My parents “eloped” to Florida. Actually, after a small wedding they packed up the car and headed south. There had been a bit of concern by her parents in her choice of husbands. A college education was prized in the McLean family – Harvard, BU, BC, Teachers College – and my father was a plumber. “The ditchdigger” was one not so nice description of his chosen trade. So, a change in latitude and attitude was just the ticket – and off they went, ending up in a little town called Eau Gallie, “rocky water”, in Florida. The little bungalow was on the Indian River. They could sit on the veranda and watch the rockets take off from Cape Canaveral across the bay.
The road trip down was mostly uneventful. Until the day they blew a tire. My mother knew there was no money to fix it. Yes, gas might have been 20 cents a gallon back in the 1950s, but the minimum wage was 75 cents an hour. How are we going to get out of this mess, she thought.
And then my Dad reached into a hidden pocket, and took out a crisp new folded $50 bill. The ‘senior ditchdigger’, his father, my Grandpa Joe Smith, had slipped him the stash of cash for just in case…..so the Hon and Dearie Show was able to continue south.
Many years later, in 1974 to be exact, I went on one of those “cruise to nowhere” trips out of Port Canaveral, with my Mom and her girlfriend Julie Guerra. The Guerras lived next door to the cottage in Monponsett. ‘Let’s go find the house where you were born’, said my mother to me. And so we cruised the streets of Eau Gallie – Avocado Avenue, Sea Grape Drive, Pineapple Avenue. And, just like in the movies, we found the house, right next door to the one Mrs. Jessup lived in, the woman who helped my mother when she came home to the little bungalow with her first child – me.
And as to the ditchdigger – many years later, when my Grandpa McLean was in his 80s, and my Dad made sure to fix what was needed around Fendale Avenue, and picked him up to go to the post office and the grocery store and on any other errands that were pressing – Grandpa turned to the ditchdigger and said, “You know, Joe, you turned out all right.”
Lynn Smith 