Page 42 - Winterling's Chasing the Wind

evening, including me and my friend, Jimmy Taylor, who lived on Duval Street, not far
from the Gator Bowl. It was Friday night and the lights were on at the Gator Bowl.
Since we usually worked Friday nights, we realized that this was our chance to see the
last half of the high school football game. We had no tickets, but then there was no one
at the gate to take a ticket, so we just walked right in and watch all of the last quarter.
We hadn’t missed much because Lee was playing Landon, and the final score was 0 - 0.
I not only worked downtown, but I found many things to do there, too. Some stores had
pinball machines that could award me free games. I played long after the five nickels I
got for my quarter were gone. I enjoyed reading, so I could easily walk to the Public
Library on Adams Street where there were many magazines, such as Life, Look,
Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Colliers, Coronet, and Readers Digest. I would
check out required reading for Book Reports. With no television, at home we listened
to radio programs or music played by DJ’s (disk jockeys) Popular songs were
performed by orchestras like Tommy Dorsey, Spike Jones, Harry James, and Guy
Lombardo’s Royal Canadians. We played the phonograph. As long as I could
remember, we listened to music recorded on large, brittle 78 RPM records until the
smaller vinyl 45’s came out in 1949. Around that time, there was a musician’s union
strike when no instrumental music was legally recorded. A group called the
Harmonicats made recordings about that time because they did not belong to the union.
One of their best songs was “Peg of my Heart”. After the strike, one of the first
recordings was Les Paul and Mary Ford’s “How High the Moon” and “Mockingbird
Hill”.

CHAPTER 10 - Almost Homeless

In 1948, my brother Richard and I left our Laura Street home to visit our grandparents
in New Jersey. Uncle Clinton took us clamming in Barnegat Bay. To find the clams,
pieces of canvas were sowed over our feet so we could feel them in the mud on the
bottom of the bay. After we collected several bushels, we spent the time riding back to
the dock sorting the different sizes of clams.

Mother had always told me that Uncle Clinton liked Richard more than me and that he
wanted him to stay with him. That made me very uncomfortable as we stayed at my
grandmother, Mamie Cranmer’s, house in Mayetta. I wanted to return to Jacksonville.

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