When we moved to Miami in 1956 we lived in the historic (now, not then) Betsy Ross Hotel on Ocean Drive. The beach was across the street. Wow! From Brooklyn to Paradise. After a year Dad bought us a home in West Miami, near the famous Tamiami Trail. It was pretty much the western edge of developed Miami at the time, with the Everglades just a few miles west of us. As undeveloped as it was there were lots of natural environments for my brother and I to explore.
Even though my mother, a city girl from Brooklyn, had spent two years in the late 40’s in the tiny rural hamlet of Cobleskill in New York when my dad was getting his second college degree at the New York University School of Agriculture, she was NOT prepared for the results of my brother and I as budding naturalists. The story of Dad going to Ag school is an important one which I will tell later. I did once ask him what he did for two years there:
“I bred bulls and shoveled stalls.”
So one day on the railroad tracks my brother and I discovered rain puddles teeming with tadpoles. Man, we thought these were the coolest looking things we had ever seen. We found a thrown away jar, filled it with water and tadpoles to the brim, and rode home on our bikes. Now what? Well, washing machines get filled with water so that was the logical place to put them. Whereupon we promptly forgot them. These were very mature tadpoles, and it did not take long for them to absorb their tales and morph into a hundred little frogs. Which promptly jumped out into our Mom’s face the next time she opened the washing machine. Yes, corporal punishment still existed in the ‘50s.
Learn our lesson? Nope. The next time involved a common garter snake. They are oviviparous, meaning they incubate their eggs inside their bodies and bear live young. We catch this really fat one. Again, where can we keep her? Well, the washer was such an easy choice! Again. Not quite the snake scene in an Indiana Jones movie, but we sure caught it that time. You know, in those days:
“Wait till your Father gets home!”
Somehow we survived to grow up!
One last story about early lessons in biology. We had the typical freshwater fish tank: guppies, tetras, mollies, swordtails. One day Mom notices little white spots on the fish. She calls the pet store.
“Oh, that’s called ICH. It’s like a fungus.”
Well, by then my New York Mom had experienced mildew in the very humid south and knew that bleach killed it. So she poured some into the tank, where upon every fish went belly up and floated to the top. Horrified and in tears, she called Dad. Dad had a Masters Degree in Science Education from Columbia University’s Teacher’s College, so he knew what happened to our fish. For the rest of his life she never let him live down his reaction. He laughed. Into the phone. Oh, boy!