Dad, Marlin Eller and Granddad Hoyt Eller split
-Dad buys the family machine shop for $900-
The last essay ended with Dad, Marlin Eller, having entered the trucking business at age 18, in 1934, hauling bagged fertilizer from Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale to the farms around Lake Okeechobee. He bought a large flatbed truck, but his father, “Pop” Eller, had to sign for the loan since Dad was too young to legally sign the promissory note required by the bank to borrow the money. Therefore, the truck was technically in Granddad Hoyt Eller’s name.
But Dad was doing well in the trucking business. He soon hired his first employee, an African-American nicknamed “Alabama”. Shortly thereafter, he bought two more trucks with Granddad still signing the notes. He was on his way as a young trucking entrepreneur, hauling fertilizer, making substantial bank payments, and still able to save enough money to buy a house.
It was a three bedroom, pre-fabricated wooden house which he and mother ordered from Sears Roebuck Company out of their catalog. He also bought a lot on the east side of Dixie Highway, directly across from his father’s house, where the present-day tennis court office is located, on which to build the house. As described in Essay No. 1, the house was made of clapboard wood, painted white, with red shutters, which actually could be closed and locked in place to protect us during hurricanes. A white picket fence established the grassed yard boundaries in the frontage on Dixie Highway, and on the south side next to the neighbor family Gaskin’s residence. The back- yard was open to what is now Pioneer Park, but then it was just open woods of pine trees, palm trees and palmetto bushes.
Granddad Eller’s “workshop” bordered our house on the north side. The house sat on short concrete piles about 18 inches above the ground with cypress beams and pinewood floors. This was because when the hurricanes and floods came in the summer, the Hillsboro Canal sometimes overflowed into our yard. Therefore, a small rowboat was left in the backyard to maneuver around during flood times.
The Army Corp of Engineers eventually solved that problem in cooperation with the South Florida Water Management District, and Dad was eventually able to retire the rowboat. He finished the house in 1937 and moved in, just in time for my sister, Linda, to be born in 1938. However, trouble had started brewing between Dad and his father Hoyt. It was over the trucks Dad had bought and paid for with his backbreaking fertilizer hauling business.
When Dad turned 21 in 1937 and made what he thought was his last payment on the trucks to the bank, he asked for the
 titles, the bank refused. It seems that the bank considered the trucks still to be collateral for Granddad Eller’s farm loans. Dad was furious! He had paid for those trucks, not Granddad, and he wanted the title. The bank refused claiming it was part of Granddad Eller’s overall loan portfolio.
Unfortunately Granddad, had had a couple of bad years in his farming business, was apparently behind in his loan payments and was not able to get the trucks released from the bank either.
Dad, as they say, was fit to be tied. He was mad at the bank and mad at his father as well. Granddad Hoyt soon sold the trucks, however, and worked out a deal for my dad, Marlin, to buy the family “machine shop”, on the north side of dad and mother’s new house, for $900. Thus at 21 years of age, Dad had at last his own place of business from which to start making a living: building and repairing farm equipment – mainly pumps – for the local farmers.
However, Dad was still mad at his father, and unfortunately, never got over it, speaking to him only on special occasions. Eventually Granddad sold his Parkland farm and Deerfield home and moved to Boynton Beach, where he bought a substantial amount of land west of town for $52,000 on which to farm.
To be continued...

David Eller