Memories From Key West

 

With each passing day, I'm reminded that I won't be around forever. I don't know when my time will come, hopefully not too soon, but one day it will come and aside from any money that I'll hopefully be able to pass down to my kids, I'd like to pass down some memories. Sometimes when certain of my children are here, we discuss things from our past, but I don't think I've ever really mentioned much about the time that Jan and I spent at Key West Florida.

When I graduated from Radarman "A" school in July of 1972, I was assigned to work aboard an old WWII radar escort ship called the Kretchmer. It was home ported in Key West. Unfortunately I had to wait to catch up to the ship, as it was in the North Atlantic. I spent a few weeks at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, mainly cleaning barracks and doing a few stints on burial detail. That was kind of fun. The burial detail that is. At least it got me out of the barracks. 

I caught up to the ship in Southampton England and we chased around the North Atlantic and the North Sea spying on the Russians until about mid- November, when we headed back to port in Key West. The captain on that boat must have gotten his license at Sluffo's school of  ship docking or some such thing. When we pulled in to the dock, I noticed the pier was crowded with women and children and there was some nautical song playing on a loudspeaker. Obviously we didn't warrant a live band. As we were approaching the dock, I noticed that we were coming in at too steep of an angle and a little too fast. It wasn't until people started pulling away from the front of the dock, first slowly, then in a mad rush that I realized we were going to hit. We bounced off the dock three times before we finally came to a stop. It was so embarrassing. The crew had all been lining the rails in our dress whites at parade rest. When we hit the dock we were thrown off balance. Welcome home sailors.

One of the first orders of business when I got to port was to find a place to live so I could get Jan moved down. I found an old conch house to rent on Fleming Street for $72.00 a month. The landlady was an old Jewish gal named Mrs. Segal. The house was divided up into four apartments, and we lived above Mrs. Segal and her ancient husband Abner. When she needed something, she would pound on her ceiling with a broom and Jan would go down to help her get her medicine bottle open or whatever it was she needed at the time.

 I flew up to Ohio to pick up Jan and put all of the worldly goods we could get into the back of our "72" Pinto and drove down. When Jan opened the door to our apartment and saw the paint on the walls, she started to cry. In part I think because she hadn't really spent much time away from her family, and in part because the walls in the living room were painted a  garish chartreuse green with tan trim. Apparently the hippies who had occupied the place before us thought it was "far out." I assured her we could paint it and she calmed down.

As I recall, there was no couch in the living room, though the apartment did have a desk which had a bad case of termites. Every morning when we walked into the living room, we had to sweep up a little conical pile of sawdust where one of the legs was being eaten from the inside. 

The headboard of the bed was also infested with termites, and at night, with the light off, and only the glow of the pirated TV we were watching, we would see the little devils flying around the room. We could hear them as they ate as well, but over time I guess we got used to it. It runs in my mind our Siamese cat, Fred, would just about jerk his neck loose watching them.

There was a resident lizard that lived in the kitchen. I'd usually see him on the window screen. Frankly, I thought he was falling down on the job. He should have been busy eating bugs, but mostly he just sunned himself. Lazy bastard.

One of the features of living in the conch house was that when they built them many, many years ago, there was both an upstairs and downstairs porch that went clear around the house. The porch floors were slanted so the rain would run off instead of collect. As it was, our bathroom was located on what had once been the upstairs porch. They never bothered to level the floor, or even to put sheetrock on the walls. There was no shower, just a tub, so that when one wanted to take a bath, you had to run enough water to fill the tub dangerously full in order to get enough water to bath in. One side of the tub would be filled almost to the top, and the other would only have a few inches in it. I was always a little afraid when bathing, thinking that the floor might collapse from the weight of the water. Because there was no sheetrock on the walls, the winter wind would come in through the cracks, which was a bit chilly on wet, bare skin.

Back in the day, the military didn't pay much at all. I was an E-3 at the time, and we were living on less than $5,000.00 a year. Even then, that wasn't much money. We couldn't afford to do much, so we mainly went fishing on the White Street pier in the evenings. On weekends we might stroll down to Mallory Square with the tourists and hippies and look at the posters and jewelry in the head shops that lined the pier. At sunset the hippies would gather to watch it go down.  On payday we might splurge and go to Lum's, a chain restaurant that I think was famous for hot dogs. Every other week if there was any extra money, we'd buy an ice cream cone. It was a spartan lifestyle, but we were young and able to do it.

Key West has a number of salt water canals flowing all through the island. Where the canals passed under side streets, culverts were needed. We were just driving around one day and saw one of the canals and stopped to look. There were brilliant blue and silver needlefish swimming, facing the tidal current, and the shallow bottom was littered with horseshoe crabs. They were kind of weird and for some reason I didn't like them at all. I was standing on top of a culvert when I noticed that there were some fish inside the culvert facing the tidal current. I realized they were Mangrove Snappers and decided to buy a dozen live shrimp and try my luck. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could catch four or five before they wised up. For us, it was a chance to supplement our food. I enjoyed more than a few days fishing for snappers in a residential neighborhood.

Our apartment was located on Fleming Street. Across the street was the Kleen- Wash Laundromat, which was convenient, since there was no laundry facilities where we lived. There was also a pay phone out front where Jan would call her mother every Sunday night. One night she was on the phone with her mother when some jerk decided to try and expose himself to her. She kept going around the phone and the fellow would follow her trying to give her a peak that she didn't want to see. Finally, she told the guy that if he didn't stop she was going to hang up and call the cops. Never a dull moment.

Another time she came to the ship where I was on watch for the night. She was terribly upset and mentioned that a fellow had tried to get in to the apartment, pounding on the door and yelling and trying the knob. When he went out onto the front porch, she ran down the stairs and came to the ship. A second class petty officer offered to stand my watch and we went to the police station. By the time we got home, the cops had the fellow in custody. They kept asking where he lived and he gave our address. He was high as a kite and they hauled him off. He had apparently jumped off the second story porch when the cops showed up, but didn't seem to hurt himself. I guess one advantage to being high as a kite is not noticing pain.  Good times. I may write about the time I got tired of fishing in salt water and got chased by an alligator next post.