Page 36 - Winterling's Chasing the Wind

Boy Scout Troop 32 met at the Venetia Elementary School. I bought a Boy Scout
handbook and some merit badge books and started earning enough badges to become a
Life Scout, one step short of Eagle. One day, my father met with a few of us at the
vacant lot where we often played softball. We decided to play court to learn courtroom
procedure. I played the part of a lawyer about to obtain testimony from one of my
friends. After telling him to raise his right hand, I said, “Do you swear to hell---”. I was
shocked and embarrassed at what I said, but all the boys laughed. I don’t remember my
father’s reaction because I was too embarrassed to look at him.

We caught the city bus at the corner of Timuquana Road and Roosevelt Blvd. On the
frigid winter mornings, we found shelter from the northerly wind against the wall of an
ornamental stucco structure at the intersection of two sidewalks. It took only 10
minutes to reach Lake Shore Junior High School where I attended the seventh grade.
The bus would turn off Roosevelt Blvd. onto Lake Shore Blvd, where I spotted the
expanding Huckins Yacht Company, which was building PT boats for the U.S. Navy.
One day we learned that a PBY Flying Boat Patrol plane had crashed near our bus
route. The next day we passed the burned wreckage between the Black Jack oak trees
not far from our school’s playground. Lake Shore was a newly constructed a red brick
two-story building on Bayview Road. I noticed the rafters in the ceiling of the large
gym were constructed by heavy wood timbers because of the shortage of steel during
the war. The playground had dry, powdery sand that was hotter than Jacksonville
Beach when the scorching sun on the lengthening spring days grew longer.

Around the same year, my brother Richard who still attended Venetia Elementary
School, saw two Grumman TBF Avengers collide overhead while he was on afternoon
schoolboy patrol duty. The airplanes were heading west over Venetia in formation,
preparing to turn left towards the airfield. But airplane # 2 peeled to the left
prematurely. It struck plane #1 which hadn’t peeled left, causing it to lose its right
wing. Both pilots were killed as both aircraft crashed in the swamp south of Timuquana
Road.

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