wood from his model plane kit onto the turtles shell so that it extended just out of reach of his extended neck with its sharp killer beak. He tied a small green frog to the stick and holding the turtle back against his straining legs, we counted down and let him GO!
After weeks of starvation and at his prime all time running weight, the racing turtle took off like a rocket… straining with every fiber of its short powerful legs, to reach the succulent green frog dancing just out of reach of his ferocious snapping beak.
Running flat out for several minutes along our measured course, with our stop watch, we estimated his speed at least at fifteen mph. After exhausting himself and thoroughly disheartened, the crazed critter had an epiphany of sorts and headed for a concrete wall at flat out full speed. The stick splintered and the frog was snapped up in a flash… We had witnessed a stunning performance, the world’s all-time fastest turtle! We left the turtle to wander back into the swamp where stories and sightings of a huge snapper with the faded number 10 painted on his shell became another one of the local legends.
We, the “Clam Commissioners,” me and my pals, would put the kids in the water and not let them out for lunch until they filled a bushel basket. The baskets were stuck inside automotive inner-tubes. Cars don’t have inner-tubes these days but back then they all did- by the way, gas in those days was twenty five cents a gallon.
So how do your catch a clam? First you tie a pair of old socks on your feet then you feel for the shells and duck down in waist deep water for each one. After you put about two to four hundred clams in your basket it’s time for lunch. We paid the kids one and a third cents per clam and sold them for five cents…some days we had eighteen thousand clams so, you do the math…we made good money for not dong much.. Huge hungry horse flies bit the kids drawing blood and they had to pull wet t-shirts over their heads for some kind of protection. The crabs and “oyster crackers,” ugly little fish with immense jaws, would try to bite your feet and the occasional shark would swim around the shallow lagoon so, the work had some hazards. We wouldn’t let any of the “worker-bees” in the boat for lunch until they all had filled their baskets. Around noon, the faster kids had to help the slower ones and the same in the afternoon- we would stay there until the last basket was filled- cooperate and graduate.
We took our girl friends from the Island Heights yacht Club with us, water skied, snorkeled and had one of the kids who didn’t like the mud, toss clay pigeons for us to shoot at… nice days.. playing on the bay…nicer to be a clam commissioner…
Over dark winter nights, I went fishing for stripped bass with gill nets on the river rowing a fifteen foot boat through skim ice … cold north west winds blowing down the dark river, ice freezing on the oars,,, waves lapping over the boat filled with four hundred pounds lbs of fish, hands, feet and noses frozen. George Washington didn’t have anything on us. The buyers were waiting for us at three am, parked near the beach with scales hanging from their trucks. We made a dollar a pound when the stripped bass were running… my share was a hundred a night- not bad for a fourteen year old, then or now!
As kids, one of our principal things was shooting ducks. We shot ducks almost every weekend during the season and sometimes out of season. I had a Remington pump with a 32” barrel and still have it today. That gun chambers three inch magnum twelve gauge shells and reaches out a hundred yards easy. I must have fired ten thousand shells through that gun and it never jammed, not once. Oh yes, we ate the ducks. Island Heights was the best place for a kid to grow up - not so good if you were a duck.
CHAPTER 2
“One can get a proper insight into the practice of flying only by actual flying experiments. . . . The manner in which we have to meet the irregularities of the wind, when soaring in the air, can only be learnt by being in the air itself. . . . The only way which leads us to a quick development in human flight is a systematic and energetic practice in actual flying”
— Otto Lilienthal, 1896
We would take off at ten pm and fly south for eight hours at 25,000’ and three hundred miles an hour over and through the Bermuda triangle to Puerto Rico. I got to fly the aircraft. Dad would sit behind me in the Jump seat and the other pilot and the Flight engineer would go to sleep. Just my Dad and I and that big starry sky… We pointed the plane at the Southern Cross and let it go… The four Wright 3350 turbo compound engines rumbled faintly fifty feet behind the cockpit, the gauges trembling behind their glass lenses. It was an aluminum magic carpet speeding through the night into the new dawn.
Dad always told me to forget being a pilot- He saw nothing but trouble in the coming years
