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Florida

Florida the Winter of 1971 (Written in the1998-99 time frame)      By my third semester of engineering my semester grade point average had had dove from a 3.0 to 0.9 to 0.6. Even though the Deans office was willing to let me continue, they didn't really want to throw people to the wolves during the Viet Nam war, I decided that my head wasn't really into college at the time and declined their offer. After the draft board sent mea notice changing my classification from 2S to 1A and inviting me down for a physical I joined the Navy under a delayed entry program. I quit my job in housekeeping at St. Peters Hospital, moved out of the apartment I shared with my cousin in Albany at 385 Madison Ave, and packed my psychedelic VW micro bus. The heck with upstate New York winters I was bound for the promised land, Florida.       My Uncle Tom had rolled the VW before he gave it to me and the roof looked a little like an accordion. Jeff Fallon and some other friends of mine had painted it in a wind storm with various colors of spray paint, as well as using brushes to paint logos on it. Some of the logos included peace signs, a Woodstock concert symbol, a middle finger and flowers. The top of the roof included PTA (Peace Through Acid) and Fuck the Pigs. Although not easily visible from the street level the roof was easy to read from a second story window. The finger was right next to a peace sign so I painted "The War" next to it. I eventually had to paint CENSORED by the BPs over it with the N hiding the finger. The BPs were the Bethlehem Police where my parents lived. Some how they decided the finger constituted public obscenity. Good thing they never saw the top of the roof. I had a cop pull me over once, and when I asked him what I had done he replied "Nothing, I just wanted to see what the inside looked like". The inside was built out for one person to comfortably live in. Once Jane Keanes and myself had found the main street of Scotia leading to the bridge over the Mohawk blocked by a parade. We just pulled the painted micro bus into the parade, waved and smiled at the crowd, and pulled out of the parade when we reached the bridge.       By January of 1971 I was southbound on I-95. I-95 wasn't completed back then and many sections south of Washington were still 2 lane roads. The VW was somewhat of a gutless wonder, it might do 70 mph down a very steep mountain with the clutch in. At one point I was on a two-lane road behind a tractor trailer rig. Every time I went to pass him he would speed up so I couldn't. Every time I dropped back he would slow down again. This went on for hours, guess he liked my paint job or he was just bored. I was having some problems with the electrical system and at one time had wrapped a blown fuse in aluminum foil. Latter I had a small dash fire which was more smoke than fire, but it brought on some intermittent problems. I was somewhere on a two lane section in Georgia when the vehicle died. I believe it was a Sunday because the small garage a few hundred yards back down the road was closed. I popped some Jiffy Pop and sat on the roof drinking beer, eating pop corn and waving to the cars going by. A cop pulled into the garage and sat and watched me for a while but he never came near me. After a while I climbed inside and went to sleep for the night. Sometime in the night there was a knocking at my door. When I looked out there were three Georgia boys wanting to know if they could help me out since they had a garage down the road. They offered to tow me there but since it was illegal to tow by chain in Georgia one of them wanted to be behind my wheel. What the heck I went for it. After we got under way I asked the guy in my VW to pop the clutch, which started the engine just fine. When we got to their garage which was a barn behind the house I was running and no longer in need of their services. They asked for $5 for their troubles but all I had was twenties and they didn't have change. When they told them I was planning on coming north again in a month or two they told me I could stop buy and pay them then.       Finally I crossed the state line and there were palm trees and a welcome center, I had made it through the south to a Yankees safe haven in Florida. Although the air had been getting warmer as I moved south, it seemed especially warm and friendly in Florida as I made my way through the Jacksonville area. I stopped along the ocean where people drove on the beach which for some reason impressed me. Around Long Island and Cape Cod the beaches seemed to me to be too soft to drive on. From there I made my way over towards Orlando where my mothers brother Jim and his wife Dot lived. My mother latter told me that when Dot had seen me standing at there door she had yelled to Jim "There's a hippie at the door" to which he had replied "That's just Louie". The first night we ate steak and when I was asked if I wanted catsup I had replied that I only put catsup on things I don't like. The next night we had meatloaf and my only remark was to ask for catsup. I visited with them for a couple days, Disney World was scheduled to open that spring so I ended up taking a day trip over to Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center. I was impressed by their museum and by the Saturn V assembly building. The tour guide explained that the little sign on the overhead crane near the top of the building was as big as the bus we had come in on. The building was huge and had huge doors and tracks which allowed and assembled rocket to be rolled out to the launch pad on a trip which took days.       After leaving the Orlando area I moved south towards Delray Beach and my fathers parents. I had been drinking legally in New York since I was 18 and illegally from 15 or younger but in Florida the drinking age was 21. For the next couple months I would visit my grandparents every two weeks and pick up a case or two of beer they would buy for me. Now a days a case would last me about two days, but I was younger and soberer than. After checking out the Fort Lauderdale and Miami areas I settled down to live off the side of a road leading into the Everglades. I would go down to Lauderdale and spend the days either in a park or on the beach and go back to the Everglades at night. The place I picked was near Andytown which was near Alligator Alley which was a toll road that crossed southern Florida to the Gulf of Mexico. There was a severe drought that year and the area near me dried up. I came home one night to find the area crowded with cars. People were out beating fish floppy in the mud with baseball bats and golf clubs or gaffing them and taking them home. After a few days the people went away and the buzzards came. I ran into a couple kids who had a 22 riffle and we spent a couple days together trying to bring down the buzzards. You could hit them a couple times, they would drop a little each time you hit them but they wouldn't fall out of the sky.       I used to occasionally go to a drive in theater which offered adult movies, they would barely make a strong R or soft X rating by toady's standards but were considered risqué at the time. The name Vixen comes to mind for some reason. They also had cartoons before the main features which included The Pink Panther and the Ant and The Aardvark, I believe Joey Bishop was the voice of the Aardvark. I saw several things in Florida I had never seen around Albany up to that time including Mac Donald's, K-Mart and free right hand turns on a red light. The park I used to hang around by the beach in Lauderdale had a small train which ran through it. A guy lived hidden in the corner of the park and sold acid to get by. One night I was wasted and didn't feel comfortable in my normal night time spot so I went down the road and tried to rent a spot for the night in a overnight trailer park, for some reason they refused to rent to me. A few days latter I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of slamming doors, there was a car off loading rednecks with baseball bats and ax handles. I looked around and since the only other thing around was me I got the gist of the situation rather quickly. Luckily the VW started and I got out of there without being perused. I previously had good dealings with locals in Georgia yet almost lost it to locals in Florida. So much for Florida being a haven for northerners, if you get off the Gold Coast from West Palm Beach to Miami the back woods of Florida had the same poor black ghettos and red necks that were prevalent in the south at that time. Maybe they thought I was a civil rights worker with long hair, a psychedelic micro bus and New York plates.       Anyway the middle of the night experience had scared me enough that I fled to the west coast of Florida for a few days. I was too cheap to pay to use the toll road so I went south and over highway 41. There was a place called Frog City which boasted a population under 10 and was basically just a store and alligator wrestling attraction. I made it about as far north as Fort Meyers before turning around and going back to the east coast. The Gulf looked chalkier than the Atlantic and I was rewarded by seeing a school of Dolphin going by as the sun sank into the Gulf. It was the first time I had seen the sun set into a huge body of water rather then rise from it. I avoided the Andytown area and after saying good-bye to my grandparents headed north. I'm ashamed to say I didn't stop in Georgia and pay those guys who had helped me out. I don't remember why exactly, maybe I just didn't recognize their place. When I got back to Albany I moved in with my parents for a couple of months then flew to Chicago for boot camp.       The beginning of the winter of 70-71 was the last winter I spent around Albany until 92-93. Florida had helped to spoiled me and when I was discharged from the Navy in California I opted to live there rather than return to my family and the harsh winters. I couldn't see living somewhere you suffered through the winters just looking forward to the day when you could retire and move to a warmer climate. In the last 27 years I spent that one winter around Albany and that was enough to re affirm my desire to live where you don't need a snow shovel.       In 73 I drove from the Bay Area in California to Albany for Christmas then continued down to Florida and back to California. About 8000 miles in a thirty day leave period. I drove the same route again in the spring of 95 with my new wife Patty before we shipped off to two years in Japan. I drove from Sunnyvale California to Florida and back in January of 90, stopping at New Orleans going both directions. The 49ers had trounced Denver 55 to 10 at the Super Bowl in New Orleans and I even left my parents and my grandmother at half time to get back to Bourbon Street and party. I flew to Florida in the January of 93 and drove my parents car back up to their Delmar home after my fathers open heart surgery (true open heart surgery, valve replacements). They flew back in February or March. I laid over in Miami for half a day on our way to Aruba on the 4th of July 98 and we are planning on visiting my parents and grandmother in Florida in February of 99.       Florida is a nice place to visit but I really don't want to live there. It's nice in the winter but too hot and humid in the summer. I had to explain the operation of a swamp cooler to a bartender at the Miami airport, they have to use air conditioning because it is too humid for evaporative coolers. They work well here in the dry Mojave Desert at a fraction of the cost of air conditioning. We also don't have to put up with hurricanes. My grandmother spends her winters there and her summers in the mountains of upstate New York. I was extremely impressed with Florida as a nineteen year old seeing it for the first time. After nineteen years of Albany winters it truly was the promised land.