Page 27 - Winterling's Chasing the Wind

a corner or on a table. On rainy days, we’d get tired of the comic books, so we then
played card games like Old Maid, Slapjack or Rummy. A few of us had pets. I had a
Collie-Spaniel mix that I named Champ, after Gene Autry’s horse Champion. At times
he would come in from the woods with a blood-filled tick on his back that I had to pull
off. One day, Champ went under a neighbor’s house and wouldn’t come out. He
snarled at us when we called him. That was the last that I saw him because he had
gotten rabies and had to be put to sleep.

During the cold winter, we would collect pieces of coal beside the railroad track that
had fallen from the coal car behind the locomotive. I didn’t think the fireman who
shoveled the coal into the flames of the furnace on the locomotive could retrieve them.
We put good use of the coal in our fireplace to heat our home. The rails were our hiking
path north to the Ortega River and south to Orange Park. We would see how far we
could walk on the rails without falling off.
A mile and a half south of Timuquana Road was the entrance to Jacksonville Naval Air
Station. Since my father worked at Lee Field (in Green Cove Springs), and several of
my friends were apparently children of Navy personnel, we were allowed to swim at
the pools at NAS. We swam in two of the main side pools most of the time and a couple
of times in the officers’ pool. Adjacent to the main side pool was the theatre where we
watched movies, such as the Bing Crosby-Bob Hope films. After the movie go into BX
(Base Exchange) and buy a large milkshake for only ten cents. This really topped off a
day at the pool, movies and ice cream fountain.

At times we would head down Timuquana Road to the bulkhead on the bank of the St
Johns River to watch the PBY Catalina seaplanes practice taking off and landing in the
river. The designation PB stood for “patrol boat”, and the Y stood for the aircraft
company (Consolidated) that built it. They said there were more PBYs built than any
other during World War II. Some were built with retractable wheels so they could be
used anywhere in the world – on land or on water. Once we saw a gigantic seaplane, the
Martin Mariner. It was unique not only for its size but also because it had gull-shaped
wings.

When I visited the home of my sixth-grade classmate, Jimmy Butts, I saw him make
model airplanes from sticks of balsa wood. Being an avid aviation enthusiast, I picked
up the hobby. Every Saturday, after catching the city bus (fare 5 cents) to town to watch
a western movie (9 cents), buy a Krystal hamburger (7 cents) and Orange Crush drink
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