A Family Vacation at the Beach in May 1956

This post is another in a series featuring old family photographs that give me an opportunity to discuss both family and other history. Let's see what's happening here.

I've been scanning a lot of these photos recently and at mom's house in Huntsville came across several batches of "Super Pak Snaps" with photos developed at "H and H Walgreen Agency Drugs". Interestingly I found nothing related to this phrase in the Walgreen company's rather lengthy history on its website, its Wikipedia entry or via a general Google search. 

Anyway, mom wrote inside the front cover of this one "Vacation 1956 (May, St. Teresa, Fla.)". She describes the place then as a fishing camp with little for her and a four year-old son to do but walk the beach and try to avoid all the trash in the dunes to get there. 

There is a funny family story attached to this trip. Dad would go fishing at night, often returning pretty late. Mom and I would go to bed until some of those massive flying Florida roaches appeared and tried to carry us away. Each night when he returned mom would tell dad about these things, but he would just scoff at her tales. About the fourth night, though, just after he had come home and gotten in bed, he felt one. Mom says he hopped out of bed, turned on the light and started packing. She kids that he might have left the two of us behind if she had not packed fast enough.

St. Teresa is on U.S. 98 east of Carabelle. The place is not too far from St. George Island where we have spent many vacations over the years. We've driven past Carabelle, but never as far as St. Teresa. Might have to do it this year and see what's there now.  

More comments are below some of the photos. 

Dad and I and the pier

Here and in the next two photos I'm exploring the shark-infested waters

Dad and I are having some more fun. Mom always claims she never knew how to work cameras, but she did a pretty good job here.

Now for some work on the beach

Mom and I and younger brother Richard, who would be born that October

And here are the cabins; I guess ours is the one in the foreground

St. Teresa is about 37 miles from Apalachicola, which is not visible on this map but is just west of Eastpoint. 

A Parade of Alabama T-Shirts (3)

OK, here's the final part, I promise. Part 1 and part 2 cover other shirts. I am happy to be able to record all these for posterity. Or something. A few comments are below.

Birmingham was one of the venues hosting men's soccer games as part of the 1996 Olympics based in Atlanta. The image above and the two below were used as part of the advertising leading up to the games.

When the kids were much younger and still at home, we often went to Gulf Shores on vacations. We stayed on the Fort Morgan peninsula at the Gulf Shores Plantation Resort. One thing we really enjoyed about the place was the large indoor pool, which was a lifesaver for all of us after a couple of hours in the hot summer sun. We spent more time at that pool than we did on the beach. In the early years the place featured the Cabana Cafe, a small but funky bar and eatery near the beach. 

The Plantation was about halfway between Gulf Shores and Fort Morgan and fairly isolated at that time. The last time we were there six or more years ago, other developments had sprouted up around it. The overbuilding and traffic hassles from Gulf Shores to Panama City is a main reason we have moved east to St. George Island and Apalachicola for so many vacations in the past twenty or more years.

I covered a bit of the family and organizational history of the Birmingham Youth Hockey League in Part 1. This shirt promoted a tournament the BYHL hosted.

In Part 2 I included a t-shirt that featured the UAB bookstore, and here's another. I recently had to get rid of a UAB t-shirt that my wife Dianne bought for me when I started working there in 1983. Now THAT would be a real antique. 

I'll close this review of my Alabama t-shirt collection with the best one of all!

The Alabama Writer Who Died in Apalachicola

OK, here's another one of those "let's figure out an Alabama connection and show some pretty pictures" posts. 

For a number of years my family has been visiting the wonderful little Florida panhandle port of Apalachicola (Apalach to the cognoscenti) and staying on nearby St. George Island. The town is full of fun shops, art galleries and even TWO bookstores as well as working shrimp, oyster and fishing boats. St George Island is half houses and half state park; the whole area is blessedly free of the numerous high rises and overbearing crowds that have ruined the traditional Red Neck Riviera from Gulf Shores to Panama City. 

Recently I was reading about Marie Layet Sheip, an Alabama author who died in Apalachicola in April 1937. In 1930, under the name Marie Stanley she published one novel, Gulf Stream, which was reprinted in 1993 by the University of Alabama Press. According to Sharon Deck's entry on Sheip in the Encyclopedia of Alabama, at the time of her death Sheip left the manuscript for another novel, "Penhazard," which her publisher had rejected.

Sheip was born in Mobile in April 1885 into a prominent city family. Orphaned when young, she lived with her maternal grandmother who was a close friend of local bestselling novelist Augusta Jane Evans Wilson. When her grandmother died, she lived with relatives in Ohio and New Jersey and studied art with William Merritt Chase before she returned to her native city at age 24. She opened an art studio and as Marie Layet wrote scripts for at least six short silent films.


In 1917 she married Stanley Sheip, member of another wealthy Mobile family. They lived on a 17-acre estate in the Spring Hill area where Marie became active in local theater and wrote poems and short stories. In the late 1920s the couple moved to Apalachicola so that Stanley Sheip could manage a sawmill owned by his family. They are listed in the 1930 U.S. census as living at 127 Bay Avenue; the house survives and can be seen below.

Sheip began writing Gulf Stream after the couple moved to Apalachicola. The novel is set in a barely-disguised Mobile and features interracial relationships and marriage. The novel received generally positive national reviews, but local blacks objected to a white author writing about their Sand Town section of Spring Hill and including much dialect. John Sledge, who wrote about books for the Mobile Press-Register for many years, published an appreciation of the novel in 2009. He called it "one of the most astonishing pieces of fiction ever set here [in Mobile]--a complex, textured and fundamentally unsettling tale."

According to a "Florida, Deaths, 1877-1939" database available at the FamilySearch genealogy site, Sheip died on April 9, 1937, and was buried the next day in Mobile. Her occupation was listed as "Housewife."

The house at 127 Bay Avenue

A street scene in Apalachicola featuring the Owl Cafe

A former ships' chandlery offers a variety of shopping

A view of the beach at the state park on St. George Island

On our last visit to the park we got to watch some mullet fishermen...

...and later I got to eat a waffle cone at the Old Time Soda Fountain in Apalachicola

We also visited Apalachicola's brewery, open about a year...

...and had some glasses full of very good beer.

One of the great places on St. George Island is Eddy Teach's