Coming of Age in the 1960s

Key West was the ideal place to grow up in the 60s. It's a small island at the southernmost tip of Florida where the temperature averages 65 to 89 degrees year round.

Saturday mornings started around 5 am for us kids. We'd load the cooler with sodas and food while Dad would hitch our 14 foot boat to the station wagon. Then we'd make the drive to our favorite launch ramp at Sugarloaf or Big Pine Key, sometimes Tavernier.

Photo: Diego Pitt via Unsplash

He'd back the boat down the ramp while we watched the car inch close to the point of no return. Once the boat was afloat, my brother would move the car and trailer and we'd head out for a day of fishing. We'd use shrimp and mullet to catch snapper, grouper and grunts. The fish fry was always a feast with fresh fillets of snapper, hush puppies made with cornmeal and coleslaw.

Back then, we walked to school or rode our bikes. On the way home, we'd keep an eye out for empty soda bottles tossed on the side of the road. Recovered ones jostled in our wire bicycle baskets, clinking out a merry tune as we rode home.

After our homework was done, we'd head outside to scrub the bottles clean using the garden hose and ride to the corner store to cash them in for two cents each. A little work paid for a ten cent comic book or a candy bar. If business was really good, we'd splurge on a Coke from the machine at the back of the store.

I recall our disappointment when they put a canned drink vending machine in front of the store. Our return-bottle business faltered with each purchase. Worse, the aluminum canned drinks were fifteen cents. It was our first encounter with inflation.

Miss Jordan's 4th Grade Elementary School Class

After school on the side street by our house, we played "Four Square" with a plastic bouncing ball. We'd draw four boxes in a larger square on the asphalt and write numbers in each square. Whenever a car came along, we'd holler "CAR!" and move out of the way while they drove through.

At the local A&W, we drank root beer brought to us by car hops on roller skates. They'd hang a tray from the driver's side window and skate around delivering orders wearing metal change-makers on their belts.

There was only one Burger King in the small town, and one Dairy Queen. They served the best soft-serve cones. There was a Royal Castle with their famous Birch Beer in a frosted mug for a nickel.

Families enjoyed dollar-a-carload night at the drive-in movies. Cartoons always played before the main feature. We saw mostly Westerns or a comedy like The Three Stooges.

The Conch Train, took tourists around the city on connected cars behind an engine car with a tour guide announcing all the historical data.

When relatives came to town, our family went to the A & B Lobster House near the docks with the best lobster salad and Key Lime pie in town.

Our school day began with the Pledge of Allegiance with our hands over our hearts. Afterward, we sang, "My Country 'Tis of Thee." Then, the teacher, Mrs. Price, would pick someone to read a short passage from the Bible. Yes, it was a public school and we exercised this religious freedom.

When Cape Canaveral, now Cape Kennedy, had a scheduled launch, our Principal, Mr. Carey, would roll an AV cart into the cafeteria/auditorium for the students to watch it live. Other times, we watched the launch from outside. On a clear day, we could see the trail of the rocket's arc from miles away.

21 Feb 1961 NASA Public Domain

In one of his last appearances in the Florida Keys, President Kennedy, traveling down A1A in his white Lincoln Continental convertible, turned to wave to our group beside the road. Soon after that visit, the announcement came over the school PA that JFK had been shot. Classmates cried and sadness prevailed, before we were dismissed from school early that day.

My Dad drove straight from the Navy Base to pick me up from school. Our family spent the evening in a state of shock watching Chet Huntley and David Brinkley recap the bad news.

We drove to Perrine to be with relatives for Thanksgiving and watched the funeral on their TV.

In 1964, Dad retired from the Navy and our family moved to South Miami and bought a house on Franjo Road. The model home, a 3 bedrooms was featured as a close-out for the subdivision with a sale price of $17,300.00. There was a swimming pool with a cabana and a separate bathroom which my brother, a Junior in High School, moved into. We lived in that house for 5 years.

My first car in high school was a 1959 Chevrolet Impala convertible. At lunch time, we'd pile in as many kids that would fit in the car, put the convertible top down and with the radio blaring, we'd cruise to 7-Eleven. An order of French fries cost a quarter and were made to order. Or we'd head to Arby's for hand-sliced roast beef cut on their slicing machine at the counter and a Jamocha shake. chocolate ice cream, milk and a dash of coffee. At Burger King, we'd order a whopper with no onions, just in case of a close encounter.

Senior year, the mixed concert chorus  took a train trip to Washington, D.C. from Miami, Florida along with the high school band and parents serving as chaperones. It was a twenty-five-hour ride jostling along in standard cars with no sleeping berths. Not that we did much sleeping on the trip.

We performed the Battle Hymn of the Republic in the Rotunda with its magnificent acoustics and our young A Capella voices. Later, we took a tour bus to the National Archives and saw original documents like the Declaration of Independence.

In Arlington, Virginia we competed in the Cherry Blossom Festival of Performing Concert Choirs. Afterward, we headed home on a much-subdued train ride home.

For our final performance of the year, the Mixed Concert Chorus performed Lerner and Lowe's 1954 musical "Brigadoon" for which we rehearsed endlessly. Tickets were sold to raise money to buy a new recording system for our music room.

That last year of the nineteen sixties, graduation day sneaked upon us far too soon, setting off major changes in our lives and the way things had always been. It was the end of an era and the commencement of a new one: the seventies.

A Land Remembered - Book Review

A Land Remembered is a fictional story that captures the true spirit of Florida's early settlers. 

Award-winning author, Patrick D. Smith brings to life  a story of dirt-poor Florida farmers in early pioneer days. Theirs is a tale of determination, hard work, and sacrifice, fraught with peril and danger.

Modern-day Florida is filled with luxury hotels, beach-front resorts, tourists, orange groves, and a collection of residents that usually come from other places. Few realize the raw nature of its existence before the railroad brought commerce to the area.

Rampant with alligators, snakes, marshy swamps, and mosquitoes, this land, in its original state, was home to the Seminole Indians. With razor-sharp saw-grass, devastating hurricanes, and treacherous flooding coupled with sudden crop-killing freezes, early settlers had a full-time job trying to stay alive.

During his research for this novel, Patrick D. Smith ran a trading post to learn about the lives of the native people of Florida. He describes the evolution of the state from its roots as a swamp and prairie to its explosive growth in population and major industry in a fictional story that captures the true spirit of early settlers.

Image from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service [Public domain]

Most people have little idea of what it was like scratching out an existence living on roots, berries and raccoon stew. In his novel, A Land Remembered, Smith gives the reader plenty to think about.

Hardships after the Civil War included a serious shortage of even the most basic supplies. Groceries like flour, sugar, fabric for clothing, shoes, ammunition for hunting and cookware needed to prepare meals were hard to come by.

He tells of the "Cow Cavalry," a group commissioned by the state's governor to round up stray cattle. Their job was to drive the cows to Georgia to feed the remaining Federal troops. Along the way, they also collected and conscripted male settlers to run the cattle, whether willing or not, to travel through the harsh land with its collection of predators and diseases like malaria and dysentery. Federal troops were known to raid villages, taking "everything they could get their hands on" leaving settlers without their horses, mules and cows with no recourse. Buzzards would collect those who objected.

Confederate deserters, hiding out in the swamps to evade arrest, preyed on the families of isolated settlers, killing and devouring even their work animals.

Native Seminole Indians, that were also hunted and pursued, moved deeper into the swamps of the Everglades to avoid those who wished them harm.

Schooners traveled down the rivers carrying supplies for the local trading posts where settlers would bring animal furs to trade for their basic needs. There, they could occasionally get items they couldn't make or grow like coffee and flour.

Legal tender following the war was limited to Spanish gold doubloons carted around in wagons pulled by oxen. With the peril of extreme storms like hurricanes came the ever-present swamp creatures hungry and waiting to pounce on the unsuspecting.

As early cowhands pushed their herds towards the nearest marketplace, they crossed treacherous prairies and uncleared land filled with quick sand and hordes of mosquitoes. Often those dangers were enhanced by cutthroat cattle rustlers ready to kill for a profit and personal gain.

The story opens with a narrative by the elder Sol MacIvey who is at the end of his life. He has decided to defy his doctor's orders and return to his old home on the prairie of Southern Florida.

His earliest memories come flooding back as he reconnects with his Native American friend, Toby Cypress, who formed a lifetime bond with Sol's father through mutual need and respect. Sol's ancestors struggle to grow crops on their homestead while trying to keep their work oxen safe from deadly creatures that lurk in nearby woods.

They flourished despite the odds by capturing, branding and driving herds of cattle across the state to market.

A Seminole family of Cypress Tiger at their camp near Kendall, Florida in 1916. Photographer: Botanist John Kunkel Small, 1869-1938 - Image Public Domain

The text weaves its way past a series of events through three generations of MacIvey's trying to establish a homestead. The author introduces their hired hand, Frog, whose dedication and respect for the family convinces him to stick around for a lifetime. Others join the small establishment in the scrubs to become an integral part of the family and its endeavors.

A mixture of "Bonanza" with its Ponderosa, and an impoverished post-Civil War “Gone With the Wind” existence, this tale keeps the reader engaged as they grow to care for and understand the characters portrayed.

The story provides insight into the erosion of the hard work ethic that prompted patriarch Tobias MacIvey to leave his roots and seek out a new existence in the developing south as life becomes easier with the passage of time.

Coming out of Georgia in 1858 with a horse-drawn wagon, his wife and their small baby crossed into Florida with "a sack of corn and a sack of sweet potatoes," and the tools to clear the land and build a house.

His forty-acre farm in Georgia's red clay soil had failed. Seeking more nourishing soil and a new start, he sold the land in exchange for the goods to stock the wagon - "a few packets of seeds, a shotgun and a few shells, a frying pan and a cast-iron pot" which would have to serve the family for years to come.

He traded the wagon horses for a pair of oxen they named Tuck and Buck. As part of the trade, they got a guinea cow, a strangely diminutive animal which would provide milk for all of them.

Photo Attribution - University of Washington, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Their journey through the wilderness, finding and establishing their first isolated homestead, losing it to disaster, then moving farther south to again, seek out richer soil leads them into a whole new world of experiences and eventual enrichment as their family grows and adds members.

With each generation, existence grows easier with successful crops, acres of producing orange groves and ready-made housing for the offspring that come along. When they found a way to earn bushels of money, they finally had it made.

This story has all the appeal of a grandfather's tale, mixing pioneer adventure with a slice of history told by a seasoned storyteller.

This is a saga that will stay in your mind as a keen reminder of what the frontier held for our ancestors. It tells of hard work, sacrifice and reward that comes, but not without its share of loss and grief.

Patrick D. Smith Talks About the Book in this YouTube video