Gulf Coast Boy Begins

I wrote this series of excerpts from my life about seven years ago. This is the first chapter. I hope it brings back some memories for you.

Freeport, Texas, 1953....That is the time I became aware of where I lived. I was five years old.
Freeport is a small coastal town on the mid Texas coast. Shrimp boasts from Texas, Florida and Louisiana used to fill the harbor during shrimping season. If you ate a shrimp in the 1950's, it could have come from Freeport.
We lived in a two bedroom rent house....we were poor, I guess, but everyone was poor and it was a good life for a kid.
I grew up in a time when boys played marbles and spun 'tops' for keeps. Cowboys and Indians and hide and go seek kept us busy all day. If we had a ball, we would play 'Annie Over' until someones Mom ran us off for hitting the roof too much.
Not much to watch on TV...but none of us had a TV anyway. Kids were expected to play outside and come in when Mom called out the door that supper was ready.
No one air conditioning, except Mr. Johnson who had a heart condition. We visited him a lot during the summer.
If we needed money for a soda or candy bar, we would finds some bottles and cash them in at the Piggly-Wiggly, enough for a Snickers or Orange Crush.
Movies were fifteen or twenty five cents, depending on the elegance of the theater.
And, they were air conditioned.
But, my best memories are of the water. I've always loved the water. My Dad worked hard like all dads do..he was an electrical lineman for a sulphur company.
But almost every Saturday, we would go together to catch a couple of nice red fish, our food for the next week. Blue Lake was a favorite fishing hole. It had been a sulphur drilling site. My Dad said once a drilling rig began to sink with men on it. It took them down, never to be seen again.
We also went down to the bays. Drum Bay was a favorite. My father would catch us bait in his cast net and we would walk through the salt grass until we reached a spot he liked. He would bait up a home-made Calcutta rod cast it out into the bay. He would move down the bank a couple of hundred yards. We would fish all night, only the glow from his pipe as he relit his Sir Walter Raleigh was visible. We had no lanterns and only one flashlight. The mosquitoes were thick as the air. Every hour or so, my father would come down to check my bait and re cast-it. Fishing was about food, not father/son time. I was eight years old.
As I got older, I could ride my bike everywhere. My friends and I explored every curiosity in town. My Mother cautioned us to stay away from the shrimp boat docks, because of the unsavory people. So we of course spent a lot of time there.
During shrimping season, boats would fill the harbor. The shrimpers would fuel up and take on ice for their catch. They would stay out in the Gulf until they were full or out of supplies. When they came back into port, the crew would buy a fresh set of clothes. They would spend their pay in beer joints and then go back to sea. They came back days later in the same clothes and bought new ones.
Occasionally a body would float up among the shrimp boats. Either a drunk fell in and drowned or some old grudge was settled. The police would fish the body out and make a report, but not much was ever done.
Like all boys, my friends and I loved to explore. Once we found an opening to a sewer pipe at the edge of town. We gathered up flashlights and a knife or two and went in to see what was there.
We crouched over in the four foot high pipe and found out what lived there. Snakes.
And rats and other vermin. Lot's of snakes..we jumped over them trying to avoid the cottonmouth moccasins and just pushing the water snakes out of the way. We traveled a long way..finally I inched up a side pipe and stuck a stick out sow we could tell how far we had gone. Back out the way we came in, avoiding the mess of snakes and such. We found the stick, almost a mile into the sewer pipe. I was ten.
A favorite swim was across our big harbour, where the cargo ships docked. It was easily over a quarter mile across. We would swim it and try to avoid the tugs and such.
Nearby was a levy with a muddy slough next to it. One very hot summer, the slough dried almost totally up. We saw thousands of red fish gasping for air in the muddy mess. Huge crabs were in the thousands. So, of course, we went home and got gigs and such. We swam/crawled through muck and got 27 huge red fish, avoiding the very angry crabs. I went down to the petroleum dock and call my Mom. She came with several wash tubs. In the end the red fish tasted like the mud they were dying in, but it was fun.
I had somehow bought a decent diving mask and fins. I made a dive belt out of old cast net weights. One special day, several of us went to the jetties. The water was clear as drinking water. Our part of the Gulf seldom gets really clear, so this was a treat.
We dove for hours, loading up on lots of lures and weights and such. I got tangled up in some fishing line, but cut myself free before I became crab food.I had a mess of cuts and scrapes from being washed against the rocks. I was twelve.
Later that summer, we moved about twenty five miles away and built a small house in the deep woods. I missed the water and my friends and all the things I had grown up with.
But life had more adventures in store for me....
end of part one