Growing up in Great Kills

In H.S. I used to work for a patient of my father named Pete Mardikos. He owned the 36' long charter fishing boat called, "Dutches." His mooring place was right in front of the the Shoals Dock restaurant & bar.

One day he had a 5lb (empty) coffee can of sea water and a large can of sterno. He got the can boiling and threw in a bunch of crabs that he had gathered from the pier pilings as the tide was going out. That was his lunch.

It looked so good that we decided to mimic him. We'd go out in an 8' pram when the tide was declining, gather a bunch of Blue crabs, or soft shell crabs go over to the east side of the harbor, gather drift wood and build a fire on the beach. We would use empty coffee cans for boiling the crabs and melting butter, chow down for the entire afternoon. It was glorious!

Shoals was an excellent sea food resteraunt. I've had several really good meals there.

God, those were the days.

Today you can't do that very often because the water in the harbor is too polluted and so are the crabs. It might have been just as polluted in the late 40s and 50s but what you don't know can't hurt you. :-)  I was told the other day that the water in Grand Haven Harbor was deemed polluted in the 1960s.  Sometime between 1957 and 1988, Shoals was demolished and condos were built on the site.

Anyway, I'd give almost anything for those good old days when you could gather your own food from the wild and gorge yourself half to death on the strength of your will, strength & ingenuity.

I used to harvest wild blueberries, wild strawberries, & huckleberries all in season.

I was harvesting frogs from Jack's Pond by the time I was 12 yrs old and we dined on frogs legs.

When I was 15 yrs old we caught a snapping turtle in our back yard and we dined on turtle soup.

I've eaten wild rabbit, venison, bear, alligator, emu, mountain oysters, wild and domestic turkey, goose, goat, horse, sheep and other so-called mystery meats.  (Not all harvested on Staten Island (of course).  We also had a steady supply of Blue Fish & Flounder from my "Dutchess" days and we drank goats milk - delicious - instead of cows milk.  I'll try anything once, except bugs.

In the 1940s 1950s, Staten Island and Great kills was a lot wilder (meaning undeveloped).  You could ride your bike all the way from Great Kills to New Dorp on Amboy Road without seeing a single traffic signal.  Not anymore! 

Where we used to to go camping and gathered wild blueberries, the ground is now covered with houses built so closely together that the roof drip lines overlap.

Ice skating on Jack's Pond in the winter, making and floating boats in the summer.  Harvesting mosquito larva in a jar and watching them develop as well as polly wogs.  For a couple of years we had our own bee hive and our own honey.

I haven't seen a lightening bug in decades but we used to catch dozens of them once and put them in jars.  We even knew where we could find fox-fire which is rotting damp wet wood that glows bluish in the night.

In short, I think that people my age grew up in Great Kills on Staten Island at exactly the right time.  Just in time for boy & girl scouts and campfire girls.  Just in time for exploring the world around us without fear or being interfered with.  Just before TV had a chance to lure us into the house and away from the out doors and all those experiences. 

We had a gazebo made of metal screening out in the back yard with a cot in it.  I used to love falling asleep in my sleeping bag on that cot, listening to the peepers, mid-sized frogs and bull frogs on a summer night.

Nature is a wonder, but you need to be out in it to appreciate it.

Last week Carol drove into our driveway after dark and interrupted two white tail deer in our back yard, and two days ago we had two wild turkey hens wandering around in my yard. 

I'm still glad to be alive.

~Lee Shake '57