Tampa

A couple of years after the war ended it became clear that things at the base were shutting down. Al and Lillian had to face facts and start looking for new jobs. The first place they turned was to Al's parents who were dislocated Yankees retired to Florida. Lillian and the two boys flew to Tampa in 1947 while Al finished up at the base and drove their car across country. He probably bothered to bring the car since cars were still hard to come by even that long after the war. Lillian was tense during every stage of the trip because she was afraid of flying but Richard remembers particularly flying over the gulf of Mexico and realizing how big the world was.

Richard was seven and Tampa was a shock to his desert-bred system. It was lush and humid and full of bugs. He thought even the soil was poisonous so often did he battle bouts of impetigo. Robert and Edith were Al's parents. They were starchy New Englanders from Lynn, Massachusetts. Robert had worked in the downtown financial district of Boston. It was hard for Lillian to meet Robert and Edith at the airport because she had never met them before. Lillian was a West Coast girl by now. She sewed beautiful, fashionable clothes for herself, wore lipstick, curled her hair, and smoked. And she was divorced. Edith wore sears sucker house dresses and made Robert go outside to smoke his evening cigar. They both spoke with such a strong Boston accent, Lillian had a hard time understanding them.

Edith and Al had always had a contentious relationship. There was a story about how Edith had shown up at Al's prep school, Moses Brown, and dragged him off the basketball court in order to go home and do his homework. All three of her other boys had good careers but all Al cared about was sports (he had been the high school's quarter back). And much to Lillian's growing dismay, betting on sports, particularly the horses. Tension was high in the house while Richard stayed with Al's parents. And soon Al and Lillian took the kids and moved into a single room closer to Tampa bay where Al got a job as a clerk at a hospital on Davis Island, a partially man made island in the bay.

Richard was almost eight and he quickly learned how to get around, exploring by walking or even riding the bus. He used to like to walk down Swan Avenue which circled the bay and lead down to a sea wall which he could walk through to get close to the water. Several times he watched the bay fill up with jelly fish as every wave rolled in with more of the viscous creatures than the one before. Sometimes the jelly fish would experience a massive die off creating a terrible stink along the shore.

He also discovered the mystical Silver Springs, an old style bathing facility where for a dime you could swim under trees hanging with Spanish moss in one of the rivers that ran into the bay. Down stream a bit there were old fashioned bleachers which seemed to indicate there had been a natatorium in use at one time.

He started school in Tampa. He knows that because he remembers one terrible teacher that tortured another student in the class by calling him nothing but "the little heathen." "Will the little heathen stand up; Will the little heathen read his lesson; will the little heathen move to the back of the room." Soon the little heathen was sitting at a desk isolated on all sides by several feet. One day he just broke down. He put his head down on the desk and started crying and wouldn't stop. The principal came and took him away and he was never seen again.

The little heathen had the last name of Cohen but it took Richard years to figure what that had been exactly about. But he was familiar with the meanness of it. It reminded him of the day one of the boys arrived in Herlong dressed by his parents in a dress for some kind of punishment. He remembered how the kid came reluctantly off the bus into a school yard of jeering savages. He remembered thinking how the bus driver should not have let him on the bus in a dress. How he should have made the kid go home and change. What would the parents have said to that: he can't come to school in a dress. Period.