FLORIDA CRACKERS

     How wonderful it was discovering all the new things that life in a tropical paradise had to offer!  Our house had no air conditioning in 1952, but then no one else's house didn't either.  In Illinois, there was no such thing, so we didn't miss it at all.  I can't remember, as a child, being bothered by the heat and humidity, mainly because we ran around all the time only half dressed and barefooted.  Fans were used at night to sleep, and there was an exhaust window fan that was in one of the windows in our "Florida Room" that pulled the hot air out of the house so that the cool night air could get in.  Of course it pulled the mosquitoes in too!  Every night, before we went to bed, we had a mosquito check and swatted those that we could see.  Sometimes our walls got kind of bloody.  Ha!
     As you can see, we enjoyed eating outside on our patio, and did it often.  Our dad also took us fishing at an inlet nearby, which became one of our favorite pastimes.  We lived right near the Intercoastal Waterway, and we would climb in one of the mangrove trees over the water and spend hours fishing for "toadies", which were toad fish or puffer fish, that were excellent eating.  Of course, everything we caught, we had to clean.  Toad fish were delicious, but their livers were poisonous.  We cleaned them by cutting off their heads and then turned them inside out by peeling the skin back.  The skin was kind of leathery and had no scales.  Toadies were weird fish, with front teeth that looked like human teeth.  They were shellcrackers and needed these teeth to break open barnacles.

                                               The scrapbook page I made with these pictures.

               Fishing at the inlet.  I had the toad
               fish, and my brother had a channel
               catfish that had a really sharp spine
               on it's back that could give you a
               painful sting.