Remembering
1954
Agnes
Currie, my 8th grade enthusiastic English teacher,
prompted me to read two classic books by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
depicting northern Florida's untamed and isolated frontier. The
Yearling and Cross Creek were
unforgettable books and left me anxious to read them again.
Less
than twenty years later I landed in St. Augustine, Florida, hometown
to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. In St. Augustine I met people that
could have been characters in her books.
Jane
and I first got to know George Tappin and his wife Mary in 1972, our
first winter in St. Augustine.
Captain
George was an easy going southern gentleman.
George’s
background of Dutch ancestry goes back to his father, a ship’s
captain that emigrated up to North Florida from Barbados before the
Flagler era when North Florida was still a wild unsettled frontier.
George’s
father ran his own freight riverboat along the St. Johns River
connecting the isolated outback settlements when river travel was the
only means of transportation up and down the St. Johns River to
Jacksonville.
George
told us that his father’s riverboat had a loose schedule and would
pull into shore along the wild cypress swamp lined shores anywhere.
It
was customary for his customers in those days to place a flag on a
pole along the shore to signal the freight boat to pull in.
The
freight consisted of cattle, lumber, turpentine, and passengers.
Anything going to town or headed back up river was loaded and
transported.
Roads
in those days in North Florida were almost nonexistent with only
horse trails through the tall pine forests and dark cypress swamps.
The up-bound and down-bound freight boat was of vital importance to
these remote otherwise isolated outposts.
George’s
mother, also of Dutch ancestry, came down to North Florida, but was
from Maine.
These
people did not come to North Florida for the social life. They
settled in a very remote nearly inaccessible region where neighbors
were not neighborly and getting to town was either by river
ferryboat, or a tedious horseback ride through pine forests and
cypress swamps filled with hordes of hungry mosquitoes, poisonous
snakes, and aggressive alligators.
The
Tappin family all lived in a log and ship-lap sided cabin nestled
away in a stand of ancient orange trees.
Their
isolated backwoods home was already an old house when they moved in.
 |
| This is the humble backwoods home where George Tappin was born and grew up. The house was almost 150 years old when I took this photo back in the 1980s. |
At
the time when the Tappin family moved into this area it was also at
the same time and place in back country North Florida where Marjorie
Kinnan Rawlings was inspired and wrote her best-selling books: The
Yearling and Cross Creek. These hauntingly memorable books
left a lasting impression on me. When I was in the eighth grade and
reading those epic tales of the wild North Florida existence, little
did I ever know that in the course of my life I would soon enter that
strange backwoods world and meet people much as they were depicted in
my reading as a youth.
Many
evenings, over the course of years, Jane and I listened eagerly to
George’s fascinating stories.
I
have a fond mental image of George rolling his eyes back while he
would peer out of our anchored vessel at an approaching storm and
exclaim, “Oh Lordie, it’s blacker than smut.”
Captain
George, in a few words and with descriptive gestures, could tell a
captivating story picturesquely describing the outback of rustic
rural North Florida in his youthful years when the place was
overflowing with no-count rogues and social misfits. One such rogue
was his friend known only as Sullivan.
Sullivan
and his family had settled far out in the everglades of southern
Florida near to Lake Okeechobee. In those days there was no
communication with the outside world, and the only access to the area
was by bateau through the serpent swarming swamp lands surrounding
Florida’s not yet drained expansive everglades.
George
told of when his friend Sullivan and Sullivan’s family were all
trapped by a killer hurricane that they had no idea was coming. The
hurricane totally flooded the entire area around Lake Okeechobee.
There was no land in sight anywhere in this forlorn watery world.
All
of the trees had been blown down flat by the savage storm’s wind,
and young Sullivan courageously clung for his life to what remained
of their tiny shanty home. He lived in the rafters and then on the
roof-top for days while the flood waters rose higher and higher. He
said that he had to fend off huge alligators and aggressive poisonous
water moccasins.
Young
Sullivan was the only survivor of his entire family.
Jane
and I later met this rugged survivor who still resided in Mandarin,
had a 65-foot shrimp trawler and also a fleet of school buses that he
leased to the local school district.
Growing
up in North Florida in the 1920s, financial opportunities didn’t
exactly abound. George, being the enterprising soul that he was,
figured out a way to generate some cash flow.
Boot-leg
booze was in big demand during the prohibition days. George did what
he considered to be the only natural thing to do and stepped in to
fill that demand. Moonshine distillation made for a profitable
business. George fed his family and bought himself a big fancy long
automobile. By and by George did get busted and went to jail.
George
told the judge that he was just doing his best to feed his hungry
family.
George
said that in those days the bail bondsmen were the ones that turned
in the bootleggers, and then the bondsmen would sell the jailed
bootleggers the bail bond to get them out of jail; a business
merry-go-round.
The
judge took mercy on poor George and let him go with a warning and
small fine. It was true that George was feeding his family, and he
continued to do so throughout the rest his life.
In
the 1930s George opened and ran a small gasoline station and general
store in Mandarin at the time when the first roads were being cut
into the back country.
George
had an endless collection of strange and interesting tales to tell.
George
told us of a customer that came in to fill up with gas and had some
long cane fishing poles tied to the side of his car. When the man
bent over to fill his gas tank, a hook from one of the poles snatched
the vein in the man’s neck. George maintained that the man was
stone dead in less than two minutes.
George’s
countless stories captivated Jane and I night after night, and now I
only wish that we had recorded and compiled more of those unique
experiences that made up the life of a this very rare one-of-a-kind
individual.
Here
are a few quotes from Captain George:
“If
you want to commit murder, you need to do it in St. John’s County.
If you do it somewhere else; you at least need to drag the body
there.”
“You
will never catch a thief stealing a plow.”
“Women
got the first 30 years of my life, and GM got the rest.”
“I
want a big house, long car, and a young wife.”
George’s
second wife Mary was known as, “pistol packing Mary. She walked
like a man, talked like a man, and she dressed like a man in her bib
overalls and baseball cap. Mary was one tough lady and held the purse
strings tighter than tight. Yes, she really did pack a pocket pistol
and always kept it ready for action.
I
can remember riding down the highway with Mary along with her
constant companion, her little dog Bimbo.
If
Mary happened to spot an empty Coke bottle discarded by the side of
the road, she would pull over, stop her pickup truck and have whoever
was riding along with her run back to fetch the bottle. She could
turn it in for its five-cent deposit. Mary never let a nickel slip
by.
One
day George, after a long day of fishing offshore by himself aboard
their 55-foot shrimp trawler Terry, asked for some money to go
buy a pack of cigarettes. Mary gave him a dollar bill. When George
returned to the boat with his cigarettes Mary asked for the change,
and that might have been one of the last straws of their marriage.
Mary
had refused to go out fishing in the ocean with George after some
hair-raising incident.
This
left George in a dangerous position alone on the boat and also made
the work load nearly impossible for one person to handle.
George
was as powerful a person as I have ever met and as able a boat
handler as there ever was but out to sea unexpected things happen
that can overpower any human effort no matter how powerful the
person, and George knew it!
We
were amazed at what came after his divorce from Mary. Something very
strange happened to Captain George’s very traditional, no nonsense,
hard working shrimp trawler Terry.
We
couldn’t believe our eyes when we recognized the profile of the
Terry coming up the bay. The old shrimp trawler Terry
had a new flamboyant coat of paint that was applied in a patchwork
pattern with so many different blazingly bright colors halter-skelter
that a pattern of symmetry could not be discerned. Somebody was
definitely making a statement!
Surely
our conservative old friend Captain George Tappin couldn’t be at
the helm, but there was his boat bold as brass coming down the river
on its way out to fish offshore.
Then
with my binoculars I noticed that Captain George had a sizable crew,
and they were all women.
It
was impossible to believe that George had actually gone out and hired
himself an all girl crew. This went far beyond just making a liberal
groundbreaking statement in an industry that over the centuries had
always been the sacred bastion and last frontier of the men’s
world.
What
had happened?
Had
our dear old friend George actually stepped over that taboo line from
arch-conservatism?
Was
he spearheading some kind of new revolutionary free-spirited, free
thinking movement?
What
else could it be?
The
girls took over George and his shrimp boat Terry. First it was
the paint job. Unique unto itself, never before had such a spectacle
ever presented itself in little old St. Augustine and boldly gone out
to sea.
George
was out of his conservative closet!
George
was flying high and having the time of his life. He had taken his
pent-up life’s frustrations and boldly flushed them down the
proverbial toilet all at once. The shit of his life was gone, the air
was clean, and now George breathed better. Captain George and his all
girl crew even took a vacation fling trip over to the Bahamas Islands
on board a cruise ship, living it up like the rich and famous.
We
thought that this must be George’s mid-life crisis or a second
childhood, but then we weren’t so sure that he ever had a first
childhood growing up as he did in the wilderness of North Florida.
This
was no small thing for little St. Augustine, and the whole town took
notice.
The
weekend edition of the St. Augustine Record newspaper
published a special feature about Captain George. The headline read:
“That Shrimper Is My Wife” Boat Captain Enlists All Female Crew.
Record
journalist Susan Love wrote:
“Going
against the old seafaring adage that woman on ships are bad luck, a
St. Augustine based shrimp boat has taken on an all female crew.
Capt.
George Tappin, a shrimping captain of more than 40 years has hired on
three women to work his shrimper “Terry’ with him.
Patsy
Zittrauer, 20, has been working the longest of the three. She had so
much fun she recruited her sister, Pam McConchie, 22, and her
sister-in-law Pam Zittrauer, 22, to work the boat with her.
It
all started three months ago…George hired her on as crew along with
a regular hand...The job is a sharp contrast to those they have held
previously... The women are a real oddity to the shrimp harvesting
industry…“Terry” and her crew start out each morning at
daylight and return each evening at 6… It is interesting to note
that before becoming members of the “Terry” crew none of the
women had been out on the ocean in a boat.
George
eventually had his fun fling, and the girls that lit up his life
moved on.
It
must have been George’s destiny to wind up with an eccentric
headstrong woman because in his next encounter he connected up with
another strong willed lady that had gained a fierce reputation of
driving out unwanted neighbors by dynamiting their homes.
George
moved in with this lady at her Porpoise Point home and bought her
three freezers to hold the catch that he landed from his hard earned
efforts aboard his fishing trawler Terry.
This
was the same old type of situation over again and was not going to
work out. In spite of the fact that George’s new woman had found a
good market for the catch and was getting top dollar, the end result
was exactly the same. George was again working hard and making lots
of money, but when the cash was counted out someone else was spending
all his loot.
George
next started dating Ruby Weaver, the widow of one of his old
shrimping buddies, Captain Weaver, from Fernandina Beach.
George
had respected Captain Weaver for his incredible physical strength.
George loved to relate how Captain Weaver could snatch up with ice
tongs a 500 pound block of ice in each hand and then carry them off
to the ice hold of his shrimp trawler. Captain George used to say,
“He was much a man!”
A
couple of months went by with the courtship of Ruby Weaver. Then one
day George showed up at our house with Ruby’s daughter Esther and
no Ruby.
Esther
smugly stated to us that she had stolen George away from her very own
mother.
So
it was, and this was going to be Captain George’s new woman.
I
can say one thing about Esther and that is that she did indeed
actually pull her own weight aboard George’s shrimp trawler Terry.
That was more than George had ever gotten out of any of his previous
wives.
“I
want a big house, long car, and a young woman.”
Those
were George’s own words, and he was on his way to fulfilling them.
He
had the young wife, he traded cars like most people changed clothes,
and all he was lacking was his big house.
 |
| George Tappin’s shrimp boat, Terry, docked in St. Augustine, Florida, at Marine Supply and Oil Company on the San Sebastian River. |
George lived with Esther in a shambles of a run down house trailer. George just didn’t really care too much about such things.
He
felt success and was in seventh heaven in his long car with his young
wife.
George
was in his second childhood with Esther, and Esther was smugly happy
with her man. They were having a lark and even made some road trips
to visit old friends.
One
trip in particular was nothing short of an over-the-road nightmare.
They
set out driving up to North Carolina to visit their shrimping friends
Mack and Audrey McLeod, the previous owners of our shrimp trawler
Secotan, which Jane and I later purchased in partnership with
George.
When
we heard their story of their three day randomly rambling road trip,
we were totally at a loss for comment.
George
and Esther never did find their friends and spent the entire three
day trip driving up one freeway and down the next because neither
George nor Esther could read the map.
George
was happy just driving and Esther didn’t ever worry much about
anything. Eventually Esther recognized some familiar landmarks and
thus got them back to North Florida where they recognized more
landmarks and knew they were close to home.
I
am amazed when I see adults like these two with such limited
knowledge going through life and doing all of the things that they do
just by their instincts that most often do see them through many a
brush with catastrophe.
A
good example of this was Captain George’s boat handling abilities
that he had acquired over a lifetime of accumulated trial and error
observations, and instinctive and deductive interpretation.
Captain
George knew the weather patterns better than the NOAA forecasters,
his ear was tuned to the engine’s health by its arrhythmic
heartbeat, and he could diagnose its fitness with uncanny precision.
He knew the rhythms of the sea and the movements of its creatures and
navigated the maritime waters day or night by some type of built into
his head computer. This was his life, and he had the instincts and
knowledge that he needed to survive.
One
of the first thoughts we had when Jane and I visited the Tappin
family home place in remote Mandarin was that anybody that would go
to the extremes that this family did to be out of the mainstream of
society must be a little bit crazy or just bonafide social misfits or
both.
When
we got to know this family a little better our suspicions were proven
correct. They were not just a little bit crazy, real insanity was
well established in the family.
Our
friend Captain George was by far the sanest one of the entire group,
and after I get done telling you some of his antics here in this
story you will have a good perspective of a family removed from the
mainstream.
A
good place to start is with George’s maternal grandfather who was a
street cleaner and garbage collector in St. Augustine. His father,
George’s maternal great grandfather had been a sea captain of Dutch
descent from Maine, and how and why he wound up in the outback of
North Florida was unclear.
Here
is where a major event that occurred in the Tappin family history
began.
According
to George, George’s maternal (the garbage collector) grandfather
and George’s father (the Dutch sea captain from Barbados and St.
John’s River freight boat owner), got into a heated argument that
escalated into an armed shooting match.
George’s
pregnant mother stepped into the fracas and attempted to break up the
dispute.
When
the gun discharged, George’s pregnant mother took the bullet in her
belly while carrying her baby Cecil. Baby Cecil lived, but the family
thereafter blamed Cecil’s erratic mental state and craziness on
that shooting incident.
This
story seems as though it could have easily been a chapter out of one
of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings classic books. The Tappin family and
their fight for survival seemed to have been the model for the
Rawlings books.
George’s
beautiful little sister had been abducted and raped when she was a
teenager by some passing strangers who were never apprehended.
These
disgusting low-life’s left George’s poor little sister a cowering
frightened recluse. She was as timid as a wild deer and would
silently run off, slipping away from all strangers to hide, cowering
and trembling, in a fetal position. She never left the homestead and
was haunted by this event her entire life.
A
half sister of George’s escaped the area to marry a rich farmer
from North Dakota who was awash in money gleaned from his oil wells.
She was however caught in a mental web of her own making.
Pleasant,
good-natured and attractive, she fell into a radical fanatical
religious cult group and subsequently built her own recluse escape
from reality with that cranky cult.
George’s
younger brother Cecil was not good looking, motivated, talented, or
intelligent, but possessed an easy going attitude that allowed him to
slip through life without any aspirations. He was content as long as
he had enough cash to scrape along with and buy a few cigarettes.
Cecil rarely left the family homestead or sought out a wife. Nothing
much inspired easy going Cecil.
George’s
mother, on the other hand, was a special case. She spent her simple
life isolated in the backwoods of North Florida where survival was a
hardscrabble existence.
Formal
education was non-existent, and the neighbors were distant,
distrusted, and disliked. Mrs. Tappin was trapped in the humblest of
circumstances. In her younger years a trip to the nearest town,
Jacksonville, was only possible by boat on the St. Johns River, which
was lined with deep dark cypress swamps and teaming with alligators
and aggressive water moccasins. She was trapped with no place to
venture even in the full light of day.
George’s
mother was his father’s second wife, the first wife died. When
George’s father’s first wife died, he needed someone to take care
of the kids—there was no courtship only a deal concocted with her
father.
 |
| This photo was taken in 1980s at the Tappin family homestead in Mandarin, Florida. On the left is my wife Jane and to the right is George’s mother, Mrs. Tappin. |
The
family was the basic unit where even the youngest were required to do
as much as physically possible, pulling their weight and contributing
their efforts. Fun and games never entered into their daily struggle
for survival where their meager marginal existence was their only lot
in life.
One
day George arrived at our home in St. Augustine with fear in his
eyes. He was visibly shaken by something dreadful.
This
was a thing that Jane and I had never before witnessed in our
easygoing self-assured old friend George.
George
proceeded to nervously relate this bizarre sequence of events that
led him to his state of anxiety.
This
episode took place in the mid-1980s. With pleading eyes George came
to us and sought out our help.
This
is not something that independent minded George would easily do, only
as a last resort of desperation.
First,
George rattled by his insurmountable problem went to the police for
assistance. They listened to his story and told him that this was
none of their business. They could only respond if an actual assault
or murder took place.
George’s
family and home life laid the foundation for his instinctive sense of
survival. All of George’s family eagerly plotted their own agenda
to commandeer the family homestead, which now was worth a small
fortune as Mandarin was developing around them.
This
rivalry took on a life of its own when George’s mother concocted a
devious scheme to get rid of George, and she didn’t like Esther
either.
First
she conspired with her son Cecil to actually do the dirty deed of
dispatching his brother George promising Cecil that she would testify
that the murder of George was just an act of self defense.
This
was serious business but Cecil couldn’t bring himself to do it, and
then he confided in his big brother George.
George
knew the determination of his old twisted minded mother and if she
couldn’t get Cecil to do the killing she would use Cecil’s gun to
kill George herself, then hang the blame on Cecil and get rid of them
both at the same time.
Jane
and I had known this clan a long time, and when George, the toughest
man we knew was stricken with terror, we knew it was time to take
this situation seriously.
These
people lived their entire lives violently without batting an eye.
They summarily dispatched anything that interfered in any way with
their existence.
The
end result to this episode finally came when the family jointly sold
all of their land to a developer with promises of a life estate where
they could remain on the land as long as they lived.
Cecil
took his money and moved into a nursing home, losing his life estate
in the land first.
George
took his money and moved his house trailer over to his half sister’s
place and also lost his life estate in the land.
George’s
mother remained on the land in her ancient tumbling down log house
along with George’s poor little sister whose custody was ultimately
turned over to George’s niece.
(This
niece had a record of nursing indigent older folks with assets that
were at death’s door. After willing their estates over to the
niece, they would soon pass away.)
In
any event, George’s old mother soon passed away, and lo and behold,
the niece wound up with the inheritance and stayed on with the life
estate. Ironically the niece outlasted all of them.
 |
| George Tappin in the wheelhouse of his shrimp trawler Terry in 1973. |
George and His Paint Story
The
biggest in the business and also the standard of the industry in
marine paint was International Paint. They had their own distribution
system utilizing their own trucks and drivers, but their inventory
control back in those years was less than chancy at best.
It
turned out that International Paint’s truck driver for North
Florida and South Georgia was looking for a little extra cash and ran
into our friend George Tappin.
That
truck driver made a proposal to George that sounded like a golden
opportunity.
The
truck driver sold George some of the most expensive marine
anti-fouling boat bottom paint for a ridiculously low price because
the cans were dented, and the driver maintained that he couldn’t
bring them back to the plant in that condition and would have to
dispose of them on his own. So, by selling them to our friend George
everybody would be happy. George could make a few extra bucks, and,
of course, the driver that wouldn’t have to drag the dented cans
off and dispose of them by himself.
Soon
our friend George began developing a route for his regular paint
customers and business rapidly began to boom.
George
even bought the biggest and longest Cadillac available, like the ones
used by drug runners with a special air suspension ride that could
easily be adjusted by just the touch of a button for excessive loads
to transport his dented cans of paint.
George’s
long car had every button and doodad that could possibly have been
bolted on to an automobile, and George was as happy as a little kid
with a new toy. Remember what George always used to say,
“Women
got the first 30 years of my life, and GM got the rest.”
“I
want a big house, long car, and a young wife.”
George’s
business was good; he was happy, and he was prosperous.
Old
Captain George knew every shrimper and boatyard on the southeast
coast of the U.S. Loading his “big car” beyond its limit, George
just mashed the button and flipped a lever and in seconds the sagging
back bumper of his long automobile was no longer dragging the ground
but was up like magic and perfectly level.
George
now had a truck load of concealed merchandise loaded in the trunk of
his leveled out long automobile and could drive past the
Florida/Georgia weight station with confidential ease and without
stopping for inspection.
Soon
George’s business developed into a high cash flow industry.
One
of George’s best paint customers was a small fish camp outside of
Jacksonville, Florida, on the St. John’s River near Mayport and the
ocean inlet.
This
quiet little out of the way fish camp turned out to be a front for
one of North Florida’s drug dealers, and the Feds had it under
their strict surveillance.
The
owners of the fish camp were there to supply their loyal customers
with whatever they wanted and desired.
One
day when George made another of his frequent stops at the fish camp
to deliver a load of his dubious paint that now no longer came in
dented cans, he decided to buy several pounds of fresh mullet from
the fish camp.
George
had been feeding his whole family since his youthful years as a
bootlegger so it was only natural that he would bring home to his 95
year old mother fresh fish, which she loved.
Wrapped
up in newspaper, his five pounds of fish and ice made a sizable
armload.
When
George stepped outside the quiet little fish camp he was instantly
apprehended, hand-cuffed, and whisked away to jail with no
explanations.
George
was guilty by association period and sent off to the slammer where he
was incarcerated in the same cell with the “The Outlaws” motor
cycle gang.
George
was innocently mystified by these doings and his suspicions began to
mount about all of that paint that was now arriving in cans without
dents.
The
cops thought for sure that George was a drug king-pin dealing in dope
and was one of the drug dealers; this is why they had the fish camp
staked out. George told the judge that he was just selling paint and
explained the story of the paint.
George
had his day in court, still astonished, amazed and shaken by the turn
of events.
The
judge asked George if he had ever been arrested before and naive
George then told him of his bootleg business back in the 1920s and of
the revenuers busting up his still while he was trying to feed his
family.
After
George told his paint story, it was discovered the truck driver was
stealing the paint. The law went after the truck driver. George was
free to go, but he was out of the paint business then and there.
Quite
ironically a short time later while George was driving his big
Cadillac down auto-row in Jacksonville, Florida, where he was well
liked and well known by all of the auto salesmen, the strangest thing
happened to him.
The
drive shaft decoupled on George’s Cadillac at the forward end. It
dropped down on the road and dug into the pavement and then
catapulted George and his big Cadillac end over end directly in front
of one of those friendly auto dealers.
The
automobile salesmen couldn’t believe their good luck, and George
went home that day with another new “long car.” The salesmen just
loved George, and George just loved their attention, and they all
were happy.
George’s
days of being a shrimp boat captain were over, due to his age. He
took a job being a night watchman until he was struck down by cancer
a few years later.
George
never was a religious man in any way, but when he was dying the
preachers swooped down on him like so many hungry vultures to pick
his bones, and poor George was a captive audience.
In
painful submission seeing that the end was in sight poor old sickly
George finally capitulated in actions only and let the vulture
preachers lead him down to the river, shroud him in a white robe, and
do their mumbling.
As
George, who had been a devote non-believer all his life, told Jane
and me, “You never know, they could possibly be right?”
On
his deathbed he did get rid of one preacher when he gave that
preacher the keys to his “long car” and that was the last George
ever saw of that preacher man and his long car.
George
was one of the very best friends that Jane and I have ever had. He
was a fine gentleman of the most genuine kind and a truly trusted
friend.
The
last words George ever spoke to me while he lay on his death bed
were, “John, I would give anything if only I could just walk out
that door.”
Note related post: https://bingsbuzz.blogspot.com/search?q=Marjorie+Kinnan
Note related post: https://bingsbuzz.blogspot.com/search?q=Marjorie+Kinnan
