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Guest column

In harm's way, yet safe, back in the good old days

By OWEN S. ALLBRITTON
Published September 22, 2005

I've often wondered how so many of us survived our childhood days. We did so many foolhardy things that put us in harm's way. So it was as I was growing up in Clearwater.

Clearwater in the 1930s was just a small, charming tourist town surrounded by rather dense pine and palmetto woods, orange groves and dairy farms. Back then, you had to drive through a lot of pine woods on U.S. 19 to get to St. Petersburg. The surroundings provided plenty of interesting adventures.

Would anyone today believe that a sugar cane press was located near the just-completed Holiday Inn Express on the north side of Gulf-to-Bay Boulevard at its intersection with U.S. 19? As a youngster I remember watching a mule hooked up to a set of rollers, walking around a circle, while men fed sugar cane stalks into the rollers to squeeze out the juice to boil and make cane syrup. The men would throw us kids the crushed cane stalks to chew on while we sat and watched.

I grew up in a house on the south side of Maple Street in the northeast section of town near Hobart's Lake. We lived in the middle house of the only three on the block. The neighbor to our left was Phil Hood, a Florida cattleman. He raised beef cattle in the woods near our houses and had a 15-foot bullwhip he would crack, which sounded like a cannon. One day he shot a cow, hoisted it by block and tackle on a big pine tree in back of his house, skinned and butchered it, then gave me a piece of fresh-cut beef to take home.

My playmates and I built a treehouse 20 feet up between two sturdy pine trees in the woods where Hobart Street ended. It was crude but sturdy. One hot summer day I was alone, perched in my treehouse surveying my domain, when a car drove up directly below it. A man and a woman got out and spread a blanket on the ground, took all their clothes off and started to "wrestle around" on the blanket. I wondered why two naked people were doing that. I then became alarmed as to what I would do if the man, who was big and powerful looking, climbed up the ladder and found me. I decided to feign sleep if that happened and claim I didn't see anything they did.

These are the same woods I was running through in just my shorts with other kids chasing me playing "cowboys and Indians" when the ground suddenly gave way and I fell into a pit up to my neck. It was an underground yellow jacket nest and they swarmed all over me, stinging like only they can. They were in my shorts, my nose, my eyes and ears.

I ran home, just a block away, dropping my pants as I ran. My mother was having her weekly group of ladies over for bridge. I ran naked into the room, followed by the angry swarm of yellow jackets. I was thrown into a bath tub filled with water. Mom called our family doctor (they did make house calls in those days) and he gave me a shot of something, saying it was the worst case of insect bites he had ever seen. I had well over 100 bites. Fortunately, rather than now being highly allergic to insect bites, I somehow developed an immunity and have no reaction if bitten today.

Down the street from our house there was a cul-de-sac that was surrounded by a steep hill of soft white sand. We kids loved to jump off the top and slide down the sand to the street. One day, friends and I brought shovels and dug a tunnel at street level about 20 feet into the hill, where the sand was cool and damp. We never gave a thought about the danger of a cave-in. It was a sure way to cool off by crawling way back into the tunnel and escaping the hot, humid summer days.

It was such doings that made me think how lucky I was to survive my early childhood.

Owen S. Allbritton of Clearwater is a retired Pinellas circuit court judge.

[Last modified September 22, 2005, 01:03:19]