Latitude 27° '09 N
October 10, 2011
Florida! There has never been a decade of my life that this state hasn’t played some part of my life. As a family we lived here in the 1950’s; I visited it with my parents in the 1960’s after they moved back north, and I returned often when they wintered here in the 1970’s to the 1990’s.
Florida! In the annals of Ladue family lore, this simple seven letter word was enough to elicit an extraordinary range of response. For my father, it was his paradise lost. For my mother, it was Dante’s seventh level of Hell.
During World War II, my Dad’s good fortune was to be stationed in Honolulu. Hula girls, no trenches, gentle trade winds and goodbye Northern New York winter. He loved it and, I imagine, reluctantly returned to Plattsburgh in 1945.
He married my Mom that same year, got a job and settled in. But by 1952, the year my brother was born, some compromise had been reached between him and my Adirondack born and raised mother. Sometime that year they were living somewhere in Central Florida.
From the start, my mother hated it. It’s not hard to see why. She was stuck in a tin can of a trailer with two young children and no air conditioning. But that was short lived. Sometime during their second year, they’d bought a small home in Lakeland, but that wasn’t enough to make her like Florida. By the end of the following year, again, I suppose, after some compromises, they left Florida behind and moved back to Plattsburgh. This was sometime in the fall of 1954 as I clearly remember starting Kindergarten in the Lakeland School District, and there are pictures showing me in a Halloween costume, so we much have left sometime in November. Pictures taken during that trip north show my mother thin and damaged. According to her, sometime during the hellish hot summer, she’d simply had enough; she told my father that she was taking the children and moving home.
Home was 23 Grace Avenue, Plattsburgh, NY. No zip code in those days. Part of their initial compromise had been not to sell the home which was, ultimately, a very wise decision.
For the rest of her life the damage done by those years stayed dangerously close to the surface of her life and the lives of those around her.
For years I never liked summer. I’d been taught that the sun and heat and humidity, especially humidity, were loathsome things—like liver and broiled fish. Years later, in my late 20’s, on a hot, sunny, humid day on a glorious Greek island, I had an epiphany. I realized my mother was wrong—at least for me. I loved this weather, and that singular July day in 1976, under a hot Mediterranean sun in a clear and hot Aegean sky, was the beginning of my love affair with warm places where palm trees grow naturally.
My mother could never be objective about those years in Florida and my father had probably just learned to keep his mouth shut. I suppose the loss of Florida and all it represented, lingered deep in his psyche. It’s one of those many things I wish I could ask my father to elaborate on if he were with me today. I’ll never really know.
Over the years my Dad would return to Florida as often as he could—sometimes with me, other times with my brother. Once, all four of us went by train and took a three day cruise to the Bahamas. On the years I went with him, he would bring me ‘round to the train station where he’d worked and then to visit old friends. This was in the early 1960’s, a few years, really, after he’d left. We’d always travel during Easter vacation. Who wouldn’t want to get out at that time of year, especially after a long, monstrous winter. I wonder what regrets he had and carried home from those springs journeys. I’ll never know.
Florida with my father in those day was wonderful. That’s almost fifty years ago. It was in Florida that I saw my first McDonald’s. One million hamburgers sold the sign would read. Today it’s 97 billion. We’d go to iconic Florida tourist attractions…attractions like Cypress Gardens and Sarasota Jungle Gardens. We’d stop at road side stands that sold oranges and Florida kitch. Live, baby crocodiles cost a dollar. He never let me buy one, but each year I did by a small palm tree. Once he took me deep sea fishing and I remember sitting in the front of the boat marveling at the dolphins swimming out with us. Another time we rode the Goodyear Blimp in Miami.
Only once did my mother come. 1964. He still worked part time for the D & H Railroad and he’d use his annual free pass to head south. How exciting it was to sleep in a Pullman Car and wake up the second morning in the South.
Years passed, and more compromises were made and in 1977, the winter after my parents sold their telephone answering service, they returned to Florida for four months. For the first year or two they rented a place at Venice Isles in Venice, but in 1981 they actually bought their own mobile home—this time at the Buckingham Club in Sarasota. They lived there five months of the year until 1990 when Dad’s cancer returned them home full time.
My Dad’s birthday was January 2nd. Forget cake and ice cream. The only thing he wanted in the way of a gift was to get out of town. Dialogue about this departure, if once could call it dialogue, started sometime around Labor Day and it would just escalate until Christmas. My Dad would have left in October, along with his sister Katherine; my mother would have stayed home the entire winter. More compromises.
This went on for years, in one form or another. Each April I’d fly down, spend too much time at the beach, essentially do as little as possible. In March 1986 I was living in Albany working on my MLS. I took the train down and wrote my Master’s thesis longhand in that 24 hour period. During the week I was there, I typed it up. My time wasn’t always non-productive.
One of the things I never did, and one of the few regrets I have in my life, is never saying to my Dad…”Take me to Lakeland, show me around the places we used to live.” It was only after he died that I realized what I’d lost. If we could do it now, here are a few of the questions I’d ask: “Where exactly was that first mobile home? Where was the school where I started Kindergarten? Where did you work? And, most important, how did you feel when you left all this behind?
My parents finally did get out of the tin can and into a proper house--on Lakeview Street in Lakeland, Florida. For years after my Dad died, I asked my mother if she knew the address. “No,” she’d tell me. And she meant it.
But then in 2000, shortly before bringing her back to Sarasota for ear surgery, she handed me an address. This was it. I Map Quested it and, with her and my Uncle Jim in the car, we found it. It was a small, concrete stucco ranch, shade tree in front/car port on the right, on a quiet street of low end homes.
Well…I was excited. “Is this it?” I asked her.
“I don’t know.”
“C’mon, get out of the car and look around. Work with me.”
She refused. For whatever reason, whether she had blocked out the memory or simply refused, she wouldn’t budge. This was the scene of her personal holocaust and, I suppose, she’d blocked out those years to the best of her ability, compartmentalizing it in some dark recess of her mind.
I took lots of photos, walked around with my uncle and even spoke to a neighbor. But in the end I knew nothing more than I did when we’d driven down the street an hour earlier.
Eleven years later I found myself back in the area and could not resist a revisit.
I tracked down the street, and the house. I parked the car and went back in time. If I had to, I could draw a floor plan of that small house. Bedrooms on the left, small living/dining room on the right and a kitchen that opened up to the back yard. The house had just been built and maybe they bought it new. I don’t know. But I do know that we had a dog and that there were small fruit trees in the house. I was no more than five, but it’s still a clear memory.
One of the neighbors, this warm October day, who lived nearby was curious who I was. I was, after all, a stranger to the neighborhood and it was just normal to ask what I was looking forward. She told me her grandfather had built the home in 1955. But I disagreed and told her my parents had owned the home earlier than that. “It’s just the date he remembered,” she said. “He was an old man when he died in 1998.”
I was satisfied. It will be fun at a later date to look back at the photos my mother so carefully chronicled. Happy memories for me, but the questions I would ask if I had the opportunity.
It was time to move on. It was midday and the sun was mercilessly hot and I wasn’t sorry to get back into my air conditioned car. The luxuries we have that just did not exist 60 years ago. Perhaps with proper a/c things would have been different.
But I doubt it.
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