Jim Wallace Sr., age 12, in front of the family home, 25 East Columbia St., with his dog Drake in 1928. younger brother’s Red Flyer wagon and tow him along the board-walk. Chiggers, a mongrel puppy, arrived one Christmas morning as a surprise for baby Bill, who was then about 4 years old. “We had the pup in a big cardboard box and brought it in when everybody was opening up their presents and told Bill that the big box was his. He started toward the box, and the puppy starting wagging his tail, and you could hear this thumping from inside the box, and Billy Boy drew back like he didn’t know what was going on. When they opened the thing up, there was this pup. Chiggers was forever jumping up and down on Billy, nipping at his front and raking him with his paws, until by spring, his little blue sailor’s coat was in tatters. It was a disgrace,” chuckles my grandfather. That same Christmas, my grand-father and his big brother, Arrington, got a 22 Remington pump. “We’d shoot everything around, but we never hit anything to speak of. I did kill a few ducks later on, and Drake retrieved them for me.” Summertime provided endless entertainment. My granddad and his friends threw each other off the tops of dunes and had mud fights in the abandoned bathhouse north of the Oceanic Hotel. At night, my grandfather took Drake to the beach to chase sand crabs. He carried a big carbide lantern to illuminate Drake’s antics as he caught crabs by their legs and tossed them into the air. “Those were happy days. We were just kids running around barefoot, shorts on, burnt up from the sun,” he says, smiling. Sunscreen was non-existent, as my grandfather’s weathered skin attests. “Back in those days, if you didn’t put something on, the sun would just cook ya,” he recalls. “So if you knew you’d be out for a couple hours or so, you’d put you some Vaseline on your face and shoulders. Well that was like basting a turkey!” My grandfather loved riding the surf. “None of us had any surfboards to speak of. Sometimes we’d find an abandoned ironing board, and we’d ride that. But I preferred to body surf. You’d go out and swim over the slough and get out to the sand bar where you could stand up then wait for the waves to come. In September, man, they’d get up four or five feet ... I mean, real nice. You’d stand back there and when you’d see it coming, you’d start swimming so that you could be moving as it came over the bar. A lot of people didn’t know how to pull their shoulders back and ride with their head thrust forward out of the wave. A lot of them just put their face down and their hands out in front of them. Anybody could do that. This other required some more dexterity, you might say. It was just a wonderful feeling to ride right up to the shore. You’d get through and your bathing suit would be full of sand, and you’d swim back out and try to get that out of your pants and then catch another one.” In those days, you could rent a bathing suit for the day. “If you came down from town with a family, say, of four or five chillun’, and you didn’t have a bathing suit, you could go to a bathhouse and rent one. They’d give you a little brass tag with your number on it. You’d put that on your wrist, see, put your clothes in a locker, put on that rented bathing suit, and go out in the surf for three or four hours, come back and take a shower,” explains my grandfather, his voice rising with excitement at the thought of the delight those folks must have experienced to trade the closed-in, stagnant heat of town for the cool ocean breezes off the Atlantic and the clear, blue-green water. Swimmers pose near Lumina Pavilion, circa 1920s. 40 WBM september 2014 “If you came down from town with a family, say, of four or five chillun’, and you didn’t have a bathing suit, you could go to a bathhouse and rent one." IMAGE COURTESY OF NEW HANOVER COUNTY LIBRARY IMAGE COURTESY OF JIM WALLACE SR.
2014-9
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