My friendship with James Stills got off to a rough start. When he arrived at Deerfield Elementary School from Tennessee, he immediately became the biggest kid in our class of fifth graders. With his large crop of wavy black hair, brown eyes and enormous hands, he was also an inch or two taller than me and classmate Dewey Bennent, and probably out-weighed us by 10 or 12 pounds. When recess came on his first day at our school, Dewey pulled me aside and suggested that we needed to find out “how tough” the new kid was. Dewey said that he would get on his knees behind James and I should walk over and pretend to “fall” into James so that he would be knocked over Dewey. We did it perfectly, expecting James to get up ready to fight. James got up from the fall, but did not respond to our belligerent attitude. He simply looked at us and our fists poised for a fight and said, “My mother told me not to be fighting.”

I was immediately relieved as I’d already figured out that I didn’t want to fight him anyway, and I didn’t think Dewey did either. It was just our way of sizing him up. I kind of liked the way he handled us, and decided immediately that I wanted to be his friend. So on Friday, I invited him to come to Sunday school and church at First Baptist on Sunday morning at 9:30. Sure enough, he showed up with his mother and his sister, Barbara, who was two years older than him. Thus began a life-long friendship, which continues to this day.

We began our friendship as 10-year-old boys by exploring the swamp near our house just east of Dixie Highway. The swamp was just over the Dixie Highway Bridge north of the Hillsboro River in what is now part of Boca Raton. Boys of Southern heritage at the time were expected to learn how to shoot a gun by around the age of 10, and I was no exception. Dad and Mother had given me a pellet rifle for my 10th birthday and Dad had taken me down to the swamp to practice. We shot land crabs. They are interesting creatures with blue bodies about four inches in diameter, with eight legs which can carry them quite rapidly when they decide to run. They typically live in swampy areas in holes in the ground, which they dig down a few feet to hide from predators like big birds and 10-year-old boys. James and I took turns shooting the rifle and watching the crabs explode.

One of the books that was required reading in school at the time was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. James and I were just the right age to really get into that book. One of the episodes, which thrilled us both a lot, was when Tom and Huck built a raft with a sail and rudder to explore the Mississippi River. With encouragement and help from my parents, James and I built our own raft to sail up and down the Hillsboro River. The main body of the raft was made from bamboo, which at the time was plentiful growing at the edges of the Hillsboro River. We only selected and cut down bamboo shoots that were at least four inches in diameter. We selected about 20 shoots and sawed them into lengths eight feet long. We then strapped them together with aluminum flat bar straps which Dad had provided, to make the raft. A steel plate with a pipe welded on top in the middle supported the mast for the sail. Mother provided a bed sheet sail for the mast, and I built the rudder from ¼” plate steel in our welding shop. Dad helped us get everything assembled and transported 100 yards or so, down to the Hillsboro River where we launched it.

It worked beautifully. We quickly became pretty good sailors. James worked the sail and I worked the rudder. Typically, we would let the tide current take us east, and then put the sail up and let the easterly breeze fill our sail and carry us back to the west. We did it over and over again until we got tired. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn would have been proud. We had lots of fun.

David Eller, Publisher

4-3-08