On Oriental and Kids back then…
Oriental was a very quiet town. My mother was known as “The Siren” because when she called me, you could hear her all over town! All the mothers watched out for and took care of all the children, not just their own. If you happened to be at someone else’s house around dinner time, you would get fed, a sandwich maybe. It was not much, but you were always welcome and so it was good enough.
Even though it was quiet, Oriental was actually pretty progressive because we had sidewalks when I was about 8 years old. People would come from all over the county to roller-skate on them. We were really into roller-skating back then! You had to be careful though because the concrete slabs were only about 4 foot long and there was grass separating the sections which could trip you up if you didn’t have your rhythm and footing going together right. We also had the first motorized school bus in North Carolina.
One of our teachers started a “Thank Goodness for Small Favors: Its Friday!” Club (a.k.a. the TGFSFIF Club) and every Friday we would walk from the school to Red Lee’s Grill where he would be waiting for us and everyone in the class would be served a hamburger and a coke.
Remember the Maypole?? I thought I was the only man in Oriental who knew the location of the old galvanized pipe Maypole that we used to swing around on at the grammar school. I was right! Nobody guessed the answer to the “Mystery Relic” contest that was in the Pamlico News recently. Yes, it is still standing. Things were made to last back then. Ask me and I will tell you where it is.
All the kids had jobs to earn money. We mostly would cut grass with a push mower for 25 cents a lawn, which would get you into the movie theater. We also did roof painting which we liked better because it brought more money. But that ended when one of us fell off the Baptist Church roof.
If we didn’t have the 25 cent admission, we would sit outside on the front steps of the theater which played movies on Wednesdays and Fridays. Friday was always a Western. From there, we could see Tom Smith or his brother, Hubert, sitting up in the projector booth, running the movie and they could see us sitting out there. When the movie was about half over, and Tom was sure we really didn’t have a quarter for admission, he would wave us on in. We would tear down to the front and lie on our backs on the floor and look up at the big movie screen. We saw the last half of a lot of movies!
Tom and Hubert Smith were always well dressed and proper, like their father, Mr. Will Smith. He was what I would call “dapper” in his straw hat. Besides owning the theater, they were merchants and sold many items, including appliances.
Many of our teachers at the school back then were from West Virginia and they were very good teachers.
When we were in the 10th grade, we were all moved from Oriental to Pamlico County High School. This was 1952 and at that time, Oriental had a whole bunch of boys and only a couple of girls. People did not have cars to get around, so Bayboro seemed very far away and many people were opposed to the change. However, I loved it because of all the girls in Bayboro!
Our school bus had a governor on it to control the speed. It went 28 miles per hour. If we took the vacuum from the windshield wipers and the mechanized Stop sign, we could get it up to 29 miles an hour. We wanted to go 28 on the ride to Bayboro and 29 on the ride back home to Oriental.
Going to high school in Bayboro is how I met Faye, who was from Lowland, Goose Creek Island.
On Courting
When I was 16, Daddy bought the first automobile he ever owned. Before that, we would get rides to places like New Bern from the few other people who owned cars at that time.
On Saturday night, he would let me borrow the car. I would shine it all up and drive up to Lowland, 32 miles away, to get Faye. She was working in a crab house, picking crab. There were not a lot of jobs you could do to make money. It was either tobacco or picking crabs. She was very good at it, but you could tell where she had been working all day. I would roll down all the windows and bring her home so she could take a bath with rain water pumped from the cistern and dove soap before we would go out on our date.
Since it was so far to drive and cars were scarce, we would often double date. We would drive up to Lowland to get our girls, then drive sometimes to New Bern or sometimes just to Reelsboro where there was a drive-in movie that everybody went to. After that, we would go and get a hamburger.
There were very few places to go for a date and lots of driving miles in between. Quite a few Oriental boys married girls from Lowland though.
On my Daddy and Shrimping
My father, Jack George Mason, was a commercial fisherman. He was a “good shrimper.” In other words, he worked really hard. He partnered with his cousin, Randolph Hardy, and they built their own boats. Daddy was good at the woodworking and Randolph was the expert in the iron work. Randolph married Daddy’s sister. They were lifelong partners and best friends. Wherever one was, the other was. They were both tough, hard working people. It was amazing how they always met up everyday to work, knowing when and where, and I never heard them planning it out or discussing it beforehand.
There is a model boat of a trawler that Randolph built in Brantley’s Restaurant.
The boats were smaller then, about 38’ and used car engines, not diesel, which were too expensive. Daddy and Randolph would go to the junk yard and get a car engine and use it until it conked out and then go back to the junk yard for another one. That’s what everybody did.
Shrimping is a young profession. Before fisherman started commercially catching shrimp, fishing was their occupation, mostly haul netting with primitive cotton nets, not nylon. Shrimp were only used for bait. Back then, nobody ate them. Sometime right after WW2, somebody sent some shrimp up north to sell…and the rest is history!
Daddy got into shrimping around 1946-47 and mainly worked Pamlico Sound in a 38’ trawler. I started working with Daddy when I was about 10 years old. We would get up very early every morning and start working about 4 or 4:30 AM. I didn’t have one day off between the end of school and working with Daddy. I never wore shoes back then; I was barefoot all the time and remember walking to our boat those early mornings on the oyster shells that were used to pave the dirt roads. There was an oyster plant in Oriental and they would pile the shells in big mounds and then the town would put them on trucks and shovel them onto the dirt roads. Once they got compacted down, they made a pretty good surface, but until then they were sharp! I could do it then, but I couldn’t do it now!
When shrimping got bad around 1955-1956, Daddy and Randolph loaded everything up on one of the boats they had built and moved with their families to New Smyrna, Florida where they built a house and stayed for 15 years. They did really well working in Florida using their shallow draft boat which did not draw water. They could shrimp the waters where other boats couldn’t go. They built a second boat and made good money. They returned to Oriental in the early 70’s.
Daddy and I built our houses then and put them side by side with the help of John Beeman, who was a very good carpenter and a very nice fellow.
On South River and Daddy
Daddy came from the Lukens side of South River. There were about 25 families living there. They fished using skiffs with air cooled motors. There were no roads on that side of the river, and still aren’t, only dirt paths, beautiful dirt trails used by duck hunters now. We did have three things: a one room grammar school, a Post Office and a grocery store. The other side of the river, called Merriman, had roads down to Morehead and Beaufort.
When the grammar school was closed down, Daddy rented a room in Oriental so that he could attend high school and then went back to South River.
In the Storm of ‘33, Daddy chopped holes in the floor to let the water in as it rose so that the house, which was on pineheart piers, would not float away. Daddy had to keep going higher and ended up in the attic where he had carried up his ax to cut through the roof if need be. During the storm, he rescued many little ladies by putting them into a No. 1 wash tub and floating them through the rising water from their homes. Daddy used to tell the story about one little old lady whom he rescued who kept reaching out to rescue chickens floating on debris and so he ended up with a washtub of chickens!
People pulled the plugs on their boats to sink them rather than let them get battered and lost in storms. They had no warning, only what they knew from their experience of the weather.
Daddy courted Mother, Ruth Godfrey, from South River by coming across the Sound in his motor boat. Mother said she could hear him when he started out to cross over to Oriental, but I doubt it because that’s a distance of 6 or 7 miles.
Mother was originally from the Long Island Sound area of Connecticut. She moved here when she was 3 years old. Her father, Mr. Godfrey, had rented a train car in Connecticut and loaded all their belongings on it and moved here with his wife, my mother and her three sisters. Mr. Godfrey was a carpenter, and built about 3 or 4 houses in the area. He and his wife, Edna, ran The Tumble Inn. We called Grandmother Godfrey, Mamoo. She was a very tiny, sweet little lady, only about 4’2” tall. There used to be a summer school associated with the University that operated here in Oriental and my grandparents rented rooms to many of these summer scholars.
Great, great uncle William came from Brown’s Creek which is right beside South River. He would cross over the creek in a little skiff to come to school in Lukens. He did not have formal education beyond that, but he was an avid reader and knew everything, much more than anybody else.
He had a seafood business in which he sold fish upstate by the truck load. After he unloaded the fish, he would fill up the truck with granite from a quarry up there and bring them back to Oriental. He eventually built his house on the Neuse River in Oriental with those granite blocks. He also built model sail boats.
He was a numismatist, a person who collects coins and banknotes. He traveled all over to trade and sell mostly gold coin, but bank notes and paper currency as well. He loved to travel and was a world traveler. By 1951, he had been to Russia and China. He had an amazing ability to communicate with people all over the world without being able to speak their languages.
He always wanted to live to be 100. He almost made it; he died at 99 years old. Before he died, he showed up one day with a piece of cedar and told me, he did not ask me, to build a tombstone. I told him I had never built a tombstone before. He told me that he was the only man in Oriental who knew where the grave of a man from South Creek was, and if we didn’t build him a headstone; nobody would ever know where he was buried.
That tombstone is the only wooden tombstone in the cemetery. See if you can find it. Funny thing is, even though it is made of three thin pieces of cedar wood, it has turned gray like all the other cement stones. We set it in 1991 and I fashioned a copper strip over the top to protect it- that’s a hint to help you. Let me know if you find it.
Uncle William started the Rotary Club in Oriental. We do a lot of things to raise money for scholarships. One of our biggest fund raisers is our tent rentals. We are very busy in the summer renting and putting up and taking down tents and tables and chairs all over the area, even up to New Bern. Fortunately, we have a lot of manpower.
On How I Joined the Coast Guard
I was about 18 years old and out of school in July 1954, working with my Dad on the shrimp
boat. It was hot and I was down by the railways, which were lines of tracks providing runways to get boats hauled up out of the water. I was standing in the water to use sand to scrub the bottom and I was covered with the red copper paint used to keep the worms off the hulls of the boats. A group of about 6-8 boys from town were coming down to the railways all dressed in good clothes. They said they were going to Wilmington on the bus to join the Coast Guard. Right then and there I said, “Daddy, I am going to join the Coast Guard.”
He didn’t say anything to stop me because he knew how hard it was being a commercial fisherman. It was one of the best decisions I ever made.
We made the recruiter’s day when he got six eligible, new recruits for his quota on one day! Four of us who joined that day, stayed and made a career of it.
On My Career in the Coast Guard
I spent 22 years in the Coast Guard. I have been to Newfoundland, Norfolk, Florida, New Orleans, Texas, Seattle, WA and Ketchican, Alaska. Most of my time was spent in the US delivering boats: Construction Tenders, Search and Rescue (SAR) or Aids to Navigation (A/N). The Construction Tenders built and maintained lights all along the Intracoastal Waterway to the Gulf Coast. The US Coast Guard is the direct descendent of the Revenue Cutter Service which was the oldest seagoing service in the US. It was established in 1790 with 10 small topsail schooners, or “revenue cutters” assigned to each of the ten seaports on the East Coast. The Coast Guard was originally under the Treasury Department, then the Transportation Department. At war time, the Coast Guard is under the Navy. At this time, it is a branch of the military under Homeland Security.
While we were stationed in Belhaven, Hurricane Donna hit the area with full fury on September 11, 1960. Carl Neuerberg was bringing his brand new 28’ Dickerson Sloop down to Oriental from Baltimore and came into port for shelter. I helped him tie down his new boat which he left there for us to take care of for him until he returned for it. He was the first person to bring a live-a-board cabin pleasure vessel to Oriental.
During the night of that same storm, Faye was in the hospital to give birth to our son, Gary. The tide got real high and the hospital flooded. The Coast Guard Station was right next to the hospital and I kept running back and forth between the two. I remember looking into the flooded delivery room and seeing that the doctor had on hip boots.
I enjoyed all my tours. However, I did not want to go back to Alaska, but my adventuresome wife, Faye, did. The Coast Guard moved our mobile home by truck from Florida, where we had been stationed, to Seattle. From there it was loaded with a crane onto a barge to Ketchican, Alaska. From there, a man from Alaska used his D-6 Caterpillar tractor to perch that mobile home onto a 200 ft. cliff on Tongass Narrows. He was what was called a “Cat Skinner” and logged the woods. He sure knew how to handle that tractor!
We lived on the Inland Passage, which was Alaska’s version of the Intracostal Waterway. All kinds of boats and sailing vessels, including all the cruise ships on their way to Juneau and Sitka, went by our little home. Faye and I and the children also could see orcas and dolphins swimming by all the time.
Faye worked at the hospital while we were there, but we camped on the weekends on the Islands in our little boat. Hunting and fishing were really good. I also commercial fished for salmon on the weekends with a Coast Guard friend who was from Hatteras.
It was a great experience in a great place, but what do I love best? Oriental…and my motor home!
Interview/Story written by Lorraine Yaeger
Photos by Jamie Baldwin
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