Text The Junior Ranchette, 1970
Uncle Corky's gold 1969 Mustang he got for graduation high school

Me wrapted in towel, Corky, Aunt Carole, David
Cousin, Brenda, cousin

After my experience at Magnesia springs in 1959, I do not remember ever going again, if we did, the overriding experience of that first time blurred any memory of it.  It’s not like we didn’t go swimming again, quite the opposite, we went swimming a lot. There were always summer trips to the beach, stays at Lake Swan which the whole family attended, family gatherings at Silver Glen Springs and camping trips at Alexander and Juniper Springs. In 1962 Grandpa and Grandma Junior built what Grandpa called The Junior Ranchette. Appropriately named for not only being small, but Grandpa’s last name was Junior. The ranchette was on seven acres of land west of Gainesville off Newberry Road with a red wooden fence around its perimeter. The first thing Grandpa did even before building his own house was build the ranch house with swimming pool where we had many family pool parties attended by all sorts of cousins, aunts, uncles and friends, often spending all day at the Ranchette.

Me, Brenda, David on our makeshift "High" divingboard

The girls in the pool. Mom with hat.
Our 1955 Chevy in the back and our English fort in top right.

One summer my brother and I did yard work for Grandpa to make a little money, and I do mean little. Grandpa paid us fifty cents an hour, it didn’t seem like much and, well it wasn’t. I always thought Grandpa underpaid us. It hadn’t been that long since I got a raise in my weekly allowance from Mom and Dad, from a dime to twenty-five cents. Grandpa’s fifty cents was twice my allowance but still wasn’t much. Of the seven acres, most was pasture for the horse and donkey with about one acre fenced in for the houses and pool. There were a group of large oak trees that needed leaves raked, flower beds weeding, and the perpetual Florida task of mowing the lawn which, during the rainy season, has to be done weekly. My brother and I got a dollar mowing lawns in the neighborhood, later we would get two dollars. Being older I got to use Grandpa’s riding lawn mower, a miniature tractor from Sears. Riding the mower at first was fun, a whole lot better than pushing the mower, but after an hour or so in the hot sun, the noise of the mower, hot dry dust the mower stirred up, and hitting the occasional fire ant mound, the fun of it soon wore off, it was hot, boring work.

Check Protector

At the time Dad worked part time for Grandpa repairing check-protector machines. Grandpa, although officially a Baptist Minister, always had some sort of side business, at this time he was the top salesman for the F&E Check Protector Company for north Florida. A check protector was a football sized mechanical marvel, looking like an oversized calculator with keys on top to enter the check amount, and then pulling a lever, it would emboss the amount on the check, which being embossed, “protected” the check from being altered. Being a mechanical device with all sorts of keys, springs, levers and whatchamacallits, they broke down and so Dad worked part time for Grandpa fixing them. Dad had gone to the factory in Chicago for a weeklong training on how to fix them. Mom wrote in her diary after he got back, “We took a nap this afternoon & went to bed early tonight. Morris is still talking about his trip. Are we ever lovey! He needs to go away more often!” Mom and Dad’s “afternoon” naps were well known in the family. It was many years later at a gathering of family when subject came up and the aunts and uncle laughed like it was some joke. I leaned over and asked my aunt Dixie what was so funny, and she tells me, “They were doing more than taking a nap.” I say “Oh” then after a pause and understanding what she was implying, say again, “Oh.”

I don’t know if I learned much from those swimming lessons at Magnesia Springs, but it was at Grandpa’s Ranchette that we kids really learned to swim from the many days in the pool. Then there was that one night that Dad worked late and dusk had fallen. Dad had brought David and I with him to Grandpa’s to mow the lawn while he worked. After we finished, we checked in with Dad who was just finishing up fixing a check protector and  seeing how tired and dusty David and I was, he said, “Lets go swimming.” I replied, “But we didn’t bring our bathing suites.” Dad says, “That’s OK, we can go skinny dipping.” I was surprised, I had never gone swimming naked before, and Grandpa and Grandma were in their house a hundred feet from the pool, what would they think?  Dad tells us that when he was a boy, they didn’t have swimming suits, he and his brothers would in the summers go skinny dipping during the summer at Plantation Pond. Dad started taking off his clothes, my brother and I followed, and we jumped into the pool. After the hot, dusty lawn mowing, swimming naked felt wonderful, I liked it.

Skinny dipping as a baby.
My sister with the hose.

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