Chapter 16 - feb 2010 - west palm beach (trip 2)

©2011 Tom Weathers

My last stop on the Florida trip was to see Joe Gettys, who migrated to West Palm Beach from the Center of the Known Universe more than 50 years ago.

Asides

My sister and I followed my father to West Palm Beach in the summer of 1956, after my mother died the previous Christmas (my father went down in the Spring). This is what I wrote in The Life and Times of Professor Ennui Pidawee about arriving in West Palm Beach:

...The first thing I noticed when getting off the bus where my 12-year-old sister and I had spent the last 20 hours in relative silence was how bright things seemed. The terminal, an ornate Mediterranean-style structure not far from the West Palm Beach yacht basin glowed white hot. It was as if my pupils had been dilated. Everything seemed sharp, like a photograph with too much contrast.

We moved back to Shelby in 1959, the day that Joe moved down from Shelby. The last time I visited (before this trip) was in August of 1965 when Brenda and I ventured out of Shelby in our black, un-air conditioned MG 1100 sedan. We stayed one day. The trip back took 18 hours. (The car was slow.) I wrote in an earlier post about that.

Pictures

Joe who lived up the street from me in Shelby when we were children. The day that I left West Palm Beach he moved and has now been there almost forever. He worked for Pratt and Whitney testing jet engines. I always refer to him as the "rocket scientist" which is pretty close to the truth.


Joe and Nancy on our way out to eat.


The building at the back of the house on the right was Joe's first apartment in West Palm Beach. This is where Bill H, Coleman, Frank and I descended in 1961 in Frank's Fiat 1100 sedan - where I borrowed Joe's 57 Corvette to go out with a dusky Greek girl named Dodson Aphrodite. The next week, back in Shelby, I called Brenda and this time managed to work up enough courage to stay on the phone.


Old Palm Beach High building where I graduated in 1957. It is a locale for dreams that overlap reality.


Princess - the 19-year old cat who only drinks running water, which I provided at 5:30 in the morning.