the right. You can see the garage door that opened up into the living room.
The garage had been turned into the living room. The bedroom, kitchen and bath were three steps up from the living room. I had a stove, full sized fridge, a dishwasher, and a sunken bath tub! There was white tile throughout the “house.” That threw me for a minute because I figured it would be impossible to keep clean, but honestly, that white tile was the easiest. It showed any speck of dirt instantly and all you had to do was damp mop it.
The garage door still functioned and I could open the living room up to the outside. There was a wall around a patio area that gave me privacy from the big house as well as the street. I stayed there and did work on the place while living there. The previous renter would deduct his hours and materials from the rent but I never did. I painted the inside, caulked all the windows (which leaked) and generally kept it in excellent condition.
Thanksgiving at Rio Vista. The green curtain hide the garage door.
There was a retired school teacher next to his place and she had fruit trees in her back yard. She was constantly bringing me grapefruits, oranges, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, etc. from her trees and garden. It was paradise.
Keith Robertson, Ron Jone, Mary Halstead, Larry Halstead, Sara Hurdle, Sue Peters, Joel Lee at Rio Vista House for Thanksgiving.
Then the evil girlfriend thought I was getting by too cheap. I think I was paying around $600/month. She sent me a note and said they were increasing the rent to $1200. I left.
By the way, she had two children, a boy and a girl. She named the girl Amanda and the boy was named Blake. Shades of Gunsmoke!
From there I moved into Ron Jones apartment on NE 6th Street in Fort Lauderdale, a half block off Federal. That’s twice I’ve lived 1/2 block off Federal (US1). It was a two story, two bedroom, 2 1/2 bath apartment with a pool for the complex. This was the most entertaining place I’ve ever lived. You didn’t need TV.
Ron Jones Condominium in Fort Lauderdale
It turns out NE 6th St and Federal, at the time, was the place to pick up male hustlers. I would stand by my bedroom window which looked out on the street below and see a regular cavalcade of prostitutes and their Johns. There were knife fights, lovers quarrels, robberies, drug deals, you name it, all unfolding before my eyes.
The busiest street at night in Fort Lauderdale. The rows of brown roofs are the condos.
The guy to the east of me often partook of the cornucopia of prostitutes and was often “rolled” by the hustler. I woke one night to a guy jumping the brick wall to the street from his apartment. The next day I saw my neighbor with blackened eyes and bruises for days. He was really hustled.
I spent many nights at this window being entertained by the street below.
The guy to the west of me worked nights as a lineman for FPL. He had roll down shutters on every window and door. His girlfriend worked at Shirttail Charlies during the evenings and when she would get in, she’d often go out to the pool and we’d get into all kinds of conversations. Every time she was on duty at Shirttail’s I got a free drink after that.
I was robbed (technically) one day when I got out of my truck in my parking space. A woman walked up to me and immediately stuck her hand in the window and started stealing change that I kept in the door panel.
One day Joel and I were doing something out front of the complex when a guy on roller blades came past us. We both did a double take. The guy was naked except for a thong.
To the east of the complex was one of those old fashioned drug stores with cafe. The chef worked there during the day and as head chef at 15th Street Fisheries during the night. It was the place to go for lunch because it was very, very cheap and very, very delicious. His wife was the waitress and we became friends. We always got larger servings than anyone in the cafe.
Sadly, the owner died and the place was sold. No more gourmet lunches for rock bottom prices. I think I lived at Ron’s for seven years. That’s when a friend recommended I use my GI Bill to buy the house I’m currently in. It’s the first house I’ve own and probably will be the last house I’ve owned.
Over the years, I’ve had two pickups. When you have a pickup, you become everyones’ best friend. Particularly when they need to move. Particularly when they want you to not only loan them the truck but also your muscles. I’ve helped move too many people for me to remember but I have never asked anyone to help me to move. Ever. Archie volunteered otherwise he wouldn’t have come down the time he did.
I decided that for the move to 2451 I would ask for help. I had things boxed up pretty well and the night before the move, Keith and I painted the entire inside of my house. I waked the next morning and I didn’t think I was going to be able to get out of bed. I forced myself up and by that time the door bell rang and the first of the movers showed up. The people I called on came through in spades. Betty Brady and her two sons, Irmgard Bocchino, Tom Green and Kurt Wilhelm, and Joel and Keith pitched in.
One of Betty’s sons brought a trailer, I had my truck and I also rented a U-Haul. We loaded everything up and we made it to 2451 and started unloading. I realized it was getting close to time for lunch so I was told to go get pizza and sodas. By the time I got, they had made a second trip and unloaded everything. It was all done and the only thing I had done was load my truck. It was the easiest move I’ve ever made.
Thankfully, there’s been no real drama at 2451. Maybe it has something to do with rental properties in South Florida.
I’m nothing if not organized. Some might say anal. I could blame it on having a Dad in the military but more likely it was the influence of Boy Scouts and their motto “Be Prepared.” I am – overly.
Hurricane season rolls around, I’m already there. Not only to I have a plan B but I have plans C and D and E. You might suppose this would lead to a lack of spontaneity but I do have my moments.
There was the time that Crag Knox and I left Ole Miss around 10 pm one Friday night and drove to the Smokies for the weekend. It’s not like I don’t do things on the spur of the moment but I do find some joy in planning things. Not always but sometimes.
I think my organizational skills were one of the things that got me into botany. I liked the idea of categorizing things and seemed to have some aptitude to it in Boy Scouts when I was a counselor at camp.
What decided me on a major was a display by my eventual major professor, Dr. Thomas M. Pullen, on the third floor of the biology building at Ole Miss. I was an undergraduate and he put a display of herbarium specimens on poisonous plants of Mississippi. I think I was hooked at first sight of that display.
I like things that challenge. Crossword puzzles and card games like bridge excite me. I like the comfort it brings to walk through the woods and know many of the plants I see by common and scientific name. Sadly, as I get older, it takes me longer and longer to come up with either name these days.
I’m not sure I was particularly good at plant identification – at least in the courses I took under Dr. Pullen. He seemed to be satisfied but also understood that I tended to rush through the taxonomic descriptions of plants and that I needed to be reeled in on occasion. I let my natural tendency to recognize something get in the way of actually reading the description. It sometimes led to the wrong conclusion.
In graduate school, I hated slugging through the technical descriptions of plants. This leaf was “2-5 mm wide and 15-30 mm long with strigose, unbranched trichomes on the abaxial surface.” Boring!
When I moved to Florida, I encountered a flora with which I was totally unfamiliar. Mississippi is more typical of southeastern flora. Southern Florida is officially designated as subtropical. When I first got here, all the plants looked alike.
I started to collect plant specimens and work on identification while at the college. I needed local floras and manuals for identification and immediately became frustrated when, lo and behold, they did not include any technical descriptions that I used to hate. I realized I needed them to identify the plant I wasn’t immediately familiar with. (In order to save money on printing costs, authors only included the standard dichotomous key that all manuals and floras contain.)
A well written dichotomous key can get you quite a ways in identification but it becomes essential to eventually work from each plant species description which includes specific physical details and measurements – as well as where the species are found – both in location and habitat. Those millimeters tend to be important. So far, I’ve never found a decent manual or flora for the flora of South Florida.
Most people know I take numerous photos on my trips – mostly of plants. Where most people take scenic views or views with people in them, I take strange photos of particular parts of plants. Half my photos seem to be of plant stems and plant leaves – as much as they are about the pretty flowers. It’s the leaves and stems that often give you the best clues as to the species since most flowers of the same species look very similar.
In my dotage, I have taken on the task of identifying plants by photograph alone. There are several reasons for this, foremost, it is illegal to collect a plant in most state parks and all national parks. I would have to press it and dry it while on vacation before I could bring it back for examination with a dissection scope anyway. Besides, I don’t need a federal felony on my record.
I get a lot of exercise on outbound hikes because I’m constantly stopping, kneeling down and photographing, getting back up and heading off again. If it takes an average person 1 hour to hike a trail, it takes me 1 1/2 hours or up to two because I’m constantly photographing plants. In bound, I’m much faster because I’ve pretty much photographed everything I wanted on the outbound trip. However, I usually have to make one or two stops even if retracing my hike because I see something I didn’t see on the outbound trip.
For example, here’s the data on number of photos for my latest trip.
Location Plant Photos Scenic Photos
Palo Duro 100 78 The Knock 133 113 Carlsbad 37 35 Big Bend 95 108 Total 365 334
That’s 699 photos with more than half of plants. As you can see, only at Big Bend did I take more scenic photos and you have to take into consideration I had already been to Big Bend and snapped 244 out of 340 photos of plants – and Big Bend is very scenic!
The frustration comes when I return home and start to try to identify the plants by the photos. I have a lot of local guides such as Wildflowers of Texas by Geyata Ajilvsgi. However, Texas is a pretty big state and the wildflowers found in Palo Duro Canyon are significantly different from the wildflowers found in Big Bend. Palo Duro is located in the northwestern part of the state with flora very similar to New Mexico while Big Bend is more Sonoran desert and flora more akin to Mexico, southern Mexico, southern California and the Baja peninsula. Palo Duro also doesn’t have a guide to wildflowers specific for the area.
There are a lot of web sites will show you maybe two or three species that you may be interested in but you realize quickly that your photo doesn’t match their photo. It’s not uncommon for me to check three or four local guides, two floras, and up to 10 or 15 websites trying to identify one species by a series of photos I took while on a hike.
For example, I had a real hard time trying to pin down the identification of this flower.
What threw me was the deeply split petals which recurved back on the flower along with the very narrow leaves. Normally, in the west, I think of the genus Penstemon when I see red flowers with long, entire leaves. But it didn’t look like a Penstemon. I photographed it in Big Bend. Sadly, there is no flora of Big Bend, no wildflower guide of Big Bend that I own (you can purchase a guide on Amazon for $74 but I’m retired and on a fixed income) and the only web site close to showing any flora of Big Bend is The American Southwest. Big Bend is close to Mexico, Arizona, and New Mexico so any guides in those areas are useful.
I searched Wildflowers of Texas, Epple’s Plants of Arizona, MacKay’s Mojave Desert Wildflowers, Ivey’s A Guide to Plants of the Northern Chihuahuan Desert, Spellenberg’s Sonoran Desert Wildflowers, Rickett’s Wildflowers of the United States – Texas (2 volumes) as well as his Southwestern series (three volumes) and the current volumes available of Flora of North America.
What you do is look for photos that resemble your photo. In the business, it’s known as picture keying and no self respecting botanist would stoop to such foolishness. Liar, they all do to some extent.
I will admit to having an idea it belonged to the honeysuckle family of plants but other than that, I didn’t have anything to go on. I was totally frustrated with this one. Sometimes typing into a search engine the characteristics of the plant like flower color, number of petals, stamens, and other physical features will get you in the ball park but nothing worked with this one. When a flower is showy, there’s a better chance to find it in a wildflower guide than if the flower is less attractive. This was in none of the guides.
I accidentally found it looking for something else. It was a web site iNaturalist.ca, a website for the Canadian Wildlife Federation. Yes, it also grows in Canada. By the way, the plant is the narrow-leaf desert honeysuckle, Anisacanthus linearis (S.H. Hagen) Henrickson & E.J. Lott). Last I checked there were no deserts in Canada.
Sometimes, I just have to give up. I can usually get plants identified down to genus but getting the specific name can be a real pain. Sometimes, I have a real problem getting things down to genus. Members of the aster family have always caused me trouble (I’m not the only one) and I do well to get it anywhere close to genus. I seldom photograph members of the aster family because I know it’s a losing battle.
The fun is when you do figure out a plant identification. You follow the clues and hopefully it leads you to the right conclusion. I feel pretty confident on the majority of my identifications but I know I make mistakes. Even the best taxonomists do.
I remember Arthur Cronquist visiting the herbarium at Ole Miss for a book he was writing on the Composite family (aster family). He was considered the world’s expert on this family (with an ego to match). Dr. Pullen allowed him access to the herbarium but there was one species Dr. Pullen vehemently disagreed with him. Cronquist changed Pullen’s identification. After he left, Pullen went back into the herbarium and changed it back to his original identification.
I’ve already identified over half of the wildflowers from my last trip but I suspect there are another 25% that I’ll never decide on the species. Any botanist worth their salt will keep a journal with plants collected and identified along with field notes for each species. When I moved to Broward College, that journal got misplaced for all my graduate work.
Since I’ve been back in the plant identification business (2013) I’ve managed to identify 1,738 species (I’m keeping a record). A lot of these are duplicate identifications but from different locations. I’ve found Fragaria virginiana (wild strawberry) at Acadia National Park, the Bugaboos in British Columbia, Isle Royale National Park, Linville Falls on the Blue Ridge, The Smokies, Voyageurs National Park and Warm Springs, Georgia – and that’s only what I photographed. You can pretty much find that species anywhere in the United States. I’ve also identified F. chiloensis, and F. vesca, also wild strawberries. They all look similar but there are significant differences when you look closely.
Notice the difference in the leaves of F. virginiana and F. chiloensis.F. chiloensis has leaflets that have a heavy waxy coating and they are more oval in shape. Leaflets of F. virginiana are more elongate and have less wax on the surface of their leaves.
Ah, it keeps me off the street at night. I enjoy it (when it doesn’t get too frustrating) and it keeps my mind agile. And sometimes, some of the photographs turn out really nice!
Life has a way of throwing challenges at you. Believe me, I’ve been challenged a lot in my 72 years. One challenge sticks with me over a lot of others because it was a challenge I put own myself.
I was a late comer to the Boy Scouts. I think I joined Troop 28 in Morton when I was 15 years old – older than most and a little embarrassing to join as a Tenderfoot (the initial rank you attempt). After a few years, I found myself ready to try for Eagle Scout – the epitome of achievement in Scouting. There was, however, one major roadblock – lifesaving merit badge. If I remember correctly, you had to earn 21 merit badges for Eagle and some were required – lifesaving among the required.
I’ve related about my experiences with water at different times in this blog – the near drowning on three separate occasions – and learning to swim with lessons from the Methodist minister’s wife. However, earning a lifesaving merit badge was serious business and it was the roadblock to most scouts trying for Eagle.
We were only allowed to attempt the badge by going to Camp Kickapoo in Clinton, Mississippi and since our troop only went for one week of the summer, your opportunities to complete the merit badge were limited to a few years. Added to that was the seriousness the Andrew Jackson Council took their lifesaving merit badge program at Kickapoo. All of the counselors on the waterfront were either Red Cross certified or had their Scout Lifeguard certification. You were going to be put through the wringer with the camp program.
I was an OK swimmer. After my cousin Jo taught me how to get out to the diving board at Roosevelt State Park by swimming on my back, I was eventually able to make it with the American crawl. As kids, we would play around the diving board and it wasn’t long before I could make it out and back without any trouble. The real problem was that my swimming ability at the time was not going to make it for the merit badge at Kickapoo.
My Scoutmaster was H.D. Polk. He managed a hatchery for one of the chicken companies in Morton. He was a no nonsense type of person and came across as very strict but with a real streak of humanity in him. His wife, if anything, was better educated than he. He went to Mississippi State and majored in agriculture (he was a life-long State basketball fan – he would listen to the games during campouts). I think his wife must have majored in liberal arts. She was the most educated person I’d met at that time. She could talk on any subject in depth. I suspect her major was literature from some of the conversations I had with her.
Hiram Polk had three sons. I remember two of the three: Don and Danny. Don was the youngest and the “bad boy” of the family. He was always lipping off to his Dad (never his Mom) and it was probably because he was more like his Dad in temperament. He had a way of getting under Hiram’s skin. Danny was the older of the two and had been in the military. He was more like his Mom and more laid back.
In any case, Mr. Polk knew I was not ready for lifesaving at Kickapoo. He told Don that Don was going to teach me and Buzz Shoemaker lifesaving so that we would be able to pass at Kickapoo. Don kicked up a fuss but reluctantly agreed. I suspect his Dad paid him to take on me and Buzz. Don took no prisoners.
During our first session at Roosevelt, he had us swim around the boundaries of the swim area. When we got close to the pier at the end of the swim, he jumped in on me and grabbed me to pull me under. Not only was I tired from the swim but I hadn’t fully taken in his instruction on how to break a hold from a panicked swimmer. He finally realized I was close to drowning and released me. Buzz was next. I figured we were done for the day after that but no, we had to swim the perimeter again and again.
Slowly, over the early summer, Buzz and I developed stamina, improved our strokes (American crawl, Australian crawl, backstroke, sidestroke and breast stroke. Don trained us over and over on how to break a hold while under water. Of course, he would wait until you had done the perimeter swim three or four times before he grabbed you and drug you under.
On occasions, Don couldn’t make it and Danny would take over. We were at Roosevelt every day for three or four weeks. Danny was more instructive. Don was more physical. If you didn’t fight Don as hard as you could, he would make you pay for it by increasing the number of times he tried to drown you in a session. He was wanting us to quit. He tried every trick in the book to get us to stop the lessons. He cursed us, damned near killed us, and told us what pieces of shit we were and that we didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell to pass lifesaving.
Once it got close to going to camp, he changed his mental abuse and started building our confidence. Slowly. Very slowly.
The first day of camp, you normally get to select what programs you want to attend. Mr. Polk was having none of that for me and Buzz. He assigned us our merit badge classes and lifesaving was first thing in the morning, right after breakfast.
We thought Don was hard. Lifesaving at Kickapoo was brutal. First, Buzz and I were split up. We were not allowed to team together. I was put with some guy from Yazoo City. I always thought of Yazoo City as a large city. In reality, it only had around 11,000 residents but that dwarfed Morton with 2,000.
Strangely, the guy and I got along. I’m surprised because I was so shy back then but we both got into the swing of the training. This guy also had a big city attitude – at least for Yazoo City.
The swimming area at Kickapoo was much larger than Roosevelt so swimming the perimeter was a challenge. That was only the first day. We later were swimming the entire lake. A lifeguard would row along side of us as we swam. Every so often, he would jump out of the boat onto one of us and we’d have to break his hold and then continue swimming. The one rule was once we broke the hold, we’d have to swim them to the boat and place their hand on the gunwhale.
The Scouts teach you a saying: “Reach, Throw, Row, and Go.” The idea is if you can’t reach someone in distress from the dock (with a reach pole), then either throw a line to them, row out to them, and lastly only when everything else has been tried do you dive in and go after them.
We were coming up on the last day of camp and we needed to demonstrate we could save someone drowning by swimming out to them, dive in front of them before they could reach out and grab you, then push them upward out of the water as you came up behind them, and reach across their chest in a chest lock. In essence, you floated them on your hip and did the sidestroke back to the pier.
The Yazoo City guy and I were teamed together and we each had someone assigned to pull in. The first thing he did was cross my lane and headed for my guy (his was bigger and had a reputation of really working you over). I pulled out in front of him as I swam and told him he was heading for the wrong guy. I kinda felt bad about that but no so bad I was willing to take his guy on.
When you swim toward a drowning victim, you never lose sight of them. You have to swim with your head out of the water as you jump in. You never dive in after them – you simply jump shallow so your head doesn’t go under. You never take you eye off the victim.
As you approach, when you get within 3-5 feet of the victim, you then dive in front of them and sneak around the back of them while under water. Then you grab their legs (dangerous because they are kicking) and then force them upward so they rise up out of the water. As you do that, you then come across their chest and place them on your hip. You then start swimming towards the dock with the side stroke – without the use of your arms. It’s all leg kick. I was fortunate to have a very strong leg kick back then.
Our instructors had this system where they would let you get within a few feet of the dock (remember, you had to place their hand on the dock) and they would use their feet as a rudder to take you back out. Once they had you far enough away from the dock, they would then break your chest hold and take you under. In this case, they would grab you around your arms and chest and sink to the bottom. You had only a breath of air to break their hold and repeat the technique of coming up behind them and putting them back on your hip.
They would do this two or three times to simply tire you out. They would see if you could break their hold (most were gym rats and were twice our size). Several were football players at colleges in Mississippi. If all else failed, you would have to get really physical with them. Several of the lifeguards would end up with bloody lips and noses. Unfortunately, that would also make them angry and they’d make you pay.
Eventually, my guy must have gotten tired because he let me pull him in all the way to the dock. What a relief it was when I put his hand on the dock and he acknowledged I had “saved” him.
Once out of the water, I looked for my Yazoo partner. He was still at it but finally was able to also pull his guy into the dock. As we headed to the community showers, he looked over at me and told me he would not have made it if I hadn’t been his partner. I acknowledged the same with him. We challenged each other every day of the week and were stronger for it.
We still had to wait until the next morning to find out if we passed the merit badge. Buzz and I both did.
This was probably the most physical and mental challenge I have ever had up until the time I hiked Guadalupe Peak in Texas. However, I was 70 years old when I did that so I still consider lifesaving merit badge to be one of my biggest accomplishments that I set for myself.
I kept in touch with the Yazoo City kid for a few years but then college happened and we lost touch. I never found if he made Eagle. Everything after lifesaving was a piece of cake so I made Eagle that year.
Mr. Polk, Don and Danny, and the kid from Yazoo City taught me that if I put my mind to something, I could probably accomplish it. It built my confidence for the rest of my life. Challenges simply became obstacles to get over and not to be feared or dreaded. It’s what got me through Ole Miss, boot camp in Alameda, four years in the Coast Guard and graduate school. I learned that I can not only cope but also do well.
Lifesaving merit badge was a significant goal that allowed me to have some modicum of success. I suspect I even surprised Mr. Polk when I completed it. I also suspect Don was in significantly better financial shape after he “tutored” me and Buzz.
