Manhood can be defined in a lot of ways… first sexual experience, first great loss, first time fending for yourself.
The trip to Stone Harbor (SH) took 2 days, along the way we stopped in North Carolina, the home of inexpensive cigarettes at that time. My sister-in-law smoked, my older brother smoked, and I smoked, so we filled the trunk of the car with 19 cent per pack cigarettes, as many cartons as would fit. When we arrived, my sister-in-law met us at the front door and said that the house was running low on food and did we have any cigarettes, we said yes and showed her the trunk. The two of them went shopping while I rearranged my room upstairs the way I liked it. The first thing you do of any consequence when you arrive at the shore house it go to the beach to make sure it hasn’t changed and it felt the same on your feet, and so it did. I started walking toward the beaches where all the guys and girls hung out, around 109th street, and to my great surprise there they all were sunning themselves. They said hi and asked me how long I was going to be here, I said, ‘all summer’ with a big grin. There was also a new girl that was introduced by Maureen (one of the summer long regulars) as Sue, a friend from Philly. Maureen told me that the dances were starting next week and I’d better be there or they would come and get me. I said, ‘oh I wouldn’t miss the dances’, the God’s honest truth I was terrified, I couldn’t dance. Maureen lived next to my good friend Joe, and Maureen said that Joe told her that I would be going to Summer School with him this year, I said, ‘Ya, I took a little too much time off during the school year’. I said goodbye and headed back toward our street.
By the time I got home everyone was there, some newly purchased food was on the shelves. We all showed how much money each of us had left, and between the four of us it was less than $25.00. It was then explained that everyone needed to have a job, my brothers would be working at Hahn’s a restaurant and bar that was owned by a man my mother and father knew for years. He also had a similar establishment in Delray Beach, FL and many of the bartenders and staff worked in NJ in the summers and in FL in the winters. Hahn’s was the place to find all the parents during the day and at night. All the families that came to SH every year, either renting or owning, created a homogenous group. If we were looking for Mom she was either at the beach, with the group, or she was at the back bar in Hahn’s, with the group.
My sister-in-law worked at a bakery and started very early in the morning and had just started a few days earlier, my brothers worked in the kitchen at Hahn’s and started later in the day for the dinner crowd. It was time for me to get my first job and contribute, the next day I stopped at a few places but since I was in summer school and could start working each day until 12:30 or later, I got a lot of rejections, that was until I stopped at Elmer’s Service Station, a Sinclair station with a green dinosaur. I got hired on the spot for the evening shift. I pumped gas and made change, but it was a job. The best part of the Elmer’s job was money for the house, it was also the worst part for me, I got paid on Thursdays while everyone else got paid on Fridays. Why was that bad for me? I had a paycheck before anyone else did. Well let me explain, when I got my first paycheck, I had been working only 3 days so it was small, I was so proud, I was an adult contributing to the house, holding my first check in my hand as I entered the house to show everyone, I’m smiling and said I got paid, a day before anyone else did, my sister-in-law grabbed me by the wrist, turned me around, and walked me to the car saying, we’re going shopping. That paycheck was gone in 10 minutes. After a few weeks there was a routine, things were working, no one was going hungry (early on, mostly because the two working in the kitchen brought left-overs home from the restaurant).
I also got into a routine at Elmer’s, doing more and more stuff, mechanical assembly, oil changes, and my most ambitious try was during the boat parade at the yacht club, a guy drives in after everyone else had gone home and begged me to try to fix his gas tank, it was being used on his boat that was in the parade. Now I had seen how another guy at Elmer’s had repaired a gas tank before and thought I would give it a try. You empty all the gas from the tank and fill it with water, then try to braze the broken bronze connection with filler rod, I tried and the hole wouldn’t completely fill, I tried three more times with the same result. I told the guy it wasn’t working, but again he begged me to give it another try, and so I did. I figured that if I roll the tank on a different side, I might have better angle at it. Now, the thing that I didn’t remember is that all the lines going to the tank were still partially filled with gasoline. I rolled it, and went to heat it with my torch and waaoooof, the vapors ignited and luckily it made a small boom-woooof. That scared the hell of out me and I quite trying. When I showed up for work the next day, Elmer told me no more using the torch. Probably a good decision in retrospect.
After 4 weeks of working at Elmer’s I was starting to get bored and needed something with a challenge. Knowing that I couldn’t start until after noon and that the restaurant kitchen staff didn’t start until around 3:00 pm, I asked my brothers if there was any work at Hahn’s? They asked and the only thing was cleaning the floors under ‘Hot side’ (grilling and cooking area of the kitchen) before 3:00. I took the job in addition to Elmer’s, it was a greasy mess under the floor boards. Each day I had to remove the floor board grating to outside the kitchen, wash and degrease them, do the same to the floor in the kitchen, and then put everything back together. As time went on, if I got my job done early the chef would put me to work doing dinner prep… stuffing flounders with crab meat, shaping hamburgers, wrapping baked potatoes in aluminum foil, things like that. Eventually they offered me a full-time job working on hot side, dishing out vegetables and the baked potatoes. I quit Elmer’s and took the job at Hahn’s. Sometimes I’d get so involved in the flow of things in the kitchen that I’d forget to put the trays of potatoes in the oven to cook, that’s also where I found out what 86 meant, (out of), as in 86 the baked potatoes, somebody didn’t cook them (ya, that was me). I learned a lot working in the kitchen.
One funny event… at the end of each day after the kitchen was shut down for the evening all the kitchen staff would get something to eat or drink and sit at the tables to relax before going home. One evening as we were picking up our dishes to take to the washing station, I saw the owner walk by in front of me and got distracted, my plate slipped from my hand and fell to the floor with a crash, breaking the plate. The owner stopped, back peddles and looked right at me and says, ‘sure, one of the Scott boys, go figure’, so we have a reputation, great…
The girl I met at the beach, Sue, we started dating, which at our age meant we met at the 96th Street dance and stayed together, we walk on the beach holding hands after the dance, stuff like that. I wanted to do something special for her before she left to go back to Philly, and asked everyone at the house if I could make her dinner there. They all agreed, looking back I think they just wanted to see how smooth I could or couldn’t be. I arranged for us to have steaks with baked potatoes (I knew how to do them), when I was checking for everything I was going to need in our kitchen, I found that we didn’t have any steak knives, I started thinking about the last place I saw steak knives, it was at a carney game on the Wildwood boardwalk, you had to win them. I had one of my friends with a license drive me over to Wildwood, I found the game and spent $35.00 playing Skee Ball to get enough tickets to get the Steak Knife set, they were junk of course, but I couldn’t see that then. I few weeks after the dinner for Sue, I was in the hardware store in SH, and they sold a very nice set of stainless-steel steak knives for under $20.00, youthful exuberance.
I cooked the meal, set the table and was the perfect gentleman, it went very well. Got a kiss for my effort. Not my first kiss, but nice none the less.
We continued on for the rest of the summer, each pulling their share, no problems, no hassles, it is a time I remember always with a smile on my face, but the summer soon was coming to a close and it was time to get ready to head back to school and I had a decision to make. Where did I want to live knowing that mom wasn’t completely honest with me when I left? I started thinking about all the stuff my older brother had been telling me, was it true? About 2 weeks before we were set to leave, we got news through the Florida grapevine that Mom had a boyfriend maybe fiancée, which was news I had already figured out from the closet. The boy friend was a Bartender who worked at Hahn’s in SH and in Delray Beach for many years. Dad, who also got the news from the grapevine, said he remembered this guy and he had been at Hahn’s every summer since we were youngsters. Well, that puts a completely different spin on things… How long before Mom left was this in the works? That sealed it, I was moving back to Sea Ranch. I figured that if Dad objected, I’d just tell him that mom didn’t need me to take care of her anymore she had the boyfriend living there. When we got back to Ft. Lauderdale I went to mom’s condo and called her all the names my older brother said she was, I was mean, I was vindictive, and I didn’t care if it upset her, and I left. After a month or so and I was out from under the constant persuasion of others, I got the opportunity to think things through in a methodical manor. I went over to see mom again, I told her that I was wrong to call her any names, that those ideas had been placed before me and that I was upset the she kept this from me. I told her about lying in the closet and finding the men’s cloths. She told me that with me going away for the summer it was the perfect time to become engaged and have another man in the house, and I can’t disagree with that. I told her I was sorry and she asked me to give her new husband a chance, he was a nice man who adored my mother and apparently had secretly for years.