Two Fifty Year Anniversaries, One Not Very Golden

Exactly fifty years ago today, April 30th, 1975, I was sitting in a cottage on the banks of the Indian River in Jenson Beach, Florida, listening to radio coverage of the fall of Saigon, a momentous day marking the end of the Vietnam War. I can remember that war when I was going to school back at Fort Dearborn Grammar School in the South Side Brainerd of Chicago. I registered for the draft while attending Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa when I turned 18, and I most definitely remember heading to the campus bookstore at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago after classes to get a copy of the Chicago Daily News, to see what my lottery number was (it was over 300, thank God). And now it was all over, 58,220 American soldiers killed, 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong dead, up to 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers killed, and between 2 and 2.5 million civilian causalities. All for nothing. Very sad. But this was also when my mother Mary, father Nelson, and I visited Stuart, Florida for the first time. I took the photograph on the left of them in front of the cottage during that trip.

We had driven down to Stuart from Chicago via Biloxi, Mississippi, Panama City Beach, and other areas along the Gulf of Mexico to visit my Uncle Bill (my mother's brother) and Aunt Elsie, who had bought a condo at the Monterey Yacht and Country Club in Stuart and retired there from South Euclid, Ohio 3 years earlier. My father had just retired after years of being a dentist, a job he hated, and was looking to see if he and my mother might like to retire there, too. My father and uncle used to play golf for two weeks together at a resort in Ontario, Canada, and Monterey had a 9-hole course that he and my uncle could play every day instead of just once a year. Although there was a yacht club, there were no boats, since Monterey was not allowed to dredge along the St. Lucie River, but no problem. You don't need a boat to have parties at the yacht club, right? My father went down and purchased a condo on the river side of the complex later that year, and they moved to Stuart in the spring of 1976. And both loved it there. And is that cottage we stayed at 50 years ago still there? The complex is now called River Palm Cottages and Fish Camp, seen in the photo on the right, and it very well might be. However, there are no trespassing signs all over the place and since this is Florida and everyone and their brother seems to be armed, I did not want to wander around and find out. After all, I already have a photo of the place.