Daytona Bike Week has passed but we all have motorcycle memories

Daytona Bike Week goes for ten days each March. It’s an extravaganza for motorcycle buffs from all over North America and even all over the world. It’s a loud week, Harleys in full roar beginning in late morning t about noon and lasting well past midnight. 

You get the full treatment along Main Street in Daytona and out by the speedway where the races, concerts, and big-time vendors are. Chris and I ended up surrounded by bikers on Thursday when we went to lunch after a medical appointment and wandered by a famous tattoo business on U.S. 1 that hosts beer and autograph sessions with Playboy models, strippers, and assorted women in skimpy outfits despite the un-Florida chill. If you go further north on U.S. 1, you pass biker bars aplenty.

For us Ormond-by-the-Sea dwellers, we hear bikes all day and night. We’re located between Hwy. A1A which promoters now call the Jimmy Buffett Memorial Highway and John Anderson Drive which locals call the street where the rich people live. The bikers ride A1A along the coast to Ormond, Flagler, and St. Augustine. They can find nice beaches if they want to dismount but more likely will end up at one of the many saloons and tourist attractions that line the way. Bikers also use that route to go to the Highbridge Exit which will take them to the Tomoka Loop, a favorite winding tree-lined route. John Anderson also takes you to Tomoka along a winding tree-lined route by riverside houses you can't afford.

BTW, you do have to have some cash and credit worthiness to buy a new motorcycle. They start at about $25,000 and goes up to $40,000. You also need a good pickup and a trailer to haul the bikes that once zoomed freely on I-95 in the 1970s and now old bones and joints need a little assistance to get to the hoopla. There’s still lodging and food and such to buy. And don’t forget your two- or three- wheeled vehicle's maintenance costs. 

Guys like my old Wyoming neighbor worked on his own Harley. He had the technical skill, tools. and big garage to do the work. One night he blasted down the street before he rolled to his driveway. Then came a knock on our door. My neighbor needed my help. I walked with him to behold the downed bike. He seemed embarrassed that his Harley was this helpless thing lying powerless on his driveway. Drunk and high, he needed my aging muscles to get the machine upright. I helped of course, the neighborly thing to do.

I have plenty of friends with motorcycles and many that used to have motorcycles. When attending Daytona Beach Community College in 1973, I shared a house in Holly Hill with a roommate who fled the north country to Florida. He helped me rebuild the engine in my 1950 Ford truck. He was a biker without a motorcycle which he had to leave behind for a reason he wouldn't talk about. He did talk motorcycle. He dressed biker too. Probably dreamed it. He moved to Orlando and the last I heard, he was riding again. 

My brother Dan rode a Harley until leukemia took him away. An air traffic controller, he ran an Internet biker-oriented side business, Daytona Gear. He loved his motorcycle. When he and our friend Blake trailered their bikes to Sturgis, Dan invited me up to ride bitch on his bike and I did. Our daughter Annie has a treasured Biketoberfest photo with her and her Uncle Dan on his Harley. She even bought me a Biketoberfest T-shirt which I wore proudly around Wyoming and I often was asked how I liked Biketoberfest and said, “Just fine, I liked it just fine.” I had Sturgis T-shirts too.

In the 1960s and '70s, I rode dirt bikes through the Florida woods and on the beaches. They belonged to friends, little Hondas and Yamahas and Husqvarnas. I covered motocross races as a correspondent for the Denver Post. A girlfriend once dumped me for her old boyfriend, a motocross racer. I responded by mailing her a verse about love and longing that I pulled from Kahlil Gibran. Didn’t make me feel any better but I hoped she read it and thought about me for a little while.

I guess we’re all motorcycle people in America. Daytona has a special claim on big motorcycles so I guess I can claim a little slice of that. Still, I like the quiet.

This aging M.F.A.-trained writer vs. Copilot's A.I. mind

This is my version of a prose poem that I dashed off late last night. Maybe it's not a prose poem. A ramble, maybe, or just a burst of words that flew out of my head. I've been doing that a lot lately. Words bursting from my mind with very little rewrite. It's fun, really, just to let the words flow. Freewriting is what I used to call it when teaching college composition. I would tell my students just freewrite for 10 minutes and then let's see if anyone wants to read their pieces. Don't think about it -- just write! Do as I do. And I would write for 10 minutes about any darn thing I wanted. Things like this:

So what do you think of Florida my old friends ask. I think what is it they want me to say that I find it the most magnificent spit of land in the U.S. of A.? They are friends so I can't lie. I find it confusing after 46 years elsewhere many elsewheres. Warmer than my recent home Wyoming but confusing. Old landmarks no longer exist or they exist in puzzling forms. The beach seems less magnificent maybe because it’s so managed. The 60s and 70s we drove the wide low-tide beach any time day or night. We drove high tide too with all the attendant risks. Mostly we were pushing Yankees out of the soft sand and sometimes they paid us because they were so grateful that their 1968 Buick LeSabre did not get gobbled by the salty-sea. We surf as the sun peeks over the flat line of the horizon. A tortoise surfaces beyond the breakwater and we hope it’s not a shark. The waves are surfable but just barely and it’s OK because there always is tomorrow and tomorrow after that. My old rental west of the interstate is now a development and the beat-up two-lane road is now named for a gated community called Tymber Creek and yeah that Tymber with a Y and all the timber cut down for new houses says thank you alphabet. On Hartford Ave my father is not out by the street, dressed in shorts and flapping button-down, with beer in hand, yelling at the surfers to slow down. I go to a funeral for a high school friend last week and the widower a guy who was my classmate and teammate and relies on a wheelchair post-stroke looks up and says, “You look just like your old man.” And I take it in stride because I do that’s a fact and I’ve heard that the old friend is incapacitated and it is not true not true at all. We share quips about our conveyances, him his fancy wheelchair and me my fancy spine-assisting e-scooter. We are a fine pair of ballplayers 1969 and we make scholarship choices and it works out for him and he returns hometown and I’m cast off into the cold and I don’t regret it now but I did hundreds of times. Our links to past lives are pulled until they almost don’t exist. I tell my new friends: Yes, this place is too crowded and this is a voice from the Capital City of the nation’s least-populated state. It’s a place where newcomers my students from Torrington and Hanna and Meeteetse say THE CROWDS!!! THE TRAFFIC!!! and we city-born ones say it will grow on you boys and girls it will grow. So what do you think of the new Florida my green-eyed senior citizen? I open the bedroom window, hear the waves breaking at night. The waves. 

MS Copilot rewrite: 

My old friends ask what I think of Florida now. After 46 years elsewhere, I'm confused. It's warmer than Wyoming but different. Old landmarks have changed or vanished, and the beach feels less magnificent because it's so managed. In the past, we drove on the wide low-tide beach anytime, even at high tide with risks. We helped Yankees stuck in the sand, sometimes for a fee. We surfed as the sun rose, hoping to spot tortoises, not sharks.  

My old rental is now a development, and the two-lane road is named after a gated community called Tymber Creek. Hartford Ave has changed too; my father no longer yells at surfers. Last week, I attended a funeral for a high school friend. The widower, a former classmate now in a wheelchair, remarked that I look like my father. We joked about our conveyances, reminiscing about our scholarship decisions from 1969.  

Living here in Florida, I tell my new friends it’s crowded, especially compared to Wyoming. But I hear the waves breaking at night, and that remains unchanged. 

MS Copilot is not wrong but it's bland is it not? It just doesn’t get some things. Surprisingly, it does get other things. I thought about breaking up my big block of type into separate paragraphs. Copilot detected the change and did exactly that. AI scares me a bit. There are times, usually late at night when I am writing things down, when I wonder why I write at all. Really, why?

President Biden signs the "Jackie Robinson Ballpark National Commemorative Act"

President Biden signed the "Jackie Robinson Ballpark National Commemorative Act" on Saturday. It designates Daytona Beach's 110-year-old Jackie Robinson Ballpark as a commemorative site and "makes it a part of the African American Civil Rights Network," according to a story in Monday morning's Daytona Beach News-Journal.

The article caught my eye because it was headed by a big photo of the ballpark's statue of Jackie Robinson handing a baseball to two young fans. Robinson's jersey said "Royals." This isn't news to locals as Robinson first played here for the Triple-A Montreal Royals on March 17, 1946. That was more than a year before his April 15, 1947, MLB debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Robinson is celebrated every April 15 on his namesake day at every MLB park. He is in the Baseball Hall of Fame. He broke every record worth breaking. He died way too young in 1972. He's idolized by millions.

But the 1940s were no picnic for a black big-league ballplayer. He was all alone in Daytona and Brooklyn and every ballpark he played in. He got death threats and hate mail. He was yelled at by hateful whites. Some players refused to play with him. 

It was hell playing in Brooklyn, Cleveland, and Chicago. Imagine how hard it was to play in Deep South Daytona. Some will say that a beach town in Florida was different, say, than Selma or Little Rock. There was prejudice but it was a more laid-back wastin'-away-in-Margaritaville kind of racism. But it was in the air and on the ground. And in some dark hearts.

When my family moved to Daytona in 1964, blacks were not permitted on the beachside after dark. They had their own beach named for the Bethune family of educators, a family so esteemed there is a college named in their honor and Mary McCloud Bethune's statue was installed in 2022 in the Florida display in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol Building, the first statue of an African-American in that hall. Many whites in Daytona called Bethune Beach "N-words Beach." The first black surfer I surfed with appeared at our beach in 1969. Coaches at my Catholic high school recruited black players for our football and basketball teams which made us the only integrated high school among the four in Daytona (the rest weren't integrated until the 1970s).

But worse things happened in this part of Florida:

From a "Freedom Never Dies" special on WUCF, a PBS station at University of Central Florida in Orlando: 

By 1930, four thousand blacks had been lynched nationwide by white mobs, vigilantes, or the Klan. Most of these occurred in the Deep South, many with law enforcement complicity. And while Alabama and Mississippi had more total lynchings, it was Florida, surprisingly, that had the highest per capita rate of lynching from 1900-1930.

"Freedom Never Dies: The Legacy of Harry T. Moore" documentary debuted on PBS stations nationwide 24 years ago Jan. 12. Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee narrated. Sweet Honey In The Rock and Toshi Reagon performed original music. Here's some background information from the WUCF web site:

Combining Murder Mystery, Incisive Biography and an Eye-Opening Portrait of Jim Crow Florida, "Freedom Never Dies" Sheds New Light on one of America's Earliest and Most Fearless Fighters for Civil Rights.

In 1951 after celebrating Christmas Day, civil rights activist Harry T. Moore and his wife Harriette retired to bed in their white frame house tucked inside a small orange grove in Mims, Florida [Mims is in north Brevard County, a 45-minute drive from Jackie Robinson Ballpark]. Ten minutes later, a bomb shattered their house, their lives and any notions that the south's post-war transition to racial equality would be a smooth one. Harry Moore died on the way to the hospital; his wife died nine days later.

"Freedom Never Dies: The Legacy of Harry T. Moore" explores the life and times of this enigmatic leader, a distinguished school teacher whose passionate crusade for equal rights could not be discouraged by either the white power structure or the more cautious factions of his own movement. Although Moore's assassination was an international cause celebre in 1951, it was overshadowed by following events and eventually almost forgotten.

"Freedom Never Dies: The Legacy of Harry T. Moore"  produced by The Documentary Institute, restores Moore to his rightful place in the Civil Rights saga.

Watching surfers the day before my 74th birthday

They are tiny figures on the outside sandbar, straddling their surfboards, heads bobbing up with each oncoming wave, and then obscured again behind the froth.

I know how it feels, this waiting. It’s not like other kinds of waiting, waiting for a traffic light to turn, waiting in the grocery store line, waiting for school day’s final bell.

It’s waiting for the future, waiting to see the heft of the wave, the promise of the day’s best ride as the sea moves beneath your board and lifts you up and it’s up to you to see where you go and what you do

And sometimes it’s a bubbling brute of whitewater that pushes you off the board and into the drink and depending on the wave size, how much time you spend cartwheeling until you emerge to find your board.

These young surfers out there today, they wear leashes and their boards spin with them and sometimes into them.

In the 1960s, the boards were bigger and unleashed, could whack you good if close enough, the skeg or fin a sharp knife that can leave a mark.

My surf life was short, a high school thing that I left behind in my twenties and I don’t know why.

Some of today’s surfers will be out on the waves in twenty years – remember how young you were at 37, half my age now? At 17, 37 is forever years away, 74 is so far down the line that it doesn’t exist except among those old people who clog the roads as you speed to the beach before the waves get blown out.

Age beached me. I can’t walk. I can swim with a floatation device. I can get to the beach by car and use my walker to get to the water, let it lick my toes, take me back to 1967 when a December day with waves was good enough but not as glorious as a July day with surf and 80-degree water and my fellow surfers surround me and I spy my girlfriend pull up and park and she waves and I return the wave and feel as if I will live forever this way, a young man in the ocean, just waiting for the next wave.

Hey old guy, you might want to think twice about returning to 6,200 feet

WELCOME TO 7,220 FEET.

That's a huge sign on UW's War Memorial Stadium. It's meant to psyche-out teams visiting from lower altitudes, which is any NCAA Division 1 school.

My Ireland-born grandfather was about my age now when, in the 1980s, he traveled to the Mile-High City of Denver, the place he spent most of his adult life. The day after his arrival, he was hauled off to the hospital with breathing problems and heart pains.

A few days later, a physician told him to go home. He said Colorado was his home. He also had to admit he’d spent the last six years living in Bradenton, Florida, with his second wife.

The doctor explained that most of Florida was sea level and Denver was a mile high. Grandpas knew all this. He arrived from Chicago as a 19-year-old hoping that the dry climate would help him breathe with his one lung. It did. He worked for the railroad and was a bank guard. He spent a lot of time mowing lawns and shoveling snow for his neighbors. He loved mountain treks, often exploring unpaved roads that he and his ’57 Chevy had no business on. My brothers, sisters, and cousins loved those trips, jouncing unbuckled in the back seat.

So, at 75, Colorado had become the enemy.

Go home, old man!

My Uncle John had the same problem when he (at 62) journeyed to Denver from his Naples, Fla., home. Heart issues drove him to the hospital. The doctor there said basically the same thing: go home. He was a Denver native, who lived all over the Front Range and even up in Buffalo Creek and commuted to The Flatlands every morning.

Go home, old man!

Not a good thing to hear, that you are too old and decrepit to live in a place that meant so much to you.

I bring this up because in September my wife Chris and I will move to our new home in Ormond Beach, Fla., some 10 feet above sea level (for now). What is this Florida obsession of our family? The space program took my father and uncle and their families to the Sunshine State in the mid-1960s. Work and the military took some of my sisters and brothers and cousins away, but most of them returned. I did not.  

What was I looking for? Work, mainly. Why am I returning to Florida? Retirement, mainly. My remaining brothers and sisters live in Central Florida. Chris has friends from high school and community college in the area. We met in Daytona Beach and got married just north in Ormond Beach. Many more health care choices in the area. I am a heart patient and partially disabled. Chris is a diabetic and breast cancer survivor. Our new home on the aptly named Ocean Shore Drive is close to the beach and recreational activities.

I close by saying that as a 73-year-old heart patient, I probably will not return to 6,200 feet. I might push it a bit to come for a few days to visit my two grown children and any grandchildren that eventually arrive. But who’s to say where my 30-something offspring will be in one, two, even five years? And who knows where I will be.

Go home, old man!

There is much to be thankful for. But there are no guarantees, are there?

On that stretch of sand near J.D. Salinger's favorite Daytona Beach hotel

June 1966. My boss asked me why I was drilling a hole so close to the frothing ocean. High tide coming, boy. Looking for bananafish, I said, and turned the auger in the soft wet sand, digging a hole for the tourist's umbrella. What you talkin' about boy? Sir it's a perfect day for bananafish in Daytona. He grabbed the auger and told me to pick up my five dollars for a day's work and get off his damn beach. Now, he said. I dove head-first into the fresh hole. Blue-green water gave way to a murky yellow soup where dead bananafish floated. They ate too many bananas, swelled, and couldn't escape into sunlight. It was summer 1948. Salinger's Seymour tried to explain it to the kids on the beach at Daytona but they just thought him crazy, which he was, I suppose. So this is what you saw in the war, Sergeant Salinger? Bananafish floating, mutilated bananafish everywhere. That dreadful allied mistake off the English coast, bloody Normandy hedgerows, the bitter Bulge, the stink of the liberated extermination camp. Dead bananafish drove you into the asylum in Germany and you never came out, not really. You shipped out to another bigger asylum, the U.S.A., wrote about it, and we never understood. Your stories spread the alarm. We never understood. We kept looking for that one yellow bananafish who made it out into the blue-green waters. We are looking still.

Sources: Sergeant Salinger, Jerome Charyn; A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger.

We got trouble, trouble, right here in Beach City

Chris and I are looking forward to our April trip to Florida. Both of us did some of our growing-up on Florida's east coast, Daytona Beach for me and Ormond Beach for her. Daytona was (and is) a beach town with all of the trappings: beachside motels and souvenir shops, lots of bars, and a very nice beach. Daytona also has the speedway for auto races. 

Ormond begins just north and it was looked at as the more genteel neighbor. We went to the Ormond beaches when Daytona's were crowded. The beach sand was deeper and less drivable, but most of it was open to surfers with the main destination the Ormond Pier. If you go further north, there is Ormond-by-the-Sea which is a bit redundant and then Flagler Beach, named for the robber baron railroad magnate of the 19th century. 

Flagler used to be a funky little beach town with a good surfing pier but growth has changed it. Palm Coast development is in Flagler County and it replaced thousands of acres of wildlands. For one of my jobs, I used to drop by city and county offices to get lists of building permits and then rush over to Orlando to type all of it into The Construction Report, printed and distributed each Friday. It wasn't really writing but kind of fun.

In case you didn't know, construction is big business in Florida. Big, big business. Florida's big challenge, besides its dingbat governor and legislative troglodytes, is people trying to find affordable home insurance. They could be cast into the homeless by the next climate-change-caused hurricane which can't possibly exist due the state's GOP-heavy legislature banning teaching anything like it in school. I grew up by the beach and we had sand dunes then, created by the Lord Almighty to blunt the impact of big storms' tendency to wash tons of sand back into the ocean. 

The so-called peninsula I lived on is a barrier island. It is supposed to serve as barrier to tropic thunder. It did for many millennia before promoters decided they could make beaucoup bucks by selling plots of sand to Howard Johnson's and Steak-n-Shake and Americans bent on living the dream. I lived that dream and it does seem dream-like to me now, a retired bureaucrat in Wyoming. 

It was a beautiful place to grow up. We surfed by day and waited on tourists at night. Me and my eight brothers and sisters grew up freckled and barefoot, one of the wandering tribes of Daytona. We had a home to go to but, as time passed and my parents got older and more frazzled, we were turned loose to have fun but not get into trouble. We mostly succeeded.

If I sound sarcastic in my Florida appreciation, I sound like this all of the time. Chris has a whole different set of beachside stories. Most involve teens getting fake IDs at 16 and going into tourist bars. They had fun but didn't get into too much trouble, or so she says. 

When you see glowing footprints on the night beach, it means I was there

When I moved away from Daytona Beach, Florida, the beachside still had sand dunes and you could drive the entire World's Most Famous Beach. I drove the packed sand many times. At night, I drove and then parked between high-tide-line and dunes to discuss the state of the world and Catholic doctrine with my girlfriend. Sometimes, the whitewater was lit up with a bioluminescence provided by nature. Sometimes I was the one who was lit up.

The Florida I loved has become joke fodder for late-night comedians. I will give you this: the governor is a joke as are his right-wing minions in the legislature. 

I've been reading interviews with people who have moved to Florida from other places. They are asked whether they are fine with the decision or regret the choice. Some love the Florida they discovered during a family vacation and vowed to return for some old people fun in retirement. Some have had it up to here with the likes of killer hurricanes, retiree-chomping alligators, and nitwit politicians. They are decamping to other warm-weather beachside communities in the Redneck Riviera, Texas, or the Carolinas, both the North one and the real one in the South. 

I just read an online article on Max My Money with this header: “Boomers – Florida Doesn’t Want You” 10 Places In Florida Where You Won’t Survive On Social Security. Gosh, it’s tough the be unwanted. These 10 snobbish Florida locales include Miami, Naples, Palm Beach, and Sarasota, none of which have surf. I grew up surfing in Florida and that's how we graded the livability of any place. Key West is on the list. It also has no surf but it does have Hemingway’s house and Tom McGuane used to hang out there when writing “92 in the Shade.” In 1982, Christine and I honeymooned in the Conch Republic following our May wedding at St. Brendan the Navigator Catholic Church and the Ormond Beach Knights of Columbus Hall. In Key West, we drank at Sloppy Joe’s, counted the toes on Hem’s cats, snorkeled offshore. Tourists! 

My Florida is a large triangle from Daytona to Gainesville to Orlando and back to Daytona. That’s the Florida I know best. When this Baby Boomer retired from my 25-year career with the Wyoming Arts Council, Chris and I looked at retiring in Florida. Too expensive. Not enough choice in dwellings. Crackpot governor. We stayed put and watched from afar Florida’s human comedy.

My youthful encounters with Florida retirees were from a distance. We surfers gathered at Hartford Approach and watch them walk the beach. You could tell the long-termers by their leathery skin and hip bathing suits. Many were daily walkers, on the beach early like surfers. Better rested than most surfers, up until 2 a.m. and jolted out of bed at 6 a.m. by friends shouting through the window to get your ass up. We knew a lot of these old-timers, men and women both. New Yorkers under Yankee caps, Canadian accents. 

Then there were the sojourners in town for a weekend of a week or maybe the entire winter. They were in couples or groups, mostly kept to themselves. They yelled at us when we drifted out of the surfing area. 

Those seniors of the 1960s and 1970s are all gone now, every single one. Their footprints live on. You can see them glowing late at night on the beach. Their memories of what lured them to Florida.

It's a perfect day for Bananafish, until it isn't

Just one more thing about Jerome Charyn and J.D. Salinger...

In "Sergeant Salinger," the author stresses Salinger's "battle fatigue" (PTSD) which is a major part of the story. But not all. Charyn writes that some of the signs were there as a youth. An unusual boy with loads of imagination and talent. He struggled in school. First he was in a NYC public school that he liked and then went to a private academy when his father started being successful and moved to Park Avenue. He struggled here. His parents pulled him out, enrolled him in a military school in Pennsylvania where he thrived. The discipline and routine was good for him. It appears he had the makings of a soldier at an early age. And he was a good soldier in the war although a bit unorthodox. His teen years also gave signs of genius and mental health challenges. 

I bring this up because some experts have traced many cases to PTSD to a soldier's early life. Maybe they had trouble learning or maybe they were just a bit off-kilter. What would he have been like without his war experiences? Who knows? But he did and he was a recluse and very careful with his privacy and reputation. Not everything he wrote later in life was as good as "Nine Stories" and "Catcher in the Rye." He joins a long line of writers who hit it big early on and then not so much. Jerome Charyn, on the other hand, just keeps getting better at 86. 

I have no first-hand knowledge of military service and combat. But good books and movies can impart some of that experience. Charyn does it in this novel. Vietnam vet writers such as Tim O'Brien and Larry Heinemann and Bill Ehrhart and Yusef Komunyakaa do it in print. It took flyer Joseph Heller 17 years to write and then publish "Catch-22." It took Kurt Vonnegut even longer to serve up the Dresden firebombing in "Slaughterhouse Five." Silent movie film director W.S. Murnau took his years as a World War I German combat pilot and created a monstrous creature in "Nosferatu." J.R.R. Tolkien transferred the horror of the trenches into a blighted netherworld called Mordor with its pitched battles and fiery pits and humans adrift in murky holes -- you know, The Somme, July 1916. 

"No soldier ever really survives a war" -- Audie Murphy

Make that two more things...

In a chapter near the end of "Sargeant Salinger," Sonny Salinger and his sister Doris vacation at the Plaza Hotel in Daytona Beach, Fla. The Plaza was a post-war vacation destination for Northerners. It was best known for the tunnel motorists blasted through to get to "The World's Most Famous Beach," back when you could drive freely on it. That was my introduction to the Atlantic Ocean when our father drove us through it on our first day in Daytona. 

In the novel, Sonny breaks away from his sister's watchful eye and joins some kids making sandcastles on the beach. The kids eye him suspiciously as he joins in, shows them some techniques he perfected during family trips to Daytona. A concerned mother fetches her kids and eventually Doris fetches her brother. Nothing is mentioned about bananafish but you can see the beginnings of the short story. 

This became my beach in the late 60s, from the Plaza down to Hartford approach where we surfed. The only thing I knew about Salinger then is that I had to read "Catcher in the Rye" for English class. We chatted up girls, played frisbee and made sandcastles when the surf was flat, as we used to say. We eventually headed home and off to our night jobs at restaurants and hotels. My mind was mostly on surf and girls, getting enough pay for gas so we could find surf when none was to be found in Daytona.

Next time I visit Daytona to see family and friends, I'm going to the beach in front of the Plaza and try to see what Salinger saw. I know now that writers see things others don't. I may spot a bananafish struggling to get out of a hole in the ocean because it got too fat eating underwater bananas.

The accountants who got us to the moon, July 1969 -- Part 3

Hurricane Dora hit a couple weeks into the new school year. The lead story in that morning’s News-Journal featured an illustration of a swirling Hurricane Dora with an arrow pointed right at Daytona. Still, our parents sent us to school. Midway through the day, the nuns made us pray for Dora to hit somewhere other than Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church/School/Shrine/Nunnery. They finally sent us home. 

My father evacuated us to the mainland. We went as far as a motel along U.S. 1. I spent the night listening to WROD 1340 on my transistor radio and tracing Dora’s progress on the tracking map I ripped out of the morning paper. At the window, I watched the gusts batter the palms.

The storm brushed by Daytona and moved on to St. Augustine and Jacksonville. We returned to our modest house in an Ormond Beach community designed for middle-class vacationers and now was temporary home to the migrating hordes of engineers, technicians, and accountants planning the moonshot. The hurricane had turned our house into a white cinder-block island surrounded by murky water. We turned our picnic table upside down to make a raft and poled across the backyard.

During the next couple years, we bought a house in Daytona and stayed put. The ninth kid was born. We visited the Jacksonville zoo and marveled at the city’s new shopping mall. In January 1967, right in the middle of Father Lopez Green Wave basketball season, my father announced that the need for accountants on the Apollo Moon Mission was coming to an end, at least in Florida. He could stay with G.E. but only if he agreed to be transferred to Cincinnati. He had a big family to feed. Other G.E. employees who declined to move to Cincinnati or Schenectady or Boston now were pumping gas or checking in Georgia tourists at beachside motels. 

The good news about him leaving is that he didn’t want to drive his 1960 Renault Dauphine to Ohio during the winter. Since I had conveniently passed my driving test in December, he was leaving me his car and chauffeuring duties for the ten people remaining at our Hartford Avenue house which was going up for sale on Monday.

Next: Cincinnati or bust?

The accountants who got us to the moon, July 1969 -- Part 2

I stepped off the plane at the old Jacksonville airport expecting the worst. It was after dark and August’s heat and humidity wrapped me in its stifling embrace. I herded my mother and brothers and sisters down the airplane stairs, across the tarmac, and into the terminal. I greeted my Dad and complained about the heat. “You get used to it,” he said.

We loaded kids and luggage into our Ford Falcon station wagon and headed to a motel as it was getting late and the babies were crying and the rest of us were cranky. We drove by a car and its window was wide open and the guy driving was not wearing a shirt. Seems ridiculous to remember that decades later but in Colorado or anywhere else in the West I had never seen a guy driving without a shirt. We landed at a motel and my brother Dan and I saw a family swimming in the pool. Swimming at night? My God, this was a different sort of universe. We bugged our Dad to let us go swimming and he did, probably because he’d been on his own for a couple months and had forgotten how many unruly children he had spawned and wanted to get rid of a few of them. The pool felt great after a day spent on planes and in airports.

The next day, we drove to our new home in Volusia County. Every bridge we crossed had at least one person fishing on it. It was a workday in the middle of the week and everyone seemed to be fishing. We breezed into town, crossed the Intercoastal Waterway, drove through a tunnel under a big hotel and right onto the beach. I had seen the Pacific during our vacation trip to the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962 (we lived in Washington State then) but I had never actually been in an ocean. And so many girls in bikinis.

The next day, we all went to the beach. The water was kind of rough but being in the ocean was so cool. Mom made us wear shirts when not in the water to cover skin vulnerable to the sun like any other Irish-American kids who’d spent their youth in snow country. Mom came in the water with us but Dad watched from the beach because he never learned how to swim. Hurricane Cleo was coming up the coast and passed through Daytona the next day, stirring up the surf on its way to St. Augustine. It dumped plenty of rain, more than I’d ever seen in one storm.

Next: Trial by hurricane

The accountants who got us to the moon, July 1969 -- Part 1

Over 400,000 people worked on the Apollo Program. – From the end credits of Richard Linklater’s Netflix film “Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood”

My father was one of them. Unlike’s Linklater’s Houston-based father, mine worked closer to Cape Canaveral, in an office in Daytona Beach, Fla. Thousands joined the Moon Mission, most of them answering JFK’s call although he was no longer around to cajole and promise. Lyndon Johnson would be president when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon on July 20, 1969 after being launched from the Cape on July 16. Johnson was glad for a bit of good news after the battles of the 1960s which weren’t over yet. Camelot a distant memory. On this hot July day in Florida, hundreds of thousands of space-age lunarnauts and millions more around the world rooted for U-S-A!

July 20 always brings footage from the lunar event. It seems like yesterday that I watched it in black-and-white telecasts beamed from the lunar lander. I am 72 and retired. I look through veils of nostalgia. I sometimes share my memories with my two 30-something children. They are mildly amused. At least they believe that we landed on the moon. I think they do but it’s difficult to know for sure. All of us carry different memory-loops through life and they change as time passes.

What do I remember from this time? Some things I know for sure. Others are a bit foggy so I conjure what seems closest to the truth. I have not made up anything that follows but I may remember it imperfectly. That’s life.

I was 13.67 years old in August 1964 when our family of 10 moved to Florida. I was not pleased to be moving to the third state I would live in during the past eight months. In January, I’d been yanked out of St. Francis Grade School in suburban Wichita in the midst of basketball season and the wooing of classmate Patty Finn. In February, I was walking to the bus stop in snowy Denver to attend the split session at a junior high packed with Boomer kids and the site of at least two knife fights and a teacher mugging during my short time there. In June, my father came home from work to announce his new job with G.E. and our Florida move. He had finished the task of hiding nuclear missiles among the sagebrush of the West. The space program needed his accounting skills and our family was going along for the ride. Dad moved immediately. We sold our house, packed our goods, said goodbye (again), and off we went.

Next: Night Swimming in the Sunshine State

Ballad for an old friend

Can you call someone a friend if you haven’t seen him in 40 years?

On Monday, I heard the news of the death of my old friend David. He suffered a stroke and was being transferred to rehab in Daytona Beach when his body gave out. The news came to me on a Facebook post from Dave’s sister in L.A. I was shocked. He is not one of the first to die in my high school class – Class of ’69. We’ve all hit 70 now and the inevitable cohort replacement grinds on every day.

The last photo I saw of David showed him holding an AK-47 which he was using for target practice out in the Florida woods. He had a gun hobby. He also was a dedicated fisherman. He once ran a popular bait shop in Daytona. He could talk your ear off about fishing and often did. We went to high school together and were roommates once on a little acreage we called The Farm. It was anything but a farm. It was an old house on Hull Road in rural Ormond Beach. The road was named after the family who built the house, one of the area’s first human residents besides Native Americans and the occasional Spanish explorer looking for the Fountain of Youth or cities of gold. Our high school, Father Lopez, was named for the priest who accompanied Pedro Menendez de Aviles when he landed in St. Augustine in 1565 to kill French Huguenots. Ponce de Leon had claimed Florida for Spain in 1513 during his fruitless search for youth, something, I guess, many Floridians search for.

Our little house had three bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen, a massive fireplace, and an outdoor shower. Our girlfriends hated that shower even though we assured them that nobody could see them as our property was surrounded by forest. Didn’t seem to make a difference. They would take baths in our big iron tub or wait until they returned to their respective civilized indoor showers. Picky, picky.

The property was owned by a group of physicians who had bought it for an investment. This place will someday be filled with houses, they contended, and we laughed about it when we got stoned on the weed stashed on the farm by a friend who swore us to secrecy. Years later, as time marched on, the land was bought by a developer and now is a thriving neighborhood called Tymber Creek. That’s timber with a y as in “some tymber was sacrificed to build these spacious homes.”

I have fond memories of a man who meant so much to me long ago. In 1971-72, David and I were college dropouts. The military draft passed us by. I worked days as a hospital orderly and David worked evenings as a cook at a pizza joint. He brought home the leftover pizza that became our breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We could exist on pizza because we were 21 and always on the move.   

Our futures had already started. I wandered the property with our dogs, always alert for rattlers and coral snakes. At twilight, we stopped at an open field and watched the bullbats. As they dive for insects, they make a strange whooshing sound. I’d come back to the house to write, always writing. David was out casting for bass or snook on the Little Tomoka River, looking for something out there on the Florida waters. I hope he found it.  

Anything was possible then.

During the 1970s, I went back to school and then returned to the area many times as I looked for work and finally decided to light out for the western territories. That’s where I am today. Still writing.

David, may the fish be plentiful and feisty in the Beyond.

Meditation after another trip to the dermatologist

Angel Kisses

The sun’s first ray taps the crown of my head. I’m the tallest creature on the ocean, me, a young man bobbing just outside of the breaking waves. Light from 93 million miles away cascades over my torso, lights up the many colors of my surfboard, paints my body with freckles that will only become visible when winter comes. Soon all the surfers will be illuminated, their multi-colored boards, the stripes on their baggies. The sun will crawl over the beach and the early-bird walkers and houses perched on the dunes and the town and Florida entire. It will unleash the heat, fire up the humidity of a July morning.  Decades later, a Wyoming dermatologist talks about his family’s Colorado ski vacation as he scoops skin from this young surfer turned old man. Cancer may have been there all of this time, a remnant of the sun’s touch during hundreds of mornings in the semi-tropical sun. My crown, my nose, my ears have all been biopsied, scraped and sown. Nothing awful, nothing like melanoma that killed my brother. I wonder if the dermatologist slaps on sunscreen before he negotiates Steamboat runs named High Noon, One O’clock, Two O’clock for the prime meridian times that January sun reaches the west-facing mountains. If sunscreen had been a thing in 1967, I would have used it. Maybe. I know one thing – I would never trade one second of those mornings for blemish-free skin. Every scar a dance with sun and ocean, every freckle the kiss from the heavens. “Freckles are angel kisses,” my mom told me when I believed in angels. I now know the science behind melanin and derma, ephelides and solar lentigines. But during my seventieth year on the planet, angel kisses seem exactly right. Just perfect.

The story of the only 1960 Renault Dauphine in Daytona Beach

An April issue of UK’s Autocar featured the Renault Dauphine in its list of "22 Totally Charming Cars." It showed a still life photo of a powder blue Dauphine parked by the ocean. The car looked as if it had just left the 1960s showroom. I contrasted it with the sad photo of a derelict Dauphine in another issue of Autocar and the article "The Haunting Abandoned Wrecks of Rural France.," It showed a rusty shell of a Dauphine being swallowed up by undergrowth in "a remote field in the French Alps."

This tells the story of our family's 1960 Dauphine. I first saw it parked in our Wichita driveway in 1962. My father needed a car to commute to his job as a civilian accountant at the local air force base. That left our 1960 Ford Falcon station wagon at home with my mother who needed it to get us to school, haul us to doctor appointments and run off to the grocery store. I still can see the look of horror on the faces of grocery clerks as Mom hauled her eight children, two of them babies, into the store. My father went to the Totally Charming Yet Obscure Cars dealership and returned with Renault. It was an oddity in a world of Olds Cutlass Supremes and GTOs. Big powerful rides were the thing. The Dauphine was tiny looked almost the same from the front as it did from behind. The engine was in the rear and looked like something that might power a lawnmower. If it didn’t start, you could wake up the engine with a hand crank.

My father’s not around to ask but I do wonder why he chose such an impractical car when he headed a family of 10. He might have seen Renaults on the streets of Paris on leave during the war. He might have liked the two-tone horn (loud for city, soft for country) and the fact you could wind it up like a toy car if it refused to go. He never said. But they are some of the Dauphine traits I admired when I was gifted the car in 1967. 

The previous year, I had learned how to drive in it on Daytona's deserted winter beaches. I failed my first driving test in it when I arrived at city hall on Dec. 18, 1966, with a bum fuse. The DMV man asked if I wanted to take the test using hand signals or return on another day, fuse replaced. It was my birthday. I had a date that night with a girl I fancied as my girlfriend. I took the test and failed. I did OK with left and right turns but forgot to gesture down for stop. I was devastated. It was a long slow ride home with my father and am embarrassing phone call to my date. 

My father was transferred from Daytona to Cincinnati early in '67. The Dauphine had many miles and he didn't want to drive it north so he put it in my hands. The idea was to take my brothers and sisters to school and anywhere else they wanted to go. My mother still had toddlers and a baby (No. 9) to care for. We would finish the school year, sell the house, and then join our father in Cincy. My brother Dan and I had been most resistant to the move. We were surfers, for God's sake, and there was precious little surf in Ohio. I played JV basketball for the Father Lopez Green Wave and had high hopes of making the varsity in my junior year. And I had a girlfriend, sort of. 

I did OK bossing around my siblings. I was also OK with having a car. It was no prize after seven years of hard use and three years of assaults by rust spawned by the salt air. It had really earned its rusty-red color. My classmates began to know me as the guy with the French car which sounds pretty romantic until you got a look at it, especially after I ripped off a rear door backing out of the garage and could only find a powder-blue replacement at the junkyard. It looked like a high school kid's car but that was OK as I was a high school kid with a car.

I revel in all of the fun we had. We crammed into the car and rode The Loop around Tomoka State Park, turning off the headlights to admire the darkness and tempt fate. I bought a surf rack and we wandered up and down A1A searching for surf. Girls thought my car was cute and liked to ride. Meanwhile, I tried to find a girlfriend with a muscle car so I could feel like what it was like to drive American. I dated Darlene for a year and got to drive her canary yellow Chevy Chevelle SS 396 and later her canary yellow Pontiac GTO. She had a thing for yellow. Her father bought her a new car every year. She didn’t mind riding in my car and but liked it better when my father returned from Cincy and bought a white Plymouth Barracuda that he occasionally let me drive.

During high school graduation summer of 1969, my Dauphine died. Kind of a drag as I worked two jobs getting ready for college and had to bum rides. I sold my car cheap to a guy who planned to turn it into a dune buggy. I imagine my car’s stripped chassis blasting through the beachside sand dunes before they were replaced by condos. I can also imagine my two-toned car with the two-toned horn abandoned in a “remote field” somewhere in the Florida scrubland.

I am 70 now. I am always 16 driving my Renault down The Loop’s dark road. Sometimes the headlights are on and sometimes they are off. I am happy.

1969 moon landing memories linger on the beach and in The House of the One-Eyed Seahorse

I like to think that I was a witness to history during Moon Landing Week in July 1969.

I witnessed the launch from the beach the morning of July 16. The Hartford Avenue beach approach in Daytona is located 62 miles northwest of Cape Canaveral. The Saturn 5, NASA's largest-ever launch vehicle, lit up an already bright morning and its sound waves seemed to ruffle the smooth Atlantic. The rocket arced into the sky and out to sea. It was visible only a few minutes. When it was gone, we went back in the water. Or maybe I was in the water already. I forget, as I saw so many launches during my 14 years in Florida. They merge into one big launch that shows the U.S. commitment to space exploration in the 1960s and into the 1970s. JFK showed the way with his 1961 speech. Congress shoveled money at the program as it took seriously Kennedy's vow of a man on the moon in 1969. An American man on the moon. Take that, Russkis!

It was all about the Cold War. The USSR ambushed us with Sputnik, Laika the Space Dog, and Yuri Gargarin. We fought back with Mercury and Alan Shepard and Gemini and finally Apollo. We won the Space Race with the moon landing. It was important to win something in the mid-60s, since we were losing in Vietnam and young people were lost to their elders and some of our biggest heroes were gunned down by assassins in 1968.

My father was a rocket man. He didn't fly them or test them. But he was a contract specialist with General Electric and later NASA. He worked out deals with suppliers of nuts and bolts and many of the gadgets that went to the moon. He could look at a launch with pride and announce that the big hunk of metal ferrying Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin to the moon was partly his doing. He and thousands of other Americans had worked together to get the U.S. first on the moon.

But all was not well in Rocketland. Workforce cutbacks had started two years earlier. One day, GE honchos told Dad that his services were no longer needed in Florida. He accepted a transfer to Cincinnati where GE was building all kinds of new and wonderful things. He said he would go on alone and the family would join him when school got out in June. Dad didn't like Cincinnati and we couldn't sell our house in Daytona as hundreds were leaving and  it was a buyer's market. This well-educated workforce that had come from New York and Ohio and New England in the fifties and sixties were no longer needed. It hurt Daytona. It was not exactly the Silicon Valley of the 60s. Most jobs were in the service industries that fed the tourist industry. I worked some of those jobs. Busboy, bagboy, laundry pick-up guy for beach motels, worker on a beach float stand. My brother was a gremmie selling suntan lotion by a hotel pool. One of my sisters was a nursing assistant taking care of old people who flocked to Florida's Promised Land. The engineers who made the rockets (and their families) would be missed by local businesses and schools.

But Dad grew tired of city life and found a job with NASA back on Daytona. I was happy because I had just made my high school's basketball squad after a year's worth of practice and visualized a bright future as a power forward.

On the afternoon of July 20 when Apollo 11's Eagle landed near the Sea of Tranquility, I was parked by the Atlantic Ocean with my girlfriend K. The radio news followed the ship's descent which we only partially listened to. When "The Eagle has landed" was announced, we paused our kissing and fondling for several minutes to let history wash over us. It rained heavily and the beach seemed deserted, odd for a July afternoon. Minuscule waves broke on the sandbar 50 yards in front of us. No surfing today. Once the announcers returned to just talking about the landing of the Eagle, we returned to our previous engagement.

I know the exact spot where this happened. When I'm in town, I walk by it and remember that historic afternoon. I see my rusty red Renault Dauphine with the light blue door that replaced the original, sheared off in a hasty back-up from my garage. Two people are inside, at least I think it's two people, as the windows are fogged. The spirit of that day drifts over that spot as does the memories of an eighteen-year-old me. This presence remains at the beach even when I'm back home in Wyoming. It may still be here when 68-year-old me and then (God willing) the 78-or 88-year-old me toddles down the beach, cane poking holes in the soft sand. When I'm gone, will the ethereal presence remain of the radio broadcast and the automobile and the young man and young woman, their thumping hearts and hopes and dreams? I like to think that beachgoers in 2069, parked in the same spot in their futuremobile, will pause their canoodling to listen to the voices of astronauts landing on Mars or orbiting Saturn. Maybe in the background they will hear a faded voice: "The Eagle has landed." 

That night, in The House of the One-Eyed Seahorse, I joined my family to watch Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon. The video feed was grainy but I could make out Armstrong and then Buzz Aldrin cavorting on the lunar surface. We watched on a TV that struggled to pull in signals via antennae supplemented by a coat hanger and a broken channel changer replaced by vice grips. Nine kids are tough on TVs, even ancient ones that received but three channels. We no longer live there, haven't in a long time. My brothers and sisters and I carry around those memories. Fifty years ago, we were plotting our escape. Now, in quiet times, those memories swirl in our aging heads. They also exist somewhere in the house that almost burnt down in August of '69. We could have lost everyone but for the quick actions of my sister Molly. I was on a date and running late so I salvaged one of the cars, the other one burned to a cinder in the garage where the fire started. My memories would be vastly different as a lone survivor.

This all will be on my mind as I watch film of the July 16 launch and the July 20 walk on the moon and the July 24 splashdown.

Part VIII: The Way Mike Worked -- Saga of a Dying Mall

It's no news that suburban malls are dying. Young people avoid their manufactured atmospheres. Families may go into the multiplex to see a movie but venture no further. Elders, me included, walk circuits of the mall when the snow flies and the wind blows. Heart attack rehab, not shopping, is our goal.

In 1977-78, I worked part-time in a dying Florida mall, a trendsetter when it came to obsolescence. I clerked at a Paperback Booksmith Bookstore. Remember when all malls had bookstores? You had PB, Waldenbooks, B. Dalton, Books A Million, Borders, Barnes & Noble. Our store, owned by a friend of a friend, was located strategically inside the mall's main entrance. Surrounding us were a women's clothing store, a cut-rate department store, a diner, an ice cream emporium, and a shoe store. If you ventured further, you could find the triplex movie theater that still showed first-run films but also midnight shows for stoners, Rocky Horror and Clockwork Orange among them. A karate studio was the lone store along one of the mall's corridors. It could be kind of spooky there at night, although the sensi, a U.S. Marine black belt, never seemed worried.

We all knew each other. How could we not? We were passengers on a sinking ship. Some nights were totally dead. Bored employees wandered the stores, trading gossip and making small bets on which place would close next. Matches happened. I dated one of the staff at the women's clothing store. Two college kids on our staff became an item. Customers sometimes interrupted them as they canoodled behind the counter.

My boss, Dave, was still smarting from his divorce but dated one of the part-time waitresses at the diner. His wife had come out as a lesbian and had moved with her lover to the other end of the state. They shared custody of their two kids. The duo had opened the bookstore in the early 1970s, when the future seemed bright for them and the Sunshine Mall.

We all knew books. I'd say that's a rarity now. It might be true at some of the Barnes & Noble stores still standing. It's usually the indies that have knowledgeable owners who hire knowledgeable staff. At our mall store, we sold a lot of best-sellers, romances, and mysteries. Magazines too. Not much demand for Tolstoy or Proust. My job was to man the register, gather up titles to be shipped back, stock the shelves with new books, and watch out for shoplifters. We stocked some skin mags, but the most-stolen were biker mags such as Easy Rider. The Daytona Beach area obviously was bigger on vroom-vroom than pulchritude.

When we returned paperbacks, we ripped off the covers and mailed them to save postage. We chucked the books. Sometimes I found one I liked and took it home. This was OK as long as I didn't try to sell it. I saved money that way but some bookstore somewhere was missing a five-bucks sale for a Conroy or an Irving. I took some to my family. There was always one of my siblings draped over a couch, reading. Mom and Dad were both big readers. None of them seemed to care that the covers were missing.

I lived with Carl, an old high school acquaintance. He was a mechanic at Ice Cold Auto Air, a very important place in steamy Florida. He fixed auto ACs at work, would roll back your odometer on the side. He offered several times to do mine but I doubted if anything would help my rusty Ford Torino. Carl was what you would call a player today. He dated lots of different women. A good-looking guy with a smooth southern accent, he could talk the talk and dance the dance, which was helpful in the dawn of the disco area. Carl blasted southern rock in his truck cassette player but, well, the chicks were digging KC and the Sunshine Band and the BeeGees and so was he. I sometimes accompanied Carl, figuring I could engage some of the women that gravitated to him like planets circling the sun. I was OK looking, but not much of a dancer and a better writer than conversationalist. I also discovered I could be an opportunist, if given half a chance.

I tired of working two jobs for peanuts and decided to move to a city where opportunities abounded. Choices were Denver, my birthplace and a city where I had family connections, and Atlanta, kind of a shining city of the South for young people. Like most Americans, I thought that the next big thing was just over the horizon. After being under-employed for a year, I was ready for a challenge.

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, 1977, Carl and I hosted a party featuring five bushels of Apalachicola oysters and several kegs. It was a full house. One of Carl's coworkers fell into the half-barrel oyster fire; neither he or the oysters sustained permanent damage. One of our two toilets backed up. Cars overflowed our yard and onto our neighbor's driveway. W hen he came to complain, we invited our middle-aged neighbor to join us in beer-swilling. He graciously declined.

I met my future wife Chris when she arrived with Cathy, one of Carl's women friends. She thought she was a special friend until she discovered that Carl had many other special friends. Cathy tried to pull Chris out of the door and away from the party. But Chris and I had already developed a special friendship that would continue through four decades, all the way into the present. Turns out, she also was planning a move to New Jersey, where she  had lots of relatives, or Atlanta, where she had no relatives but ventured there often with friends. If we had made a Venn Diagram of our choices, ATL would have been the place we had in common. That would be the logical place to go.

So we moved to Denver.

Next: Rocky Mountain High

Part III: The Way Mike Worked -- Never Take Your Eyes off of the Cash Box

My first and only job on the beach lasted one day.

I walked from our family's house on Hartford Avenue to a float stand near the Daytona Beach Boardwalk. A couple miles. Daytona is known for its hard-packed beaches that you can drive on. A float stand exists every half mile or so. They offered most items needed by a vacationing family in 1965 Florida: inflated rubber rafts, umbrellas and beach chairs. You rent by the hour or the day. Mom and Dad sit under the umbrella's shade as the kids ride the waves and try not to drown. Lifeguards are spaced in red towers every few hundred yards to keep an eye out.

My float stand was owned by a crusty old codger who probably was in his 40s when this 15-year-old worked for him. Can't remember his name, probably Bob. He wore shorts and his skin was the color and texture of cured leather. A no-nonsense guy with a few employees my age,  We were tasked with charging the tourists (cash only in those days) and setting up their equipment. Most customers were in pretty good spirits --they were on vacation after all -- although many were still a bit jangled after a two-day drive from Detroit in an un-air-conditioned station wagon with six yelping kids. We were tolerant of their gruffness and stupid questions. Is the beach open at night? Any sharks in the water? Where can I buy suntan lotion?

We were happy to answer in the least snarky way possible. Later, we could make fun of them. That was a hobby of anyone who worked on the beach. Plus-sized men and women in too-small bathing suits, their skin so white you knew they would end up in the ER burn unit by the end of the day. We knew better, or thought we did. Here in the 21st century, I spend an inordinate amount of time at the dermatologist checking on my sun-damaged skin.

Bob was a taskmaster. He taught me the ropes and turned me loose with customers. His cardinal rule was "Never take your eyes off of the cash box."  You rent the gear, stash the cash box, and help the tourists set up. We had a device like a big corkscrew to dig holes in the hard sand for umbrellas. A typically busy summer day. Many high school girls to ogle. Many grumpy parents to assuage. At one point, I left to install an umbrella and returned to find the cash box missing. Uh oh. I frantically searched for it. Bob came up and asked what I was doing. I told him. Concern creased his face. "What's rule number one?" he asked. "Never take your eyes off the cash box." My fellow helpers looked on with bemusement. After Bob let me search for a few minutes, he finally reached under a beach chair and produced the metal box. "Let that be a lesson to you." So my task was clear -- at the point of paranoia -- never take my eyes off of the cash box. I didn't know it at the time but my fate was sealed. At quitting time, Bob paid me what I'm sure was a princely sum for 1965 and told me I was fired. "What's rule number one?" I was tempted to say, "Never curse at a leathery old man who tricks you." But I didn't. I just took the money and headed home.

The sand heats up by the end of the day. Although my feet were as leathery as Bob's face -- barefoot is the usual summer state-of-being -- I walked through the shallows. I scattered the shore birds, watched the sand fleas dig into the sand. I watched older teens power their muscle cars down the beach. If I had thought about it, I might have stopped and looked behind me, watch as the waves obliterated my footprints. My life, already, was being born and was disappearing. I had walked on this beach dozens of times and would walk on it hundreds more. I was here with my parents and brothers and sisters. That first day, just moved from Colorado, with my mother shouting at us not to go out too far as a hurricane was coming. I walked the beach with my Irish grandfather, Me, hung over from my brother's bachelor party. my 80-year-old grandfather outpacing me, leaving behind shoe prints from the black Oxfords he wore. I ran the beach. Bicycled it. Played Frisbee on it. Walked it with girls from Kentucky I just met and a hometown girl who would eventually be my wife. I walked the beach in a February chill, taking a break from my dying father's bedside. My kids' footprints are down there, too, during our rare visits to Florida from Out West. Our family's Irish setter Shannon, her paw prints as she chased the gulls and sandpipers, the animal control officer hot on her trail.

All those footprints.

On that June day in 1965, I contemplated the lesson of the day: don't work for a jerk. I knew that my parents would not be pleased. They weren't, just urged me that night to find another job. I did. The following week, I was a new busboy at the Village Inn Pancake House and Kentucky Fried Chicken Restaurant. I worked pancakes and chicken all through high school. More about that later...

Love is love is love is love -- but not at Florida's Father Lopez Catholic High School

Below is an e-mail I sent to Father Lopez Catholic High School President Pat LaMorte in Daytona Beach, Florida. It's in response to Mary Kate Curry's "resignation under duress" at the school when it became public that she was engaged to a woman. To read more about this, go to the New Ways Ministry web site at https://www.newwaysministry.org/2017/10/23/catholic-school-teacher-fired-gender-engagement/. Thanks to fellow Lopez alum John Bartelloni (Class of '70) for alerting me about this.

My letter:

Dear Pres. LaMorte:

My Father Lopez High School education taught me that the Catholic Church should be alleviating pain and suffering in the world, not adding to it.

I just read about Mary Kate Curry's "resignation under duress" as a theology teacher and the school's decision to forbid her from coaching (even volunteering to coach) the FLHS girls' basketball team. 

Curry's letter was heartbreaking. She obviously loved her jobs as teacher and coach. To take those away from her is the worst kind of cruelty. 

And the reason? She publicly outed herself as a member of the LGBT community, someone who loves someone of her own gender. She couldn't live a lie any more and you punished her for it. Shame on you, the school and the diocese. Shame.

I attended Father Lopez from 1965-69. I was president of the National Honor Society and lettered in basketball, part of the team that went to the state tournament in 1969. I am proud of being a Lopez alum. 

Make us all proud. Alleviate the pain you caused in this young woman's life by reinstating her as a teacher and coach. 

Some 50 years from now, a 2018 Lopez grad will look upon his or her time in the classroom or on the court with Ms. Curry and say, as I do today, that I learned how to be a honorable human being at Father Lopez. 

Do the right thing.

Sincerely,

Michael Shay

Cheyenne, Wyoming

Reunion time Down South

Traveled to Florida for Chris's high school reunion. Not exactly her reunion but her sister Ellen's, who was just one year behind Chris as a member in good standing of the Seabreeze High School Fighting Sandcrabs. Sandcrabs can be particularly feisty when males fight each other during mating season and when attacked by predators. Humans feel the crab's pinch when they step on gnarly crustaceans while strolling through the surf.

We met mostly congenial Crabs at the reunion at the Hilton, the convention hotel directly across from the Daytona Beach Ocean Center. The convention center and hotel are new additions since these 18-year-olds graduated in 1976. Their name badges featured their photo in the bicentennial annual. The guys were longhairs, many of them surfers. Seabreeze sits a half block from the beach. If the surf was up, well, attendance was down. The school district built a fence to pen in surfing youth, especially since a McDonald's was en route to salt water. Fences are made to be climbed or, on occasion, dismantled. Coaches served as border guards. One of Ellen's classmates told us how he and his pals handcuffed an unsuspecting football coach to the fence. They had to run laps the rest of the year, but the surf was worth it.

At reunions, people tell stories. Almost all are true, although they get reimagined over the years. While the classmates shared, I listened. Some of the guys knew my brother Pat, surfer and football player, class of '74. My sister Eileen was in the '76 class. And many of Chris's friends. They partied together in high school and shared a beachside house while attending the local community college. Even though Chris attended school with a bunch of heathens, she sang in Daybreak, a Catholic singing group. Her questionable singing skills led her to a spot in the back row jangling on the tambourine. 

Seems funny, but they were of a different generation. I was class of '69 at Father Lopez Catholic High School six miles from the beach. School named after the priest who accompanied Ponce De Leon to Florida. Our mascot -- the Fighting Green Waves. I wore a uniform to school. Green Wave coat and tie. Attended weekly mass. You skipped school at your peril. Sister Bernandita would be in your face the next day. Not your face, really, as she was four-foot-ten and barely reached my chest. She roared like a lion, Punishment could be severe. The nuns hit and punched us. The priests took out the paddles. Just a look from Sister Norbert could freeze a linebacker in his tracks. 

The Crabs had a different experience. Principal a drunk. Teachers lackadaisical -- and some dated students. Every night a party night. Students allegedly engaged in s-e-x, unlike their Catholic brethren and sistren.  

As the current Pope might say: Who am I to judge? Chris's sister and friends are amazing. Remember how confusing it was to be 16? Remember how important friends were? High school can be the best of times and/or the worst of times. The first half of the 1970s meant sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll. In the South, it also meant integration. The school had a riot, or at least va major disturbance. Blacks and whites treated each other with suspicion. Until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (and slightly thereafter) Daytona was a sundowner town. African-Americans weren't allowed on the beachside after sundown without a work permit. To be there otherwise, you risked arrest or a beating or worse. Blacks lived on the other side of the bridge in the Second Avenue neighborhood adjacent to Bethune-Cookman College, a traditional African-American college founded by noted educator Mary McLeod Bethune.

Daytona has a lively history. The baseball stadium on City Island is called Jackie Robinson Ballpark or "The Jack." In 1946, Daytona Beach defied segregation laws and was the first Florida city to allow Robinson to play in public with his Brooklyn Dodgers farm team. Noted African-American author Zora Neale Hurston from nearby Eatonville wrote on her houseboat in Daytona. Stephen Crane spent a night in Daytona after he was shipwrecked while on his way to cover the Cuban dust-up in 1897. This was the genesis for Crane's much-anthologized story "The Open Boat." The now unknown Robert Wilder (only one of his books still in print) wrote a Hemingwayesque book about Daytona's early days entitled "God Has a Long Face." Walter M. Miller, Jr., the tormented and reclusive World War II veteran and author of "A Canticle for Leibowitz," committed suicide in Daytona. He announced his death in advance with a call to the police, telling them that there was a dead man in his front yard (thanks to Denny Bowden and his excellent blog Volusia History for this info). Fireball Roberts (see comments) and Dale Earnhardt both died in wrecks at Daytona International Speedway. NASCAR started with races on the hard-packed sand of the beach. Early stock-car racers refined their skills by outrunning "revenooers" in the Appalachian hills.

It's all about stories and relationships. Can't have one without the other.