ROMARIN SAILING STORIES
Long Ago and Far Away
Edwin P. Cutler 4 June 1999
LIFE IS A RIVER
Actually it was the Patuxent River, in Southern Maryland, but it had all the characteristics of an old swimming hole. Like a place to play hooky and swim in your underwear because you couldn't bring your bathing suit, and get caught. But the interesting thing about it was we rowed around in some boats that we borrowed, little row boats, and we played pirates, one of us in each boat and we tried to push each other out. But then, Bobby Ripple's older brother brought down a pole and an old piece of canvas cloth and rigged up a sail on one of the rowboats and we sailed across the Patuxent River and back. And I got the idea that it would be nice to sail out of sight of land someday and steer by the stars.
This all started when I spent a night with Raymond Richards in the old Perry house while his father, Arthur Richards, was building a new home up on the Westwood Road. The new house had a picket fences around it and he made the top of the picket fences by hanging a sagging rope between the posts and cutting off the pickets to match. It made a perfect catenatenary. Isn't that tricky? He was a very good carpenter, and later, during the summers when I worked for him, he showed me how to cut molding, and gave me my first shot of self confidence. There was another carpenter there, older than I was, I was just a kid. Mr. Richards would tell the carpenter to take me over and frame in a dormer window up in the roof. He would tell me the measurements, and then send the two of us off, and we'd get over there and the older carpenter would say, "Now what were those measurements?" I'd quote them back and we'd saw them out and put them in place. I began to realize that maybe I had something on the ball, but I wasn't sure what yet.
It was Raymond Richards that suggested we go swimming. I didn't think my parents would think too much of that so I told them I was going down to see Ida Dixon. Ida was my Ideal. I'd been in love with Ida since the third grade and we were in the tenth grade at the time.
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Actually, I was born in Washington, DC and my mother, maiden name Zeta Jones (no relation to the movie star although my mother was prettier), moved to Waterloo, Iowa, before I can remember. But that's another story.
One of my first memories in my life was Dad Cutler pulling me in a sled across a vacant lot with snow, beside a big brown house where we lived in the second story. When we went upstairs, my Grandfather on the Cutler side was sitting on the couch with his snowy white hair. His name was Llewelyn Cutler, and I found out later he used to be a railroad pension inspector. He made sure that people who were getting pensions were still alive and kicking. That employment earned him a lifetime free ticket on the railroads so when he wanted to visit one of his children, he caught a train and away he went. He had a habit of leaving without saying goodbye so my folks had trouble keeping track of him.
Dad had lots of stories to tell. Like falling asleep while floating on his back swimming in Lake Michigan. He also told how Granddad Cutler moved the family to Arkansas in a swampy area. They lived in a cabin and when he went outside to pee at night he could hear cougars screaming in the woods. If they were off in the swamp during the day and didn't get back before dark, grandmother was to shoot the shotgun in case they were lost. Granddad did some speculative building in Debuque, Iowa and got wiped out when the Mississippi flooded and floated the construction material away. Dad told how he used to walk across the Mississippi river on a railroad bridge to get to work and if a train came, they laid down on the ties out side of the track and let the train go by. Then they got up and walked on to work.
My next memories, after the sleigh ride, found us living at 321 Lincoln street; I thought someone couldn't count. Seems like a lot of streets were named after presidents in Waterloo. I started kindergarten in Lafayette Elementary School; maybe some heroes too. I remember taking my rug to school for a nap in the afternoon.
Times were tough and we actually moved in with Oscar and Grace Neelins who had a little girl my age named Vanita. Oscar was a machinist at the John Deere company and could play the violin by ear just beautifully. That was my first introduction to a musical instrument that I can remember, except of course my mother's heartbeat before I was born. It was while living here that I recall listening to a radio. Little Jimmy sang songs at 8:00 o'clock each evening and then we kids were sent to bed.
Now little Vanita was named after Oscar's sister, Vanita, and Oscar's sister, Vanita, had married my Uncle Evard Jones and they had a boy named Morton and Morton is my first cousin, of course. I didn't see much of Morton, but I saw quite a bit of little Vanita. She got the mumps while we were living with her. It was Christmas of 1934, she also got a truck with lights that turned on and off and a steering wheel that turned the front wheels and I played with it on the rug while she lay on the sofa with her mumps and watched.
My second introduction to music was when we were living on Franklin Street in 1936 to 1938. Across the street, we were over there playing with some kids one evening, and we heard this music coming out of this house and we sort of stood out front and looked at it and they invited us in and we went in and this young lady was playing at the piano. Oh and there were several older people, in their teens or young adults, standing around and they let us kids come right up to the piano and she played and they sang Empty Saddles in the Old Corral.
During the summer of 1935 we moved thirty miles out in the country to Edgewood, Iowa where I started first grade. I saw my first frost there that fall.
Edgewood was where another cousin, Jane Ellen, lived with her parents, Bill Smith and Angie Smith. Bill Smith was a barber and I remember him cutting hair and telling stories and talking to people. Their house burned down in the dead of winter. It was a cold bitter night, 35 below, but there were plenty of people around to put them up, but they sort of lost everything.
You could stand in the main intersection, the only intersection, in Edgewood, and no matter which way you looked you saw corn fields. If you went out a ways in one direction you came to a house where my great uncle Halfhill was living. His wife was my grandfather Jones' sister, so I guess that made him my great uncle. Anyway he was a very enterprising man, he was a preacher, a stone mason, and he raised sorghum. Down behind his house out in the country there was a steep valley, more a deep gulch, where huge trees grew up seeking the sun. Down in the gulch it was dark and damp and cool and smelly, and filled with deep forest fragrance. I can still smell the chestnuts when we walked on their green husks and turned their bouquet loose.
It was while visiting out there once, that Uncle Wilson and Bill Smith came rushing into the farm house. They had cut Bill Smith's leg with a two man saw. They had been sawing wood and the saw cut right through Bill's leather boots into the calf of his leg, there was lots of blood. I thought the leather boots he wore were the most fantastic boots, they laced all the way up the front, nearly to the knee, and they had a little side pocket for a penknife. From that moment on I dearly wanted some leather boots -- which I later finally got. I don't remember exactly where, but I got them. Times were tough, but somehow we seemed to manage, and Bill Smith didn't lose his leg. Dad pitched in with half the county to build a barn for the man who had the farm next door.
In the winter of 35-36, we moved back to Waterloo into a house on Franklin Street. The school next door which was named, you guessed it, Franklin Elementary. Since the house we lived it was beside the playground, another you guessed it, a softball came through an upstairs window and Mr. Walters, our landlord was furious.
In Edgewood I was getting A's and B's and everything was fine, but at Franklin Elementary I almost flunked. They said I couldn't read so my mother used flash cards to bring me up to speed.
A lot of things happened on Franklin Street. For one thing, I was on my way to a life of crime. Here I was eight years old smoking cigarettes, stealing coke bottles out of a barn and turning them in at the store for a two cent deposit to buy Mary Jane's candy. Now it wasn't marijuana, we hadn't heard of marijuana yet, but it had the same name, Mary Jane's.
Now how did we get the cigarettes to play cowboys? There was a boy names Lorraine Cole, and he had a bicycle and another boy whose name I can't remember, and they rode double on the bicycle, and I rode on my scooter. We set off on our steeds and rode north about eight or nine blocks, tethered our "horses" outside of a drug store and went in. Lorraine and I were supposed to distract the clerk while the other boy swiped some cigarettes. He did it, but the clerk saw him at the last moment and she came roaring around the counter yelling, "Stop, thief," and we all fled out the door mounted our steeds and rode away. Let me tell you those two boys on that bicycle had trouble keeping up with my scooter. Fortunately we moved to Maryland before I became a hardened criminal.
There was a girl named Mary Ann lived across Franklin street. In the hot Iowa summers, all we wore were bib overalls, no shoes, no socks, no underwear. She and I played doctor down in an old barn. I never really wanted to be a doctor, but liked the game.
While we were there, Vern, my little brother, who was about three or four years old developed some sort of problem where he couldn't control his legs and he kept falling down. After awhile the problem went away but he walked real funny, he flopped his legs. Mother communicated with my Aunt Evelyn in Washington, DC, and Aunt Evelyn said bring him to Maryland and we'll put him in Johns Hopkins University Hospital. That was 1937, and Dad bought a second hand car, a 1928 Chevrolet four door with a huge back seat. The car was nine years old, a year older than me.
Speaking of cars, the son of the lady who lived next door bought a second hand twelve cylinder Lincoln, can you imagine twelve cylinders purring?
Dad was working out in front of the house one day replacing one of the wooden door posts of our Chevy with a plane and screwdriver. He was good at things like that. I ran around the front of the car, looked both ways, and crossed the dirt street.
When I got to the other side, I looked back and saw Vern come around the car Dad was working on. He didn't look both ways and there was a car coming down the street. When I hollered, "stop!" he saw the car. His legs flopped and he fell flat on his tummy. It was a dirt road and the car slammed on its brakes. When it finally drug to a stop, one front tire was just touching Vern's shirt. Well, Vern wasn't hurt, but Dad nearly fainted. He was scared to death, and of course the driver of the car was almost sick until he found out there were only tire prints on Vern's shirt.
We used to take weekend trips in that old Chevy. Once at a relative's farm I got to ride a bicycle. It had a size 28 frame, much too big for me, so I had to get up on the windmill platform to get on the seat and push off. If I stopped for any reason, I had to push it back the to the windmill to get on again.
The farm was surrounded by open fields that stretched all the way to the horizon. There was only one small patch of woods.
Times were hard in 1937 and while Dad was working at Rath's Packing house, cutting up beef and pork, there was a strike and he was fired.
We moved to East Fourth Street when I was in the third grade. I attended Roosevelt Elementary School, and Mrs. Richards was my teacher -- her name was a coincidence, of course. She told the class how a governor worked to control the speed on a car, and if she had had a governor on her car that morning she would have been hit because she sped up and got out of the way of an oncoming truck. So she wasn't sure governors were necessarily the best thing in the world even though they would keep people from going too fast on the highway.
While going to this Roosevelt Elementary School, I fell in love with Bonnie Kanztes, and to this day I remember her whenever I smell leaves burning. I went over to visit her, mind you I was in the third grade, and her father was raking up leaves in the yard and burning them -- that was back in the fall of 1937.
They lived right along beside a creek and later that winter when the creek was frozen over, I walked out onto it in my boots, and crack, fell right through the ice. Fortunately it wasn't too deep, only up to my knees. The only disaster was my boots were filled with ice cold water. Now I was in the third grade and must have been eight years old. Well being eight years old and not having had too much experience with falling into icy rivers, the obvious best thing to do was go home to mama. So I ran for five blocks with boots full of ice cold water and let her dump them out.
For a dime, me and my friends could walk across the Cedar River bridge and go to a Saturday movie. We saw Flash Gordon, Tom Mix, and Roy Rogers.
One day my mother and father sat me down one and said, "Paul, Dad Cutler is not your father. Your father's name was Raymond Leroy Brady and he's back in Maryland. And since we're going back to Maryland, we thought we'd better tell you about it so you wouldn't be surprised." I can still feel the texture of the overstuffed armchair I was sitting in when I gripped it with my hands. My father was not my father? It was very early spring so I must have still been eight since my birthday is May 8. After East Fourth Street we moved in with Grace and Oscar again. This time they lived on Lafayette Street and Oscar helped Dad build a trailer for our trip to Maryland. I was still in the third grade and lo and behold, I spent a couple of months going to school at Lafayette Elementary School where I had first started in kindergarten. Now my teacher made her zeros kind of open and they looked like sixes. And I told her that when I had been going to Roosevelt School I had a teacher that made her sixes closed that looked like zeros. For some reason she didn't particularly appreciate that.
But, anyway, we left for Maryland in 1938 in a 1928 Chevrolet with my American Flyer sled tied on the side of the trailer.
We crossed the Mississippi River into Illinois with black fertile soil. On into Ohio where a high speed train out of Chicago appeared beside us going at the speed of sound. It blew its whistle and almost scared us to death. We crossed Pennsylvania's rolling green hills and up into the Appalachian mountains. One time we climbed up a long graded mountain and had to put water in the radiator three times before we got to the top. We finally crossed over the divide and started down into Maryland and Dad said, "They sure raise a lot of cabbages here." and Mother explained, "No, Bert, that's tobacco."
Well, we got to Maryland, and there was Aunt Evelyn, and we stayed at her house a couple nights, and then they found a house near Brandywine, Maryland close to the property that my Great Great Grandfather Fish bought back in 1904 called Bowling Green Acres near Cedarville. Dad was going to go to work with Arthur Richards -- somehow Aunt Evelyn set that up, too.
We were half a mile off the main road, back Letcher Road in a four room house we rented from a farmer named, believe it or not, Richards. Awful lot of Richards in this story.
The house had an interesting design. There was a door between each of the adjacent four rooms so Vern could ride his tricycle around and around and around the house from one room to the next. We were out in the country. Lots of kids move from the country to the city, but here I was a city kid moving out to the country. I had never lived out in the country before and when we drove in the yard at night in that old 1928 Chevrolet there'd be an owl sitting on a fence post. The lights would blind him, but when we got closer, he'd finally fly away. Then there were whippoorwills. I'd never heard a whippoorwill before, but all night long the whippoorwill would sing its beautiful song.
I started school in Maryland in the Baden school which had all eleven grades. I was still in the third grade, my fourth school in the third grade, and a Mrs. Brady, no relation, was teaching our class. I finished up third grade there and then went to the third, fourth, and fifth grades in the same room, but with a new teacher, Miss Turner.
Arrangements finally came through with Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and Vern was taken up and put into bed. He stayed there for two months and Dad Cutler became so exasperated with the lack of progress, he was ready to bring him home. They explained that what they had to do was take him off his legs so he would forget how to use them, and then they put him in a swimming pool and taught him how to walk, step by step. And they kept doing that until he walked normally. He had to have part of his brain retrained. He never had another problem. In fact, in high school he pitched baseball with either hand. Sort of unbelievable.
Remember we got there in the springtime of 1938 and I turned nine years old in May, and before he got out of the hospital during the summer, we moved from that four room house to the CCC camp in Cederville -- the Civilian Conservation Corps.
My grandfather, David Monroe Jones, was no relation to Catherine Zeta Jones father who was also named David M. Jones. My grandfather walked four miles to Brandywine and climbed 125 feet up into the fire tower during the fire season and sat there all day looking for fires. During the summer when everything was green and fire was not a problem, he was assigned caretaker of the CCC camp which had bunkhouses and dormitories and a house and acres and acres of pine forest. We moved in with him, rent free.
All the CCC boys were down in Ironsides, Maryland spending the summer living in tents working down that area. They'd be back in the fall. But during that summer, I played pool on the pool table with Grandpa Jones and found out he was born in 1867 just after the civil war. He grew up breaking horses in the 1880's for cowboys who made the legends of the movies we love.
There wasn't any electricity so we had oil lamps and had a kerosene cook stove and a telephone that you had to turn the handle to crank to get the operator and then you told her who you wanted to talk to.
One night we ran out of kerosene for the oil lamps and Grandpa Jones went down to the shed and got some fuel and put it in the oil lamp and the damn thing flared up and then went out and we tried it again and it flared up and then went out. So mother told me, "You go down there with Grandpa and this flashlight and you find out which tank he got this out of." Sure enough right back in the corner where he got it was "gasoline". We were just lucky that night, I guess.
That summer I sure learned to love the vast pine forest. It was like walking in a church with a soft carpet of pine needles below and the wind and the stars sighing through the treetops making a sound like the low notes of an organ. The Bowling Green land that great grandpa Fish bought in 1904 had been divided up in 1933 between the five children his daughter, Frances Elizabeth Fish Hoffman Jones. The land fronted on the Cedarville and Brandywine road. Well, during that summer, my Uncle Evard, who had gone to France in the Navy in 1918, wanted to build a house on his 45 acre lot which was next to my mother's. So he made a deal with my dad. You build my house and I'll give you forty dollars a month and after you finish it you can live in it two years rent free.
So Dad went to work. He started digging the foundation and it was so hard that he had to pick it chip after chip of hard clay and he was telling Vern about this who was still up in Baltimore. They'd Vern a Dixie cup and when he was digging the ice cream out of the cup he said he was digging the basement just like Dad did.
We were still living in the Cedarville CCC camp while Dad was building the house and I would ride out with him and help on the house until the school bus came by to take me to Baden Elementary School, that's where I met Ida, where this whole doggone thing started, that is about sneaking off to the old swimming hole?
Anyway it was in that house I drove my first nail ever. It was in some plaster lath-board in a closet, and he told me to be sure and set the nail in tight because if I didn't it would pop the plaster later. The things you learn along the way.
There was red wood siding on the outside of the house that looked just like modern days aluminum siding. Grandpa Jones was painting it and he told me always paint from the top down so that you don't dribble down where you had just painted.
Now that school bus was a problem. It was 1940 and segregation was still in effect. I had come from Iowa and there was one colored boy in the elementary school where I went, he was the only black person I'd ever seen. And here in Southern Maryland there seemed to be more blacks than whites.
The blacks had their own schools. In fact, they had two schools; one was a little one room school up the road beyond Cedarville and the other one was down in Westwood. They didn't have school buses, they had to walk to school. Now, while I was waiting for my school bus, some of the colored children walked one way and some walked the other way. It turned out the black ones, the really black ones, walked down to Westwood, and the lighter skinned ones walked up to Cedarville. So they had segregation amongst themselves.
They would walk by while I was waiting for my school bus to come and pick up this white boy. Never knew much about segregation until we got to Maryland. I was really impressed when one time Arthur Richards, and Raymond, his son Raymond, my swimming hole buddy, and Dad and I went up to Marlboro to the movies. We went in the theater and all the seats were full and I said, "Well, there's stairs going up to the balcony," and Arthur looked at me and said, "That's for the colored folks."
Now the old swimming hole problem started when I was thirteen, old enough to really be in love. I would tell Mom and Dad I was going down to see Ida Dixon, my one true love, and would ride off on my bicycle. But I would stop by Raymond Richards house on the way and he'd get on his bicycle, and the two of us would ride right past Ida's house at a cross roads named, Bald Eagle, and go on down to the Patuxent River.
It was OK for Raymond to go swimming and he had a bathing suit made out of a new material called nylon; when he took it off and shook it, it was practically dry. But, since I wasn't supposed to be there, I had to go swimming in my underpants.
We'd splash around and take a couple rowboats and row around and dream about being pirates sailing out in this ocean and that all worked out fine until one day a fellow named John Perry, nicknamed "Foot" came down and he had an old model-T and after swimming he offered to give us a ride back up the road. So I threw my wet underpants in the back seat of his car and put on my dry clothes and climbed in and rolled the window down and somebody set my bicycle up on the fender and Raymond's bicycle up on the other fender and up the road we went -- tootle, tootle, tootle.
When we got up the road aways where Foot was going to turn off, he stopped, let us out, I got out, got on my bicycle, Raymond got on his bicycle, we rode to his house and I went on home.
I was very smug about pulling that little deceptive shenanigan until Sunday morning at church. Foot Perry's mother came into the church. Now my mother played the organ, and she was up front getting her music arranged when Foot Perry's mother came walking down the church aisle with a little brown bag in her hand. She reached over the alter and handed it to my mother and said, "Your son, Paul, left these in my son's car yesterday. I thought you'd probably want them."
Mom looked in the bag and pulled out a pair of wet underpants, right there in the church. That afternoon, I had some confessing and explaining to do.
The funny thing was, they didn't really criticize me, they just said, "If you're going to go swimming you should tell us where you are so if we need you, we know where to look for you." You know, I never went swimming again. Must be more fun when you're playing hooky. Of course I was thirteen years old by then, and going to Gwynn Park High School, and in the eighth grade. Mr Hernick, the principal, came in our general math class and took five of us boys and a couple girls to another room and said he was going to teach us some algebra. So he gave us some algebra books and told us to start reading. Said he'd come in every now and then to check on us and see how we were doing. He wrote on the board "MV = Ft" M as in Mass, V as in Velocity, equals, F as in force and t as in time. Mass * Velocity = Force * time.
He said it was the impulse equation. He said that was the equation that would permit rockets to go into space where there was no air to push on. Right then, I forgot about wanting to sail out of sight of land and steer by the stars and, instead, I wanted to become a rocket scientist.
I worked real hard on the math, got reasonably good grades and when I was in my senior year, one day, a bunch of us boys had study hall and were sitting in the library whispering to each other, and Mr Hernick walked in and looked across the table into my eyes and said, "Paul, how would you like to go to the Naval Academy?" Now young folks shouldn't be held responsible for some of the decisions they make. Right then and there, I said, "I wanted to go to a school with a more engineering." Mr Hernick said, "Well, OK, just thought I'd ask," and turned around and walked out.
He never told me that the Naval Academy had all kinds of engineering classes. I don't know who made the mistake then, him or me.
Well I went off to the University of Maryland to study engineering. I didn't want to take civil engineering, I had enough of construction by then I'd done carpenter work and dug holes and carried block and mixed mortar. And I said I don't want to do mechanical engineering that's like building motors and things. Either electrical or chemical, which were the only two options left. I flipped a nickel, and it came up chemical.
Now I was kind of a logical person, but I didn't have a disciplined memory, at least I didn't think I did, and so chemistry was not my forte. Every electrical engineering and physics class that I took with labs and things I did fine in. But chemistry, wow.
And guess who I met there? He was a couple of years ahead. He was a junior by then. It was Raymond Richards and he was studying pre-law. It was the fall of 1947 and there were a lot of veterans on campus because the war was over, and he said the school is just trying to flunk everybody out because they can't handle all the students, but they have to give everybody a chance so all these veterans are just swarming on the campus with the GI Bill of Rights.
So there was my friend, Raymond Richards, getting me out of trouble this time by telling me to study hard. The same fellow who had talked me into going down to the old swimming hole.
I met a lovely bright eyed girl. After a proper courtship, we were married and began producing beautiful, bright eyed children.