[START TAPE 1, SIDE A]

This is an interview with Mike Baldwin (MB) of Tampa- Port Tampa. The interview is being conducted on August 14, 2001 at the Port Tampa Library. My name is Steve Szekely (SS), and I'm representing the Tampa-Hillsborough County Library system's oral history collection project.

Steve Szekely: We're going to talk about recollections of Port Tampa. Mr. Baldwin?

Mike Baldwin: All right, we moved here when I was four years old, so among other things, I was ( ). First thing I remember distinctly was it was right before a hurricane, and we lived on what--, across the street there down to the pier. There was three houses along there. What I remember about it is not so much that it was coming in, but we got notice that we had to leave. They sent a train down here to pick us up.

And so, well, we had to walk from down where we lived up to the depot to get on the train. The rec--, the recollection of ( ) stays in my mind was: the raindrops were hitting us, and it felt like needles sticking into you. And it got up to a, a depot, and the train was waiting for us with about ( ). And that's the first ( ) I've ever seen.

But there, it pulled off. The--. All the men went up there helping us, and they noticed that the water was receding. And so they decided since the water was receding, that the ( ), so we had to get off the train.

( ) hurricane, my mother kept chickens. She had chicken coops. And we had a fence around the backyard that now I think must've been about five feet tall. Those chicken coops floated over the, the fence, so that's how high the water got.

And, and very shortly, the water was all gone back into the bay. It's--. I mean, I don't remember all of the ( ) because everybody that had ( ) had a more difficult time, because everything was washed up. The streetcar line used to come down from Tampa through Bayshore Boulevard, ( ) Interbay. And that was completely washed out. And the streetcar line was washed out. And what you see now, the ( ) on Memorial, was the start of it, and they started building it that way.

Then the next thing I think I remember, more or less, is just being around, you know, and seeing things. ( ) Atlantic Coast Line Railroad ( ). And the phosphate trains were very long, and they ran all the time. But--. And so, electricity--, the generating station building is owned by Atlantic Coast Line Railroad.

( ) remember this very distinctly, but they used to cut the lights off at seven o'clock in the morning and put them back on at seven o'clock at night. And then some of the ladies started getting irons. And by the way, if you know, in those days, laundry was washed ( ); Tuesday was ironing day. So on Tuesday-- [Clears throat] excuse me-- they left the electric--, electricity on 'til noon.

Well, I can remember distinctly the day and the hour when the Tampa Electric Company took all the electricity supply of Port Tampa. We were sitting around waiting for it, and then they pulled us--, they told us they were going to pull the switch at a certain time. And we had--. I remember being with my father, mother and all of us sitting around waiting. And then they pulled the switch, the lights came on, and then went off. ( ), and then they came on bright. And from then on we had Tampa Electric.

SS: How old were you at the time?

MB: I must have been five or six, maybe seven. And there were--. A lot of things like that changed. ( ). When we first moved in here, we had telephones, of course. But we had a switchboard operator, and everything was done through the switchboard operator.

When you talk about ( ) telephone companies--. They're making a big thing about all this stuff they did- call waiting, call forwarding, and all of this. ( ). Its best telephone services we had was Miss Williams. She was call waiting, she was information, she was time of day, she was call forwarding. She was everything- and the local gossip.

I can remember one time when we--. I was thinking about this thing, and--. But my mother-- I can remember this ( )-- so my mother called up a friend of hers, Mrs. Givens. And the operator said, "Mrs. Givens is out of town. I just sat down in the grocery store. She called ( )-" things like that.

SS: Did people leave messages with the operator?

MB: Oh, yeah.

SS: ( )?

MB: ( ), you know, and she was--. Everybody, she knew what they were doing.

SS: And her name was Mrs. Williams, too?

MB: ( ) I don't think it was Mrs. Williams. I'll have to remember sometime. I may be able to remember. But it was--. There are things like that happened, and I can remember very distinctly when they--, telephone people were down here changing everything switchboard to dial. And we used to see them working on the lines.

And what reminds--, remembers in my mind-- stays in my mind-- is the fact that they--. In the telephone business at that time, when they were splicing the cable, they used hot water--, hot wax to put it on it, so it would dry it all out. ( ). And when they went to lunch, they would leave these hot wax things. Only thing that the, that the ( ) was going back to school, you could walk around with ( ), and some of us would stick our hands down there ( ).

SS: Yeah, wax mittens, huh?

MB: Yeah. And there's so many things like that that happened ( ). Maybe I shouldn't mention this, but ( ). Everybody in those days, in the early '20s, had outhouses. And the city of Port Tampa had a truck wagon, horse and wagon, that, that set out every night and ( ). I don't know exactly when that stopped, but when we moved from that house up into what was considered Port Tampa the city, ( ) we had bathrooms from then on.

And going down this morning, I was looking at some of the places where we lived. When we first moved to the place that is almost down where the baseball--, where that street where the baseball diamond is. I think it's closed off now. The--. As I remember, they had a wrap-around porch, so which you could get in the shade anytime during the day.

The next time we moved, we moved to a place up on--, up--. Let's see, what's the name of that street? I think it's Parkland Street or something. But it was a big house; it had two stories and staircase. And one of our cousins had a big wagon there, so she could ride around the staircase.

SS: Mm hmm. Was your father still working for the railroad at that time?

MB: ( ) he retired. And we basically--. I remember this, because this was the start of the Florida boom ( ). An awful lot of people lived here. And my mother loved to cook, and she loved to cook Sunday dinner. Somebody ( ) asked to sell, sell, or sell Sunday dinner in our house. So every Sunday ( ).

SS: How many people did you have coming in?

MB: Oh, I don't remember that too much, but it was always full- how many people that two tables could hold. Also, the school that we went to then was down that road, Prescott Road, out there. It was a wooden building, two stories high. And I was reading--. I remember something the other day I read in some place about it.

But some of the ladies decided they'd have a little rest--, a little cafeteria there where people could eat. And they had their kitchen right outside of the building on the ground. There was a window out ( ), and we used to go--. We heard about that window ( ). [Laughter]

And at that time, in the back of the school, there was two little buildings, where the first and second grade was. And I can remember ( ) the first grade, and I didn't like it very much. And I thought I never would ( ). And the next thing I remember is when I was in the second grade, we'd have--. We moved up to the building, and--, the big building. This was way back in the third, fourth, fifth and sixth. ( ) third grade ( ), because we had a teacher that liked fresh air, and we all wore shorts at that time. ( ) windows, and I ( ) that cold breeze. ( ).

And then, when I was in the--, graduating from the fifth, and I was in sixth, they opened Westshore Junior High School over here. It was built over--, was built down here in a beautiful building. And surprisingly, I helped build that building, because on this side was a kind of a gambling casino from San Domingo, I think it was. And it had died out, and they left it standing. And I can remember going in and playing. They had a big hole in the wall where the safe was, and that's ( ). But when they built Westshore Junior High School, they decided to use some of those bricks to build it. And so they got all of the kids in town, and a penny apiece they paid us to haul off all the bricks ( ).

SS: ( ).

MB: Yeah. And now, they--, some other building someplace has those bricks in it, and they go way back. And from then on, they--, we thought we were--. Oh yes, and something else I have just remembered. In those days, when we lined up to go--, when school was open, we didn't go in the building to our classroom. We stood in line outside on the sidewalk. And then when the bell rung, we all marched in. And--

SS: Quite different than what you do today?

MB: Everything.

SS: Yeah.

MB: So I can, you know--. Scholastic, and then I think about the schools ( ) curriculum in high school, junior high school here, we took Latin, we took military law, algebra, almost--, civics; history was big. We had to take all of those things. And we didn't ( ), but we sure got a good education, especially in the things we would need all of our lives. And our foundation was mathematics ( ). And surprising thing, in the schools-- Westshore Junior High School-- they paid the highest wages in any school in the state of Florida--

SS: Oh really.

MB: --because Port Tampa City, at that time, had a tax base that lived on railroads and oil companies ( ).

SS: And this, of course, was before it became part of Tampa.

MB: Yeah, and that's why Tampa took it over- to get their taxes. And it was--. My father was on the school board, and he decided he'd been on there long enough. So he ( ) stand in his place. My father lost the election by one vote, but he had voted for the other-- [Chuckle]

SS: Interesting.

MB: The other thing ( ). And the baseball diamond--. Baseball, by the way, was a big thing in those days, because every city had its own baseball diamond, diamond and team. And I can remember sitting right over here; in this area here, there was a baseball diamond. And the railroad track went around it. So it's a big thing for somebody to hit one that would drop over into the cars of the train. And everybody turned out on Sunday. We had a great time. Later on, it moved up to where it is now. At--.

Sometime along the line-- I don't remember exactly when it was-- but they paved ( ) streets. And I can remember when they started--, when the streets were not paved. And I can remember when ( ) started paving them with bricks.

And marbles were a big thing then. And when they laid the bricks, they basically would lay the bricks on top. Then they'd cover the whole thing with white sand. And we used to use that to shoot marbles. And by the way, the bricks that they laid then are still on these streets now.

SS: Are a lot of them covered over with tar?

MB: No, ( ) you can see them right out there. Another thing that's changed: Westshore Boulevard used to run all the way around- back of MacDill Field and all around until it becomes Interbay. Then the Florida Board sort of paved that in hopes that they could get people to buy the land. But the, the prosperity quit before they could really finish that. We used to take our bicycles and ride around out there.

Also, we knew where Picnic Island was, but we couldn't get to it, because it ( ) trees had grown up and blocked the way. So we had to run out there. And this reminds me of Port Tampa Pier. At that time, it was Port Tampa Company Yacht Club. And they had a mooring place for boats- a big circle out there with all docks, and they had crab boats and everything. And along the side, they had a long, low building that you could come in and rent a boat--, rent a swimming suit and go on in together. ( ). Well, I can remember on Sundays down there, there'd be crowds of people. I was down there this morning, and all the beach is gone.

SS: Was the water clean, and--?

MB: The water was clean, and they had a--. Nice and deep and--. The beach was almost a block wide. ( ), and we had a good time down there. But--

SS: Was that a municipal beach? Did they--?

MB: It was ( ). Well, actually, ( ) Port Tampa City had a lease on it. And the lease was that they could not build anything there that they couldn't tear down in a day. ( ), and--. But it was quite a social place. And by the way, we used to have a dance down there every Saturday night. And the local orchestra here played, and it was a good time by all. So--

SS: What's that?

[Recorder is turned off, then back on]

MB: When the Depression came--. Of course, we didn't know it was the Depression for a good while more, so we didn't change--. We didn't have things we were getting used to, but it didn't matter. We moved across the street and stayed there for a while. And then I think the street ( ), so we moved in with the Smith family. They shared half the house, and we shared the other, across the street from the Methodist church. And we were members of the Methodist church, and we stayed there all during the Depression- I mean, during that period.

And the Coast Line finally built my father and my family a home, down--. It's a city park there now, at the end of that. And I was messing around there one day. And I pushed some sand off, and the bricks that I had laid beside our front door were still there.

SS: Uh-huh. And that's in a park now.

MB: Yeah. And the park now--. By the way too, that park, one time--. It must've been in the early '30s that they built a boxing ring out there. We used to have amateur boxing once a week. The people crowded there. And that place too, at one time--. My father decided that nobody was using it; the Coast Line wasn't using it. He had taken things apart there. My father planted black-eyed peas. And it was covered. And I can remember that I used to--, my mother would--, my father would go out and take a washtub there. And my mother ( ) shovel and she ( ). But--

SS: What did the Depression do to the business at the port?

MB: It slowed it down, but it didn't seem to slow it down that much, because most of the phosphate was being sold to Japan and all these others. It was very, very common ( ) then that we got so used to foreigners that we didn't pay attention to them. All the boats used to come in a lot from Japan and the--. What I remember--, what I would have liked to have found out if I could have found somebody to interpret. Every Japanese that came in here had a camera. And they took a picture of everything. We'd be playing baseball out there, and they'd be taking pictures. And we got used to them. ( ). When I was in Japan during the war, I thought, I wish I could find where they stored those pictures of us.

But another fact we used to know when the Japanese were in: you can look out on the bay, and it would be dotted with Japanese out there catching stingrays, because they were good to them ( ). It was a lot of traffic here then. I don't think that ever slowed that much, because all of the oil coming into Tampa came through Port Tampa. ( ) oil trains; the oil's coming in and out, and the phosphate trains were coming in and out.

So that part of it went, and then we had the ( ) passenger boat between here and Havana. ( ) twice a week. We used to have ( ). They had a boat train that came in from Tampa to bring the people from Havana. And when the boat came in, the train came down to take them back. And the boat train--. And all the young people-- I was too young at that time, or I was too lazy or something-- used to come down to the port and carry the luggage for the people and make some change. It was a--. As I remember, we were--, it was always some doing down there. I can remember unloading the boat and putting them on the cars and saying--.

Which reminds me of when prohibition was repealed and they would go in port. When that boat came in that day-- the day before is maybe is the same day-- it was full of beer. And they had a freight train down there; ( ) boxcar was taking that beer out.

SS: Mm hmm. This happened in ports everywhere beyond Tampa?

MB: Yeah, I would imagine so, but I just--, we just saw it here. At that time, the canal on up to Tampa wasn't very big, but we had a lot of big boats out here. And I would say too that it used to come up through Tampa on those long trains, those stock cars ( ). So my father helped the men move them. And then ( ). But up until World War II, all the phosphate came through here.

SS: Mm hmm. And they came through downtown Tampa ( )?

MB: Yeah, right through--, across Franklin Street, right across ( ). And on the bay--, on the river there was the yards for the Coast Line. ( )--

SS: Uh-huh. The shops, the shops were here, but the yards were over there.

MB: Well, no, that was after they moved that thing.

SS: OK.

MB: They--. All the yards were right there, except ( ). I think that ( ) stuff designated for Tampa was parked there. Things coming here ( ) same boat.

SS: Right. Makes sense.

[Recorder is turned off and then back on]

MB: The Westshore Junior High School ( ), we had teachers that were--, I think that they were better than most teachers, because the schools here were able to get who they wished. I understand now that during that time they paid the best wages in the state of Florida. So we had good teachers. They were strict, and when they said to do something, they said it, but they had ( ).

Let me say they recognized that kids in the sixth grade are a little smarter than what most people believe, because we had a chart on the wall with your name, and then after it was ( ) places where you could write to. And ( ) said we could write onto each square that we had read it- a book or a--; it didn't matter. You could read any book you wanted to. And so when we graduated from the sixth grade, we could read anything. So now, somebody tells me that all that you get from a diploma from high school now, you have to be able to read at a sixth grade level.

When I was graduating from the sixth grade, we were reading at the college level, because there was nothing we wanted to read that we couldn't, and some people read everything. So we learned to read early. It was all that way; it was--. The teachers were boss. And they ran this class, and we had to study. And when they said homework, that meant homework. And because they got the, the people--. The parents were behind them. And whatever the teacher said, the parents would remind you to do it, and you did it.

SS: Did the teachers paddle kids when they were getting into trouble?

MB: No, they did early. ( ) a ruler to hit your hand. Yeah, that was quite common. Everybody expected it. I guess, sometimes they might take somebody out with a switch. I can remember sometimes too that if some boy would get out of line, they would give him a knife and say, "Go cut your switch." So he cut all the ( ). [Chuckle] But now, of course, you couldn't do that. The--. I have a fond memory of all the teachers that I can remember, and I remember mostly from the third grade on.

SS: Were they local?

MB: No, they brought them from all over. The teacher that we had in the ninth grade came from South Carolina, and she was good.

SS: But they lived here? They lived In Port Tampa?

MB: They lived here. The principals, usually, were from out of town, and they lived here. The other ones that didn't live--. Or the ones that lived in Hillsborough County stayed. We had a lady that lived--. Well, now I know that she was social. She was society, and coming down and being with us was a real, a real let-down.

But she taught us more about how we should do things, how we should live. ( ). To this day, her husband was a speaker at my graduating class up here. One day I was--. I don't remember where it was, but it was someplace, and I had to make a speech.

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[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

MB: ( ) I had to make a speech and I used a, a term. And I said, Now, where did I read that, and where? And ( ) I say, well, that's like he said in your--, when he spoke this on a ninth grade level. And I had remembered that, and I used it in a speech. She was a very nice person, and something happened at that time. We used to have a track meet- a county track meet every year, I think at the Ballast Point School. And one time--. Well, I was a pretty good runner, and I was a pretty good broad jumper. And one time, we had, we had a meet up there. I think it was our junior year or ninth grade, and I was involved in the 100 dash and the broad jump, both standing and running. ( ).

So during that ( ), the first time I ran in the hundred, I run across, and I find a little pin on the ground, a white hand--. I think I have something like that. And I put it on, and then I told everybody I won it because of that.

So we had a girl called--. Her name was Gibson-- one of the Gibson girls-- and she was running in the dash for the girls. And she had no chance to win it. So then--. So I gave--. Shortly, everybody heard about it, and said everybody's wearing it. And I gave it--. I pinned it on her, so--. And she was coming a distant second. And the leader tripped and fell down, so she won. [Laughter] And so that was a big thing.

So I gave it to the teacher. And I understand later that he was a--, he became a judge here. And after--. I've been meaning to call his daughter and see--. I'm sure she's dead now. But we--. You know, you think, why don't we tell people now what they did for us? And we never did it. And I wish I had gotten in touch with her and you know, told her something, because she had her way of doing things and she wouldn't put down, because you didn't know it. But you learned from it, and that's the kind of teachers we had all along.

If it was a--. If a teacher taught algebra, for instance, she knew algebra, and you knew it, too, afterwards. And so when I know we had to take--. We had a choice in the ninth grade- we had to take Latin. And after we got to Plant High School, we could change-- we had to have two years of it-- so we could take either Latin or Spanish. So a lot of us took on Spanish because it's easier.

And--. But sometimes now, I think about those algebra classes and how ( ) between the children. So it was something that was not had to do it, but it was there. We had to pass, and it became kind of a fun thing. Now they don't do that anymore.

All of the classes we had, I can remember--. My love of reading, I think, started in this Literature and Life, it was called then. And it was ( ) in English, we were required to be able to write letters, for instance. They taught you all these little things that we should like, and now they don't do it anymore.

SS: Let's talk a little bit about the, the mix of people. Now, you had some dock workers living down here, middle class people…

MB: Yeah. We had Cubans. There were a lot of Cubans. Some of the best friends we had were Cuban. And most of them, well, who lived here--, most of the students here were old families. The other mixture we had, actually, was the Cubans. And most of those lived down, by the way, what we called Colored Town.

SS: What town?

MB: Colored.

SS: Uh-huh.

MB: Now this section down here was Colored Town; that is where all the colored people lived, and they loved it. They all got together and had a good time. And these Cubans were there because, in the beginning, they thought that there were some cigar factories here.

SS: OK.

MB: But Ybor City- most of them worked there, so that failed. And I think that these who were living here had jobs there, and they just stayed. So they used to walk up and come to school. And one of them would--, our best friend--, a big friend was Manuel Lopez. And they knew all the girls and everybody. Only trouble, we didn't have much to do with the ( ) girls, simply because their families didn't allow it. We were ( ). But they were always welcome to ( ). But they usually didn't, because the families ( ). But I never remember anybody getting married ( ). The colored people always stayed by themselves. And then I never had anybody getting--, raising cane with them.

And my mother had a ladies' servant that ( ). And when my father died, and the funeral at the Methodist church--. So we went and sat with the family in church. And in those days, if ( ) hadn't been there, the rest of people would have questioned, where was she?

There was a very high standard; I don't remember. But I think they, they liked to be with themselves, and we liked to be with ourselves. I do think one of the things we shouldn't--, we didn't do, and it was very bad; we recognize it now, but we did it then- but the school here is not very good for the colored. They didn't have the good teachers; they didn't have anything. But until--. They didn't expect it, because that's the way it has always been. So that's one good thing that now that they're getting the same opportunity. But we would play baseball with them, and we would each have a game. We didn't like to play baseball with them, because they'd beat us.

SS: For amusements, did you leave the city, the Port Tampa city, or ( ) Tampa?

MB: ( ). We'd go to Tampa every Saturday. Saturday we'd go to the movies. Down in--. Once a week down in school, somebody would come in and show a movie. And we used to have an awful lot of parties, hay rides, and stuff like that. It seemed like it was going all the time, that people and children ( ) an awful lot of them.

I was thinking today that we had a group of them our age would all get together and would form a club, and I can't remember the club. Anyway, we would be sitting around ( ) just talking, and somebody says, let's have a party. So we would get on the telephone and call ( ) and, and say, we're going have a party next Saturday night, or a hay ride next Saturday night. And there were people ( ) hay ride who were truck driving and had a truck. We'd go over and say, would you take us? We'd say sure. So we'd put hay or something in the back, and go on a hay ride. And, you know, it seemed like ( ) all the time.

A lot of things we would--. In the summer time, we would head down to the pier. The afternoon we'd go swimming, and then picnics down there and dances. There was never any time that I can remember when we weren't doing something. There was all, all--.

Another thing, too, that was nice growing up here: it was during the Depression, and a lot of men didn't have jobs. So the meeting places was down on Hanks' Corner. Every night, everybody'd go down there and sit down and talk. And I am surprised now how much history of World War ll, World War l were learned there ( ). There were all kind of people say, "Well," they'd talk about it, "Well, on the last ship I was on, we went to Japan," or "We went to some other place." They'd tell us all about it.

SS: Now these were seamen?

MB: Yeah. ( ), and they were laid off. And they'd take it easy. The railroad people would talk about all the towns they'd been in. We got an education, and--.

But on the daytimes, we might have a pick-up. We used to have a lot of light pick-up ballgames, where we would go out and then start. And the men didn't have anything to do anyway, so they'd come up and join us. But they always played by our--. And we didn't push any of them; they didn't tell us what to do, they didn't--.

And one of the things I used to remember: we were deciding, what can we do today? So let's think up a new game; you know, make up a new game. You know, there's always something to do. It's--. You think about those things that happened, but you know, that didn't mean anything to you then. But now it means a lot to us now. The way that everybody got along so well--. I don't know, it was just a different way. Maybe I didn't know what was going on.

SS: When you, when you were young, did your family have a car?

MB: No. My family didn't get a car until almost World War II, when my younger brother was ( ). Because it didn't seem like it was necessary, because there was always somebody who will take you some place. Everybody worked together.

SS: When your family went to Tampa, did you take a streetcar?

MB: Streetcar, yeah. Another thing streetcars played a part down here: it was our time signal. It had two things: it had a whistle in the morning, whistle at noon, and whistle at five o'clock. That was telling the people, time to get up now and come to work. They had a dinner train that ran from the port up in Port Tampa to bring the men to eat lunch. And they'd take them back. And it was things like that that you don't see anymore. It was a kind of a--. It wasn't a close-knit, but it was a nice thing.

And one time, there was a--. I shouldn't tell you this, but we had a Ku Klux Klan outfit here. ( ) you had to be something to get into. And there was a man here that ( ) something. He was outside ( ), and he was making himself all obnoxious to a lady. And she simply didn't worry about it. So the boy just went over to talk to him about it. ( ). [Chuckle] He was gone the next day. ( ). But he denied this ever happened.

It was little things like that went on that we don't think about anymore. Broad Creek is ( ). It was a place out where MacDill Field is now. And there's a ( ) out there that you had all the boats, a rowboat--. And if you wanted to ( ) get in a rowboat, and go out anyplace you wanted to. ( ). And they had a good beach, and sometimes we'd go down there and spend the night. And I don't ever remember seeing ( ). They had the boats there for anybody who wanted to use them, and I never heard of anybody not returning them to them.

But as I said before, we knew where--. We knew where a lot of things were along there, but we didn't get to them, because we had ( ) Tampa. So we always went there for swimming or anything else. So many things like that that happened that was--. I think--. To me, I can't think of any place I would rather grow up in than here, because we were on our own, we did what we wanted to, but we knew right where to stop.

SS: ( ).

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[END OF INTERVIEW]

(end of interview)