VISITING  GRANDMOTHER  CARLTON

By Lula Dovi

      Going from Tampa to Ft. Myers in a 1930’s Essex could be a real adventure during the 120-mile trip. During that decade the roads leading out of Hillsborough County were not as good as those beyond. Very often we had a flat tire at least once either coming or going and possibly a burned out bearing, a common hazard for that car model.

       The scanty traffic on the road made us worry about getting help from other drivers. All the towns we passed through were small. Roaming livestock was a threat because at that time Florida had no fence laws. Clashes between cars and cattle or pigs were rather common. I heard some stories from my family about that.

      We three children, my two cousins Lillian and Leslie Joughin and I, were very close in age. I had gone to live with them and their parents, Uncle Leslie and Aunt Lillian, when I was four years old. My mother had died two weeks after I was born in 1922.

      As we neared Ft. Myers the excitement began to build because there would be six  cousins belonging to Aunt Lillian’s three sisters, Clara, Matred and Lois. Plenty of playmates. We might go across MacGregor Boulevard, lined with royal palms on either side, and admire the broad Caloosahatchee River. Thomas Edison, who invented the incandescent light bulb, had his home nearby on the river. Or we might go to a creek a few blocks away and climb the banyan trees. The landscape was more tropical in Ft. Myers than in Tampa.

      One of the best adventures was visiting the “science lab” that Aunt Lois’ two sons had in their garage. Part of the lab was a dark room for photography. A chemistry set could turn our pennies into dimes. The magic was performed by dipping the pennies into mercury which would make them silver. Invisible writing, good for passing on secrets, could be produced by writing in lemon juice on stationery and later heating up the paper.

      When it was a Thanksgiving dinner that brought us all together, the cooking smells and seemingly interminable wait drove us children half-crazy with hunger. It became a game to sneak around and dip fingers into giblet gravy or pumpkin pies without being caught.

     Grandmother Carlton, who had married a cousin of former Governor Doyle Carlton, had a  big old cracker-style, two-story frame house with a wrap-around porch and a tin roof  that became a dormitory at night for us children. We were put to bed, several of us in one big bedroom, in old iron frame beds. Before the lights went out there would be several saucer-sized black spiders noticeable on the ceiling or in corners. We trusted that they would not drop down on us in the dark.

      There was one bedroom that was very special because Grandmother allowed us to color the wallpaper with crayons. This was very upsetting to Aunt Lillian who feared we might want to do the same thing when we got home.

      Other special privileges at Grandmother’s house included our helping her in the big kitchen when she was making guava jelly and jam. We could stir the pots, help mash the fruit through a sieve to remove the seeds and help skim off the foam. What a delicious fragrance and taste those guavas made. Guava jelly is still my favorite today. When Grandmother was making a crazy quilt she allowed my cousin Lillian and me to piece together the scraps with chain or buttonhole or running embroidery stitches.

      In spite of the good times at Grandmother’s house there were a couple of things we were glad to leave behind. Sometimes a black cloud of mosquitoes would swarm among the orange trees near the house. They would end up blanketing the screen door. We couldn’t go outside until we got a spray gun and sprayed furiously before opening the door. We were also happy to leave the drinking water which had a strong sulfur taste. The city at that time had no aeration system.

     As we headed back to Tampa we hoped we would not hit a cow or have a flat tire or get stranded with a burned out bearing. One time Aunt Matred, who was traveling ahead of us, did hit a cow. Fortunately the cow just wandered off and her car was not damaged. It was a warning.

PASS-A-GRILLE  SUMMERS

By Lula Dovi 2007

Early in the morning when it was cool and the fishermen were pulling in a fulsome harvest of curious creatures with the high tide, all of us vacationers marveled at the variety of scooped up specimens. A flying fish leaped up. A blowfish puffed his last gasp. Horseshoe crabs and other crabs struggled with their loss of freedom. And mackerel waited to become someone’s delicious dinner.

Some beachgoers bought their supper from the fishermen before they went to market. We children thought about all those things, including an occasional stingray, in the waters when we swam. The last barrier island in a chain near St. Petersburg, FL, Pass-a-Grille drew us for many years during the 1930’s to its pristine white sands and turquoise waters. At night the water was luminescent with a glow when the breakers churned. That phosphorescence is gone now due to pollution.

A magical rhythm of waves, wind, showers and sometimes day-long rainstorms took hold of us. Each procession and recession of the tides swept up the secrets of the deep. Certain kinds of seaweed provided us with curved pens for writing in the sand. Small round translucent shells that came in pink, white or gold were pretend money. When the blistering midday sun forced us under a thatched pavilion, we built our sand castles there. Sometimes the castles with towers and moats were close enough to the tidal area to be  washed away after nightfall.

High tide formed two sandbars for us to explore. Low tide left shallow water for wading and floating in deliciously warm water and also for digging up coquina shells. Coquinas had infinite color variety in their tiny shells. When a wave receded they wiggled back into the sand quickly. Along the beach there always were many shells and bits of coral and sponges from the bottom of the tropical waters. While traipsing down to the water we were careful to avoid the many fiddler crab holes in the soft sand. They scattered quickly  into their holes as we approached.

Behind the sand dunes and sea oats there were no condominiums facing the gulf in those days. Many family-owned cottages and old wooden apartments dominated the seascape. My family rented an apartment in an old Patterson Apartments.And sometimes two other families, the John Biggars and the Alec Steuarts, also came along with their children.  

On the weekend my Uncle Leslie Joughin brought a special treat from Joe Alvarez’ Restaurant on upper Franklin Street. A full Cuban type meal in tiered metal bowls arrived with tantalizing smells. There were garbanzo soup, yellow rice and chicken and fried plantains. My Aunt Lillian didn’t have to cook that night on the kerosene stove.

The Biggars’ sons concocted a story about having found some human bones in a nearby vacant lot. Some of us younger children were led to the bones, and we believed the story especially in the light of Pass-a-Grille’s legendary pirate history. It was said that the island was so named because the pirates paused there to eat supper during their marauding travels around the coastline. We became so fearful we were afraid to go outside. Finally some parents went with us to the site and dispelled our fears by announcing they were only chicken bones.

No ghostly visitors appeared. So we happily went back to our summer routine of diving into shallow waters for sand dollars, avoiding large crabs on the water bottom , watching schools of porpoises rolling in the distance, and  watching pelicans feed in the morning and evening. The trip back to Tampa included lots of smelly shells in the car and white, clinging sand.

BOBBY SOCKS AND SADDLE OXFORDS

By Lula Dovi

We came in bobby socks and saddle oxfords to Florida State College for Women (now Florida State University) at Tallahassee in the fall of 1940. My hometown of Tampa seemed to dwarf that small town. By the time of our graduation in 1944 the world was aflame with World War II, and many of us had intellectually outgrown some of our former beliefs. Friendships from those years have continued the rest of our lives.

The beauty of the campus, with its clay hills, dogwood, azaleas and Gothic buildings, was in contrast to the repression that prevailed in the numerous administrative rules. I began to feel imprisoned by the treatment we received, and the hourly chiming of the big clock in the tower made me grumble.

Dormitory bedtime hours were mandated by lights out, forcing some of us to study with a flashlight in a closet. Signing out and signing in was a rule when leaving campus. There was no dancing allowed on Sunday, and never was any liquor allowed. Visiting a private home in Tallahassee or another college campus required special permission from one’s family.

Further evidence of repression, even censorship, existed in the library, as some of us curious students discovered. Look for authors Rabelais, as bawdy as Boccaccio, and Bertrand Russell, British philosopher and freethinker, only to be told to ask at the desk for their works. Some of us who were members of the Student Senate tried to fight against the many rules, but we lost.

A small group of us rebels, mostly journalism and political science majors, had deep discussions on every taboo subject we could imagine. The list included sex(endlessly discussed), religion(mostly ecumenical and freethinking), politics(liberal), marriage and careers. In addition to “bull sessions” we did our share of volunteering to make bandages and to take Red Cross First Aid courses to help the war effort.

School population at the time was only about 2,500, mostly southern girls.There were hardly any men on campus until the nearby air bases sprang up after 1941. Many soldiers from the Air Force and Amphibious Corps appeared everywhere. Finally we could dance with men instead of other girls in the recreation building where the juke box blared as we danced cheek to cheek or did the jitterbug. Some daring girls occasionally whistled at the men.

Men. Men in their dashing uniforms. Men about to be shipped to God knows where.   Maybe the European Theater or the Pacific Theater. The atmosphere was electric. And some of us became engaged and married before graduating. As I did. Lt. J.B. Martin, Air Force  pursuit pilot, and I eloped in April 1944 after knowing each other only two months. Two months later he was killed in a training accident in Puerto Rico. It was only with my family’s permission to marry that I was able to finish the final semester of college.

During my senior year I was assistant editor of The Flambeau, official campus newspaper published weekly. One day, after the appearance of the paper, the editor and I received a summons to the office of the college president, Dr. Doak Campbell. We had to answer to a charge of failing to use “proper protocol” in publishing an editorial which urged promotion of dances and social events between the local air base and the college.  We had never consulted the administration before writing such an innocuous editorial.

The editor and I had to go separately into the office to face the president, his secretary, and the dean of women. Editor Mildred Heston was able to take shorthand notes of the  meeting. Altogether it was rather scary because Dr. Campbell had the reputation of tyrannizing over us young women. Two years later the state legislature made the college coeducational. Before that happened, however, the editor of the campus paper the year after I graduated almost got expelled by Dr. Campbell for lobbying for coeducation at the state capitol building. She was a friend of mine from Tampa, Cordelia Barclay, and her father had to get a lawyer to prevent her expulsion.

In 1944 I left the bobby socks and saddle oxfords at home. I took off to join a friend in San Diego, CA. Two years of working for the San Diego Tribune Sun and Associated Press brought more adventures before I married again. What great lessons we learned at FSCW about challenging authority and thinking for ourselves. Despite the petty rules we had the chance to develop leadership skills that can probably best be done at an all-girls school.

ONE  LAST  TRIP  HOME

By Lula Dovi

2007

     I hurriedly called my daughter Lucretia as soon as I read the columnist’s article in the newspaper.

     “They’re going to tear down the house where I spent 17 years of my childhood and youth,” I said. “Will you go with me to take some snapshots? I realize I don’t have any pictures of that beautiful home.”

     She said of course she would, and we took my six-year-old granddaughter Astrid with us. Somehow that Dutch colonial  two-story house on Morrison Avenue in Suburb Beautiful seemed to have gotten a bit smaller, perhaps because the giant liveoak on the side had grown bigger and more over-arching.

      My widowed father, who was head of R.T. Joughin Plumbing, Heating and Air Conditioning Company and which included his three brothers, had sent me when I was four to my uncle and aunt, Leslie and Lillian Joughin, to be raised along with their two children, Leslie and Lillian junior, close to my age. They had the foresight to buy the vacant lot next to the house shortly after building it in the mid-1920’s. I’m sure the addition of that lot spared some wear and tear on the house and well-groomed yard. However, on many summer evenings we children would roll around on the grass and then scratch a while from the stinging sap. To cool off we would sit in a circle and tell ghost stories while the bats flitted around the streetlight.

      In our early years we had a large playhouse and a swing, trapeze and stationary bar ensemble for limited acrobatics. At times we used the whole play area for a neighborhood circus event or we produced plays in the playhouse or turned it into a very amateur science lab. Our acrobatics could never equal those of the Zacchini family of circus performers who lived about five blocks away on Fountain Boulevard. We often rode our bicycles over to gawk at them and marvel that the father and sons also had an act that shot the men out of a cannon into a net.

     The tempo of life in the earliest years of that house could be measured by the regular delivery of the ice man. Roy, a patient black man, took his horse-drawn cart up and down the streets. He allowed us children to ride with him a few blocks and chip away at the ice to cool ourselves with crunchy bites. It was almost as delicious as vinegar and mustard sandwiches which helped to combat the summer heat. No air-conditioning in those days.

      Facing the street at our house was the carefully landscaped part of that lot with a water fountain and pool with goldfish—also polliwogs at times. The bright orange and red canna lilies took over where the septic tank nourished them below ground. Aunt Lillian was a passionate gardener and member of the Garden Club. Many people are not aware of the role that club had in the building of Bayshore Boulevard. The ladies took turns preparing lunches for the workers and delivering them to the construction site in the 1930’s. All part of the WPA (Works Progress Administration) during the Great Depression.

      Every season’s flowers paid respect to the time of year in Aunt Lillian’s garden__  from jonquils in January to sweet peas in spring to zinnias in summer and chrysanthemums in fall and poinsettias at Christmas. She showed me how to arrange them after I picked a bouquet. Which is indeed an art.

     The first thing Astrid did when we entered the house was to go to the top of the stair landing and bump her way on her bottom to the floor of the hallway below. How many times we children did that or slid down the bannister! The hardwood floors shone with the same gleam my uncle carefully nurtured. Each Christmas brought the ritual, first of all, of the arrival of Henry, middle-aged floor cleaner and polisher. No mechanical equipment for him. He put on the wax and pushed around a heavy weight covered with a cloth.

     Our next big undertaking was putting up lights around the large arch framing the door. Then there would be the preparation of  fruit cakes going into colorful tins for gifts . The cakes received numerous dousings of rum to keep them moist and flavorful. All these odors were agonizing for hungry children. The climax of these rituals, besides exchanging gifts, was the decoration of the tree, only on Christmas Eve, and the topping of the tree with an angel. New Year’s Day marked the absolute end of the Christmas season and the exit of the tree.

     During World War  II many military servicemen from MacDill Air Force Base came calling on Lillian and me and stayed to dinner. Our black maid Mary was an excellent cook. Her dinner rolls and blanc mange dessert were special. Our dates from the North might have their first acquaintance with grits and turnip or collard greens. One time as a joke, while on our way to swim at Lake Carroll, Lillian and I asked our dates to stop at a

West Tampa Latin bakery to ask for a yard of Cuban bread.

     The war years of the 1940’s brought sadness and unsettled feelings to everyone at Morrison Avenue. My aunt suffered a series of strokes before Lillian and I went to Florida State College for Women in 1940. The decline of her health was accompanied by irascibility and a lot of drinking. Her son was in Europe with the Air Force and her daughter and I were away at college. She no longer played the piano and neither did my uncle take out his violin to play with her. Her decline was especially painful because she had been a well-read, cultured, talented woman who was within one semester of college graduation when she married. Our friends admired this petite, shapely and attractive woman as an example of a “modern woman.” She could hold her own in a political discussion.

      Added to the turmoil at home was the fact that I had changed so many of my ideas about politics, race and religion. I stood alone among the family members. When I eloped with an Air Force pilot just before my graduation, my father disowned me and remained hostile even after the young man was killed two months later in a training accident. Although I visited the family after my return from San Diego, CA, where I was a newspaper writer and editor, no one could seem to overcome the strained feelings.

     After seeing the gracious old well-kept house, with its ten-foot ceilings, ample fireplace with a finely lathed mantel and stippled walls in the living room and dining room, I pondered with Lucretia: Why would my aunt and uncle sell this house and then build an exact duplicate on Bayshore Boulevard in the late 1940’s? Within a few years both of their children had married and left the new house. I had already left the old house by 1944. My aunt died in 1965 at the age of 65 and  my uncle moved into a condominium.The house remains on the bayshore near the Colonnade Restaurant , but maybe it too will be torn down one day soon to make way for another of the usurping high-rises on that strip.

       Novelist Thomas Wolfe’s book could be the title of this narrative:  You Can’t Go Home Again.   

OUR  APPALACHIA

By Lula Dovi

After building our ridge-top house outside Boone,NC, in 1962, my husband and I knew we needed Venie as a helper to watch over it in the winter and open it up for our summer visit. She had done the same for years for my friend Thelma whose cabin was just up the road above us. She called us the “summer people” from Florida and sometimes “flatlanders.”

It was a delicate negotiation with Venie as we wanted to convey, more than anything else, our need for her services rather than give the impression that she could most certainly improve her sparse existence with our wages. These people were very  independent and proud.

One could notice that her small cottage, which clung to a steep bank about twenty feet from the gravel road, had no inside sealing. Venie told me in the winter snow would blow through the chinks and pile up on the windowsills. For heating and cooking there was only a big iron wood-burning stove in the kitchen. How could delicate biscuits come out of the oven of that metal monster with no thermostat?

Luther, Venie’s husband, had been a widower with several children when she married him. They had several children together. She stretched their budget by making quilts, rag dolls and catnip balls to be sold in local craft shops. Many times Luther tramped around the wooded hills looking for “sang root” which he sold to a local pharmacy. This nondescript root was ginseng which brought a good price and was shipped to Asia.

Behind the weather-scarred house a vegetable garden sloped gracefully down to Howard’s Creek. Venie always planted a row of gladioli and peonies along with her cabbage, onions, “taters” and lettuce. Part of their acreage was planted with hay for the “milk cow.” Later she would can a lot of vegetables for the winter. One summer when I visited her she was making cheese. That hobby earned her a feature article in the local newspaper as one of the few home cheese-makers.

For a woman a bit more than middle-age her complexion was soft and almost dewy, probably due to the constant mists and rains and lack of harsh sun. Her durable frame attested to the years of milking cows and hoeing in the garden. Short and well-muscled, she had the imprint of uphill and downhill. A wad of tobacco was always inside her lower lip, which gave extra prominence to her long jaw. Her gray hair, with few dark streaks left, was pulled back starkly into a knot at the back. Large blue eyes set in a narrow face seemed to take in everything around her. Indeed, one could get most of the local news by going no further than Venie’s house.

After Luther died and Venie slowed down she developed the hobby of listening to the police band on the radio. She could tell us all the dire things that were going on in Boone as it became a burgeoning university town. Some of her opinions were not exactly scientific. She was convinced that the U.S. walk on the moon was all done with optical illusion. And she also pronounced the small earthquake in the area to be a warning from God about our wicked ways. Listening to gospel music on the radio was another of Venie’s pastimes. To share the experience she would call her sister on the telephone and ask her to listen as she put her speaker close to the radio.

Over the years prosperity became more noticeable as Venie and Luther sold some land.  New siding appeared outside. Inside the house sealing was applied. Indoor plumbing appeared, and the hand pump outside was displaced. New linoleum covered the floor. There was some new upholstery, but it was as hard as ever to discover if there had ever been a color scheme.

One summer shortly before Luther died I found Venie to be very depressed. She was mourning the loss of her cow because she could no longer take care of it. She was also aware that Luther was declining. He spent more time sitting and sleeping in his big upholstered chair. She was very tender and thoughtful toward him as she called him her baby.

Eventually Venie moved into town to live with her daughter Pauline and son-in-law Junior. A few years ago Venie died . Thelma and I enjoy recalling our sturdy friend who was so full of mountain advice and remedies and gifts from her garden. She promised me one summer just before my departure for Florida that the following year she and the family would do some “hollerin” for me. We never got around to it, and I still wonder what it was. I suspect it was probably yodeling.

OUR APPALACHIA II

 By Lula Dovi  2007

Although many of the local characters that my family knew have passed away, we still enjoy re-telling stories we remember from our 45 years of vacations in Boone,NC.That cluster of friends and acquaintances helped us with necessary repairs and projects of all kinds and also informed us of important mountain lore, such as the almost eternal durability of locust trees used for posts. In fact, for 30 years those posts supported my porch.

Ron Ragan, the builder of our cottage, was a soft-spoken, tall and handsome man with a sparkle in his eyes and a good sense of humor. He outlived two wives, both of whom died of cancer. He and the first wife had five children. We never called him anything but “Mr. Ragan,” because there seemed to be an air of dignity and authority about him. He could do stone masonry, electrical work, plumbing, cabinetry, and furniture-making.

One summer when our son Enrico was a teenager he received an invitation from Ron to join some local men to go fox-hunting. We thought it was an honor, almost like a bid to an exclusive club. The men had beagles and “feist” dogs that they set loose when they reached the top of our ridge. After a while my daughters and I could hear the yelping of  the dogs running throughout the woods, sounding as if they were on the track of a fox.

Much later that night I could hardly wait to talk to our son about his fox-hunting initiation. Surprise, he said. “Mom, they don’t really hunt the fox. They just let the dogs loose to run and then they sit around a fire eating canned pork and beans and telling stories.” Many nights during the summer we would hear the dogs howling as they went up and down the road and through the woods. Next day there might be a knock at the door as a “hunter” would ask if we had seen his dogs. Somehow they always got back limping and exhausted. Sometimes they slept off the “hunt” on my porch.

A few miles away from us on Howard’s Creek Road lived Marvin and Jay Miller. The two brothers lived next door to one another. Jay never married. Marvin had a son, Bobby, the same age as our son. In his late teens Bobby died in a car accident when the engine blew up during some hot-rodding. Marvin and Jay engaged in various business enterprises, from hauling up river gravel for our driveways to doing odd construction jobs. Marvin also built many rental houses on the property he owned.

A memorable repair job became the talk of our little community. Dorothy Fisher, of Jacksonville, FL, asked the brothers to blast out a huge boulder under the corner of her little summer cottage which perched vertically above the road. Dorothy went to Asheville for the day while the men worked. When she returned they said, “Mrs. Fisher, we had a little accident. We used a little too much dynamite and it took off the whole bedroom in back.” The remnants of the room scattered among the treetops around her house. 

Finally we heard that Jay Miller was courting a lady. By then he must have been around sixty. We thought that perhaps Jay, after his brother died, might be feeling lonely. He brought the woman to his house to show her where they would live. But when she began saying what she would change and rearrange in his house, he called off the engagement.

 I  wonder what these friends and neighbors thought and said about us  “summer people” up on the ridge when we organized a neighborhood watch program. They were all very independent. But when my neighbor from Jacksonville, FL, asked them to sign a petition to the Post Office for delivery in front of our houses, they did so. No one else had thought to make that request. And it went through with no trouble.

THE  MOUNTAIN  HOUSE

By  Lula  Dovi

2007

     It was more my dream than my husband’s. Building the cottage on a ridge-top outside Boone, NC, became a reality after my father’s modest inheritance came through in 1962.

     My husband Steve, born and raised in Milwaukee, had no fondness for or knowledge of rural life. On the other hand I had spent many summers at a huge old six-bedroom house with many parlors and fireplaces on a hilltop on the Asheville Highway a mile from Hendersonville, NC. The aunt who raised me had three sisters who at times vacationed there together with a varying total of seven to twelve children__all close in age.The hikes, the internecine battles, the picnics and excursions were spectacular and memorable.

     One summer Grandpapa Carlton rented a cow. We even had some chickens which became a fascination as the slaughter and cleaning revealed all the ugly steps that take place before chicken and dumplings.I remember the warm milk sitting in a large ceramic crock waiting for the cream to rise to the top. Our two maids who accompanied us cooked constantly for the crowd. We all helped with shelling chick peas and shucking corn from the garden.

      In one parlor of the house there was a piano where we took turns playing and singing. Sometimes we would  beg our maid Sadie,  the daughter of Mamie, to do the snake dance. I think it was actually a version of the shimmy. It was Sadie, a late teenager, who graphically explained to some of us girls the actual facts about babies being made and born. When the whispers of that information got back to the visiting mother of our family doctor, she told her two girls that no, babies were cut out of the mother’s heart. The subject died quickly as we children much preferred climbing trees, playing miniature cars or sliding down clay banks in our overalls

     All things came together auspiciously in 1962 for Steve and me. Six-plus acres were a bargain price, and the builder, Ron Ragan, tobacco-chewing neighbor, craftsman, rock mason, electrician, was available to do the work before next summer. He did nearly all the construction himself except for help with wiring and plumbing. Window seats, bunk beds, picture window overlooking the valley, and cabinets were nicely crafted and planned__ all from just a pencil sketch on paper. He located a spring downhill and built the spring-box to house the pump.

     When it was finished a friend and I drove up in June to get the furniture from my father’s house installed. Along with her two children and my three children we stayed in a cabin belonging to another friend up the road a bit. Conditions in the unsealed cabin were rather primitive. Bats had entered the house during the winter. The water was murky at times.

     In a few days the Mayflower moving van chugged to a stop in front of the house. At that time the gravel  road was very rocky and narrow. The van had to go up half of a mile in order to turn around. Everyone pitched in with the unloading.    

     Finally my friend and I were ready to return to Jacksonville. We had hung curtains, bought foam mattresses for the four bunk beds in one bedroom and the two bunk beds  in front of the rock fireplace. We ate many meals on the deck among the treetops. The children had been invited to visit the Baptist Bible Camp up the road. And they did go up a few times but came back describing how the preacher had scared the Baptist children so badly with his righteous ranting and descriptions of hell that they were crying. Our children were not  moved, except for sympathy for the captive audience, because they were Unitarians.

     The next visitors to the new cottage were my husband’s brother and his bride who went up for their honeymoon. Steve and I planned our vacation in the new house after their return. But when his brother Sandy came back we got startling news. His wife Jackie said,”We had a little accident but we cleaned it up.”

     The honeymooners had built a romantic fire in the fireplace. But they didn’t know about opening the damper. Smoke poured into the room. In a panic Sandy got the fire extinguisher off the wall. It was one of those that is turned upside down and spews foam that won’t stop foaming. Sandy’s  firefighting path could be traced two weeks later as the extinguisher’s ingredients still reacted on the mantel, the walls, the kitchen cabinets, and both doors leading outside. He had finally made it outside and decorated the trees next to the deck with white foam.

     When my family got up there it was a shock for Steve’s inaugural view of our mountain house.We spent hours and days further cleaning the foam. It kept rising up like an evil genie that had burst out of a large red canister. Even after 45 years the acid marks on  knotty-pine walls, doors and cabinets are still there but somewhat fainter now.

      Our children__Enrico and Marguerite, teenagers at the time, and Lucretia who was almost two__had mountain adventures similar to those of my childhood for many years.We still laugh together over the tribulations that a leaking springbox could bring(no water), the invasions of mice during the winter, and trying to sleep at night in the meadow across the road but waking up with the neighbor’s cows staring at us.And we have some still-unexplained ghost stories.

Seen Personally: Florida Boom and Bust Again

By Lula Dovi

   Is it Florida boom and bust again when I see so many “For Sale” signs and a few rental signs in my neighborhood? Some signs have stood for more than a year. This is in a stable neighborhood. The year is 2008.

   Recalling the Great Depression of the 1930’s I remember vacant lots and some unfinished homes in Tampa’s Suburb Beautiful near Hyde Park. At that time my father, R.T. Joughin, having recently completed a term as sheriff of Hillsborough County, temporarily closed his business, R.T. Joughin Plumbing, Heating and Air Conditioning.

   Radio news and newspaper headlines spoke of bank failures, massive unemployment  and business failures. There were runs on banks and bank failures. My father went out to Tombstone, AZ, and bought a silver mine with two other friends. That enterprise failed after a few years. He thought he had insider information from a friend in Congress that this country was going on the silver standard instead of the gold backing for currency.

   The dire headlines and negative talk of our parents changed the atmosphere for us children as we felt those tensions. The Garden Club members took turns preparing  lunches for the WPA(Works Progress Administration) workers who were building what is now Tampa’s beautiful showcase, Bayshore Boulevard. A sign of the times was when homeless men often appeared at our door asking for food. We always fed them a good meal.

   Before my father went to Tombstone he had gotten rid of his two Lincoln automobiles and settled on a Chevrolet sedan. He would drive me around parts of Tampa and regretfully point out the important buildings or lots he had owned before the Depression. For the first time in his life, he said, he had to get a mortgage on his house in Tampa Heights.

   One year in the ‘30’s the school system ran out of money. What a bonus for us young students when school ended in May instead of June. Teacher salaries were below par—a trend that seems never to have been properly addressed. We students noticed one particular junior high teacher who always wore beautiful clothes. She was also a very lively teacher. It wasn’t until some years later that we realized she was wearing her “dress-up” clothes to avoid making any new purchases.

   Weather also affected Florida fortunes in real estate. A freeze caused my father to sell his orange grove sometime in the 1920’s. Freezes, hurricanes and drought have greatly affected the Florida economy off and on. And now, of course, a crisis in mortgage and insurance failures has flattened Florida homeowners.

   Will Florida weather these new crises without a lot of personal heartache and ecological degradation and economic troubles? Some important studies have come out from Florida State University, my alma mater, the St. Petersburg Times and other information-gatherers. Ultimately many of the answers fall into the political realm where they must be studied and addressed. Let’s hope our citizens have the will to look responsibly at what must be done and what can be done.