Family Fun

As I’ve already alluded to, I had a large extended family. Not having any brothers or sisters of my own, my cousins were a big part of my childhood. I really had two sets of cousins. My first cousins were my "almost" siblings. I had six of them: Neal (who was one year older than me), Susie (who was one year younger), and their little brother, Rusty; and then there was the younger set—Jeff, Steven, and Julie. When we were little, it seemed like we did everything together.

Then there were my second cousins. Most of them were older than me, and although I loved them, they were too old for us to really be playmates. However, they were always there, at church on Sundays, at every birthday party, every Christmas, every Easter, and every summer at the bay. It was a large, happy, boisterous family, and I loved being part of it. In my large extended family, it didn’t matter that I was an only child. Acceptance as one of the crowd was an automatic given. We were all loved and we all belonged.

What I remember most about my large extended family is the time we all spent together at “the bay house.” It was actually more a collection of bay houses that various members of the family owned in a tiny community called San Leon on the edge of Galveston Bay. For years, the entire family came and went during the summer months, vacationing together and having a marvelous time.

The first bay house I remember was called “the Big House.” I’m not sure which family members actually owned the Big House, but everyone was welcomed to stay there. I think I was about four years old the first time I really remember it. It was a long wooden frame building painted white with big wooden shutters. What impressed me the most about the Big House was that it was really just one great big room with what seemed like dozens of beds! A long row of double beds in old iron bedsteads with bumpy chenille bedspreads stretched the entire length of one side of that building. On the opposite side of the house there was a separate bathroom and then an open kitchen area with a large picnic-style table. That was it. The big wooden shutters were propped open to catch the cooling bay side breezes, a couple of big ol’ box fans to stir the air at night, and Lord only knows how many people all crammed up in there sleeping together every night.

But the bay house was just for sleeping. During the day, we spent almost all of our time swimming and fishing and crabbing on the Big Pier. There were no beaches at San Leon. There was, instead, a tall bulkhead that ran along the water’s edge and protected the land and houses perched along its shores. In order to reach the water, families built long, long piers that stretched way out from the top of the bulkhead over the shallow waves to finally descend down to the water. At the end of the pier’s long narrow walkway, the structure expanded into a large covered rectangle, much like a big porch, that sat high up out of the water (and away from the waves) on pilings. But there was always a lower deck or dock that stretched across the front of the pier for access to boating and for swimming.

I don’t know how many people that big ol’ pier could hold at one time, but I remember there were many, many families that used it. My dad, along with all of the uncles, shared the maintenance of that pier and all of their families used it.

We used to spend hours down on that pier. All of us kids were water rats and we all loved to swim. Even before we knew how to swim, we were out there in the water, bobbing around with our “inner tubes” on. Usually the water wasn’t really very deep, maybe four feet. As we grew older, we could “touch bottom” easily and the inner tubes came off. We played in that salty water for hours at a time, jumping off the pier to see who could make the biggest splash, dunking each other under the water, playing water games like “Marco Polo” and no doubt screaming our heads off.

Up and down the long walkway, the adults, usually the moms, were all busy crabbing for blue crabs. When the crabbing was good, we kids were often recruited to man the nets. Crabbing was so much fun! We would tie a long string with a big safety-pin type hook on the end of it to the edge of the walkway, usually right next to a barnacle-encrusted piling. Raw pieces of bony chicken that the moms had saved, usually either a neck or a back, were securely threaded onto the hooks and lowered into the water. Then the fun began.

We would run back and forth, up and down the pier, checking the lines for crabs. When there was a crab pulling and gnawing on that raw piece of chicken, you could feel it! First you would holler for somebody to “bring the net!” and then you would begin to pull the line up out of the water, inch by inch, holding your breath lest the crab get off. When you got the crab just to the surface of the water, your partner with the net would scoop the crab up, bait and all. And then both of you would try frantically to extract the hook without extracting the angry snapping crab from the tangled up net! Finally, when the hook was free, the crab would be dumped into a large galvanized washtub with a bit of salt water in it to be cleaned later that evening.

I can remember times when we caught so many crabs that they would literally climb over the backs of each other and escape the tub! Much screaming and running would then occur to try and capture the snapping, sideways-crawling crustaceans before they reached the edge of the pier and tumbled back into the water.

Cleaning the crabs in the evening was always an exciting and slightly dangerous occupation, and one that we children loved to watch. One of the adults would slip on a thick glove and using an ice pick, would make a hasty stab into the tub of crabs, spearing one of them in the back. Those pinching claws would be snapping madly and we would all scream in appreciation of the danger. Once skewered on the end of the ice pick, the crab would be held upside down and the claws could be twisted off. Thus rendered basically harmless, the crab would be passed on to another cleaner, assembly-line style, and the whole process started again.

Many times we sat down to a fresh-caught dinner of fried fish and crabs. I can still taste those fried blue crabs! They were so good. My Mommaw would batter them in buttermilk and flour and fry them up for us for supper. We might also have french fries or onion rings, sliced cantaloupe, fresh sliced tomatoes or cucumbers, and gallons of cold, sweet tea. Those were wonderful family dinners.

And of course there were boats. The older cousins all loved to water ski. I can remember as a little girl, being squeezed into sharing a seat with one or two other smallish cousins, and zooming around the bay in a big old wooden motor boat, bouncing over the waves: ka-woom, ka-woom, ka-woom. We would be pulling my older cousins around on skis and thrilling to every minute of the exciting ride.

Or sometimes we went sailing. But I’m talking about the old-timey kind of sailboat, one that was nothing much more than a wooden board with a sail perched atop of it. They were forever “tumping” over and throwing all of the sailors into the drink! Then the sailors had to climb up onto the rudder board and heave and pull to get the thing turned upright again, always accompanied by lots of screams and shouts of encouragement from the onlookers on the pier.

And then there were the jelly fish! We had encounters with all kinds of jelly fish down there at the bay. Most of these were of a common variety that were always around. Half-spherical in shape and about the size of a sand dollar, some were clear and veined with an iridescent blue; they were the "good" jellyfish because they didn't sting. Others were also clear, but with sizzling hot red veins; they DID sting. However we did also get the occasional man-o-war or other exotic variety of jellyfish. I remember one time my mother and I walked down to the pier and the water was filled with round PINK jellyfish which were covered in black polka dots. There were hundreds of them floating on the surface of the water. Needless to say, we did not go swimming that day!

One of our favorite occupations while we were waiting for the requisite hour of rest after lunch to pass was to take the crab net and swish it through the water. Invariably we would pull it up with one or more blobs of jelly fish hanging from its net. Oh, the horrible tortures we devised for those jellyfish! Sometimes we would stuff them into empty Coke bottles. Sometime we would pretend to be frying eggs and pour salt all over them. Other times we would just squish them into unrecognizable blobs. But don't feel too sorry for the poor jellyfish. We were all stung by them countless times over the years. The poor jellyfish definitely had their revenge!

Fishing was another favorite pastime at the bay. We would cast our lines rigged with big bobbing corks out from the pier and there was no telling what we might pull in. Mostly we caught mullets (which we used for cut bait as they were no good to eat) and a peculiar kind of fish we called a "croaker", so named because of the croaking sound it made once out of the water. They were delicious fried. But there were also salt water catfish and trout. Sometimes we would hook an alligator gar! The gars always seemed to move up into the bay in the late summer. Ferocious-looking (but probably harmless) we wouldn't go swimming while the gars were in residence.

But mostly the philosophy at the bay house was “live and let live.” Nobody minded the screaming kids, the roaring motorboats or the blaring radios. Adults drank ice cold bottles of dark brown beer from old washtubs filled with cracked ice. Kids drank gallons of Kool-Aid and bottles of ice-cold Coke or 7-Up. Picnic-style lunches were served on the pier with plenty of peanut butter-and-jelly or bologna sandwiches and Lays potato chips and cold dill pickles. And kids were made to sit on the edge of the pier and wait, kicking their feet impatiently, for one hour to pass after eating before it was “safe” for them to go swimming again.

(It was widely believed at that time that if you went swimming right after you ate a meal, you could get the cramps and drown. Our mothers may have been slightly inebriated from all the beer and sun, but nobody went swimming until that hour was up!)

Eventually several of the families in the Big House broke off and bought their own bay houses. Our own family bought a small blue frame house just one street over from the Big House. It, too, was a one-room house, but this time only shared by my grandparents, and my immediate family. I think it was originally built by my Uncle Frank. We only had three double beds and a couple of pull-out sleeper sofas, but it was all ours. There was a private bathroom with a big clawfoot tub and a small kitchen area separated from the living area by a corner bar. No air-conditioning, of course, but lots of old-fashioned hand-crank windows and a couple of fans made it quite comfortable.

We also had our own pier at the end of our street. It wasn’t as large as the Big Pier, but it was great fun. We kept that bay house until I was a teenager, at which point I guess we all must have lost interest in it. Or maybe a hurricane blew down the pier (again) and nobody wanted to build another one. Whatever the reason, that chapter in our lives came to a close, but I will always remember all of the good times we had in tiny San Leon at the bay house.