Memories of the St. Lucie River

it seems like we just had the closing program but we had a fantastically busy summer clock with all that was going on we would not have any business and we wound up breaking records for every month the last three weeks have slowed down a little bit but now we're looking towards the season so we know in September we had a program that was in the works and it got canceled until later in the year and so this is how we came up with this program this is our all-star cast sitting up here at the table that means old I'm going to introduce them all but back in June with the conditions of things the way

they were in with the September program getting canceled I walk the Riverwalk four days a week out here and on June 28th I wanted to cry that's how bad it was there was no birds there was no fish there was nothing jumping it was a dead River and I've lived within a block of this River all my life and I've spent much much time on the river so as I was walking on the boardwalk and getting a terrible severe infection which that's another whole story but anyway I thought to myself this River was the lifeblood of this community and when people came here like my dad's family came in 1917 and actually Mom's family came

in 1907. the river was why did they hang what they lived on say fish they swam everything they did getting in the store even they came by the river and how many of them would have believed what they built in the name of construction and a better world for Florida would turn it into what it's become today but it so I said you know we need to have a program there's not a program on what needs to be done there's been a program on everything all I really want to say is to the people of Martin County that there was a lot of fun and a lot of likelihoods on this river that people don't

even understand today they go out when they're big boats and they go out with a sand barley these children that lived here lived in this River they swam in it they fished in it they didn't have boats they did have a boat it was probably a robo so I sent letters out to some of the people that I personally knew lived close to the river and were involved in the river and we got a fantastic panel we got Betty Hardwick Dale hibson Corky Hudson Gloria kaveri fight but DeLoach and John Peterson and we also have a pretty good wide section of different parts of Martin County and the river so what we want them to

do stand up and tell us how they enjoyed the river when they were young and what they did on the river and then at the end of that we're going to open it and let anybody in the audience that wants to tail what the river means to them stand up and tell them so without further Ado I'm going to kick it off over here and Benny you want to be the first one I had to make a note because I'm getting too old to remember anything the first thing I can remember here was in 1944 I was 12 years old that was like 20 years ago you know we came down here that summer and

the City Dock was back over that way on what used to be I guess that was probably First Street First Street and Mrs Callahan lived right there by the city dock and her grandson uh Carl Ulmer and I were great Buddies and our favorite thing in the world was to run down that road and jump off that dock into the water the water was beautiful the bottom was beautiful and I remember how we got out I think I don't think there was a ladder I think we had to walk around or swim around to the OR at the beach and get off then after I got married Grace Walton a lot of you remembers Grace

Walton Grace um Palmer what she was to begin with her mother and dad her mother and dad lived over on St Lucie crest and Jim had a boat with a motor on it which was pretty nice in those days and I could crank the motor but Grace could run the boat so we'd take the three kids who were little but they could swim Grace couldn't swim and off the river we'd go Heather I don't remember what we did just fiddled and did around I look at that and I think if she'd have fell overboard I would have never got her or the boat or anything else back but nothing ever happened to us then by

the time the 70s came we got enough money to have a boat then life was really sweet because we spent all our time out before that was on the beach the beach was always beautiful but once we got a boat we could go to the sand bars the river was beautiful and clean you didn't have to worry about having a boo-boo and not being able to go in the water the dogs could run and play you knew everybody that was on those sand bars and it was wonderful and now it's this that's all I gotta say we got Dr Dale Hudson and I'm going to let him sit and talk right there in his chair

okay good thank you because I'm full of cancer pills and his pills no killing the cancer well but I'll do my dance okay but bear with me this is interesting Charlie and I looked for this for a long time this is the slips that I have for fishing and it was more response back then like like you said the river was made for you know take a look you're going to give these to the museum I could give them to the museum right anyway this is September and September is the height of the snip season when the dog face eels come into spawn and the snook wait for the dog faced you and and the

eels don't have a chance but we would rig up your skin rigs we get the five uh five-skinned pickle skins from nickel hardware for a while and we break them up on a rig a hook in front hook and back and trailer from from a boat and it was it was a killer on Snoop and I've got some notes there if I can uh oh is it the best day we had Snoop fishing uh Sue Arrow there and I were positioning we caught 100 snook and they weighed five pounds of pizza we had 500 pounds Wesley in the river right out here most of them from the lighthouse Lighthouse Point in that area between there

and found's Diner all the way up to to the point of it's um anyway hang in there folks thank you and uh but that was a good day and we would get like 14 cents a pound for them and I think I had to keep track of how much I made the summer so they had to take me off as income tax as a dependent and they came out to be uh 1553 pounds of Snoop can you believe that in one one year King Michael trout bass Jack more bass uh Cobia than Spanish like a 2531 pounds of fish of the summer of 51. you worked hard I worked hard but it was a lot

of fun I'll tell you that it was it was a blast but anyway when we're getting back to the Snoop where's the gal that's gonna ring by a goblin meanwhile okay uh fishing you'd be trolling in a little boat big boat or whatever and there'd be a hole or depression in the bottom and the snook would lay there in the in the bottom waiting on the eels would pass over and when they did they come out of the hole grab the eel and or your fishing line and then you'd move on and that'd be sometimes maybe a dozen boats in the circle and most of the people would get it was like a daisy chain

they get it they get in back get in line now Ed Miller of the flower farm of the Oodles he had a speedboat and he couldn't slow it down he would say look out boys here I come and of course he went straight through the circle and he usually get one one or two snook and that was good but it was it was so neat everybody saw it gave the other person a chance at a snoop kind of run and uh that was Ed Miller and I shouldn't have ripped these things okay had a boat inboard boat and a teller he'd have a straw hat on and he'd pull it over his head's face and

he'd sit back like this and you'd swear up and down he was going to run you over and so you moved over and let old man back get in the circle he had it all figured out and everybody had had their chance and we we get in there and get a super two and and make the circle let's see the best who had won the 27 pounds that was her biggest fish and uh oh that's probably enough on the Snoop thing but the uh and the Ducks were here yeah then the bluebells have you ever eaten the Blue Bell no excuse me they're they're bad I I got a couple of bluebells and uh the

background this is a very short story but good I read the instructions you can't shoot them from a sailboat you can't shoot them from a boat that's being towed and of course you can't bend a motorboat so I I got the right idea of having a head a little flanny and I towed my boat upwind of a great big pot of blue whales and early in the morning over at Massachusetts the North Shore and they would take off and by the thousands and it would it would definitely it disguise it was it was really fantastic but anyway I got up ahead of a nice bunch of bluebells sitting there and minding their own business and

I anchored my little boat and I got in the slatty and I drifted down I laid down in the bottom of the boat and I had my shotgun double Grandpa's little double male shotgun and I drifted up on them and I raised up and I got two two blueberries and I'm so happy I went over and picked them up and then I was going to roll back to this my little powder boat which had a one a gift engine in it there a gasoline engine had a well it was an inboard and you could go all day long on a gallon of gas and that that was kind of nice but anyway I was rowing

back to my to the Mothership in the damn warlock popped loose and it was that was it and I couldn't pound it because the wind was too strong I had that figured out through it so I had to paddle all the way in the North River Shores and walked the boat towing it and get way up ahead of it to the point and then panel out and get ahead of it and I panel down to where my boat was anchored and I made it by that far so we got back to the boat and anyway mom and I cooked up the Ducks and that came into the house and he said I know one goddamn

thing we're not going to cook any more ducks in this house and he was right oh they were terrible they smelled well they were bad so that was my I'm gonna escape with the uh with the blue whale and apparently they were they ate clams and oysters and and shrimp whatever they could find and uh and of course we wasn't going to court well we were shooting blueberries shooting blue whales yes we were after they got down and ate fish they taste worse than fish out of the house yeah it was and they were out front here and I remember the uh oh the two boys over at uh Rio they were always shooting and

we hear this boom boom even when I was in schools right and I don't know how they prepare them but they did and they could eat them or maybe evenly fertilizer I don't know but that's all they were worth but uh oh we had we had great fun back there and uh of course they did there was a lot of clams and oysters in the river then and that was good uh I just had a little boy scout group with me and we were on Coconut Point and we had breakfast and we had to go back in with water skinny dipping of course we didn't have bathing suits and no one cared and we got

out there swimming and I swear there was about six manatees sea cows got up between us and Shore and they blew and they started and and we didn't know if those things ate meat or or vegetables you know and we didn't have much but we wanted to protect it so we could reach down and got clams and threw them and scared them and they gave us a an open pass so we could get back to our camp which was an Old Camp where the netters had their necks and let's see oh Ernie and I've been talking about how clean the water was and way up the South Fork it probably was in some of the

little there was an East prong in the west Prague off the south Florida and you could get to it by taking Kansas Avenue and going south and then going east yeah at the at the Wagon Wheel Road there was a wagon wheel there Road and of course you can't now they got a damn Turnpike in the way but it was and the water was clean you can see the bottom and it was great we would uh shoot garfish we were trying to clear the water of these bad gar fish because they ate little Brandon Bass and everything we were doing on that part and he had a big snook and a big Tarpon tied on

a rope they were mostly Skin and Bones and they were both about 25 pounds and they said Doctor should have been here yesterday and uh he was a he was a cover well let's see I think that's about it but anyhow it was a wonderful place to grow up in and it happened as was when I had the little 14 foot skip with the one horsepower Briggs and Stratton motor in it and I could give us up as a Gibson made from Jacksonville right beautiful immigration and but that was happiness when I had that so okay next in line okay okay I enjoyed it and and the pills didn't quite take over today because okay

here you go thank you he wants to go last so next is I'm the cleanup guy okay okay now I came along a lot later anyway um I grew up in a fishing family we started fishing with cane poles on the St Lucie Canal catching Brim and uh I learned how to use a reel and Rod and then bass fishing then came the river fishing um growing up we grew up sort of on poppleton Creek and back of Fern Hill Cemetery in Castle Terrace and my father had the mill workshop at the lumber yard filled two kayaks out of plywood and my sister and I were always in the creek hitting little baby Gators in

the head would paddle because nobody was afraid of little Gators back then and we were told never to go out into the river never go under the Palm City Road Bridge well of course you know what happened when your parents tell you not to that's the first thing you want to do so we would go out into the river when it was calm and in in The Kayaks and we'd go along Shore it wasn't really clear clear I've heard people say oh I remember the days when you could see the bottom yes you could see the bottom towards Shore with that Panic colored water but you you could see and we'd take a fishing pole

we were always catching mangrove snapper we couldn't take a lot of tackle because it was a one-man kayak for each one of us and then we graduated we were allowed to use the boat with an outboard motor and we would go in the river and we would go over to the Roosevelt Bridge we were allowed no further than the Roosevelt Bridge and there were huge power poles on one side of the bridge way back Mike I guess that was late 50s early 60s and we would fish around the bottom of these uh big poles and cotton we'd catch sheep's head we'd catch a huge Croaker and now and then we'd get a Snook and one

day we were watching um Vernon chason's record pulling up the jewfish at somebody I caught remember that um anyway later on we were allowed further down the river and we'd go off of Bay Tree Lodge my father would take us over there first and there was a hole off of Bay Tree Lodge and we would always always just catch a ton of fish most mostly Croaker we'd catch Jacks we'd catch a snook now and then we'd catch snapper and and when the blue fish were running they would be coming through there and we'd catch a ton of blue fish so my memories of the river were mostly with with fishing because it was really good

and it's it's not too bad now I mean I still catch fish in the river it's it's not like it used to be but what is nothing's like it used to be anyway um I I I've got I have a little story about Hayes hibson that's my son no no no this is a good one okay oh um one day I was I was home and it was on a I don't know if it was Saturday or Sunday and and there was an uh the doorbell rang and I was living on Inlet Harbor Drive down the street from chichik and and it's Hayes hibson dripping wet in his clothes and he said I I went

to Chichi's house nobody's home he says I got to use your telephone and I said what happened what happened he says I caught a tarpon at Hell's Gate and he pulled me in he fell on the boat the boat went across the river so he came and wanted to use the phone to call Dale to come and get bring his boat so he could go and and get his little boat wow anyway yeah yeah well Hell's Gate was a great place you know oh it was anyway um look at the world record the other story that I have to tell about the river the non-memory of the river was probably the most outstanding one in

my memory my sister Diana and I decided to run away from home and we stole the neighbor's boat and we knew he wouldn't get too mad it was Bruce Jones who had Bruce and Harry's restaurant on the corner of U.S one and now Colorado Avenue yeah so we were All Shook Up and mad at our mother you know how kids are you know if you don't get your way you're gonna do something about it and rebel and so off we went and it was getting dark and we're going out completon Creek and right at the end of the of the land there where overlooked Drive comes out Ivan and Olive Taylor lived and they were

out in the yard playing or messing around with their dogs and we both by then were getting guilty feelings and we thought oh no they're going to see us we're never going to be able to get away anyway we went on across the river and Miss Harris school was going on at that time and there was a caretaker's cottage very close to the river and um Miss Harris School was no long it wasn't in operation but the buildings and all were still there they had just closed and the caretaker's house had an old bed in it well we pulled a boat up covered it with palm fronds so it wouldn't be safe and had a

radio went in got on this bed spent the night and the next morning we're listening to the radio and Les Combs was given the news well you can't even begin to imagine our feelings when they said the Cavalry girls were Aloft in the river and the Coast Guard is coming the cap was coming up well let me tell you it was terrible and we did spend the night and I don't think we got a lot of sleep but the rest of the story is embarrassing young and foolish next we have a spud DeLoach thank you okay my name is I was born and raised in Salerno I grew up there and I sat here reminiscing

and listening to all of these stories about how beautiful our River was you can't imagine the beauty of this River you just cannot imagine the crossroads out there where the St Lucie and the Indian come together was next to Paradise sand bottom Crystal green clear water and you could anchor up at any tan buoy or child marker and get your own fish you wanted and oysters clams one Island up there where the archipelago is off of sewage point had those little pink clams on it the only Island I know of it had those and you could go up there with a potato rake and in a few hours you'd have a washed up full it

was unbelievable and you could go anywhere in the river and get all the oyster if you wanted and big oysters beautiful oysters and but getting back to Salerno where I grew up my favorite hangout was the fish house and the shark house I stated that shark house most of the day not every day watching those fellas skin out new sharks and see them processing them and folks you can't imagine the smell I was down there I never wore shoes and I smelled like a shark house when I got home and they brought one in there one time it was so big but then they couldn't put it on the boat they had to take the

engine on the skid there and the one in the boat to get it up on the dock to get it out skin it it had to be a great white because nothing else that they caught down or compared to that thing that was the biggest thing and I ever saw but anyway they I only kept the fins the liver and the skin at first and then as they began to process the whole carcass they put in a plant back there that would grind up the carcass because the bone Nails on nothing but cartilage it wasn't like our bone and that would go through a process back there and then go over a steam drum they

had a big Steam Plant back there and heated that drum and is that stuff went over that drum that dried it and then it come down in sheets and fell into a trough with an auger in it it grounded up and bagged it for chicken feet and now back they had several Acres of the chicken wire about two three feet off the ground it's where they laid the fins to dry them and then after a certain length of time they were putting a burlap bag of chips in the Far East for what I have no idea so they said that the people over there eat them for soup or something the the shark house was

there until after the war and then someone found a artificial liver oil in the place of the regular and put them out of business overnight and uh and I haven't written a book about my life in Salerno my wife has them up front if you care to look at look at it as you go out it tells all about my life down there and I would go to the fish houses during the season and gut fish for 25 a basket mark on Blue Fish because the commercial fisherman brought them in there by the thousands of pounds and that's where I made my Christmas money because they just weren't any to be be made otherwise and

back then of course everything was so cheap and you could uh you could buy most anything with just a few dollars and but Salerno was Paradise to me another little story that I didn't know how to swim and I was always around boats and one day I was standing on two guns and two row flat he said bailing them out and uh the boats began to separate I couldn't stop it I just stood there to Augusta far apart I just fell backwards in the water my dad happened to see all this and he'd come running down there well by the time he got there I was crawling up that muddy bank and he said you

all right I said yeah when he turned around and left that's the last I saw it so from then on I knew how to swim but uh it's amazing the beauty of that River and what it's turned into today and folks let me tell you we're all a part of the problem every one of us when you've got nothing but asphalt and drainage canals we've got over 40 golf courses in this County do you know that and they're all being sprayed with pesticides insecticides and all that runoff is going into the big canals and big canals going into our Rivers that's why you're having the problem you got and another thing the problem we got

is that Causeway up here in Jensen Beach that thing should have never been put there because it's damned up the river you've got that old seagrass on there on the West Shore that Banks up in those pockets and that's why it smells up there they should have never put it there left the River open where like God made it worked and flush itself out and it it really breaks my heart to see how man has ruined our Rivers and like I say we're all part of the problem thank you so much thank you and almost last it's John Peterson foreign I was born and raised there on the water my dad was a commercial fisherman

he was from Norway he came here in the early 1900s and married my mother when she was she was from Jessup Georgia and they had four children my sister my oldest sister is back there waving around and uh two older brothers and I was the baby it was raised on the on the river and on the ocean or Vegas fishing part of it was on the ocean where we caught the most fish macro and blue fish and we also fished a little bit in the river my dad never was much of a river fisherman but he did go out and drive Islands but we used we used the rivers for a lot of our food

we ate fish about every day and we go out and pick up oysters go out and break the clams and the rest of the time when I was in the water it was in the water all the time playing down in the Sonoran in the manatee pocket we were swimming we had to push the shark Parkinson's out of the way once in a while but it was still clean and dirty and our night entertainment we've got to be a certain age up in high schools skiing over here on ski point right around the I want to hear from uh US-1 on the weekends on Sunday afternoon I don't have any boats and people would be

their watershed and you could if you look across the river like stud was saying and you'd see one or two houses scouted all along all along the woods and now you look across there and there's a house on every every lot and um the rivers went from beautiful to not not worth swimming in uh it's been a great life I've lived all my life here in Martin County and uh and like I say the water the waters was something different unlike Spud I never saw the bottom too far up the rivers but uh they said they could see the bottoms and I believe them I never never took a boat towards Stewart so I I

can't really tell you how the Maneuvers looked I was like I didn't spend most time on them water skiing over here at ski point and uh that's about all I've ever said about the water when I just spent my whole life on them and uh it was just part part of life right now okay last but not please Corky said he has 30 minutes so he can talk or I got this thank you I didn't get the word I thought I would become Cleanup Man and anything these guys miss maybe I'll pick up uh well we moved on to the Saint Lucie River uh in about 1937-38 uh CBR bagasse sold my dad a lot

on St Lucie Estates which was right on the river uh by the 40s I was in the river every day me and my friends and uh we were about eight years old seven eight years old first thing we learned about the river was the three kinds of jellyfish there was only three kinds in our life and one was a cannonball jellyfish was a nice handy thing to hold it in your hand he's sort of like a baseball you could throw it at each other it didn't sting you and it was fun and sometimes it breaks that was fun then there was a big flower jellyfish about the size of a dinner plate which had a

beautiful white flower right in this middle and it would kind of fly itself along in the water like that and we found out they stung a little but not much and we could play with them and it was all right if it came apart each part would come become a new jellyfish when we were doing then the Third Kind was the most beautiful jellyfish we'd ever seen it was beautiful paint about the size of a baseball with four feet of tendrils hanging down Underneath It All filled with hypodermic needles that would set you unplugged we learned quickly about the queen jellyfish and uh many of the time we were running ashore and taking sand and

trying to discover it off of us uh I'm skipping through here now to see what is is missed uh the water was never clear the locks were finished in 1925 and from then on the the fresh waters coming into the river with mud and whatever carried with it she also locks are open the water was muddy if the locks were closed you still had the tanning color from the tannic acid the uh biggest problem in those days from the lox dragon in the river was highest the river would be covered with hyacinths in the South Fork you couldn't run a boat they would pay from bank to bank and the boat couldn't even get through

and uh we finally got rid of the hyacinths uh I think they poisoned them and pulled them out and did all kinds of things uh but they would come into the river getting the salt water and eye and kind of drift to the shore and rot and smell so the houses were a big problem which has been solved uh let's see where I am now uh the um the there was very little sailing in the river in the 30s in the 40s uh the the commercial sailboats no longer came here because we had roads and railroads and there was very little Sports sailing which was regrettable uh clack of tan uh who you'll remember on

the Stuart paint and metal was a big sailor and he did there was a fleet of moss which were small little wooden sailboats which were cheap you could mail them yourself and that's why we had them here and why there was a fleet here because no one had any money here to buy anything and uh But Clyde said that during the war the boys all went to went to the service in the Moss just laid around and ride uh I had a seven foot uh how to say a rowboat a little seven foot rowboat uh when we first moved into the home on the river and uh I did a lot of things with it

I shot Ducks one time with it as Dale mentioned and the blue pill duck was no good to eat after he'd been here for about a week uh that was tricky though in a little seven foot rowboat with a single shot shot shotgun shooting ducks uh I had one exciting experience I always wanted to sail and I had this little robot and I got a a bamboo pole and made a mess and took an old on him that was laying around the house and made a sale and by gosh I was sailed across the river steered with an orb and had my coffee can the bill and everything and I was amazed it was working

and the storm came a big storm and a sail actually that awning had pressure and it pushed the boat forward but of course as you push yourself before the bowel tends to be to decline and I was saying myself right into the under the water which did happen and I was going under and I Lincoln grab the bamboo pole and threw the whole thing overboard and slowly bail out making sure I didn't tip and I've got it about half empty and dropped my bailing can so then I'll be able to my shoes and sail back so I got the sale back and sail back you know so happy it was fun my father had been

watching to the binoculars and saw the sales disappeared he called his good friend Walter Johns ah Who had who had been a charter Skipper in part of his life he knew boats he had two boats the wanahoo and the Uber and they were both backish boats built in Fort Pierce well he cranked up on him and came looking for me and I was out in the river right in front of here couldn't find him came back and told him my father said I don't see him anywhere and so they didn't worry about it and pretty soon I showed up so that was amazing uh where are we now uh Yeah by 1942 I had a

14-foot robot it had a three-horse Briggs and Stratton motor in it and uh it was Saturdays to the beach we went to the sunrise and Beach uh we should stay call the bathtub Beach and the sunrise end that could have passed away through the mangrove swamp from the river to the ocean and built a wooden sidewalk there and so we would tie up our little boat there and me and my buddies would walk over to the beach and spend the day at the Sunrise and Beach there was nobody there it was we were the only people in the world as far as that beach was concerned so we stripped out and swam Jaybird until we

started getting burned on the places where the sun don't shine that much so we pulled up the bathing suits back on and on that particular day we waited out on the reef which goes out on an angle and we waited out until we're about neck deep and said the heck it's too hard to walk back on this this just went straight into short which we did and we're stopped paddling and swimming in and it's clear water or white sand bottom about 12 feet deep pretty soon we see these Shadows going by we look and we're in the school of sharks but four or five six foot sharks and we looked ahead and the water is

all black with glass minnows and these sharks were herding these glass minnows into Shore so they could trap them on the shore and Gobble them up and we wound up and we got in Shallow enough Walking we were walking through these massive glass minnows with these sharks in there and their heads are going up and down as they gobbled up these little minnows and we we made it through them and nobody got bit and we decided we thought we'd try to catch a shark and we'd grab one by the tail when they washed up on the beach but he'd kick you off he could shake you off they were strong uh wait that's what we

did in those days we had of course my father required that I mows along every Saturday and it was a big long so I had my three friends bring their Morse and we mowed that lawn in 30 minutes there would be a few three inch strips were amidst but we got the job done and got onto the beach and those are push mowers they weren't motorized morses those kinds of push like some of you older people may remember they actually had mowers you had to make the blade turn by pushing it forward and uh that was fun uh you know there was a war on at that time and the Saint Lucia Inlet was guarded

by a Coast Guard Cutter and if you want to go in or out of the inlet even in my little 14-foot boat you had to go by the Coast Guard boat and sign in or sign out until the movie where and what you were going to do and uh I thought that was a lot of fun and you get offshore you could load up on Spanish macro and Bluefish and things like that I almost never caught a kingfish it would I didn't know how to do that ah let's see there they had for guys in the river uh it was mud boats uh they see people weren't caught on the sailing here in those days

in the 30s and 40s and uh uh the regattas or motorboats and bird Kruger who was one of our kids Heroes uh owned a boat called the Miss Stewart it was uh probably 35 feet long and a launch it had a uh fresh warplane engine in it from World War one it was called a suan Switzerland or some such thing as they don't know how to pronounce that it's better sweetie Hispano Sweezy is going and uh that boat would go like a skull of dog and Bert would have to run the the uh he'd have to stop in the race and let the others catch up with him and get ahead and then he would

go past him and he won all of the races uh we love bird because he was a pilot he had a biplane and we were watching the loops and Spins and things and we thought that was wonderful uh and uh I'm told that he was a pilot in World War one I don't know if that's true but I suspect he must have been uh I got my Private Client license in those days as a teenager as did my good friend Evans query and Jim Harrell and uh we apply over the area and look at things and fly over the Indian River you always saw manatees of yourself giant stingrays and you would say selfish it

was nothing to see them and I think they are financially selfish still in the river I sure hope so uh the dogfish eels uh Dale is told me about that one interesting thing about that Dogfish eels was one Sunday they were under the Palm City Bridge and the charter Skippers from West Palm about four of them came down here to fish with these these uh Schnucks in the St Lucie River and we had a large circle of boats going around either clockwise or counterclockwise one or the other not both and they were catching and voting they snow we were feeding on the eels today you can walk where those boats ran those big you know

60-foot sport fishermen were running in plenty of water which shows how the canal has brought out the muddy water when it gets into the wide river it stops flowing so fast and the mud and sand and silk sink through the bottom and it is filled in that Old River where they used to actually run a deep draft boats and were catching snow uh and this is September some of you fish may get out there they may still be doing it nobody knows and there were big fish in the river in those days uh uh the Goliath grouper which uh when you spill a jewfish uh and uh one of the and we always had the

Martin County fishing guide which went all over the United States and probably Europe and and the front of it was a picture of Johnny Mann who was our fire chief whom everybody in love Johnny was in everything he was just a nice guy and he suppose in front of a 300 pound goliath grouper being held up by the town Wrecker and Johnny's got a little teeny casting rod in his hand which you could hardly catch a 10 pound black bass on and he's got a big grin on his face and the joke is who is going to tie together this 300 pound grouper with this tiny little rock and that was an inside joke which

I don't think very many people uh caught up on um they uh hold on I'll get the page turned in a minute I I read slow I wonder who writes this stuff commercial fishing in the St Lucie River back in those days it was saying the Nets were too at least two miles long uh you would see him come down the river a string of boats they had a tow boat pull in a a a boat that had a winch in it I'll call it a winch boat behind that there would probably be two or three Net boats filled with Nets and behind that about four molecules which were empty big big row boats which

they were going to put the fish in when they caught them and uh they would try one end of the neck to a tree on the River's Edge and then they would tow the net boats in a big circle going almost all the way across the river and back into a tree about a quarter mile down the river and uh tie the the lunch boat to the lab tree and crank up the motor in the winch that run the wrench which pulls a pull line which was a net a line which was which was subtited to the cork line on the net the cork line of the top line and as it quirks it makes

the net fluid and as that tow line was pulled in which which the The Freshman could never pull all that dead in it was too much they had to have this winch to do it and is that as a tow line pulled in you had to pull a slip knot to keep it from getting the neckline the cork line mixed up in with that wrench because that would be a mess and sometimes they let me do that if I happen to be around and I'd pull a slip knot I thought that was really doing something now the fishermen were pulling were as he as the net was brought in they would take it into the

into their boat into one of the neck boats uh uh I don't know if they took the fish out then or where they left them in them but they had a problem with blue crabs the Nets were made of cotton it was tired cotton and those crabs would eat it plus they would get mixed up in the net and Tangled Up and they were a mess they put the fishermen pool in that end and there's a crab all tied up in the net well he's not going to stop and untangle him and throw him back he'd take his love hand and smash the crab against the bulkhead and then Shake him out into the water

and that's how they got rid of the Blue Crabs in your neck well I would take my little small my little seven foot boat and pull myself around the cork line until I saw a crab down there and I pulled that up and and it'll take me about a minute to undo the crap where it was Tangled Up and probably 50 fish would go out underneath the fisherman never cracked cracked at me about it they certainly should have and I wound up that day with a bucket of blue crabs to take onto my boat and I thought you know I'm going to sell these crabs you know I better get a nickel a piece for

them and so I after that I'm going to start a business so I walk with my bucket of crabs the first house I came to was Mrs Jack Coleman's house uh Jack was the of the Texaco dealer for Stewart and uh so I knocked on the door and Miss Coleman came to the door and she was a big woman very loud hey yeah and I said Ms Coleman I held up I have I have these crabs and I want to and she said she opened her away thank you and grabbed the crabs fuck it took it in and slammed the door and left me stand on the porch I thought to myself now I don't

even have the bucket of the crab scene there were a few guides in the river that took people fishing I don't remember any of them except Doris follicle endorse and another lady lived together uh and the way up South Fork where the Southport comes almost to State Highway 76 and they had a fish camp there where they lived and they would take people fishing and for the black bass and the Bremen things and they did quite well and they were lovely girls the big thing I remember about Doris is she had the only person I know that had a pet a pat armadillo and she said if you keep an armadillo in your house you'll

never have a boat to worry about she because that's what the armadillos eat and I had a house for years it was full of roaches I really should have gone out and gotten an armadillo I suppose uh chart about fishing how did that get into our town uh well sure about fishing is mostly offshore uh it came and the guys of Captain ad Whitaker well that was ad Whitaker and um he's been gone many years he was a sweater from New York I may be wrong they may have been pusherman but I think he was a squitter he moved to Stewart and settled into a port Sewell where their house is still there and that's

where the Whitaker book yard is and uh they had lined with squid and Squid uh 10 squid you can scrape it with your knife and it makes it real shiny like a piece of silver and you pulled out with a hand line they fish with hand lines and you'd get a kingfish and Spanish mackerel blue fish and whatever but they were fishing for the Kings mostly uh they uh the so how did charter fishing start well at tourists were here and they wanted to go fishing and no one had anything set up for tourists uh there were no boats to rent and they didn't want to buy a boat and they discovered Captain ad and

said can I go fishing with you and Captain that being a nice guy said why certainly you just have to help out so they would fish with him and he'll pull in the Kings and all and uh when they left they were often giving captain at a tip which made Captain ad start thinking and so he took the old hard seats out of his launch and your open launches they're fishing out of uh open boats and he he put in a wicker chair with a cushion to make it softer and started charging a fee you can go fishing but you have to pay a fee so that was okay and it worked fine and one

day one of the Anglers that's the guy that's paying the feed of fish we call them Anglers that angler got a big fish on and they pulled a rod right out of his hands and and and uh Captain Atlas was Rob you know I was that was a big loss so Captain ad said well I'll fix that until the next day he he tied the rod off to a chair of the quicker chair and of course as you can well imagine several weeks later they had an even bigger fish and the the the uh the uh angler got real excited and stood up and dropped the Rock and of course then the fish gave it

a big tug and pulled the whole wicker chair right in the water so I guess I got that back the chair probably floated and so from then on they tied and nail the chairs to the bottom of the boat and that's how this Charter Business started in Martin County uh the captain and I had three sons two were fishermen and one is a boat builder uh Captain Jack was the first son and he fished the hobo the elbow was always a red boat uh Jack owned several hobos but they're always red and no one else dared paint their whole red that was for Jack only and that was called a hobo and it went all

around like a hobo wood it was known all over the Caribbean and the Bahamas and Jack was a good guy to take on a month's fishing tour into the Bahamas or somewhere and he knew everybody and where to go and what to do uh the nurse Captain Johnson who fished organic and these boats were always Whitaker boats they were built by their family and again there's right now in Whitaker's yard is straight down uh stripped and is sitting there waiting for a buyer and if any of you rich people want to get a boat with history uh the gannet the Johnson Whitaker ran uh now's your time all you have to do is you have

to pay a modest price for the whole and then they want the Whitaker wants you to hire them to rebuild the boat and put it into pristine shape again that's why they almost give you the hope but it's that'd be a good boat to buy years ago they had the the the widget which was a 28th Whitaker one of the smaller Whitakers and I it was caught carrying drugs in uh Whitaker bought it back from the authorities and I wish I'd had the money to buy it but I didn't um the third shot was Curtis who was still living and I think Curtis Whitaker is I think he's a hundred is he 100 is anyone

105 and he's he's just as sharp as he can be it goes into the shop almost every day and checks on what's going on he's a great artist he's painted thousands of paintings and his paintings are in many of the uh stores around town it'd be good to have one of his paintings he's a writer he's written the story of the Whitakers and a hell of a nice guy and he's a great guy to lecture I love listening to him he knows so much of what's happened in the past uh I want to tell you about Captain Von Jordan he was in the auxiliary Coast Guard uh auxiliary Coast Guard the train boaters out of

the boat they checked their boats to make sure they were safe and they rescued people who needed rescuing Avon had arthritis in his ships he was bent over and kind of walked like a crab he was never more than four and a half feet tall and uh but a hell of a nice guy and he took the radio he was a radio guy for the auxiliary Coast Guard that radio was with him all the time he slept with it at his home and if you called in the middle of the night he would be there and he'd wake up and he would help him uh and uh he uh he did some children I had

a small boat he charted in the river and maybe shallow on the in the ocean uh he'd like to tie up an anchor in front of the Bay Tree Lodge uh and catch wink fish he had a crowd that like Greek fish and they stayed at the Pelican Hotel where they would carry the fish back in Russell Holloway would cook the fish for them Russell was one of the best cooks there ever was and he cooked for about October and in the Army but anyhow one day I was fishing in the ocean that was around the inlet and it had about eight or tent little blue Runners which are great live bait for a kingfish

and Bob was out there and I waved to him and he yelled to him he says if you catch him he's Runners and I said yeah he said I can shut up I can't catch any and I said well come on over and we got together we gave him about four of our runners and uh he went on down to the kingfish hole which is south of the inlet and I waited about 30 minutes and then I went on down and there he is he's got three big Kingfish Tails sticking out of his his garbage can in the back of his boat and he's playing another going around our Circle she's got another giant head

he caught four big fish so my glue Runners did a good job for him at that time we had a doctor in town called George trevell he was an orthopedic man a phone guy one of the nicest kindest guy should ever know and I hate to have gone in his ships and suddenly Vaughn is six feet tall standing straight up a totally different person and uh to continue the story we lost George some years after that he was being taught how to do aromatics in an airplane and something happened and it crashed and killed him and the instructor problem we sure missed uh George come out hi I am going to talk about Bill Matheson

who any of you have been here anytime remember Bill who could forget bill well he almost got him right in front of front of the where we are right now he was in front of the hospital he had been at High Point uh talking to one of his friends on a business deal and was coming back to his home which is on Pandora to school over near the Palm City Bridge he was running a 30-foot uh open skiff boat with a big motor on it and it was a Mako which has a short size the size come up not quite to your knee and if it hits nothing then goes sideways it's it's like being

clipped in football it just knock you right out of the boat well Bill had a sharp uh wink right in front of the hospital and was thrown out of the boat which kept going at a hundred of speed in large circles uh Bill said he finally I came so closely at the time to try to dodge it and The Escape of the motor coat is sure tail and Taurus uh the fortunately there was a tourist and a hotel or a brewing house right near the hospital which saw this happen and the Taurus knew that it wasn't right whatever happened was not right so if he called the U.S Coast Guard who got on the radio

immediately and called Captain Von Jordan and told him what was going on well Vaughn was backing out of his slip in Frasier Creek with his with his crew over a young horse and they just went out and fired all night mode and ran around the front of the hospital and there was a bell floating with a ski mask a ski belt and was not quite ground I don't know if he was conscious or not but they managed to get him in the boat and there was no DOC for the hospital so long Jordan just ran his boat straight upon his ran up on the beach they drilled bill out and carrying him into the hospital

and managed to save it it was a day before they would say that bill was going to live they said had it been fresh water he would have drowned but because it was salt water somehow the lungs managed to survive and build them for that reason the hospital now has a nice top because Bill Matheson had a dog built for the hospital so that the next guy that was wouldn't have to run up on a beach they could take it to the top and I'm sorry to take so much time but uh I've blown my walk until about 8 30 I'm gonna give you a few minutes if there's anybody that would like to tell

our murder story of when they were in the river or if anybody has a question for us yeah I have a story okay you don't have to go back 30 or 40 or I mean that shouldn't thank you you don't have to go back to the 30s or the 40s to know the beauty of the river we moved here in 1979 which is about 37 years ago and we live about a half a mile or a little bit less east of here right on the river we had a 200 dot foot dock when we first moved here and my children were ten and five respectively my son and my daughter they used to go swimming

in the river back then in 1979 80 81 and all the Institute years after that I remember one time my six or seven-year-old daughter of him running into the house well we have an apartment building she came running down the hallway dripping with water she says mommy mommy there's something in the river but Danny's really upset about it so I went out there I know she was panicking I went out there and guessed what was in the river a five foot shark and they had been swimming with their inner tubes up until that point so a needless to say every now and I didn't let them go in the river by themselves anymore I would

stay right with them but that was a quite an experience and I can one other thing I can remember very admittedly one of my tenants went swimming in the river and it was at night time and I went out there to see what he was doing and I said you know how can you see where you're swimming and he says well look and he went like that and it was all green and yellow sparkles where I don't know what they were electrolytes or something I don't know yes as as he swam you could see right where his his hands were going and his feet were kicking and it was just like an outline of it

it was just a fantastic um the last thing I wanted to say is up until about five or six years ago we used to see a dolphin in the river all the time swimming 10 o'clock in the morning to go to the North Fork well it could be that way in about four o'clock they come it comes what I haven't seen him for probably seven eight years thank you a few more minutes is there anybody else I also would like to think about for sure cheers are very uncomfortable I had originally from Brooklyn and two of my uncles came here on a fishing trip in 1957 and fell in love with chance at the beach

and they decided that they just didn't want to go back to Brooklyn this is going to be the life they wanted so when I'm going to look back on the train and got the car and came back and the following year my Mom and Dad and us three kids and my grandfather moved down to Jensen and they needed something to do obviously there wasn't much to do here it's nothing really you know for us actually it felt like we got dropped off the planet coming from City lineup go ahead right there's the movie theater is the big stores and everything like that so anyway they were looking for property and they found a little fish

camp now in Jensen and they bought but it's now a jumpwood motel and uh back in my own one of my uncle's worked for Bill Matheson as a plumber and they all had to have jobs because the motel two uncles owned one side of the hotel and my mom and dad owned the other which one side I think had four or five cottages on it and the other side was just concrete one concrete um shell and the rest of the units weren't built yet so they had all gone good jobs and they made a sign that this is not about fishing really but they made a sign they one uncle was a plumber supposed to

make a held up like Plumbing pipes one cloves of paper we painted the sign and they went out to the beach and found some Driftwood and threw it on the ground under the sign and that was the driveway so anyway it was all about fishing swimming boating that's what brought them here the originally they came here because they were almost a fishing trip and a really nice boat when they got here supposedly it was broken down so they were getting paddle boaters throw them over I mean a little um load a joke or something like that but we spent all our time on the River of the ocean the South War we fished in every

possible body of water here my dad at one time then they bought the paint box and Jensen they had that too and my dad would go to Tarpon Springs and get short shrimp and we had the air Raiders I think you should call it in the truck sometimes that would go bad I would eat a lot of shrimp thank you foreign poles like they were talking about and we they used to throw them under the um under one of the units and not too many years ago they were doing putting a new floor in and when my husband took out the floor and I looked down and I go would you please hand that to

me it turned out to be the three um fishing poles came fishing both games when we were little kids so that was like a good surprise my plan when I finished the office hanging them up but um I got involved three years ago with a group called The River Warriors and that changed my life dramatically I've been on that River since I was seven years old and I really didn't understand what was going on the river the Indian River Lagoon is the most bio-processary in North America and some people don't even know that and like everybody talks about the fish that were in their exam the light that was in there and then it's not

what we see now I remember going um with my grandfather in the river with his shrimp shrimping net and we catch the shrimp and they'd walk in that thick Lush seagrass and I would see seahorses and you know everything crafts you can see your feet and it was just unbelievable light we have them it'd be like a couple where we've been out there we'd make rafts and and had all kinds of fun but it's not what used to be has a lot to do with a lot of areas it's putting up even an extending River when I took about them and straightened with that I thought that was a great idea instead of it taking

I think they took 16 months or some long period of time for the water to come down from there and it's got it shot down into days so you have that going on you have um uh fertilizers that people are using especially in summer there's no you prefer to live here because there's fertilizer in the rain and it just gets washed into the waterways and you know poisons our Rivers but you have agriculture you have cattle Farms you have the big contributor is the sugar farmers and uh they would have that portion into our Waters so we're all a part of what's Happening here and we all have to be a part of doing something

about it this river is not what it was when we got here when I got here in 1958 and it makes me cry and I've gone to Washington several times I've been to DC you've seen me in the news probably and it it it really chokes me up because I know what it was and I see what it is now and and the water is capable of causing Alzheimer's ALS and Parkinson's disease some people don't know 2013 uh you could get a cup have a cut we had a really bad discharges then people just people in Florida died we had over 200 manatees died over 80 Dolphins the fish have lesions on there except the

fish at times is not edible White House later there is about time Gail can you tell me what that is there's something near the fish sometimes they're really not edible so please everybody right in your local state and federal government and I I just uh just the other day I met with somebody from Hillary uh Hillary Clinton's I think I'll be asked both the candidate to send somebody down Hillary Clinton sent somebody down to talk and I had an interview with that person at Central Marina and then if someone came down to the motel and interviewed me and uh I just want everybody to you know love this water and do something about it write

them a call whatever it takes to try to make a change thank you quickly I'll let her speak and then we've got to get out of here I just want to close on this though when we moved in 31 years ago the first thing I saw was I went over the Roosevelt y I mean knocked me out so gorgeous I know the river's got trouble I know it's not what it was it breaks my heart but even today whenever I go over the Roosevelt bridge and I look at that River I thank God that I lived there thank you they drive over the Palm City Bridge and even the new bridge we go why wouldn't

this be a fabulous place to live it's gorgeous and we have to preserve it thank all of you so much thank that wonderful panel and thank you