Tiger Tail

Our last post (did you notice the use of the royal plural?) was entitled 'Tiger's Tale' and since this one is 'Tiger Tail', you can tell it's completely different. Actually, it's still on the theme of North Miami and now I'm going to annoy you with history and geography. Sorry. There's a point made later.

Ah, North Miami. Although formally established under this name in 1926, Europeans have been living in the Arch Creek area since 1858. That's a long time in 'Miami years'. To the rest of the country, that's like the sixteenth century.

Dade County's first major road to the outside world was the 'Military Trail' and it ran right through the eastern part of North Miami. It can be traced from what is now Biscayne Boulevard right through Arch Creek Park where the Natural Bridge was and down NE 16th. Avenue to rejoin with Biscayne Boulevard. In south Florida, the Military Trail ran through Fort Pierce and Fort Lauderdale to Fort Dallas (later renamed 'Miami'). The purpose of the road was to move troops during the Seminole Wars.

There were three so-called 'Seminole Wars' but they actually involved many different tribes in addition to the Seminoles. During the Second Seminole War which ended in 1842 one of the lead strategists was Thlocko Tustenuggee who wore a Florida panther tail on his waist and went by the respected name Tiger Tail. Tiger Tail lived around Tallahassee and is not known to have ever been to the Miami area. But his legend made it there along with some namesakes.

There was a warrior in the Third Seminole War (which ended in 1858) who was also known as Tiger Tail. He is referred to as Old Tiger Tail or Big Tiger Tail and he had a younger relative called Young Tiger Tail or Little Tiger Tail.

The younger man may have been his son or nephew. More likely a nephew, actually, since the matrilineal Indian culture had sons follow their mother's clan not their father's. Consequently, men in Old Tiger Tail's clan would be the sons of his sisters - his nephews.

Now before I tie this huge mess together, I have to bring in the geography part. South Florida exists as we know it because of a thin ridge of limestone that runs down the southeast coast. The Military Trail followed this narrow limestone ridge and was used later to be developed into Dixie Highway which was later expanded and developed into US 1 - Biscayne Boulevard.

This limestone ridge forms the eastern edge of a huge, wide river that runs from Lake Okeechobee south to the ocean. That river is the Everglades. Most of what is Dade County now used to be a part of the Everglades and in the rainy season it was underwater. Underwater as in 'swamp'. This map from 1888 shows the Everglades almost to the coast.

From downtown Miami north to the Broward County line, there were only a few breaks in that thin limestone ridge: The Miami River, Little River, Snake Creek (then Snake River), Arch Creek and the Oleta River. If not for the modern day extensive range of canals and man-made lakes, Dade County would still be mostly swamp today.

During the rainy season, Old Tiger Tail, Little Tiger Tail and the other Seminoles, Miccosukees, Tequestas and other tribes lived on the islands in this swamp and moved around the landscape in their canoes. They camped on these 'islands' and the camps were identified when the mapmakers hit south Florida. One of those island camps was located on what we would now call North Miami.

On this map from 1890, three Indian towns are clearly identified. Tigers Tail Town named for Old Tiger Tail, Aleck Town (yes, 'Aleck') named for another warrior named Old Alec, and Little Tigers Town named for Little Tiger Tail. Tigers Tail Town and Aleck Town were around where Arch Creek Park is now and Little Tigers Town appeared in the area between downtown North Miami and William Jennings Bryan Elementary School.

By 1917, four major canals had been cut to allow the land to dry out and be habitable. The Biscayne Canal drained most of what is North Miami now.

And what's the point of all this then? You can't ever know yourself and the land where you live without discovering what was there before. That's the point!

Now, go out and study something. ;->

Tiger's Tale

For those of you who have read more than one entry of this thing I laughingly refer to as my 'blog', you know it sometimes takes such sudden and unexpected turns that some people get a little queasy. If that's the case, you'd better put on your seat belt for this one.

The reason for the sudden bounces is that sometimes I feel a bit like Billy Pilgrim. I'm sure you know who Billy Pilgrim is and if not, see if you can find a library still operating and check out Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. The actual title is Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. Now that's a title!

Billy becomes 'unstuck in time' and jumps around to different events in his life, much as I'm doing in this 'blog'. Vonnegut being a better writer, his work doesn't produce that queasy, upset stomach feeling. So, in this post, the logical thing for me to do is to talk about my first junior high, North Miami Junior High School.
The natural place to start such a discussion is with Herman Roman Gustav Proske who was born in Vienna on Sept. 21, 1898 and died in Miami in July 3, 1972. In 1911, exactly one hundred years ago, when Proske was thirteen years old, he ran away and joined the circus. How great is that!

He went on to become what many consider the greatest big cat trainer that ever lived. He wrote two autobiographical books about training lions and tigers and even today Proske is still considered the authority on one arcane aspect of big cat handling that had never really occurred to me.

Among serious students of big cat interaction, the question of who would win during a battle between a lion and a tiger is a matter of much discussion and debate. No debate from Proske, however, he stood entirely behind the tiger and referred to his eye-witness accounts of actual battles. The tiger always won, and such respect is shown, at least in part, by his choice of the nickname 'Tiger' Proske. The main reason people say 'lions and tigers' instead of 'tigers and lions' is because of the Wizard of Oz, not because lions are better.

Proske arrived in New York on June 23, 1933 and was detained for not bothering to get a visa. He put on shows and built zoos around the country and finally ended up in Miami, Florida where he built the North Miami Zoo. At his 'tiger farm', he showed off his many tigers including the famous Nubian the Tiger along with his 200 pound chimps Congo the Great and Gargantua. The chimps were probably more dangerous than the tigers. Tigers just kill you, they don't rip your face off and eat it like chimps do.

Here's Proske below with his pals.
His North Miami Zoo was located on NE 131st Street between 7th and 8th Avenues just a half block from West Dixie Highway. This block is the location today of the newly built North Miami Senior High School. I wonder if today's students who attend that school know what lies beneath their feet? Remember, Diaspar was not always thus.

When North Miami's population exploded following World War II it became clear that a new high school was required. Land was donated by Edward L. Constance from the High Pines Addition to Iron Manor. That site extended from NE 135th Street to 137th Street and from NE 7th Avenue to 9th Avenue. The Edward L. Constance Junior-Senior High School opened in the fall of 1951 being renamed North Miami High School four years later.

In the image below from today (which becomes much clearer when you double click on it), the original North Miami High School site is that horizontal four blocks on the top half of the photo with all those big buildings on it. The new High School is the vertical four blocks in the lower portion of the photo. The zoo was located in the lowest two blocks where the new High School buildings are now.
Beginning as a Junior-Senior High School mostly with students from nearby William Jennings Bryan which was running grades 1-8 at the time, the new school became overcrowded immediately. So more land was required and Tiger Proske's zoo was targeted. After a spectacular uproar (get the tiger reference?) nearly causing a civil war in North Miami, the tiger farm was purchased and North Miami Junior High School was built there in 1955. Also built on the former zoo property was the North Miami Armory and Municipal Pool.

Now, here's what the area looked like in March 1952 during the High School's first year of classes. Construction is still underway at the High School and Proske's zoo is still in full operation, you can see the zoo in that square with dark growth near the bottom of the photo. You can see it better if you double click on the photo. That's West Dixie Highway cutting diagonally across the image.
After North Miami Junior High School was completed, they paid homage to their predecessors on that land by calling themselves the Tigers. Their yearbook was named Tiger's Tale. See? Everything's a circle.

But speaking of circles, I did some of this research the other day and a lot of this work is very obscure and frankly difficult. Thank goodness for the Internet. But the very night I discovered that the name of the zoo owner was Roman Proske, I was mindlessly watching this idiotic movie called Vampires Suck which is a parody of the Twilight series. And who do you suppose is the star? Jenn Proske. What are the chances? Is the Proske name really everywhere and I just never noticed? But twice in the same day? Geez, it gave me a little chill.

Next time, I'll drop the other shoe and tell you about Tiger Tail.

The Grim Reaper Hovers

I might have mentioned that I was a cadet in the Civil Air Patrol when I went to Carol City Junior High. Of course I mentioned it, I don't just make this stuff up. For students, it's a way to learn about aviation especially if you intend to go into the US Air Force since it is the official Air Force Auxiliary.

None of the people in this photograph is me because, strangely enough, I have no photos of me in uniform. You might think, "Surely there will be some offhand snapshot." But, nooooo.

Actually, it's for the best because this is what I looked like in eighth grade so the fewer photographs, the better. Geez, look at that hair! What's the matter with me?

Naturally, after all this experience and training, I joined the US Navy instead. Of course, the Navy has an excellent flight program, but they thought things would be better for everyone if I served on a Destroyer which is as far from any aircraft as humanly possible.

The Civil Air Patrol really was a great opportunity for exposure to things I had no contact with before. I learned how to march, and what a 'load factor' is (i.e., the ratio of the lift of an aircraft to its weight). You gotta know this stuff or you may not be able to march to your aircraft and get it off the ground.

But I also got to fly in small civilian aircraft like Cessnas and Piper Cubs and the legendary DC-3 (pictured above), which many consider the most perfect aircraft ever built.

This airplane was designed in 1932 and is still in daily retail operation around the world. You got any 1932 automobiles being used as taxis? Many pilots still believe the only replacement for a DC-3 is another DC-3. This respect shows in the other commonly used phrase that the DC-3 is 'a collection of parts flying in loose formation'. And I got to fly in one.

So, because I was a cadet in the Civil Air Patrol, I got to play a small part in the closest thing to nuclear war the world has ever seen - The Cuban Missile Crisis. And it was a crisis. For those who didn't live through it (or who can't remember it), it was particularly nasty for those of us who lived in south Florida. After all, that's about 20 seconds flying time for a missile from Cuba.

Kennedy and Khrushchev (in this photo above, Kennedy is asking Nikita to 'pull his finger') got into a royal pushing and shoving contest because of some missiles that Khrushchev has snuck into Cuba.

For a while there, it was really tense, many people thought there would be nuclear war at any moment. The US rushed boatloads of missiles to Miami and set up acres of launch sites. There was a really big Nike Hercules facility just a couple of miles from where I lived at the time and they didn't even bother to try to hide it.

But, no, they didn't ask the Civil Air Patrol cadets to man the missiles. We were put to work at the Opa Locka Airport putting together civil defense food and emergency packages in case that war happened. I'm not sure what good it would have done us if Miami had been nuked and all our sand had been turned into a kind of root-beer-colored glass. Well, it kept us busy.

Nowadays, I doubt that people realize how close October 1962 came to all of us going pbbtttth. A lot of Congress wanted to go ahead with the big one and called Kennedy 'reluctant'. He was probably just concerned that we hadn't finished those food packages and was buying us some more time.

I'm good with that.

Ahh... Spring!

So this is my first 'Spring' season after retiring. It turns out it's a pretty busy little season.

This year I got to help my wife, Deb, with all the work that she usually did herself for, lo, those many years since I was always at work, doing whatever it was that I did. Gosh, that was an awful, run-on sentence. I'm surprised the blog police didn't shut me down.

The first thing we did was to clear away all the snow. That was a pretty good trick because there toward the end there was no place to put any more.

But then there was yard clean-up, tool sharpening and maintenance, re-doing the bed-edging, taking down the netting that kept the damned deer from eating everything we ever planted. Those deer are a menace, I tell you! Homeless people could eat them, you know, deer and Canadian geese, the homeless would never go hungry.

Returning to Spring... then we re-set the rocks lining the paths we had put in the woods, had the guys put down new wood chips on the paths, the chips came from all the deadfall the trees contributed over winter. We're very green, we recycle everything! Deb then vacuumed the woods and polished the trees, and then we moved all the plants a few inches to the left to get them just right. But it was all worth it as the new growth came in.

We only lost one tree over the winter and some of the heavy ice split a few of our Dragon Lady evergreens. But they're healing nicely. That is what Spring is for.

Look how carefully the downed tree managed to thread itself through the other trees so as not to damage any of his friends. See? That's why Deb polishes the trees, they just slide off one another in case one of them falls.

So, here are a few photos of Spring around the house. It's my favorite season, rebirth, second chances... all that. It could be because growing up in Miami we didn't have this kind of Spring. I don't think I even realized a lot of trees flower in the Spring until I moved up north. In Miami there's a wet season and a dry season and if a tree flowered, it pretty much always flowered. It's a little like a different planet up here.






And if you're the observant type (you must be, otherwise you wouldn't be bothered to read this 'blog') this last photo is the Spring version of the snow scene I included at the beginning of this post. And that's why I'm so glad it's Spring! Yay!

He's Dead, Jim

None of the jobs I've had have been really dangerous like policeman or fireman (unless you count the Navy where I could have painted myself to death), so I've never been in danger for my life while at work. I've never even had any serious automobile accidents. I still managed to get myself into plenty of trouble with the sun, however.

Growing up in Miami, we were outside all the time, deliberately getting a tan. And we didn't have any of that fancy-schmancy SPF 1,000,000 like the stuff that's available now. We slathered ourselves with baby oil so at times you could actually hear the frying noise as we cooked to a rich, golden brown burning away multiple layers of our precious and irreplacable skin.

I miss my skin. I miss my knees, too, a lot, but the sun didn't take my knees away. I did that on my own. No, the sun took my skin away.

Well, I guess that was my fault as well, who sleeps in the sun at the beach all day for days on end? What dumbbell works construction outside all day with only a hardhat, boots and little short-shorts? Hmmm?

The guy who ends up with no skin, that's who.

Of course, I can take consolation in the fact that we didn't know any better, it was our culture to get the best tan we could. And no one ever said all cultures are good. Some cultures are just stupid.

So, my first skin cancer appeared exactly twenty-five years ago. It was my first trip to a dermatologist (certainly wouldn't be my last) and by sheer luck I selected the best dermatologist in the whole world, Dr. Robert Cott. He removed my first basal cell carcinoma from behind my left ear.

After that, we were off to the races. Over the course of years, Dr. Cott removed multiple instances of basal cell carcinoma, dermal nevi, compound nevi with melanocytic dysplasia, epithelial hyperplasia, keratinous epithelial cysts, inflamed seborrheic keratoses, compound lentiginous nevi, and diagnosed me with my personal favorite - transient acantholytic dermatosis otherwise know as Grover's Disease. Grover's is frequently found among those of us with sun-damaged skin and has no cure. It makes me itch. I've suffered with it for more than twenty years. I use it as an excuse for my drinking (like I need an excuse!).

My back was the area most affected and as excellent as Dr. Cott was, my back still looks like a small war was perpetrated there. I haven't been in the sun on purpose for more than twenty years and here's my advice to all of you.

Stay out of the fricking sun!

But I probably won't die of Grover's Disease or the diseases associated with any of the other Muppets. I also shouldn't downplay the dangers of being in the US Navy, I did get my hand smashed up pretty good and some other nasty wounds. I'll have to tell you about that sometime.

The closest I came to dying was at beautiful Haulover Beach in Miami. My friend, Richard Scandore's mom took us to the beach when I was maybe eleven or so. We were digging holes in the loose Haulover sand and (being an overachiever) I was trying to dig really deep and fell in head first with the hole collapsing around me.

I don't have any video or photos of this so you'll have to use your imagination. Pretend you're this woman in the sand here. OK, now change yourself into a little boy and then flip yourself over so only your legs are sticking out of the sand. Got it? Now try to breathe with your mouth and nose completely full of sand.

Doesn't work, huh? Yeah, it didn't work for me either. From what I was told later, I was kicking so hard, no one could get a grip on my legs until this big guy came along and pulled me out with one of those wet, sucking noises you usually only hear in cartoons. I didn't hear it at all because my ears were full of sand, too.

I'd like to tell you a story about how clearly I was thinking as the life ran out of my skinny little eleven year old body. You know, something like regretting not being able to grow up and become a great doctor and discovering a cure for cancer (maybe even skin cancer!) - but I can't. I had no thoughts, just sheer, blind panic. How ordinary.

I still get sand coming out of parts of me now and again. But I learned a valuable lesson - life is all about lessons, isn't it? I learned humans can't breathe sand. And I won't forget it either.

What Lies Beneath

We read all the time about some construction project in Europe digging up an unknown 2,000 year old ruin with artifacts and bones and what not. It even happens in places like Philadelphia where records were (supposedly) kept.

But when it happens in Miami, that's a bit more peculiar since Miami is relatively new. Many buildings in Miami are the only ones that ever stood on their location, more often than not because it was swamp before the land was drained for construction.

Take Keystone Point for example: beautiful homes in a beautiful, richly landscaped setting in northern Miami. I wonder if any of those residents know that before their homes were built, that land was an airport.

People need a sense of history, which is part of the reason I drone on in this dopey blog. You need to know why stuff happened. They are now going to tear down my brother's high school, North Miami Senior High.

My elementary school is still functioning normally after more than eighty years, but his high school is gone after only sixty. They're going to build a middle school in its place, it will probably look like a brick.

My brother went right to work after high school. I'll have to ask him if he ever considered college. It wasn't as though our family ever had any deep ranging discussions about careers and college. It just never came up.

"Well, son, I've talked it over with your grandfather and we've decided you should attend Yale, as we did. I've spoken to the dean and it's all arranged." Yeah, right.

I expected just to go to work after high school, you know, eventually get a house something like my parent's house and perhaps get married. Although frankly, marriage never crossed my mind at that point, it was another thing that was just never discussed. Working was no mystery, I had already been working (pretty much) full time for more than two years. If I was going to work, then I would work, no big deal.

But my high school friends were making plans to go to college and I just kind of fell into the idea with this vague notion of being a teacher, maybe even a history teacher. So I signed up at the North Campus of what was then called Miami Dade Junior College along with practically everyone from my high school class. No one had any money in those days.

The school had opened only a couple years before and just two buildings had been built, the Classroom Building and the Library. It was on a huge site with plenty of room for parking and expansion. But was there anything on this site before it? Hmm?

Well, if you've learned anything about my foreshadowing technique, you'll have guessed that it was an airport. Master's Field was one of three airports within just a couple of miles of one another. Amelia Earhart Field was immediately adjacent to Master's Field to the west and the Opa Locka Airport was located to the north in beautiful Opa Locka.

Opa Locka (originally Opa-tisha-woka-locka) the Seminole name for the high land north of the little river on which there is a camping place built on an Arabian theme (how about that!) and has the distinction of having a real Sesame Street.

Actually, all the streets are named on the Arabian theme, this photograph is of the corner of Sesame Street and Ahmad Street. I know these streets very well, I worked at the Opa Locka Post Office sorting mail, so I know (or knew) every house.

So, I wonder if today's students of 'Dade County College' know their school is built on an airfield? The clues are there. During the first years, we parked our cars on the runways, and if you look carefully, you can still find an occasional old metal ring embedded in the concrete. These rings were used to tie the aircraft down. I found some old images of what the airfields looked like before all the changes. Some of the strips were even used for drag racing back in the day. You never know what kind of history is lurking until you check.

So this image is Master's Field (the actual name was Master Field because at one point, it was the main Miami airport, but no one called it that) from 1956.


That's NW 27th. Avenue running along the right border. Then a few years later by 1970, they had added several college buildings, dug the lake and added the gym and stadium. The south-western part is beginning conversion into an industrial park.

By 1986, it was getting difficult to identify the airport heritage.

And now, you have to squint a little to see it.


Stuff is there for you to find if you look for it. What's under your feet?

In Praise of Libraries

I know I said a couple of posts ago that spiders are your friends. But as far as friends go, libraries just blow spiders away.

A library is not simply a collection of books because when a certain critical mass is reached, it becomes a Library. Yes, more than an amalgamation of book components, rather its own entity with its own life and soul. You can feel it when you walk into a good library. You can taste it... and smell it.

The photograph up above is Pattee Library at Penn State. It smells pretty good. I did a lot of my studying right there in the library. They had rooms full of those big super-heavy, blonde-wood library-tables that you could spread out on like some sort of executive.
But I had the rare and sought-after privilege of having a study location right in the stacks. Absolute silence and a locked area to keep my stuff centered there in the middle of the seventh floor stacks. I mean, really! Who could ask for more?

Because, like I said, libraries (and subsequently books) are your friends.

Think about it.

If you have no social status or social skills, books don't care, they're there for you just the same! If you have no friends, they will volunteer. If you have no money, they will take you places. If you have no education, they will teach you. If you don't know anyone, they will introduce you. Yet, they ask for nothing in return. And they smell good. If that's not a friend, what is?

I've loved libraries since I was introduced to my first school library at William Jennings Bryan Elementary. I couldn't believe there were SO MANY books! Of course, I had to work in the library at all the schools I attended. I never had a chance. Maybe it's genetic.

So, as I was saying in my last post, there was another bus line serving Carol City, the City of Miami bus line that would take me practically anywhere in Dade County. 'Anywhere' included the mecca of all meccas, the downtown main branch of the Miami Public Library.

Whooooaaaaaa!

For thirty-five cents, I could get on a bus five blocks from my house and get dropped off right in front of the library. And it was a beautiful library, this is what it looked like in those days.

Look at it sitting there like a temple in the middle of Bayfront Park, all marble and solid-looking. With more books than I'd ever seen! I read my first Freud there. I wrote my papers there with so much at my disposal, it was like stumbling on the Internet! And they even let me take books home!!
So, what did Miami do with this cathedral? This central magnet of all things good and illuminating? Why they tore it DOWN of course! Why would you want to KEEP something like that? They built another one down by City Hall. Looks like a brick.

Yale, on the other hand, designed their library to actually LOOK like a cathedral. Which it IS!
And inside it was just as impressive, I doubt they'll tear it down in ten years.
And they respected their history enough to keep their old card catalog structure so new students would have a chance to feel fortunate that everything is online. Here's Deb wishing that little cart was motorized.
Oh, I'm not really complaining about Miami's decision to destroy my history. I'm certain they had a really good reason. Look, they had a little exhibit of some of the tools we used to use to sort cards. Wow, that brought back memories.

It's just annoying that I've walked into buildings a thousand years old or more but this beautiful structure, BARELY broken in, with all those marble memories and that wonderful smell - this building had to go. Pfffffffthh!

You can call me a Luddite if you wish, but e-books can't replace books any more than the Internet will replace the Library. Supplement, sure. Complement, absolutely. Replace? Naaah. Have you smelled an e-book reader? It smells faintly of plastic and machine oil.

That ain't the same thing!

Get on the Bus

I went to work pretty much full time at Royal Castle when I was sixteen. That is, if you count thirty hours a week as 'pretty much' full time. And I guess it is for a tenth grader, but HEY, I needed the money... to pay for a car... to get to work. Hmm, in the magic clarity of retrospect, that doesn't make any sense, does it? But I never said I was smart when I was sixteen. I never said I was smart now for that matter. This is my tenth grade school photo. I didn't have a mustache yet.

But before I was sixteen, pretending to be eighteen so I could work all night alone cooking eggs for drunks in Miami, I was fifteen and only worked sporadically here and there. Interestingly, I have no photographs of my brother or me in our Royal Castle whites.

We wore whatever the manager ordered from the laundry that week and since I was already six feet four at fifteen, nothing ever fit, so I looked like Tom Hanks when he outgrew his kid clothes in Big.

To complete the picture, you have to add the cheap brown canvas shoes that were so soaked with grease that they squished when I walked, the paper hat with the sweat stains creeping up from my fevered brow and the pièce de résistance, the once-white, now-filthy apron harboring generations of disease-carrying flora and fauna steeping in a peculiar meld of burger juice, egg leftovers and five-day-old chili.

OHHH, and it wasn't hot enough in this cauldron, so they made us wear Colonel-Sanders-style black ribbon bow ties. This was the South, after all, and we were gentlemen. Greasy gentlemen.

The ties were designed to keep the steam inside our shirts, but as soon as we were out of sight of any 'manager', we would disconnect the tie from one side of our collar and let it dangle from the other like a tragically crippled black bird with a broken wing.

But, like I said, before all this I was fifteen with Royal Castle far off in the future. It was then that I discovered buses. The part of Miami where I lived at this point is called Carol City. Just a few years before we moved there, it was called 'The Everglades' which is a euphemism for 'The Swamp'. But they cut some canals and drained it and voilà cheap land! But by the time we got there, it was built up enough to have service from two bus lines.

And if you were a fifteen year old with no other means of transport, the bus was a gift from heaven. One of the lines was the Haulover Beach Bus.

This picture is sort of what it looked like. Somebody captured some old buses from the 1940s and ran them into the ground for us. Just a couple of blocks from my house was the absolute end of the line, but you could get on there and ride all the way to the beach for a quarter.

There was no air conditioning but we all rode in our bathing suits anyway. It was a real treat, because even though my brother and I grew up in Miami, my family went to the beach very rarely. I guess my parents weren't big beach-goers.

Haulover (get it... Haul - Over) is a beautiful beach, this is how it looked a couple of years ago.

My eldest (not old) daughter, Leah visited Haulover as a baby, here's a shot of her just before she dove into the surf.


So since Leah had been there so much, we had to take Heather to Haulover as well when we went down for a visit. Look how cute these people are! Heather with her little hat and Leah hoping not to drown this time and look at Deb just a few months after giving birth! See what happens when you're poor and have no food.

So, Deb put Heather down in the sand and she immediately grabbed a handful of beach sand and ate it. Yay, Heather!

Fortunately, the sand there isn't the sticky crap they have at the Jersey shore, it's larger pieces of broken shell, so we were able to get most of it out of her mouth. Well, some of it, anyway.

I know I can't leave you hanging, so we'll talk about the other bus line in a future post. I know you can hardly wait.