The Vanishing Fireflies

            

My fake firefly jar...

When I was a child, there were a lot of things about summers here in the tropics that made growing up in Palm Beach County spectacular. We spent days on the beach or boat. We built forts out of Brazilian pepper trees (don’t do this – they’ll make you itch). We rode our bikes across the village of North Palm Beach to the country club where we flung our sweaty bodies into the icy waters of the Olympic-size pool. We tromped barefoot through freshly-mowed grass and sat in damp bathing suits in the shade on the ground next to our parents who, also in damp bathing suits, relaxed in aluminum lawn chairs with nylon webbing. We sipped Coca Cola ® and ate watermelon while they drank ice-cold beer.

At dusk, we chased fireflies with big, glass mayonnaise jars—jar in one hand and metal lid with holes poked in it in the other. When we weren’t trying to catch them, we danced with swarms of fireflies in the backyard. Yes, danced. We were fairy princesses surrounded by flickering, flying candlelight. It was magical.

Recently, I realized the fireflies are gone. I haven’t seen them in a long time, perhaps decades. My children never got to dance in a cloud of light like I did. I went looking for answers and discovered that fireflies have disappeared from all of South Florida.

 Where did they go? Why did they leave?

There’s a wonderful website called www.firefly.org that has one reasonable, and very sad, explanation. They say that most species of fireflies are “found in field, forests and marshes. Their environment of choice is warm, humid and near standing water of some kind.” And there’s the problem. As South Florida has grown exponentially, a lot of those lovely “fields, forests and marshes” have been paved over in order to accommodate the hordes of people. The United States Census states that the estimated population of Florida in 2013 was 19,552,860. In 1969 when I was ten, it was reported to be a quarter of that, only 4,951,560. That amount of growth requires a lot of pavement.

Is there anywhere one can see fireflies in Florida at all? Yes, there is. Central Florida and locations north still have them. FloridaRambler.com suggests that Blue Springs State Park, about 30 miles north of Orlando, is reported to be a great place to spot them. It’s only a few short weeks in April, but they’re still swarming there. Best bet is to camp overnight or arrange to stay an hour after the park closes.

And for those of who might complain that I’m anti-development, don’t bother. I’m not. But I have always been in favor of balanced development. I’ve always thought the need of humankind need to be weighed against the needs of the environment and the wild animals that were here before us.

I’m not sure if there’s a way to re-create marshes and forests, but I hope there’s someone working on how to bring back the environment the fireflies need. 

            

It would be a shame if future generations of barefoot Florida children didn’t get the chance to dance in that magical flying candlelight.

(copyright 2014 Ruth Hartman Berge)

Halloween Past

     When my children were little, I got to pick the Halloween costumes. That's how my son ended up in tights as Peter Pan at age four.  Could be why he still is fearless when it comes to outrageous costuming.... Unfortunately for me and my inner child, they grew up and started demanding costumes of their own design.

     This picture is from a few years ago when they decided to go as Vikings in a salute to their Norwegian heritage. Their Grandpa Berge would have really enjoyed the costumes. The picture still makes me smile - even though neither one of them are wearing tights. This picture became our Christmas card that year. With the Norwegian words for Merry Christmas and this shot, my relatives were reassured that I was still somewhat off kilter.

     One of my favorite costumes over the years was the one my daughter chose when she was six years old.  She wanted to be a "Scary Waitress." I have no idea where she got the idea, but we went with the creative muse and picked over the racks at Goodwill for costume pieces. She ended up looking like a miniature TGI Friday's waitress (remember when they wore red and white striped shirts?) with a tray of unsavory plastic tidbits from the Walmart body part bins. By the end of the evening, I was carrying the tray. Her pillowcase had become too heavy thanks to the homeowner who ran out of candy and began handing out cans of soda to the few straggling trick or treaters.

     One of my favorite Halloweens was the first year we lived in St. Louis. There, you don't just knock on the door and yell, "Trick or treat!" In St. Louis, you have to have a riddle. If the homeowner doesn't answer correctly, you get the treat. While my niece was asking her riddle, my fourteen-month-old son marched in the door and was moving quickly through the house. She had to go retrieve him from their family room.

     Growing up, every October 31 in North Palm Beach was windy. (At least that's the way I remember it and I'm sticking to it.) Sometimes cool, sometimes hot, sometimes balmy--but always windy. Our pillowcases would bump against our legs as we ran from house to house, masks on top of our heads because they were too hot and hard to see through. Costumes and hair wind-blown, make up running due to humidity or heat, we raced through the three dead end streets in my neighborhood.  My cousin, Jack, our escort in the dark, made sure we were safe and not bullied out of our candy by older children or run over by a car driven by a frantic parent heading out to get more candy. I promised to share my haul with Jack because half of those answering the doors we knocked on said he was too old to be trick-or-treating. They weren't too impressed with our "escort" title. The bodyguard explanation didn't go over too well, either.

     When we got home, however, my children followed the same ritual my cousin, brother and I did. Sit on the floor, empty the pillow cases, sort and trade. Unfortunately, I checked over their candy the same as my parents checked over mine. Even in the halcyon days of 1960s Palm Beach County, there were warnings about cruel people who would mess with kids' candy. 

     We don't get trick-or-treaters in our neighborhood now. I miss seeing the little princesses, ghosts and cowboys and yes, I'd even welcome a scary waitress.

     Happy Halloween to you and yours, may all your treats be safe and yummy. And here's hoping your tights don't cut off your circulation by the end of the night.

   

The Haunted House of North Palm Beach

"Winter Club" posted on Looking Back blog.
Estimated taken in the late 1970s.

            The mansion appears to sit alone on the top of the hill, shrouded by huge banyan trees. Saplings fight their way up between cracks in the foundation. Vines grow up the once proud stucco walls and the broken windows gape at the street like the vacant eyes of someone who has seen too much of the harsh side of life. Two young girls cautiously make their way up the north staircase. They hear skittering sounds coming from the second floor and grab each other’s hands in fear, but they still slowly ascend the stairs. Reaching the second floor landing, they jump in fright as thunder booms and lightning flashes through what’s left of the windows creating jagged shadows and illuminating a huge stain on the floor.

            “This is where it happened,” one girl solemnly says. “This is where Sir Harry Oakes was murdered!” And the lightning flashes again.



Sir Harry Oakes
Photobucket



            This scenario was one played out in the minds of children growing up in North Palm Beach in the 60s and 70s. I can say that most of the children I knew were convinced the “Oakes Mansion” was haunted. Older children made sure the younger ones had heard. Trips to the North Palm Beach Country Club involved lots of peering at the second floor of the mansion just east of the pool to see if one could get a glimpse of the famous terrifying ghost of Sir Harry Oakes.

            The truth is that Sir Harry Oakes was in The Bahamas when he was brutally murdered in July, 1943, not in North Palm Beach. His son-in-law, Alfred de Marigny, was tried for the crime, but found innocent and the murder remains unsolved to this day. Speculation continues among mystery buffs and suspects include a reputed gangster as a possible culprit.

            As for the “Oakes Mansion,” its real name was “The Palm Beach Winter Club” and it wasn’t built by Oakes. Harry Kelsey started construction in 1925 at the instigation of Paris Singer who wanted a golf course for patrons of the hotel he was building on Singer Island. Kelsey hired Louis DePuyseger, a world-renowned French architect, to design a club house for the golf course he was building north of Kelsey City (Lake Park). DePuyseger didn’t disappoint. He designed a beautiful, Mediterranean-style club house of three stories with “gay orange and green awnings and old Cuban tile on the roof.” Palm Beach Post 03/06/1926.

Articles from the Palm Beach Post archives describe an incredibly elegant and sophisticated club complete with dining room. The basement held locker rooms and the first floor included lounges.  As the tale goes, Al Jolson once performed an impromptu concert in the men’s lounge which made him late for a scheduled performance further south. The third story had three bedrooms, although one article in the Palm Beach Post claimed it was twelve.

The grand opening of the Winter Club was on January 5, 1927. Celebrating went on for three days and used not less than three boatloads of smuggled liquor. The social elite of the day gathered, and names such as Vanderbilt, Phipps, Harriman, Woolworths and Basche were in attendance. The club opened to the public for the first time on January 9, 1927.

            After initial success, the 1928 hurricane season rolled in. The clubhouse suffered extensive damage in the devastating hurricane that year and had to be temporarily closed. About this time, Harry Kelsey had some financial difficulties of his own which were compounded by the hurricane and began selling off property. One of the properties sold was The Palm Beach Winter Club and the buyer was Sir Harry Oakes.

Oakes was an American who became a Canadian citizen, struck it rich in the gold mines of Canada and then, in an attempt to avoid Canadian taxes, became a British citizen. He was knighted by King George IV in 1939 after he donated a half million dollars to St. George’s Hospital in London.  Sir Harry stayed in the clubhouse sporadically and moved the western fairways of the golf course to the south side to accommodate his children’s horses and stables--a move some said seriously impacted the beauty of the course.

            After Sir Oakes’ murder, the property was sold by his Tesdam Corporation and eventually made its way to John D. MacArthur and then the Village of North Palm.  The library was located there in the 1960s and generations of children attended dance, gymnastics, art, pottery, and summer camp in its aging rooms.

            Unfortunately, you can’t drive by The Palm Beach Winter Club or “The Oakes Mansion” as it will always be known to the natives. Despite being named to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, it was demolished in 1984, after huge controversy and bitter public debate.  It had deteriorated to the point where repairs were deemed “too expensive” to undertake and an empty hill now sits at 951 U.S. Highway One.

            You can, however, sit on the stone steps that once led to the clubhouse from the east. On a calm night lit only by a full moon, if you turn and look at the grassy plateau where the mansion once stood, perhaps you’ll see the ghost of Sir Harry Oakes. Or maybe just hear spectral ice tinkling in ghostly glasses as men who played a good game of golf in 1927 relax in the lounge

The Joy of Terrazzo



Home, Clean Home blog



                My parents purchased our house in North Palm Beach when I was just shy of seven. Like most of the houses built by that particular builder in North Palm, we had beautiful terrazzo floors. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, terrazzo is a smooth, polished surface made with a lot of cement and sometimes bits and pieces of marble, quartz, granite or glass for little flecks of color all through it.  Terrazzo was originally a way to recycle bits and pieces of leftovers from other projects. Just picture a birthday cake someone went postal on and deluged with candy sprinkles in every color they could get. There was no cooler surface in the hot, humid days of Florida before air conditioning was everywhere. My pregnant mother, who was from California where there is nothing to compare to Florida humidity, often would just lie down on the terrazzo to try to cool off.

Google Maps

            Marge Hartman, my fun-loving mom, was one of those moms that kids just enjoyed being around because she has never forgotten the value of acting silly. A boon for a shy, tends-to-be-too-serious child like me. I've told her more than once that she could strike up a conversation with a rock and get it to answer her.  I actually brought friends home to play with her a lot. She had, and still has, quite the sense of humor. We went together to see “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure” and almost died spitting Diet Coke out of our noses when “Large Marge” hit the screen. She even let me run around barefoot and get dirty. Glorious!  As I had three older male cousins and was definitely the tomboy when I wasn’t sneaking a read under the covers with a flashlight after bedtime, the ability to get dirty was highly prized.

             My cousin Jack was around nine and his brother, Tom, a little bit older when we moved into the house and they were often over playing for an entire afternoon.  For a tomboy, they were the best of playmates. One of our favorite games involved the terrazzo, an old blanket, and my mother.

              She’d load the three of us onto the blanket and drag us all over that house. The slick, smooth surface of the terrazzo just begged for it. If it had a voice, it would have been whispering, "Pssst. You know you wanna. C'mon. Get the blanket." Our favorite ride of all was when she’d go to the end of the long hall and race down to the center of the house, spinning us in a wide, crazy circle in the near-empty living room. Needless to say, we clung to that blanket with white-knuckles. If we relaxed even a little bit, children’s bodies would go flying off and roll into drywall in every direction. No one ever got hurt and no dry wall was ever injured in the process, but I can remember laughing maniacally until I could hardly breathe. Now, that’s a fun day! We’d try to talk her into it every chance we got until the floor was finally carpeted. I’m sure my parents thought it was an improvement, but my cousins and I would have been happy if it had stayed naked terrazzo forever.

               I looked into getting terrazzo installed on the first floor of the little house I now live in because I had such wonderful memories of it. I also figured out I was pretty safe as my kids are grown and wouldn’t be begging for the blanket game. I was astounded at the cost. I really don’t think it could have possibly cost twenty to fifty dollars a square foot back in the early 1960s or it would never be lying underneath the carpets of thousands of homes throughout South Florida.  So, alas and alack, I didn’t do it and am living on plain white tile. Something worth saving up for though. Sigh.

Earman River

          In the early 1970s, my friends and I would borrow my little brother’s old red wagon and load it up with glass bottles we collected from the trash. The goal of collecting as many bottles as possible was to be able to walk to The Village Store on Prosperity Farms Road and turn them all in for recycling deposits. We could get a nickel for every bottle. After cashing in, we’d use our earnings to shop for glorious candy.

          We’d set off in the sticky sunshine to trudge about a half mile down two lane Prosperity Farms Road and over the Earman River Bridge to get to the store. Just as we’d get to the point of debating the wisdom of hiking in heat so heavy it was hard to breathe, we would finally reach the open garage doors of the store and walk across the hard-packed dirt floor into the shade. Proudly, we’d show our collection of bottles to the clerk who would count them and point silently to the back door. We were well recognized in The Village Store as careful bottle handlers and selective candy shoppers who knew exactly what was expected.

          After setting the bottles inside of the wooden crates stacked outside in organized chaos, and happily collecting our quarters and we’d shop with reckless abandon. Spending down to the last nickel, the debate would rage over Chick-o-stiks, bubble gum, candy cigarettes, and should we get some of those little wax bottles with the way-too-sweet syrup inside this time or not?  Adding a Coca-cola in a big glass bottle to share we’d go happily back out the door, carefully carrying our reward for being good recyclers in brown paper sacks. Taking turns dragging each other in the now empty wagon, we’d make our way back to the Earman River Bridge. There we’d stop and after pushing the wagon behind the bushes for safekeeping, carefully climb down the steep riverbank to the cement wall under the bridge and sit in the cool shade under the bridge, dangling our feet over the water where we could feast on all that sugar without our mothers looking over our shoulders making dire predictions of horrible future dentist visits. In front of us, the brackish water of the river would barely move, and every now and then a fish would appear as a murky shadow just below the surface like a marshmallow popping to the surface in a bowl of molasses.

          The Earman River and the bridge that crossed it at Prosperity Farms Road was a major part of the landscape in the southeastern part of the little Village of North Palm Beach. Boys would gather on the riverbanks to fish or if they were lucky, to chug up and down the river in little boats borrowed from their dads. Men on their way out to Lake Worth and the ocean to fish would wave to kids along the banks as they slowly made their way east, unless of course, the dad spotted his kids. Then it was, “Hey, get away from the river. I told you! Wait ‘till I get home!”

          When I was ten, I decided I was going to live under the bridge. Convinced in the way that only a drama queen-in-training can be, I was sure that I had been horribly mistreated and was totally unappreciated. So, late at night, maybe all of eight o’clock, I pushed out the screen of my big front bedroom window, crawled over the bushes and stomped off toward my new home under the bridge. As I marched down the street steaming about how totally unfair parents could be, bare feet slapping the pavement, the cool October wind filled up my thin cotton nightgown like an air balloon and lifted my hair as if playing with it.

          “I can live under the bridge and my friends can bring me food,” I thought. “That’ll teach my parents.” It was a great idea that got better and more elaborate in the details as I stormed toward the river.  Until I reached the corner of my street, that is. “Hey. It’s really dark.” I looked warily around. Something in the neighbor’s yard rattled loudly. Eyes wide, I tried peering into the darkness to see what was making that rattling sound. One more loud bang further down the street and I turned and raced back to the house, climbed back in the window and dove in the bed and under the covers.  There would be no living under the Earman River bridge anytime soon for me.

          Once, my cousin Jack raced toward the Earman River for salvation. He didn’t quite make it, though. It was a family tradition to grab whoever was close to you when they least suspected it and rub your knuckles on their scalp while screaming, “Noogie!” in their ear. Jack made the mistake of daring my dad to give him a noogie late one Saturday afternoon. I think his exact words may have been, “well, you can’t catch me, old man.” The two of them stood frozen looking at each other for a moment. Time seemed to expand and everything was perfectly still just like in the black and white westerns we watched on Sunday afternoons on television. The rest of the family stood on the sidelines at high noon in front of the saloon in an old western town as the gunslingers stared each other down. My dad made a slight move and everything exploded. Jack dashed across the yard and over the fence like he was jet-propelled. Even more surprising, my dad did the same. The rest of us turned to each other, mouths open and eyes wide.

          They didn’t return for a half hour. Both came back panting. Jack didn’t stop running until he reached the river thinking he could swim to safety. He hesitated before diving in and that’s where dad caught him and gave him the by then much deserved noogie.

          The water of the Earman River was always brackish and the dark brown color caused parents to spend a lot of time over the years warning us to stay away from it. I had no idea what was on the bottom and I doubt if any of my friends did either.  Boys would dare each other to swim from one side to the other, but I, along with the rest of my girlfriends, refused to get that close. I heard once that a shark had been sighted in the river which sent most of the kids I knew into a shark-hunting frenzy.   After weeks of campouts and daily meetings where binoculars were handed around along with a thermos or two of koolaid without sighting even the bare tip of a shark fin, we became highly suspicious. There were numerous discussions of the likelihood that anything other than a muck monster or an occasional mullet could live in that brown water. The discussions became hot debates that the shark story may or may not have been invented by a parent who had finally lost patience with his kids coming home reeking of the river. 

          The Earman River isn’t actually a river, though.  Natural rivers in Florida tend to meander peacefully and lazily back and forth as if they have all day to get from one point to another, like the Suwannee River in north Florida. The Earman is awfully straight, even though I never noticed.  Years after spending all those summer hours under the bridge and shark hunting along its banks, I finally learned the truth. The Earman River is actually a canal manmade in 1897 to help with drainage for the farms that were in the area way before North Palm Beach existed.  

         The cool bit of shade and concrete under the bridge was our oasis, a hideout. The hours spent lying on our backs munching on candy with the sound of the occasional car swooshing by overhead were filled with talk of what we were going to do and be.  One of the boys even grew up to play with sharks. It may have been his dad who started the rumor that kept us busy one entire summer.

Author's Note:  This is actually the short story that came out of the column written for Seabreeze Publications. You can find the condensed version at the following url:
http://www.seabreezepublications.com/Portals/0/eMag/1106/SouthernExposure/flash.html#/18/