Louis Roney: Slugs, snails and puppy dog tales

How many times come and go that leave their unique memories forever engraved in the back of one’s mind? The childhood memories that, from out of nowhere, crystallize in an old noggin are often astonishingly clear.

I’m remembering that 6-foot-tall box kite that my dad and I built and flew at grandmother’s in Atlanta until our cord ran out, snapped by a strong March gale, and the kite sailed off into a windy eternity.

I remember an Armistice Day at 11 a.m. when we on the Winter Park High School football team stood at attention on the 50-yard line prior to playing another high school. A car drove up and a guy jumped out, running to us and yelling, “Albert is dead!” Albert, a classmate, had died pulling a shotgun out of the back seat of a car, and the gun went off.

I can’t forget, in the ’30s, the alligators we encountered lying lethargically on the lake bottom as we swam 10 feet underwater in Lake Virginia off the Rollins shore.

I recall a night football game against Leesburg when I injured my hip in a way that still won’t let me forget.

I remember watching from a tall dune in Daytona Beach as Sir Malcolm Campbell broke the land speed record in his Blue Bird racing car.

In 1928, when I was 7, my father took me with him on a business trip out of Atlanta. We crossed a bridge over the Savannah River and on the South Carolina side, saw a tri-motor Ford biplane at the end of an improvised red-clay runway. A sign read: “Airplane Rides $1.” Both dad and I were anxious not to let such an opportunity pass us by. The plane took off in a cloud of dust. We soared high above Augusta and several other smaller towns for some 15 to 20 minutes and then landed bumpily. When we got home and I told my mother what we had done, she was not at all happy at the risk she thought dad and I had taken. But the next morning in Spring Street School did I have a story to tell the other kids? You bet!

Riding my bike at night in Winter Park was a scary proposition when I was a kid. When I rode from the scout hut on Lake Killarney to our house off Lake Sue, the streets were all paved with loose bricks. Rattlesnakes had the habit of coming out of the palmetto jungle and warming themselves at night on the lonely brick roads. I was ever on the lookout lest I run over a rattlesnake and throw him up around my neck as had happened to some bikers.

Speaking of rattlesnakes, there was a butcher shop on the west side of Park Avenue at New England. Behind the store was a broad white fence on which people hung the biggest diamondback rattlesnakes they had killed — some were 6- or 7-feet long!

We were always careful to look out for coral snakes — the small red, yellow and black-colored serpents that sometimes dropped out of local trees if you brushed a branch with your bike. A coral snake once fell out of a banana tree and into a canoe I was paddling in the canal between Lake Virginia and Lake Osceola. I set a speed record vacating that canoe — that’s why I’m able to tell this tale!

About Roney:

Harvard’42—Distinguished Prof, Em.—UCF

2004 Fla. Alliance for the Arts award

(Assisted by beautiful wife Joy Roney)