Tropic Isles

We moved to Flour Bluff in 1957, when I was 10. It was a small fishing community - fishermen and Navy and some Exxon people. Tropic Isles was the beginning of suburbia there. We lived on canals dredged from the Laguna Madre. Actually, “canal” is a word that became popular in later years. We lived on the channel. Part of this Girlfriend Tour is to visit Marie, who lived across the channel from me, and Charlene, who was at the end of the channel.

We were country..beach. Nothing in the Bluff to do but what was on the base and on the water. So that's where I grew up – going to movies for 10 cents at NAS Corpus Christi and playing on the Laguna Madre. We didn't have bicycles; we had boats. I could tear down that little 2.5hp motor on the back of the S.S. Peanut blindfolded. We always had to repair those things floating in the middle of the ICW. I carried a prop key in my back pocket.

This was a great place for a childhood. In later summers we shrimped all night. We had cast nets and push nets and would just light up the docks behind our houses and catch those little guys ‘til our hands were bloody. We'd lie out - the neighbor kids all in a row on the grassy slopes, and watch the night skies for shooting stars and ponder our pre adolescent universe.

The next door neighbors were tarpon and shark fisherpeople. They'd sometimes take me along, and we'd stay on the end of Bob Hall pier for 3 or 4 days - up all night - sleep on the pier during the day. We'd just lie on the wooden planks, right in the middle of fish slime, and sleep. A quick run into the surf solved any sticky problems; smelly problems didn't bother us much (until we got to be about 14 and wanted to smell good).

When I was 8 or 9, my grandfather taught me to sleep on the water - to go out between the bars where the swells are smooth, float along and fall asleep. I could still do it the last I tried at age 45. Of course, one eventually drifts into the breaker zone.

In my teens, I had a 59 VW bug that would go down that beach farther than most 4WD's. At 14, I started scuba diving, but didn’t do it after leaving home at 18. Up until the mid-90s, I still snorkeled around some - got urchins and neat little critters from the jetties for the folks I was teaching in my Padre Island Ecology classes.

So.. a bit of my childhood. It was a good one. / mary – March, 1995/edited March 2010

The VW & Mary - Padre Island, 1962

Christmas, 1959 - Mary & the S.S. Peanut