“It is a good thing we have got a place picked out to go to and don’t
have to choose a hotel, as it would be hard to choose amongst them if
every one of them is the best.”
She laughed.
We found a jitney and I give him the address of the room my
son-in-law had got for us and soon we was there and introduced
ourselves to the lady that owns the house, a young widow about
forty-eight years of age. She showed us our room, which was light and
airy with a comfortable bed and bureau and washstand. It was twelve
dollars a week, but the location was good, only three blocks from
Williams Park.
St. Pete is what folks calls the town, though they also call it the
Sunshine City, as they claim they’s no other place in the country
where they’s fewer days when Old Sol don’t smile down on Mother
Earth, and one of the newspapers gives away all their copies free
every day when the sun don’t shine. They claim to of only give them
away some sixty-odd times in the last eleven years. Another nickname
they have got for the town is “the Poor Man’s Palm Beach,” but I
guess they’s men that comes there that could borrow as much from the
bank as some of the Willie boys over to the other Palm Beach.
During our stay we paid a visit to the Lewis Tent City, which is the
headquarters for the Tin Can Tourists. But maybe you ain’t heard
about them. Well, they are an organization that takes their vacation
trips by auto and carries everything with them. That is, they bring
along their tents to sleep in and cook in and they don’t patronize no
hotels or cafeterias, but they have got to be bona fide auto campers
or they can’t belong to the organization.
They tell me they’s over 200,000 members to it and they call
themselves the Tin Canners on account of most of their food being put
up in tin cans. One couple we seen in the Tent City was a couple from
Brady, Texas, named Mr. and Mrs. Pence, which the old man is over
eighty years of age and they had came in their auto all the way from
home, a distance of 1,641 miles. They took five weeks for the trip,
Mr. Pence driving the entire distance.
The Tin Canners hails from every State in the Union and in the summer
time they visit places like New England and the Great Lakes region,
but in the winter the most of them comes to Florida and scatters
all over the State. While we was down there, they was a national
convention of them at Gainesville, Florida, and they elected a
Fredonia, New York man as their president. His title is Royal Tin Can
Opener of the World. They have got a song wrote up which everybody
has got to learn it before they are a member:
The tin can forever! Hurrah, boys! Hurrah!
Up with the tin can! Down with the foe!
We will rally round the campfire, we’ll rally once again,
Shouting, “We auto camp forever!”
That is something like it. And the members has also got to have a tin
can fastened on to the front of their machine.
I asked Mother how she would like to travel around that way and she
said:
“Fine, but not with an old rattle brain like you driving.”
“Well,” I said, “I am eight years younger than this Mr. Pence who
drove here from Texas.”
“Yes,” she said, “but he is old enough to not be skittish.”
You can’t get ahead of Mother.
Well, one of the first things we done in St. Petersburg was to go
to the Chamber of Commerce and register our names and where we was
from as they’s great rivalry amongst the different States in regards
to the number of their citizens visiting in town and of course our
little State don’t stand much of a show, but still every little bit
helps, as the fella says. All and all, the man told us, they was
eleven thousand names registered, Ohio leading with some fifteen
hundred-odd and New York State next with twelve hundred. Then come
Michigan, Pennsylvania and so on down, with one man each from Cuba
and Nevada.
The first night we was there, they was a meeting of the New
York-New Jersey Society at the Congregational Church and a man from
Ogdensburg, New York State, made the talk. His subject was Rainbow
Chasing. He is a Rotarian and a very convicting speaker, though I
forget his name.
Our first business, of course, was to find a place to eat and after
trying several places we run on to a cafeteria on Central Avenue
that suited us up and down. We eat pretty near all our meals there
and it averaged about two dollars per day for the two of us, but the
food was well cooked and everything nice and clean. A man don’t mind
paying the price if things is clean and well cooked.
On the third day of February, which is Mother’s birthday, we spread
ourselves and eat supper at the Poinsettia Hotel and they charged us
seventy-five cents for a sirloin steak that wasn’t hardly big enough
for one.
I said to Mother: “Well,” I said, “I guess it’s a good thing every
day ain’t your birthday or we would be in the poorhouse.”
“No,” says Mother, “because if every day was my birthday, I would be
old enough by this time to of been in my grave long ago.”
You can’t get ahead of Mother.
In the hotel they had a cardroom where they was several men and
ladies playing five hundred and this new tangled whist bridge. We
also seen a place where they was dancing, so I asked Mother would she
like to trip the light fantastic toe and she said no, she was too old
to squirm like you have got to do now days. We watched some of the
young folks at it awhile till Mother got disgusted and said we would
have to see a good movie to take the taste out of our mouth. Mother
is a great movie heroyne and we go twice a week here at home.
But I want to tell you about the Park. The second day we was there we
visited the Park, which is a good deal like the one in Tampa, only
bigger, and they’s more fun goes on here every day than you could
shake a stick at. In the middle they’s a big bandstand and chairs
for the folks to set and listen to the concerts, which they give you
music for all tastes, from Dixie up to classical pieces like Hearts
and Flowers.
Then all around they’s places marked off for different sports and
games--chess and checkers and dominoes for folks that enjoys those
kind of games, and roque and horseshoes for the nimbler ones. I used
to pitch a pretty fair shoe myself, but ain’t done much of it in the
last twenty years.
Well, anyway, we bought a membership ticket in the club which costs
one dollar for the season, and they tell me that up to a couple years
ago it was fifty cents, but they had to raise it to keep out the
riffraff.
Well, Mother and I put in a great day watching the pitchers and she
wanted I should get in the game, but I told her I was all out of
practice and would make a fool of myself, though I seen several men
pitching who I guess I could take their measure without no practice.
However, they was some good pitchers, too, and one boy from Akron,
Ohio, who could certainly throw a pretty shoe. They told me it
looked like he would win the championship of the United States in
the February tournament. We come away a few days before they held
that and I never did hear if he win. I forget his name, but he was a
clean cut young fella and he has got a brother in Cleveland that’s a
Rotarian.
Well, we just stood around and watched the different games for two or
three days and finally I set down in a checker game with a man named
Weaver from Danville, Illinois. He was a pretty fair checker player,
but he wasn’t no match for me, and I hope that don’t sound like
bragging. But I always could hold my own on a checkerboard and the
folks around here will tell you the same thing. I played with this
Weaver pretty near all morning for two or three mornings and he beat
me one game and the only other time it looked like he had a chance,
the noon whistle blowed and we had to quit and go to dinner.
While I was playing checkers, Mother would set and listen to the
band, as she loves music, classical or no matter what kind, but
anyway she was setting there one day and between selections the woman
next to her opened up a conversation. She was a woman about Mother’s
own age, seventy or seventy-one, and finally she asked Mother’s name
and Mother told her her name and where she was from and Mother asked
her the same question, and who do you think the woman was?
Well, sir, it was the wife of Frank M. Hartsell, the man who was
engaged to Mother till I stepped in and cut him out, fifty-two years
ago!
Yes, sir!
You can imagine Mother’s surprise! And Mrs. Hartsell was surprised,
too, when Mother told her she had once been friends with her husband,
though Mother didn’t say how close friends they had been, or that
Mother and I was the cause of Hartsell going out West. But that’s
what we was. Hartsell left his town a month after the engagement
was broke off and ain’t never been back since. He had went out to
Michigan and become a veterinary, and that is where he had settled
down, in Hillsdale, Michigan, and finally married his wife.
Well, Mother screwed up her courage to ask if Frank was still living
and Mrs. Hartsell took her over to where they was pitching horseshoes
and there was old Frank, waiting his turn. And he knowed Mother as
soon as he seen her, though it was over fifty years. He said he
knowed her by her eyes.
“Why, it’s Lucy Frost!” he says, and he throwed down his shoes and
quit the game.
Then they come over and hunted me up and I will confess I wouldn’t of
knowed him. Him and I is the same age to the month, but he seems to
show it more, some way. He is balder for one thing. And his beard is
all white, where mine has still got a streak of brown in it. The very
first thing I said to him, I said:
“Well, Frank, that beard of yours makes me feel like I was back
north. It looks like a regular blizzard.”
“Well,” he said, “I guess yourn would be just as white if you had it
dry cleaned.”
But Mother wouldn’t stand that.
“Is that so!” she said to Frank. “Well, Charley ain’t had no tobacco
in his mouth for over ten years!”
And I ain’t!
Well, I excused myself from the checker game and it was pretty close
to noon, so we decided to all have dinner together and they was
nothing for it only we must try their cafeteria on Third Avenue.
It was a little more expensive than ours and not near as good, I
thought. I and Mother had about the same dinner we had been having
every day and our bill was $1.10. Frank’s check was $1.20 for he and
his wife. The same meal wouldn’t of cost them more than a dollar at
our place.
After dinner we made them come up to our house and we all set in the
parlor, which the young woman had give us the use of to entertain
company. We begun talking over old times and Mother said she was
a-scared Mrs. Hartsell would find it tiresome listening to we three
talk over old times, but as it turned out they wasn’t much chance
for nobody else to talk with Mrs. Hartsell in the company. I have
heard lots of women that could go it, but Hartsell’s wife takes the
cake of all the women I ever seen. She told us the family history of
everybody in the State of Michigan and bragged for a half hour about
her son, who she said is in the drug business in Grand Rapids, and a
Rotarian.
When I and Hartsell could get a word in edgeways we joked one another
back and forth and I chafed him about being a horse doctor.
“Well, Frank,” I said, “you look pretty prosperous, so I suppose
they’s been plenty of glanders around Hillsdale.”
“Well,” he said, “I’ve managed to make more than a fair living. But
I’ve worked pretty hard.”
“Yes,” I said, “and I suppose you get called out all hours of the
night to attend births and so on.”
Mother made me shut up.
Well, I thought they wouldn’t never go home and I and Mother was
in misery trying to keep awake, as the both of us generally always
takes a nap after dinner. Finally they went, after we had made an
engagement to meet them in the Park the next morning, and Mrs.
Hartsell also invited us to come to their place the next night and
play five hundred. But she had forgot that they was a meeting of the
Michigan Society that evening, so it was not till two evenings later
that we had our first card game.
Hartsell and his wife lived in a house on Third Avenue North and had
a private setting room besides their bedroom. Mrs. Hartsell couldn’t
quit talking about their private setting room like it was something
wonderful. We played cards with them, with Mother and Hartsell
partners against his wife and I. Mrs. Hartsell is a miserable card
player and we certainly got the worst of it.
After the game she brought out a dish of oranges and we had to
pretend it was just what we wanted, though oranges down there is like
a young man’s whiskers; you enjoy them at first, but they get to be a
pesky nuisance.
We played cards again the next night at our place with the same
partners and I and Mrs. Hartsell was beat again. Mother and Hartsell
was full of compliments for each other on what a good team they made,
but the both of them knowed well enough where the secret of their
success laid. I guess all and all we must of played ten different
evenings and they was only one night when Mrs. Hartsell and I come
out ahead. And that one night wasn’t no fault of hern.
When we had been down there about two weeks, we spent one evening as
their guest in the Congregational Church, at a social give by the
Michigan Society. A talk was made by a man named Bitting of Detroit,
Michigan, on How I was Cured of Story Telling. He is a big man in
the Rotarians and give a witty talk.
A woman named Mrs. Oxford rendered some selections which Mrs.
Hartsell said was grand opera music, but whatever they was my
daughter Edie could of give her cards and spades and not made such a
hullaballoo about it neither.
Then they was a ventriloquist from Grand Rapids and a young woman
about forty-five years of age that mimicked different kinds of birds.
I whispered to Mother that they all sounded like a chicken, but she
nudged me to shut up.
After the show we stopped in a drug store and I set up the
refreshments and it was pretty close to ten o’clock before we finally
turned in. Mother and I would of preferred tending the movies, but
Mother said we mustn’t offend Mrs. Hartsell, though I asked her had
we came to Florida to enjoy ourselves or to just not offend an old
chatterbox from Michigan.
I felt sorry for Hartsell one morning. The women folks both had an
engagement down to the chiropodist’s and I run across Hartsell in the
Park and he foolishly offered to play me checkers.
It was him that suggested it, not me, and I guess he repented himself
before we had played one game. But he was too stubborn to give up and
set there while I beat him game after game and the worst part of it
was that a crowd of folks had got in the habit of watching me play
and there they all was, looking on, and finally they seen what a fool
Frank was making of himself, and they began to chafe him and pass
remarks. Like one of them said:
“Who ever told you you was a checker player!”
And:
“You might maybe be good for tiddle-de-winks, but not checkers!”
I almost felt like letting him beat me a couple games. But the crowd
would of knowed it was a put up job.
Well, the women folks joined us in the Park and I wasn’t going to
mention our little game, but Hartsell told about it himself and
admitted he wasn’t no match for me.
“Well,” said Mrs. Hartsell, “checkers ain’t much of a game anyway, is
it?” She said: “It’s more of a children’s game, ain’t it? At least, I
know my boy’s children used to play it a good deal.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “It’s a children’s game the way your husband
plays it, too.”
Mother wanted to smooth things over, so she said:
“Maybe they’s other games where Frank can beat you.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Hartsell, “and I bet he could beat you pitching
horse-shoes.”
“Well,” I said, “I would give him a chance to try, only I ain’t
pitched a shoe in over sixteen years.”
“Well,” said Hartsell, “I ain’t played checkers in twenty years.”
“You ain’t never played it,” I said.
“Anyway,” says Frank, “Lucy and I is your master at five hundred.”
Well, I could of told him why that was, but had decency enough to
hold my tongue.
It had got so now that he wanted to play cards every night and
when I or Mother wanted to go to a movie, why one of us would have
to pretend we had a headache and then trust to goodness that they
wouldn’t see us sneak into the theater. I don’t mind playing cards
when my partner keeps their mind on the game, but you take a woman
like Hartsell’s wife and how can they play cards when they have got
to stop every couple seconds and brag about their son in Grand Rapids?
Well, the New York-New Jersey Society announced that they was going
to give a social evening too and I said to Mother, I said:
“Well, that is one evening when we will have an excuse not to play
five hundred.”
“Yes,” she said, “but we will have to ask Frank and his wife to go to
the social with us as they asked us to go to the Michigan social.”
“Well,” I said, “I had rather stay home than drag that chatterbox
everywheres we go.”
So Mother said:
“You are getting too cranky. Maybe she does talk a little too much
but she is good hearted. And Frank is always good company.”
So I said:
“I suppose if he is such good company you wished you had of married
him.”
Mother laughed and said I sounded like I was jealous. Jealous of a
cow doctor!
Anyway we had to drag them along to the social and I will say that we
give them a much better entertainment than they had given us.
Judge Lane of Paterson made a fine talk on business conditions and a
Mrs. Newell of Westfield imitated birds, only you could really tell
what they was the way she done it. Two young women from Red Bank sung
a choral selection and we clapped them back and they gave us Home to
Our Mountains and Mother and Mrs. Hartsell both had tears in their
eyes. And Hartsell, too.
Well, some way or another the chairman got wind that I was there and
asked me to make a talk and I wasn’t even going to get up, but Mother
made me, so I got up and said:
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I said. “I didn’t expect to be called on for
a speech on an occasion like this or no other occasion as I do not
set myself up as a speech maker, so will have to do the best I can,
which I often say is the best anybody can do.”
Then I told them the story about Pat and the motorcycle, using the
brogue, and it seemed to tickle them and I told them one or two
other stories, but altogether I wasn’t on my feet more than twenty
or twenty-five minutes and you ought to of heard the clapping and
hollering when I set down. Even Mrs. Hartsell admitted that I
am quite a speechifier and said if I ever went to Grand Rapids,
Michigan, her son would make me talk to the Rotarians.
When it was over, Hartsell wanted we should go to their place and
play cards, but his wife reminded him that it was after 9.30 P. M.,
rather a late hour to start a card game, but he had went crazy on the
subject of cards, probably because he didn’t have to play partners
with his wife. Anyway, we got rid of them and went home to bed.
It was the next morning, when we met over to the Park, that Mrs.
Hartsell made the remark that she wasn’t getting no exercise so I
suggested that why didn’t she take part in the roque game.
She said she had not played a game of roque in twenty years, but if
Mother would play she would play. Well, at first Mother wouldn’t
hear of it, but finally consented, more to please Mrs. Hartsell than
anything else.
Well, they had a game with a Mrs. Ryan from Eagle, Nebraska, and a
young Mrs. Morse from Rutland, Vermont, who Mother had met down to
the chiropodist’s. Well, Mother couldn’t hit a flea and they all
laughed at her and I couldn’t help from laughing at her myself and
finally she quit and said her back was too lame to stoop over. So
they got another lady and kept on playing and soon Mrs. Hartsell was
the one everybody was laughing at, as she had a long shot to hit the
black ball, and as she made the effort her teeth fell out on to the
court. I never seen a woman so flustered in my life. And I never
heard so much laughing, only Mrs. Hartsell didn’t join in and she was
madder than a hornet and wouldn’t play no more, so the game broke up.
Mrs. Hartsell went home without speaking to nobody, but Hartsell
staid around and finally he said to me, he said:
“Well, I played you checkers the other day and you beat me bad and
now what do you say if you and me play a game of horseshoes?”