| TRAVELS OF DURSMIRG VOLUME IV THE ROGUES OF ST. AUGUSTINE AND OTHER SOCIAL MISFITS Chapter 24 |
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CHAPTER 24 CAPTAIN GEORGE, A REAL FISHERMAN
Captain George Tappin his shrimp boat Terry and wife Mary; Jane and I first got to know this unusual social
misfit couple our first winter in St. Augustine.
(In volume 1, chapter 10 of Travels of Dursmirg, and also in my story of our shrimp boat, Travels of Secotan I have
several photos plus a short story of our interesting times together with Captain George, Mary and their little dog
Bimbo aboard their shrimp trawler Terry.)
Captain George was always an easy going southern gentleman and didn’t qualify for the status of “Rogue”; however
he surely did fit the profile of social misfit.
George’s background of Dutch ancestry goes back to his father who was a ship’s captain who emigrated up to north
Florida from Barbados in the1800s. This was when north Florida was still a wild unsettled frontier.
Then George’s sea captain father started and ran his own freight riverboat along the St. Johns River connecting the
isolated outback settlements when river travel was the only means of transportation up and down the river to
Jacksonville.
George told us that his father’s riverboat had a loose schedule and would pull into shore along the wild cypress
swamp lined shores anywhere.
It was customary for his customers in those days to place a flag on a pole along the shore to signal the freight boat
to pull in.
The freight back in those days consisted of cattle, lumber, turpentine and passengers. Anything going to town or
headed back up river was loaded and transported.
Most of the river was wide with huge bays like a flowing lake.
Roads in those days in North Florida were almost nonexistent with only horse trails through the tall pine forests and
dark cypress swamps. So the up bound and down bound freight boat was of vital importance to these remote
otherwise isolated outposts.
George’s mother also of Dutch ancestry came down to North Florida, but was from the State of Maine.
These people did not come to North Florida for the social life. They settled in a very remote nearly inaccessible
region where neighbors were not neighborly and getting to town was either by river ferryboat or a tedious horseback
ride through pine forests and cypress swamps filled with hordes of hungry mosquitoes, poisonous snakes and
aggressive alligators.
They all lived in a one room log and shiplap sided cabin nestled away in a stand of ancient orange trees.
Their isolated backwoods home was already an old house when they moved in.
When Jane and I first visited this place in the early 1970s it was a dilapidated aged settled down ramshackle log
house that was nearly a hundred and fifty years old.
This is the humble backwoods home where George Tappin was born and grew up. The house was
almost 150 years old when I took this photo back in the 1980s.
At the time when the Tappin family moved into this area it was also at the same time and place in back country North
Florida where Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was inspired and wrote her all time best-selling classic books; The Yearling
and Cross Creek. These hauntingly memorable monumental books left a lasting impression on me and I have to
thank my 8th grade teacher Miss Currie for her inspiring guidance pointing me to these timeless gems.
In eighth grade as I read those epic tails of the wildest of back country north Florida existence, little did I ever know
that in the course of my life I would soon enter that strange backwoods world and meet the people much as they
were in those pages of my youthful reading.
Jane and I listened eagerly many an evening aboard our shrimp boat Secotan when work was done and we had time
to enjoy the captivatingly fascinating stories told by this naturally gifted and talented narrator. Captain George with
his colorfully descriptive dialogue that was spoken with an 18th century colonial English lilt painted vivid pictures with
his expressive language.
I still get a fond mental image of George rolling his eyes back as he would peer out of our anchored vessel at an
approaching storm and exclaim; “Oh Lordie!, its blacker than smut.”
Captain George in a few words and descriptive gestures could tell an entrancing story picturesquely describing the
outback of rustic rural North Florida in his youthful years overflowing with no-count rogues and social misfits like his
friend and neighbor known only as Sullivan.
As George related to us; Sullivan and his family had settled far out in the Everglades of south Florida near to Florida’
s largest lake, Lake Okeechobee. In those days there was no communication with the outside world and the only
access to the area was by bateau through the serpent swarming swamplands surrounding Florida’s undrained
expansive everglade.
According to the story told to us by George, his friend Sullivan and Sullivan’s family were all trapped by a killer
hurricane that they had no idea was coming and that totally flooded the entire area around the big Lake
Okeechobee.
There was no land in sight anywhere in this forlorn watery world.
All of the trees had been blown down flat by the savage storm winds and young Sullivan courageously clung for his
life to what remained of their tiny shanty family home. He lived in the rafters and then on the roof-top for days as the
flood waters rose higher and higher where he said that he had to fend off huge alligators and aggressive poisonous
water moccasins.
Young Sullivan was the only survivor of his entire family.
(Jane and I later got to know this rugged survivor who still resided in Mandarin, had a 65 foot shrimp trawler and also
a fleet of school buses that he leased to the local school district.)
Above are photos from our Secotan; lelt is Jane sitting in the wheelhouse door while offshore of St.
Augustine trawling for shrimp with the boat on auto-pilot. Center is our Secotan fully rigged with its nets
moored at our dock in Hospital Creek. On the right is our friend and partner Captain George Tappin back
in the 1970s.
Growing up in North Florida’s outback in the 1920s, financial opportunities didn’t exactly abound and so our dear
friend George being the enterprising soul that he was figured out a way to generate some cash flow.
Boot-leg booze was in big demand during the prohibition days and so George did what he considered to be the only
natural thing to do, he stepped in to fill that demand. Moon-shine distillation made for a profitable business and hard
working enterprising George fed his family and bought himself a big fancy long automobile that just naturally
matched his likings from his proceeds.
By and by George did get busted by the revenuers and went to jail.
George told the judge that he was only doing his best to be able to feed his hungry family.
In those days the bail bondsmen were the ones that turned in the bootleggers and then they would sell the jailed
bootleggers the bail bond to get them out of jail, a business merry-go-round.
The judge took mercy on poor George and let him go with only a warning and small fine. It was true in part that
George was feeding his family and he continued to do so throughout the rest his life.
Also at Mandarin, George later opened and ran a small gasoline station and general store back in the 1930s as the
first roads were being cut into the back country.
George had an endless collection of strange and interesting tales to tell and here is one George told.
This story of a customer that came in to fill up with gas and had some long cane fishing poles tied to the side of his
car. When the man bent over to fill his gas tank a hook from one of the poles snatched the vein in the man’s neck.
George maintained that the man was stone dead in less than two minutes.
George’s countless stories captivated Jane and I night after night and now I only wish that we had recorded and
compiled those unique experiences that made up the life of a this very rare one of a kind individual.
Here are a few quotes from our dear old friend Captain George;
“If you want to commit murder you need to do it in St. John’s County, if you do it somewhere else at least you need
to drag the body there.”
“You will never catch a thief stealing a plow”;
“Women got the first 30 years of my life and GM got the rest.”
“I want a big house, long car and a young wife.”
George’s second wife Mary was known as, “pistol packing Mary” she dressed like a guy, walked like a guy and
talked like a guy with her bib overhauls and baseball cap. Mary was one tough lady and held the purse strings
tighter than tight. Yes, she really did pack a pocket pistol and always kept it ready for action.
I can still remember riding down the highway with Mary along with her constant companion her little dog Bimbo.
If Mary happened to spot an empty Coke bottle lying by the side of the road she would pull over, stop her pick-em-
up truck and have whoever was riding along with her run back to fetch the bottle that she could turn in for its 5 cent
deposit. Mary never let a cent slip by.
George after a long day of fishing offshore by himself aboard their 55 foot shrimp trawler Terry asked for some
money to go buy a pack of cigarettes and Mary gave him a dollar bill. When George returned to the boat with his
cigarettes Mary asked for the change and that I think might have been one of the last straws of their marriage.
Mary had refused to go out fishing in the ocean on their shrimp trawler with George after some hair-raising incident.
This left George in a very dangerous position and also made the work load nearly impossible for one person to
handle.
George was as powerful a person as I have ever met and as able a boat handler as there ever was but out to sea
unexpected things happen that can overpower any human effort no matter how powerful the person and George
knew it!
The next thing we knew was that something very strange had happened to Captain George’s very traditional
designed for no nonsense hard working shrimp trawler the Terry.
We couldn’t believe our eyes and weren’t sure that this could possibly be the same boat. Yes it was the same old
work boat the Terry but under a new flamboyant coat of nearly psychedelic paint that was applied in a pastel
patchwork pattern with so many different blazingly bright colors helter-skelter that a pattern of symmetry could not
be discerned…somebody was definitely making an extroverted in-your-face statement!
Surly our conservative old friend Captain George Tappin couldn’t have taken up whatever kind of drugs it took to do
these far-out burned-out kinds of things…but there it was bold as brass coming down the river on its way out to fish
offshore.
Then with my binoculars I noticed that Captain George had a new and sizeable crew and they were all women.
The revolutionary new Terry was uniquely like none other.
It was true though nearly impossible to believe that our straight arrow conservative old friend George had actually
gone out and hired himself an all girl crew. This went far beyond just making a liberal groundbreaking statement in
an industry that over the centuries had always been the sacred bastion and last frontier of the mucho-macho men’s
world.
What had happened?
Had our dear old friend George actually stepped over that taboo line of arch-conservatism?
Was he here on the cutting edge of and spearheading some kind of new radically revolutionary free-spirited, free
thinking movement?
What else could it be?
The girls took over George and his shrimp boat Terry and first it was the paint job…definitely the wild woman’s touch.
Unique unto itself, never before had such a flamboyant spectacle ever presented itself in little old St. Augustine and
boldly gone out to sea on its debut.
George was out of his conservative closet!
This was by far the most stupendous, outrageous, absurdly and dazzling expression of exotic color and
uncoordinated gaudy a thing as has ever been witnessed.
Pinks, yellows, lavenders and an endless array of unrelated unbalanced hues screaming out in colorized defiance.
For an old geezer like our dear friend Captain George he had in a moment really stepped beyond mere
flamboyancy. He was the epitome of a “far-out” social misfit!
For our mild mannered, easy going and soft spoken George this was an awakening of a youthful free-spirit in a
transformation that was setback shocking to one and all.
George was flying high and having the time of his life. He had taken his pent-up life’s strikingly petty little frustrations
and boldly flushed them down the proverbial toilet all at once. The shit of his life was gone, the air was clean and
now George breathed better. Captain George and his all girl crew even took a vacation fling trip over to the
Bahamas Islands onboard a cruise ship living it up like the rich and famous.
We thought that this must be George’s mid-life crisis or a second childhood but then we weren’t so sure that he ever
had a first childhood growing up in his raggedy dirt poor humble hovel existence.
This was no small thing for little old St. Augustine and the whole town took notice in amazing disbelief.
The weekend edition of the St. Augustine Record newspaper published a special feature and tribute about our
friend Captain George and his all girl crew aboard the newly renovated shrimp trawler Terry with its ostentatiously
glitz paint job. Here it is;
from the St. Augustine Record
Going against the old seafaring adage that woman on ships are bad luck, a St. Augustine based shrimp boat has
taken on an all female crew.
Capt. George Tappin, a shrimping captain of more than 40 years has hired on three women to work his shrimper
“Terry’ with him.
Patsy Zittrauer, 20, has been working on the longest of the three. She had so much fun she recruited her sister,
Pam McConchie, 22, and her sister in law Pam Zittrauer, 22, to work the boat with her.
IT ALL STARTED three months ago, according to Patsy, Jane’s husband and Patsy’s brother Don, was interested
in buying a shrimp boat and eventually introduced Patsy to Capt. George.
As Patsy relates the situation, her brother would need some help on the boat if he bought one so she decided to get
some experience.
Capt. George hired her on as crew along with a regular hand.
“Patsy really outworked for that guy the first day,” Pam remarked. “He took all of his stuff off the boat and never
came back.”
Since that day in July, Patsy has been a regular member of the crew. She learned the basics of the boat her first two
days on the job, Capt. George contends that she is the fastest learner he has ever had.
THE JOB IS A sharp contrast to those they have held previously. Before becoming shrimpers, the trio worked
together as maids and motel painters at the same time. Patsy had worked as a bookkeeper and Pam worked for
Desco.
The women are a real oddity to the shrimp harvesting industry. “There are a few women that own shrimp boats , but
as far as I know we are the only women to work on one,” Patsy said.
“It’s really funny,” remarked Pam, “we pull alongside another boat and the men all want to know where to get a crew
like us or if we are really working!”
the three admitted that the work is not easy, “Pulling up the anchor is the hardest job,” said Patty. “It’s pretty hard
scraping too.”
“No, the hardest part is sorting,” argued Pam.
“CLEANING THE nets isn’t easy either,” added Jane.
“Terry” and her crew start out each morning at daylight and return each evening at 6. Jane is the mother of two
children, Steve, 4, and Carrie, 2, but she doesn’t think the hours are too bad. Her husband takes the children to
nursery school each morning before he goes to work at Desco Marine as a mechanic and then picks them up on his
way home.
“He doesn’t mind at all,” Jane remarked. “If it was any other job other than working shrimp boat he would be mad
since it keeps me away from the home a lot of the time.
“WE HAVE TO sort everything that comes out of the nets,” Jane said.
“We get all sorts of things besides shrimp,” Patsy said. “We get crabs that really pinch and the fish some stingrays
and sharks and jellyfish and things. The stingrays are the worst. You have to be careful with them and pick them up
holding them between their eyes. The jellyfish can sting you too.”
According to Pam the shrimp can be bad too. “They have eyes on the side of their heads and a horn right in the
middle. They can really stick you,” she remarked.
“We can almost run the whole back of the boat by ourselves,” Patsy boasted.
“But Capt. George likes to do some of it too. He lets us let out the outriggers, but he likes to do his part.”
“He’s teaching us to drive, too,” Jane said. “We can almost drive as well as he can except he’s been more places.”
“YOU REALLY HAVE got to learn where all the snags are and where you can run and where you can’t run,” Pam
remarked.
One of the three noted another danger in working on a shrimp boat. “One time the wind blew so hard that Jane
almost went overboard!”
With hazards like that it would seem that the ability to swim would be a necessity. “They swim like fish but I can only
float on my back,” Jane admitted.
One of the other drawbacks on the job are the possibilities of rough seas. “When it gets rough out there you really
bounce around,” Patsy said.
It is interesting to note that before becoming members of the “Terry” crew none of the women had been out on the
ocean in a boat.
“It’s really different than being out on a lake of something,” Jane said.
“It can really get mean out there,” added Patsy.
THE THREESOME ALL emphatically say that they love their job. “Capt. George is really taking a chance in a way by
taking us on,” Patsy said. “We could not like it or just quit or something, but we really like it.”
“If I had gone over to Salvador’s and asked for a job they would have asked me if I could mend nets and all that
stuff and I would have said no and I couldn’t have gotten a job,” Patsy speculated.
They also agree on some of the comical episodes their new profession has caused. “The guys on the docks usually
help us lift the baskets,”recalled Pam. “But I am really strong and I lifted one myself and they realized I didn’t need
their help.”
IN ANOTHER THEY ALL get a kick out of listening to the conversations on the radio.” These guys gossip more than
women do,” Pam said. She related overhearing i=one man recall a night he got drunk to another. “They really come
up with some crazy stuff,” she said.
Patsy commented that this is partly due to the long hours between empting the nets. “It gets pretty monotones,” she
said. “there isn’t a lot to do besides listen to the radio or the tape player.”
All three said most of their time is spent down in the galley telling jokes and horsing around.
Patsy said that all that will change for the next few months during shrimp season. “When shrimp season is on you
have to empty the nets every hour or so,” she said. The trio finds the arrangements of working with each other to be
quite amiable and very easy going. “With three of us there is no problem about taking a day off,” Patsy said.
TOWARDS THE END of the summer Patsy worked almost by herself to make money to attend Flagler College
where she is a student. “If one of us needs money another will lay off,” she said.
Since school has started se doesn’t work all the time. Her classes take a lot of time so Jane and Pam work during
the week.
In a maverick situation such as the one the threesome have put themselves in, the question of women’s liberation
naturally comes up.
Patsy answered an immediate “I do! To the query as to her agreement with the movements goals.
“You should be able anything you can do,” Pam stated.
JANE REMAINED rather quiet during the discussion and Patsy commented that if you are married and your
husband doesn’t keep you from doing things then you really don’t have a gripe.
All of the job of working on a shrimp boat is not on the sea pulling in nets. This past weekend “Terry” was in dry
dock getting a face lift and the three members of the crew always assisted to help paint her inside and out.
Jane commented that she would put her two children in the cooler to keep them out of the way and all three broke
up with laughter.
The job is a hard one, they admit, but they also conclude that it is better than any other they have had.
Looking back on these times I think that they may have been among George’s very happiest days.
Lamentably the above photos are not in color because that psychedelic paint job was positively ghastly gaudy.
George eventually had his fun fling and the girls that lit up his life moved on.
It must have been George’s destiny to wind up with an eccentric headstrong woman because in his next encounter
he connected up with another strong willed lady that had gained a fierce reputation of driving out unwanted
neighbors by dynamiting their homes.
George moved in with Annie May Dueling at her Porpoise Point home and bought her three giant sized freezers to
hold the catch that he landed from his hard earned efforts aboard his fishing trawler Terry.
This was the same old type of situation over again and was not going to work out either because in spite of the fact
that Annie May had found a good market for the catch and was getting top dollar for George’s shrimp the end result
was exactly the same.
George was again working hard making lots of money but when it was all said and done and the cash counted out
someone else was spending all his loot.
Dear old George next started dating the widow of one of his old shrimping buddies from Fernandina Beach who
George had respected deeply for his brutally incredible physical strength.
George had often times over the years admiringly told Jane and I impressive tales of the super-human power that
this seagoing superman, Captain Weaver possessed.
The one story George loved to tell about Captain Weaver was how he could snatch up with ice tongs a 500 pound
block of ice with each hand and then carry them off to the ice hold of his shrimp trawler.
As Captain George used to say; “he was much a man!”
In spite of the enormous physical strength that Captain Weaver possessed he was ultimately pulled down by cancer
of the lungs.
Well, Captain Weaver’s widow Ruby and George had been friends for many a year, in fact they were almost as close
as family. They made a happy couple.
George was so proud of Ruby Weaver that he used to take her down to St. Augustine to visit with Jane and I. We
spent many a lovely social evening together.
This is when we got to know Ruby’s daughter Esther who would always tag along each time George paid us a social
visit. Esther was a sturdily built person just a little more than slightly over weight that had some kind of learning
disability that was bad enough so that she received a disability check every month from the government.
I believe that Esther was some kind of an autistic person because she certainly was not stupid.
When it came to complicated calculations she could spit out the answer faster than you could punch the numbers
into a calculator.
A couple of months went by with the courtship of Ruby Weaver and then one day George showed up at our house
with Esther and no mother.
Esther smugly stated to us that she had stolen George away from her very own mother.
So it was and this was going to be Captain George’s new woman.
I can say one thing about Esther and that is that she did indeed actually pull her own weight aboard George’s
shrimp trawler Terry. That was more than George had ever gotten out of any of his previous woman.
George Tappin’s shrimp boat, the Terry docked in St. Augustine, Florida at Marine Supply and Oil
Company on the San Sebastian River with wife Esther in the wheel house. Across the river in the
background is located the San Sebastian Marine, builders of wooden shrimp trawlers.
“I want a big house, long car and a young woman.”
Those were George’s own words and he was on his way to fulfilling them.
He had the young wife, he traded cars like most people changed clothes and all he was lacking was his big house.
Poor old George lived in a shambles of a run down house trailer that I hope he didn’t pay too much money for
because it didn’t even have junk value…but then George just didn’t really care too much about such things.
He felt success and was in seventh heaven in his long car with his young wife.
George was in his second childhood with Esther and Esther was smugly happy with her commandeered man. They
were having a lark and even made some road trips to visit old friends.
One trip in particular was nothing short of an over-the-road nightmare.
They set out driving up to North Carolina to visit their shrimping friends Mack and Audrey McLeod, the previous
owners of our shrimp trawler named Secotan, which Jane and I later purchased in partnership with George.
When we had heard the epic travelogue story later related to us after their three day randomly rambling road trip we
were totally at a loss for comment.
It turned out that George and Esther never did find their friends Mack and Audrey and spent the entire three day trip
driving up one freeway and down the next because neither George nor Esther could read the map.
George was happy just driving and Esther didn’t ever worry much about anything. Eventually Esther recognized
some familiar landmarks and thus got them back to North Florida where they would not need a map.
I am often totally amazed when I see seemingly adult people like these two with such limited knowledge going
through life and doing all of the things that they do just by some unknown means trusting their animal instincts that
most often does see them through many a brush with catastrophe and surviving just by chance.
A good example of this was Captain George’s boat handling abilities that he had acquired over a lifetime of
accumulated trial and error observations and instinctive deductive interpretation.
Captain George knew the weather patterns better than the NOAA forecasters, his ear was tuned to the engines
health by its arrhythmic heart beat and he could diagnose its fitness with uncanny precision. He knew the rhythms of
the sea and the movements of its creatures and navigated the maritime waters day or night by some type of built
into his head computer. This was his only life and it was what he needed to know to survive.
One of our first thoughts we had when Jane and I first visited the Tappin family home place in remote Mandarin was
that anybody that would go to the extremes that this family did to be out of the mainstream of society must be a little
bit crazy or just bona fide social misfits or both.
As we got to know this family a little better our suspicions were proven correct. They were not just a little bit crazy,
real insanity was well established in the family.
Our friend Captain George was by far the sanest one of the entire group and after I get done telling you some of his
antics here in this story you will have a good perspective of a family removed from the mainstream.
A good place to start is with George’s maternal grandfather who was a street cleaner and garbage collector in St.
Augustine. His father, George’s great maternal grandfather had been a sea captain of Dutch descent from the state
of Maine and how and why he wound up in the outback of North Florida was unclear.
Here is where a major event that occurred in the Tappin family history began.
This is a story as related to us by George;
According to George; George’s maternal (the garbage collector) grandfather and George’s father (the Dutch
descent sea captain from Barbados and St. John’s River freight boat owner), got into some kind of a heated
argument and altercation that escalated into an armed shooting match.
George’s pregnant mother stepped into the fracas and attempted to break up the dispute.
George’s mother was pregnant at the time with George’s little brother Cecil.
When the gun discharged George’s pregnant mother took the bullet in her belly.
The family thereafter blamed Cecil’s erratic mental state and craziness on this shooting incident.
A half sister of George’s escaped the area to marry a rich farmer from North Dakota who was awash in money
gleaned from his oil wells. She was however caught in a mental web of her own making.
Pleasant, good natured and attractive she fell into a radical fanatical religious cult group and subsequently built her
own recluse escape from reality with that cranky cult.
George’s younger brother Cecil was not good looking, motivated, talented or intelligent but possessed an easy
going attitude that allowed him to slip through life with out any aspirations. He was content as long as he had his
menial little job to get enough cash to scrape along with and buy a few cigarettes. Cecil never left the family
homestead or sought out a wife. Nothing much inspired easy going Cecil.
George’s mother on the other hand was a special case. All we know for sure is that she came from parents of Dutch
descent who had resided in the state of Maine. She spent her simple life isolated in the backwoods of north Florida
where survival was a harsh hardscrabble existence.
Formal education was non-existent and the neighbors were distant, distrusted and disliked. She was trapped in the
humblest of circumstances. In her younger years a trip to the nearest town, Jacksonville was only possible by boat
on the St. Johns River lined with deep dark cypress swamps teaming with alligators and aggressive water
moccasins. She was trapped with no place to venture even in the full light of day.
George’s mother was his father’s second wife, the first wife died.
The father needed someone to take care of the kids…there was no courtship only a deal concocted with her father.
This photo was taken in 1980s at the Tappin family homestead in Mandarin, Florida.
Pictured above are my wife Jane and George’s old mother who had been a captive of this heavily
wooded and isolated place since she was a young girl.
Surviving upon their wild isolated outpost molded their minds and defined their spirits into the most resolute and
basic instincts for human survival.
Self-reliance drove these instinctively self-sufficient people to make do in every circumstance of sickness, injury and
basic necessity to endure and only the strongest would survive.
The family was the basic unit where even the youngest were required to do as much as physically possible pulling
their weight and contributing their efforts. Fun and games never entered into their daily struggle for basic-survival
where their meager marginal existence was their only lot in life.
Captain George and his nightmare of survival with his mental case family members;
This is a younger Captain George at the helm of his shrimp boat Terry in 1973 on his way off-shore of St. Augustine
for fishing. Check out his cardboard trawl time clock hanging by his side. Almost all shrimp boats had one of these to
keep track of the time the nets went over for each drag.
One day George arrived at our home in St. Augustine with fear in his eyes, visibly shaken by something that must
have been dreadful.
This was something that Jane and I had never before witnessed in our easygoing self-assured old friend George.
George proceeded to nervously relate to us this bazaar sequence of events that led him to his present state of
anxiety.
This episode took place in the mid-1980s after we had sold our shrimp boat and apartment business and were
chiefly involved in land development and home building. So we had some leisure time to ourselves.
With pleading eyes George came to us and sought out our help.
This is not something that independent minded George would easily do, only as a last resort of desperation.
First, George rattled by his insurmountable problem went to the police for assistance. They listened to his story and
told him that this was none of their business and that they could only respond if an actual assault or murder took
place.
George’s family and home laid the foundation for his instinctive sense of survival. With all of George’s family each
eagerly plotting their own agenda to commandeer the poor little family outpost homestead.
The opportunity was all that was needed.
This rivalry took on a life of its own when George’s mother concocted a devious scheme to get rid of George, and
she didn’t like Esther either.
First she conspired with her son Cecil to actually do the dirty deed of dispatching his brother George promising Cecil
that she would testify that the murder of George was just an act of self defense.
This was serious business but Cecil couldn’t bring himself to do it and then confided in his big brother George.
George knew the resolute determination of his old twisted minded mother and if she couldn’t get Cecil to do the
killing she might not stop there and even use Cecil’s gun to kill George herself then hang the blame on Cecil and get
rid of them both at the same time.
Jane and I had known this clan a long time and when George, the toughest man we knew was stricken with terror we
knew it was time to take this situation seriously.
These people lived their entire lives violently without batting an eye. They summarily dispatched anything that
interfered in any way with their existence.
The end result to this episode finally came when the family jointly sold all of their land to a developer with promises
of a life estate where they could remain on the land as long as they lived.
Cecil took his money and moved into a nursing home, losing his life estate in the land first.
George took his money and moved his house trailer over to his half sister’s place and also lost his life estate in the
land.
George’s mother remained on the land in her ancient tumbling down log house along with George’s poor mentally
deranged little sister whose custody was ultimately turned over to his niece.
(This niece had a past history of nursing indigent older folks that were at death’s door and soon to die after willing
their estates over to her.)
In any event George’s old mother soon passed away and low and behold the niece wound up with the inheritance
and stayed on with the life estate. She in the end outlasted all the rest of them.
***
GEORGE AND HIS PAINT STORY;
The biggest in the business and also the standard of the industry in marine paint was, International Paint, well
known worldwide. They had their own distribution system utilizing their own trucks and drivers but their inventory
control back in those years was less than chancy at best.
It turned out that International Paint’s truck driver for North Florida and South Georgia was looking for a little extra
cash and ran into our friend George Tappin.
That truck driver made a proposal to George that sounded like a golden opportunity.
The truck driver sold George some of the most expensive top the line marine anti-fouling boat bottom paint for a
ridiculously low price because the cans were dented and the driver maintained that he couldn’t bring them back to
the plant in that condition and would have to dispose of them on his own. So, by selling them to our friend George
everybody would be happy, the company, George, who could make a few extra bucks and of course the driver that
wouldn’t have to drag the dented cans off and dispose of them by himself.
Soon our friend George began developing a route for his regular paint customers and business rapidly began to
boom.
George even bought the biggest longest Cadillac available, like the ones used by drug runners with a special air
suspension ride that could easily be adjusted by just the touch of a button for excessive loads to transport his
dented cans of paint.
George’s long car had every button and doodad that could possibly have been bolted on to an automobile and
George was as happy as a little kid with a new toy. Remember what George always used to say;
“Women got the first 30 years of my life and GM got the rest.”
“I want a big house, long car and a young wife.”
Well, George’s business was so good; he was so happy and he was prosperous.
Old Captain George knew every shrimper and boatyard on the east coast of the U.S. Loading his “big car” beyond
its limit, George just mashed the button and flipped a lever and in seconds the sagging back bumper of his long
automobile was no longer dragging the ground but was up like magic and perfectly level.
George now had a truck load of concealed merchandise loaded in the trunk of his leveled out long automobile and
could drive past the Florida/Georgia weight station with confidential ease and without stopping for inspection.
Soon George’s business developed into a high cash flow industry.
One of George’s best paint customers was a small fish camp outside of Jacksonville, Florida on the St. John’s River
near Mayport and the ocean inlet.
This quiet little out of the way fish camp turned out to be a front for one of North Florida’s biggest drug dealers and
the Feds had it under their strict surveillance and scrutiny and discretely staked out.
The owners of the fish camp were there to supply their loyal customers with whatever they wanted and desired.
This quiet little fish camp had become a regular stop for George and his cash paint business.
One day when George made another of his frequent stops to deliver a load of his dubious paint that now no longer
came in dented cans for cash; he decided to buy several pounds of fresh mullet from the fish camp.
George had been feeding his whole family since his youthful years as a bootlegger so it was only natural that he
would bring home to his 95 year old mother fresh mullet that she loved.
Wrapped up in newspaper, his five pounds of fish and ice made a sizeable armload.
When our dear friend George stepped outside the quiet little fish camp he was instantly apprehended, hand-cuffed
and whisked away to jail with no explanations.
George was guilty by association period and sent off to the slammer where he was incarcerated in the same cell with
the “The Outlaws” motor cycle gang.
George was innocently mystified by these doings and his suspicions began to mount about all of that paint that was
now arriving in cans without dents.
The cops thought for sure that George was a drug king-pin dealing in dope and was one of the drug dealers; this is
why they had the fish camp staked out.
George had his day in court, still astonished, amazed and shaken by the turn of events.
The judge asked George if he had ever been arrested before and naive George then told the judge of his bootleg
business back on the1920s and the revenuers busting up his still while he was trying to feed his family.
Then the paint story came out quite by accident and the interstate grand larceny paint theft story came to light.
With this our friend George was free to go but he was out of the paint business then and there.
Quite ironically a short time later while George was driving his big Cadillac down auto-row in Jacksonville, Florida
where he was well liked and well known by all of the auto salesmen the strangest thing happened to him.
The drive shaft decoupled on George’s long automobile at the forward end. It dropped down on the road and dug
into the pavement and then catapulted George and his big do-dad-laden Cadillac end over end directly in front of
one of those friendly auto dealers.
The automobile salesmen couldn’t believe their good luck and George went home that day with another new “long
car”. The salesmen just loved George, and George just loved their attention and they all were happy.
George’s days of being a shrimp boat captain were over, due to his age and he took a job as a night watchman until
he was struck down by cancer a few years later.
George never was a religious man in any way but as he lay dying the preachers swooped down on him like so many
hungry vultures to pick his bones and poor George was a captive audience.
In painful submission seeing that the end was in sight poor old sickly George finally capitulated in actions only and
let the vulture preachers lead him down to the river, shroud him in a white robe and do their mumblings.
As George who had been a devote non-believer all his life told Jane and I; “You never know, they could possibly be
right?”
On his deathbed he did get rid of one preacher when he gave that preacher the keys to his “long car” and that was
the last George ever saw of that preacher man and his long car.
George’s third wife Esther wanted a house and so George took what little money he had left and bought what he
could afford which was one of the most pathetic shanties I have ever seen…but it was a house…just barely.
George was one of the very best friends that Jane and I have ever had and we do miss him very much…a fine
gentleman of the most genuine kind and a truly trusted friend.
The last words George ever spoke to me as he lay on his death bed were; “John, I would give anything if only I could
just walk out that door.”
Poor George smoked his last smoke as the vultures swooped in to pick the puny bones of his pathetic estate.
next chapter
CHAPTER 24 CAPTAIN GEORGE, A REAL FISHERMAN
Captain George Tappin his shrimp boat Terry and wife Mary; Jane and I first got to know this unusual social
misfit couple our first winter in St. Augustine.
(In volume 1, chapter 10 of Travels of Dursmirg, and also in my story of our shrimp boat, Travels of Secotan I have
several photos plus a short story of our interesting times together with Captain George, Mary and their little dog
Bimbo aboard their shrimp trawler Terry.)
Captain George was always an easy going southern gentleman and didn’t qualify for the status of “Rogue”; however
he surely did fit the profile of social misfit.
George’s background of Dutch ancestry goes back to his father who was a ship’s captain who emigrated up to north
Florida from Barbados in the1800s. This was when north Florida was still a wild unsettled frontier.
Then George’s sea captain father started and ran his own freight riverboat along the St. Johns River connecting the
isolated outback settlements when river travel was the only means of transportation up and down the river to
Jacksonville.
George told us that his father’s riverboat had a loose schedule and would pull into shore along the wild cypress
swamp lined shores anywhere.
It was customary for his customers in those days to place a flag on a pole along the shore to signal the freight boat
to pull in.
The freight back in those days consisted of cattle, lumber, turpentine and passengers. Anything going to town or
headed back up river was loaded and transported.
Most of the river was wide with huge bays like a flowing lake.
Roads in those days in North Florida were almost nonexistent with only horse trails through the tall pine forests and
dark cypress swamps. So the up bound and down bound freight boat was of vital importance to these remote
otherwise isolated outposts.
George’s mother also of Dutch ancestry came down to North Florida, but was from the State of Maine.
These people did not come to North Florida for the social life. They settled in a very remote nearly inaccessible
region where neighbors were not neighborly and getting to town was either by river ferryboat or a tedious horseback
ride through pine forests and cypress swamps filled with hordes of hungry mosquitoes, poisonous snakes and
aggressive alligators.
They all lived in a one room log and shiplap sided cabin nestled away in a stand of ancient orange trees.
Their isolated backwoods home was already an old house when they moved in.
When Jane and I first visited this place in the early 1970s it was a dilapidated aged settled down ramshackle log
house that was nearly a hundred and fifty years old.
This is the humble backwoods home where George Tappin was born and grew up. The house was
almost 150 years old when I took this photo back in the 1980s.
At the time when the Tappin family moved into this area it was also at the same time and place in back country North
Florida where Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was inspired and wrote her all time best-selling classic books; The Yearling
and Cross Creek. These hauntingly memorable monumental books left a lasting impression on me and I have to
thank my 8th grade teacher Miss Currie for her inspiring guidance pointing me to these timeless gems.
In eighth grade as I read those epic tails of the wildest of back country north Florida existence, little did I ever know
that in the course of my life I would soon enter that strange backwoods world and meet the people much as they
were in those pages of my youthful reading.
Jane and I listened eagerly many an evening aboard our shrimp boat Secotan when work was done and we had time
to enjoy the captivatingly fascinating stories told by this naturally gifted and talented narrator. Captain George with
his colorfully descriptive dialogue that was spoken with an 18th century colonial English lilt painted vivid pictures with
his expressive language.
I still get a fond mental image of George rolling his eyes back as he would peer out of our anchored vessel at an
approaching storm and exclaim; “Oh Lordie!, its blacker than smut.”
Captain George in a few words and descriptive gestures could tell an entrancing story picturesquely describing the
outback of rustic rural North Florida in his youthful years overflowing with no-count rogues and social misfits like his
friend and neighbor known only as Sullivan.
As George related to us; Sullivan and his family had settled far out in the Everglades of south Florida near to Florida’
s largest lake, Lake Okeechobee. In those days there was no communication with the outside world and the only
access to the area was by bateau through the serpent swarming swamplands surrounding Florida’s undrained
expansive everglade.
According to the story told to us by George, his friend Sullivan and Sullivan’s family were all trapped by a killer
hurricane that they had no idea was coming and that totally flooded the entire area around the big Lake
Okeechobee.
There was no land in sight anywhere in this forlorn watery world.
All of the trees had been blown down flat by the savage storm winds and young Sullivan courageously clung for his
life to what remained of their tiny shanty family home. He lived in the rafters and then on the roof-top for days as the
flood waters rose higher and higher where he said that he had to fend off huge alligators and aggressive poisonous
water moccasins.
Young Sullivan was the only survivor of his entire family.
(Jane and I later got to know this rugged survivor who still resided in Mandarin, had a 65 foot shrimp trawler and also
a fleet of school buses that he leased to the local school district.)
Above are photos from our Secotan; lelt is Jane sitting in the wheelhouse door while offshore of St.
Augustine trawling for shrimp with the boat on auto-pilot. Center is our Secotan fully rigged with its nets
moored at our dock in Hospital Creek. On the right is our friend and partner Captain George Tappin back
in the 1970s.
Growing up in North Florida’s outback in the 1920s, financial opportunities didn’t exactly abound and so our dear
friend George being the enterprising soul that he was figured out a way to generate some cash flow.
Boot-leg booze was in big demand during the prohibition days and so George did what he considered to be the only
natural thing to do, he stepped in to fill that demand. Moon-shine distillation made for a profitable business and hard
working enterprising George fed his family and bought himself a big fancy long automobile that just naturally
matched his likings from his proceeds.
By and by George did get busted by the revenuers and went to jail.
George told the judge that he was only doing his best to be able to feed his hungry family.
In those days the bail bondsmen were the ones that turned in the bootleggers and then they would sell the jailed
bootleggers the bail bond to get them out of jail, a business merry-go-round.
The judge took mercy on poor George and let him go with only a warning and small fine. It was true in part that
George was feeding his family and he continued to do so throughout the rest his life.
Also at Mandarin, George later opened and ran a small gasoline station and general store back in the 1930s as the
first roads were being cut into the back country.
George had an endless collection of strange and interesting tales to tell and here is one George told.
This story of a customer that came in to fill up with gas and had some long cane fishing poles tied to the side of his
car. When the man bent over to fill his gas tank a hook from one of the poles snatched the vein in the man’s neck.
George maintained that the man was stone dead in less than two minutes.
George’s countless stories captivated Jane and I night after night and now I only wish that we had recorded and
compiled those unique experiences that made up the life of a this very rare one of a kind individual.
Here are a few quotes from our dear old friend Captain George;
“If you want to commit murder you need to do it in St. John’s County, if you do it somewhere else at least you need
to drag the body there.”
“You will never catch a thief stealing a plow”;
“Women got the first 30 years of my life and GM got the rest.”
“I want a big house, long car and a young wife.”
George’s second wife Mary was known as, “pistol packing Mary” she dressed like a guy, walked like a guy and
talked like a guy with her bib overhauls and baseball cap. Mary was one tough lady and held the purse strings
tighter than tight. Yes, she really did pack a pocket pistol and always kept it ready for action.
I can still remember riding down the highway with Mary along with her constant companion her little dog Bimbo.
If Mary happened to spot an empty Coke bottle lying by the side of the road she would pull over, stop her pick-em-
up truck and have whoever was riding along with her run back to fetch the bottle that she could turn in for its 5 cent
deposit. Mary never let a cent slip by.
George after a long day of fishing offshore by himself aboard their 55 foot shrimp trawler Terry asked for some
money to go buy a pack of cigarettes and Mary gave him a dollar bill. When George returned to the boat with his
cigarettes Mary asked for the change and that I think might have been one of the last straws of their marriage.
Mary had refused to go out fishing in the ocean on their shrimp trawler with George after some hair-raising incident.
This left George in a very dangerous position and also made the work load nearly impossible for one person to
handle.
George was as powerful a person as I have ever met and as able a boat handler as there ever was but out to sea
unexpected things happen that can overpower any human effort no matter how powerful the person and George
knew it!
The next thing we knew was that something very strange had happened to Captain George’s very traditional
designed for no nonsense hard working shrimp trawler the Terry.
We couldn’t believe our eyes and weren’t sure that this could possibly be the same boat. Yes it was the same old
work boat the Terry but under a new flamboyant coat of nearly psychedelic paint that was applied in a pastel
patchwork pattern with so many different blazingly bright colors helter-skelter that a pattern of symmetry could not
be discerned…somebody was definitely making an extroverted in-your-face statement!
Surly our conservative old friend Captain George Tappin couldn’t have taken up whatever kind of drugs it took to do
these far-out burned-out kinds of things…but there it was bold as brass coming down the river on its way out to fish
offshore.
Then with my binoculars I noticed that Captain George had a new and sizeable crew and they were all women.
The revolutionary new Terry was uniquely like none other.
It was true though nearly impossible to believe that our straight arrow conservative old friend George had actually
gone out and hired himself an all girl crew. This went far beyond just making a liberal groundbreaking statement in
an industry that over the centuries had always been the sacred bastion and last frontier of the mucho-macho men’s
world.
What had happened?
Had our dear old friend George actually stepped over that taboo line of arch-conservatism?
Was he here on the cutting edge of and spearheading some kind of new radically revolutionary free-spirited, free
thinking movement?
What else could it be?
The girls took over George and his shrimp boat Terry and first it was the paint job…definitely the wild woman’s touch.
Unique unto itself, never before had such a flamboyant spectacle ever presented itself in little old St. Augustine and
boldly gone out to sea on its debut.
George was out of his conservative closet!
This was by far the most stupendous, outrageous, absurdly and dazzling expression of exotic color and
uncoordinated gaudy a thing as has ever been witnessed.
Pinks, yellows, lavenders and an endless array of unrelated unbalanced hues screaming out in colorized defiance.
For an old geezer like our dear friend Captain George he had in a moment really stepped beyond mere
flamboyancy. He was the epitome of a “far-out” social misfit!
For our mild mannered, easy going and soft spoken George this was an awakening of a youthful free-spirit in a
transformation that was setback shocking to one and all.
George was flying high and having the time of his life. He had taken his pent-up life’s strikingly petty little frustrations
and boldly flushed them down the proverbial toilet all at once. The shit of his life was gone, the air was clean and
now George breathed better. Captain George and his all girl crew even took a vacation fling trip over to the
Bahamas Islands onboard a cruise ship living it up like the rich and famous.
We thought that this must be George’s mid-life crisis or a second childhood but then we weren’t so sure that he ever
had a first childhood growing up in his raggedy dirt poor humble hovel existence.
This was no small thing for little old St. Augustine and the whole town took notice in amazing disbelief.
The weekend edition of the St. Augustine Record newspaper published a special feature and tribute about our
friend Captain George and his all girl crew aboard the newly renovated shrimp trawler Terry with its ostentatiously
glitz paint job. Here it is;
from the St. Augustine Record
Going against the old seafaring adage that woman on ships are bad luck, a St. Augustine based shrimp boat has
taken on an all female crew.
Capt. George Tappin, a shrimping captain of more than 40 years has hired on three women to work his shrimper
“Terry’ with him.
Patsy Zittrauer, 20, has been working on the longest of the three. She had so much fun she recruited her sister,
Pam McConchie, 22, and her sister in law Pam Zittrauer, 22, to work the boat with her.
IT ALL STARTED three months ago, according to Patsy, Jane’s husband and Patsy’s brother Don, was interested
in buying a shrimp boat and eventually introduced Patsy to Capt. George.
As Patsy relates the situation, her brother would need some help on the boat if he bought one so she decided to get
some experience.
Capt. George hired her on as crew along with a regular hand.
“Patsy really outworked for that guy the first day,” Pam remarked. “He took all of his stuff off the boat and never
came back.”
Since that day in July, Patsy has been a regular member of the crew. She learned the basics of the boat her first two
days on the job, Capt. George contends that she is the fastest learner he has ever had.
THE JOB IS A sharp contrast to those they have held previously. Before becoming shrimpers, the trio worked
together as maids and motel painters at the same time. Patsy had worked as a bookkeeper and Pam worked for
Desco.
The women are a real oddity to the shrimp harvesting industry. “There are a few women that own shrimp boats , but
as far as I know we are the only women to work on one,” Patsy said.
“It’s really funny,” remarked Pam, “we pull alongside another boat and the men all want to know where to get a crew
like us or if we are really working!”
the three admitted that the work is not easy, “Pulling up the anchor is the hardest job,” said Patty. “It’s pretty hard
scraping too.”
“No, the hardest part is sorting,” argued Pam.
“CLEANING THE nets isn’t easy either,” added Jane.
“Terry” and her crew start out each morning at daylight and return each evening at 6. Jane is the mother of two
children, Steve, 4, and Carrie, 2, but she doesn’t think the hours are too bad. Her husband takes the children to
nursery school each morning before he goes to work at Desco Marine as a mechanic and then picks them up on his
way home.
“He doesn’t mind at all,” Jane remarked. “If it was any other job other than working shrimp boat he would be mad
since it keeps me away from the home a lot of the time.
“WE HAVE TO sort everything that comes out of the nets,” Jane said.
“We get all sorts of things besides shrimp,” Patsy said. “We get crabs that really pinch and the fish some stingrays
and sharks and jellyfish and things. The stingrays are the worst. You have to be careful with them and pick them up
holding them between their eyes. The jellyfish can sting you too.”
According to Pam the shrimp can be bad too. “They have eyes on the side of their heads and a horn right in the
middle. They can really stick you,” she remarked.
“We can almost run the whole back of the boat by ourselves,” Patsy boasted.
“But Capt. George likes to do some of it too. He lets us let out the outriggers, but he likes to do his part.”
“He’s teaching us to drive, too,” Jane said. “We can almost drive as well as he can except he’s been more places.”
“YOU REALLY HAVE got to learn where all the snags are and where you can run and where you can’t run,” Pam
remarked.
One of the three noted another danger in working on a shrimp boat. “One time the wind blew so hard that Jane
almost went overboard!”
With hazards like that it would seem that the ability to swim would be a necessity. “They swim like fish but I can only
float on my back,” Jane admitted.
One of the other drawbacks on the job are the possibilities of rough seas. “When it gets rough out there you really
bounce around,” Patsy said.
It is interesting to note that before becoming members of the “Terry” crew none of the women had been out on the
ocean in a boat.
“It’s really different than being out on a lake of something,” Jane said.
“It can really get mean out there,” added Patsy.
THE THREESOME ALL emphatically say that they love their job. “Capt. George is really taking a chance in a way by
taking us on,” Patsy said. “We could not like it or just quit or something, but we really like it.”
“If I had gone over to Salvador’s and asked for a job they would have asked me if I could mend nets and all that
stuff and I would have said no and I couldn’t have gotten a job,” Patsy speculated.
They also agree on some of the comical episodes their new profession has caused. “The guys on the docks usually
help us lift the baskets,”recalled Pam. “But I am really strong and I lifted one myself and they realized I didn’t need
their help.”
IN ANOTHER THEY ALL get a kick out of listening to the conversations on the radio.” These guys gossip more than
women do,” Pam said. She related overhearing i=one man recall a night he got drunk to another. “They really come
up with some crazy stuff,” she said.
Patsy commented that this is partly due to the long hours between empting the nets. “It gets pretty monotones,” she
said. “there isn’t a lot to do besides listen to the radio or the tape player.”
All three said most of their time is spent down in the galley telling jokes and horsing around.
Patsy said that all that will change for the next few months during shrimp season. “When shrimp season is on you
have to empty the nets every hour or so,” she said. The trio finds the arrangements of working with each other to be
quite amiable and very easy going. “With three of us there is no problem about taking a day off,” Patsy said.
TOWARDS THE END of the summer Patsy worked almost by herself to make money to attend Flagler College
where she is a student. “If one of us needs money another will lay off,” she said.
Since school has started se doesn’t work all the time. Her classes take a lot of time so Jane and Pam work during
the week.
In a maverick situation such as the one the threesome have put themselves in, the question of women’s liberation
naturally comes up.
Patsy answered an immediate “I do! To the query as to her agreement with the movements goals.
“You should be able anything you can do,” Pam stated.
JANE REMAINED rather quiet during the discussion and Patsy commented that if you are married and your
husband doesn’t keep you from doing things then you really don’t have a gripe.
All of the job of working on a shrimp boat is not on the sea pulling in nets. This past weekend “Terry” was in dry
dock getting a face lift and the three members of the crew always assisted to help paint her inside and out.
Jane commented that she would put her two children in the cooler to keep them out of the way and all three broke
up with laughter.
The job is a hard one, they admit, but they also conclude that it is better than any other they have had.
Looking back on these times I think that they may have been among George’s very happiest days.
Lamentably the above photos are not in color because that psychedelic paint job was positively ghastly gaudy.
George eventually had his fun fling and the girls that lit up his life moved on.
It must have been George’s destiny to wind up with an eccentric headstrong woman because in his next encounter
he connected up with another strong willed lady that had gained a fierce reputation of driving out unwanted
neighbors by dynamiting their homes.
George moved in with Annie May Dueling at her Porpoise Point home and bought her three giant sized freezers to
hold the catch that he landed from his hard earned efforts aboard his fishing trawler Terry.
This was the same old type of situation over again and was not going to work out either because in spite of the fact
that Annie May had found a good market for the catch and was getting top dollar for George’s shrimp the end result
was exactly the same.
George was again working hard making lots of money but when it was all said and done and the cash counted out
someone else was spending all his loot.
Dear old George next started dating the widow of one of his old shrimping buddies from Fernandina Beach who
George had respected deeply for his brutally incredible physical strength.
George had often times over the years admiringly told Jane and I impressive tales of the super-human power that
this seagoing superman, Captain Weaver possessed.
The one story George loved to tell about Captain Weaver was how he could snatch up with ice tongs a 500 pound
block of ice with each hand and then carry them off to the ice hold of his shrimp trawler.
As Captain George used to say; “he was much a man!”
In spite of the enormous physical strength that Captain Weaver possessed he was ultimately pulled down by cancer
of the lungs.
Well, Captain Weaver’s widow Ruby and George had been friends for many a year, in fact they were almost as close
as family. They made a happy couple.
George was so proud of Ruby Weaver that he used to take her down to St. Augustine to visit with Jane and I. We
spent many a lovely social evening together.
This is when we got to know Ruby’s daughter Esther who would always tag along each time George paid us a social
visit. Esther was a sturdily built person just a little more than slightly over weight that had some kind of learning
disability that was bad enough so that she received a disability check every month from the government.
I believe that Esther was some kind of an autistic person because she certainly was not stupid.
When it came to complicated calculations she could spit out the answer faster than you could punch the numbers
into a calculator.
A couple of months went by with the courtship of Ruby Weaver and then one day George showed up at our house
with Esther and no mother.
Esther smugly stated to us that she had stolen George away from her very own mother.
So it was and this was going to be Captain George’s new woman.
I can say one thing about Esther and that is that she did indeed actually pull her own weight aboard George’s
shrimp trawler Terry. That was more than George had ever gotten out of any of his previous woman.
George Tappin’s shrimp boat, the Terry docked in St. Augustine, Florida at Marine Supply and Oil
Company on the San Sebastian River with wife Esther in the wheel house. Across the river in the
background is located the San Sebastian Marine, builders of wooden shrimp trawlers.
“I want a big house, long car and a young woman.”
Those were George’s own words and he was on his way to fulfilling them.
He had the young wife, he traded cars like most people changed clothes and all he was lacking was his big house.
Poor old George lived in a shambles of a run down house trailer that I hope he didn’t pay too much money for
because it didn’t even have junk value…but then George just didn’t really care too much about such things.
He felt success and was in seventh heaven in his long car with his young wife.
George was in his second childhood with Esther and Esther was smugly happy with her commandeered man. They
were having a lark and even made some road trips to visit old friends.
One trip in particular was nothing short of an over-the-road nightmare.
They set out driving up to North Carolina to visit their shrimping friends Mack and Audrey McLeod, the previous
owners of our shrimp trawler named Secotan, which Jane and I later purchased in partnership with George.
When we had heard the epic travelogue story later related to us after their three day randomly rambling road trip we
were totally at a loss for comment.
It turned out that George and Esther never did find their friends Mack and Audrey and spent the entire three day trip
driving up one freeway and down the next because neither George nor Esther could read the map.
George was happy just driving and Esther didn’t ever worry much about anything. Eventually Esther recognized
some familiar landmarks and thus got them back to North Florida where they would not need a map.
I am often totally amazed when I see seemingly adult people like these two with such limited knowledge going
through life and doing all of the things that they do just by some unknown means trusting their animal instincts that
most often does see them through many a brush with catastrophe and surviving just by chance.
A good example of this was Captain George’s boat handling abilities that he had acquired over a lifetime of
accumulated trial and error observations and instinctive deductive interpretation.
Captain George knew the weather patterns better than the NOAA forecasters, his ear was tuned to the engines
health by its arrhythmic heart beat and he could diagnose its fitness with uncanny precision. He knew the rhythms of
the sea and the movements of its creatures and navigated the maritime waters day or night by some type of built
into his head computer. This was his only life and it was what he needed to know to survive.
One of our first thoughts we had when Jane and I first visited the Tappin family home place in remote Mandarin was
that anybody that would go to the extremes that this family did to be out of the mainstream of society must be a little
bit crazy or just bona fide social misfits or both.
As we got to know this family a little better our suspicions were proven correct. They were not just a little bit crazy,
real insanity was well established in the family.
Our friend Captain George was by far the sanest one of the entire group and after I get done telling you some of his
antics here in this story you will have a good perspective of a family removed from the mainstream.
A good place to start is with George’s maternal grandfather who was a street cleaner and garbage collector in St.
Augustine. His father, George’s great maternal grandfather had been a sea captain of Dutch descent from the state
of Maine and how and why he wound up in the outback of North Florida was unclear.
Here is where a major event that occurred in the Tappin family history began.
This is a story as related to us by George;
According to George; George’s maternal (the garbage collector) grandfather and George’s father (the Dutch
descent sea captain from Barbados and St. John’s River freight boat owner), got into some kind of a heated
argument and altercation that escalated into an armed shooting match.
George’s pregnant mother stepped into the fracas and attempted to break up the dispute.
George’s mother was pregnant at the time with George’s little brother Cecil.
When the gun discharged George’s pregnant mother took the bullet in her belly.
The family thereafter blamed Cecil’s erratic mental state and craziness on this shooting incident.
A half sister of George’s escaped the area to marry a rich farmer from North Dakota who was awash in money
gleaned from his oil wells. She was however caught in a mental web of her own making.
Pleasant, good natured and attractive she fell into a radical fanatical religious cult group and subsequently built her
own recluse escape from reality with that cranky cult.
George’s younger brother Cecil was not good looking, motivated, talented or intelligent but possessed an easy
going attitude that allowed him to slip through life with out any aspirations. He was content as long as he had his
menial little job to get enough cash to scrape along with and buy a few cigarettes. Cecil never left the family
homestead or sought out a wife. Nothing much inspired easy going Cecil.
George’s mother on the other hand was a special case. All we know for sure is that she came from parents of Dutch
descent who had resided in the state of Maine. She spent her simple life isolated in the backwoods of north Florida
where survival was a harsh hardscrabble existence.
Formal education was non-existent and the neighbors were distant, distrusted and disliked. She was trapped in the
humblest of circumstances. In her younger years a trip to the nearest town, Jacksonville was only possible by boat
on the St. Johns River lined with deep dark cypress swamps teaming with alligators and aggressive water
moccasins. She was trapped with no place to venture even in the full light of day.
George’s mother was his father’s second wife, the first wife died.
The father needed someone to take care of the kids…there was no courtship only a deal concocted with her father.
This photo was taken in 1980s at the Tappin family homestead in Mandarin, Florida.
Pictured above are my wife Jane and George’s old mother who had been a captive of this heavily
wooded and isolated place since she was a young girl.
Surviving upon their wild isolated outpost molded their minds and defined their spirits into the most resolute and
basic instincts for human survival.
Self-reliance drove these instinctively self-sufficient people to make do in every circumstance of sickness, injury and
basic necessity to endure and only the strongest would survive.
The family was the basic unit where even the youngest were required to do as much as physically possible pulling
their weight and contributing their efforts. Fun and games never entered into their daily struggle for basic-survival
where their meager marginal existence was their only lot in life.
Captain George and his nightmare of survival with his mental case family members;
This is a younger Captain George at the helm of his shrimp boat Terry in 1973 on his way off-shore of St. Augustine
for fishing. Check out his cardboard trawl time clock hanging by his side. Almost all shrimp boats had one of these to
keep track of the time the nets went over for each drag.
One day George arrived at our home in St. Augustine with fear in his eyes, visibly shaken by something that must
have been dreadful.
This was something that Jane and I had never before witnessed in our easygoing self-assured old friend George.
George proceeded to nervously relate to us this bazaar sequence of events that led him to his present state of
anxiety.
This episode took place in the mid-1980s after we had sold our shrimp boat and apartment business and were
chiefly involved in land development and home building. So we had some leisure time to ourselves.
With pleading eyes George came to us and sought out our help.
This is not something that independent minded George would easily do, only as a last resort of desperation.
First, George rattled by his insurmountable problem went to the police for assistance. They listened to his story and
told him that this was none of their business and that they could only respond if an actual assault or murder took
place.
George’s family and home laid the foundation for his instinctive sense of survival. With all of George’s family each
eagerly plotting their own agenda to commandeer the poor little family outpost homestead.
The opportunity was all that was needed.
This rivalry took on a life of its own when George’s mother concocted a devious scheme to get rid of George, and
she didn’t like Esther either.
First she conspired with her son Cecil to actually do the dirty deed of dispatching his brother George promising Cecil
that she would testify that the murder of George was just an act of self defense.
This was serious business but Cecil couldn’t bring himself to do it and then confided in his big brother George.
George knew the resolute determination of his old twisted minded mother and if she couldn’t get Cecil to do the
killing she might not stop there and even use Cecil’s gun to kill George herself then hang the blame on Cecil and get
rid of them both at the same time.
Jane and I had known this clan a long time and when George, the toughest man we knew was stricken with terror we
knew it was time to take this situation seriously.
These people lived their entire lives violently without batting an eye. They summarily dispatched anything that
interfered in any way with their existence.
The end result to this episode finally came when the family jointly sold all of their land to a developer with promises
of a life estate where they could remain on the land as long as they lived.
Cecil took his money and moved into a nursing home, losing his life estate in the land first.
George took his money and moved his house trailer over to his half sister’s place and also lost his life estate in the
land.
George’s mother remained on the land in her ancient tumbling down log house along with George’s poor mentally
deranged little sister whose custody was ultimately turned over to his niece.
(This niece had a past history of nursing indigent older folks that were at death’s door and soon to die after willing
their estates over to her.)
In any event George’s old mother soon passed away and low and behold the niece wound up with the inheritance
and stayed on with the life estate. She in the end outlasted all the rest of them.
***
GEORGE AND HIS PAINT STORY;
The biggest in the business and also the standard of the industry in marine paint was, International Paint, well
known worldwide. They had their own distribution system utilizing their own trucks and drivers but their inventory
control back in those years was less than chancy at best.
It turned out that International Paint’s truck driver for North Florida and South Georgia was looking for a little extra
cash and ran into our friend George Tappin.
That truck driver made a proposal to George that sounded like a golden opportunity.
The truck driver sold George some of the most expensive top the line marine anti-fouling boat bottom paint for a
ridiculously low price because the cans were dented and the driver maintained that he couldn’t bring them back to
the plant in that condition and would have to dispose of them on his own. So, by selling them to our friend George
everybody would be happy, the company, George, who could make a few extra bucks and of course the driver that
wouldn’t have to drag the dented cans off and dispose of them by himself.
Soon our friend George began developing a route for his regular paint customers and business rapidly began to
boom.
George even bought the biggest longest Cadillac available, like the ones used by drug runners with a special air
suspension ride that could easily be adjusted by just the touch of a button for excessive loads to transport his
dented cans of paint.
George’s long car had every button and doodad that could possibly have been bolted on to an automobile and
George was as happy as a little kid with a new toy. Remember what George always used to say;
“Women got the first 30 years of my life and GM got the rest.”
“I want a big house, long car and a young wife.”
Well, George’s business was so good; he was so happy and he was prosperous.
Old Captain George knew every shrimper and boatyard on the east coast of the U.S. Loading his “big car” beyond
its limit, George just mashed the button and flipped a lever and in seconds the sagging back bumper of his long
automobile was no longer dragging the ground but was up like magic and perfectly level.
George now had a truck load of concealed merchandise loaded in the trunk of his leveled out long automobile and
could drive past the Florida/Georgia weight station with confidential ease and without stopping for inspection.
Soon George’s business developed into a high cash flow industry.
One of George’s best paint customers was a small fish camp outside of Jacksonville, Florida on the St. John’s River
near Mayport and the ocean inlet.
This quiet little out of the way fish camp turned out to be a front for one of North Florida’s biggest drug dealers and
the Feds had it under their strict surveillance and scrutiny and discretely staked out.
The owners of the fish camp were there to supply their loyal customers with whatever they wanted and desired.
This quiet little fish camp had become a regular stop for George and his cash paint business.
One day when George made another of his frequent stops to deliver a load of his dubious paint that now no longer
came in dented cans for cash; he decided to buy several pounds of fresh mullet from the fish camp.
George had been feeding his whole family since his youthful years as a bootlegger so it was only natural that he
would bring home to his 95 year old mother fresh mullet that she loved.
Wrapped up in newspaper, his five pounds of fish and ice made a sizeable armload.
When our dear friend George stepped outside the quiet little fish camp he was instantly apprehended, hand-cuffed
and whisked away to jail with no explanations.
George was guilty by association period and sent off to the slammer where he was incarcerated in the same cell with
the “The Outlaws” motor cycle gang.
George was innocently mystified by these doings and his suspicions began to mount about all of that paint that was
now arriving in cans without dents.
The cops thought for sure that George was a drug king-pin dealing in dope and was one of the drug dealers; this is
why they had the fish camp staked out.
George had his day in court, still astonished, amazed and shaken by the turn of events.
The judge asked George if he had ever been arrested before and naive George then told the judge of his bootleg
business back on the1920s and the revenuers busting up his still while he was trying to feed his family.
Then the paint story came out quite by accident and the interstate grand larceny paint theft story came to light.
With this our friend George was free to go but he was out of the paint business then and there.
Quite ironically a short time later while George was driving his big Cadillac down auto-row in Jacksonville, Florida
where he was well liked and well known by all of the auto salesmen the strangest thing happened to him.
The drive shaft decoupled on George’s long automobile at the forward end. It dropped down on the road and dug
into the pavement and then catapulted George and his big do-dad-laden Cadillac end over end directly in front of
one of those friendly auto dealers.
The automobile salesmen couldn’t believe their good luck and George went home that day with another new “long
car”. The salesmen just loved George, and George just loved their attention and they all were happy.
George’s days of being a shrimp boat captain were over, due to his age and he took a job as a night watchman until
he was struck down by cancer a few years later.
George never was a religious man in any way but as he lay dying the preachers swooped down on him like so many
hungry vultures to pick his bones and poor George was a captive audience.
In painful submission seeing that the end was in sight poor old sickly George finally capitulated in actions only and
let the vulture preachers lead him down to the river, shroud him in a white robe and do their mumblings.
As George who had been a devote non-believer all his life told Jane and I; “You never know, they could possibly be
right?”
On his deathbed he did get rid of one preacher when he gave that preacher the keys to his “long car” and that was
the last George ever saw of that preacher man and his long car.
George’s third wife Esther wanted a house and so George took what little money he had left and bought what he
could afford which was one of the most pathetic shanties I have ever seen…but it was a house…just barely.
George was one of the very best friends that Jane and I have ever had and we do miss him very much…a fine
gentleman of the most genuine kind and a truly trusted friend.
The last words George ever spoke to me as he lay on his death bed were; “John, I would give anything if only I could
just walk out that door.”
Poor George smoked his last smoke as the vultures swooped in to pick the puny bones of his pathetic estate.
next chapter
| Story and photos by Susan Love. Transcript of the newspaper story below: |
This is the famous Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings; she made her home in St. Augustine.
The above story seems as though it could have easily been a chapter out of one
of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings classic books; The Yearlin gor Cross Creek.
.At the time I read these books I didn’t grasp the full significance of these
monumental works but later when my wife Jane and I moved to North Florida we
got to know this unique Tappin family with its grass roots fight for survival.
George’s beautiful little sister was maliciously abducted, abused and raped as a
teenager by some passing strangers who were never apprehended.
fetal position. This terrible condition haunted George’s poor little sister throughout
fetal position. This terrible condition haunted George’s poor little sister throughout
her entire life. She was a strikingly beautiful woman and shamefully was left
permanently chained in her hellish mental state.permanently chained in her hellish
mental state.
The above story seems as though it could have easily been a chapter out of one
of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings classic books; The Yearlin gor Cross Creek.
.At the time I read these books I didn’t grasp the full significance of these
monumental works but later when my wife Jane and I moved to North Florida we
got to know this unique Tappin family with its grass roots fight for survival.
George’s beautiful little sister was maliciously abducted, abused and raped as a
teenager by some passing strangers who were never apprehended.
fetal position. This terrible condition haunted George’s poor little sister throughout
fetal position. This terrible condition haunted George’s poor little sister throughout
her entire life. She was a strikingly beautiful woman and shamefully was left
permanently chained in her hellish mental state.permanently chained in her hellish
mental state.
