This is an early picture of the house we grew up in before we moved in. When the road were installed, but itąs low, it flooded easily at times. Sometimes the water was so high and the school bus couldnąt go through it. You would have to walk through waist deep water, very painful in the winter. It was a summer house, so there was no insulation, only a small space heater to heat one room. Before we moved in we would have to burn sulfur candles to kill the rodents and insects in the house. A lot of times we would have no money for fuel or oil, the whole house would freeze, all the pipes frozen solid. The ice would expand and busted the pipes, when they thawed out the house would flood.

Even though my father was working 2 jobs and knew nothing about plumbing, he would have to fix the pipes. When I started working for Earl Scheib Auto Painting Shop at Freeport, I would have to siphon oil from their large fuel tanks into my 5-gallon cans. To get the oil flowing you have to suck on the end of the hose just about every time you'd get a mouth full of oil. The times when we have no heat, we had to wear a bunch of clothes which made it hard to fall asleep but it was so cold. Finally when you did fall asleep, my father would come woke us up to push start his car, since it went dead. I'd never forget the cold my hands felt on the metal of the car every time when I had to push it. Sometimes you fell down slipping on the ice when you hit the ground it seemed to hurt more with the ground being frozen.

There were a lot of holes in the walls of the house and broken windows from family disagreements. We would put cardboard and plywood in the place of glass. The cops knew my family well, especially my brother Dorian, Doc we called him. He was into drugs and always fighting in the bars. He beat up a lot of people. He had to prove he was the best, the toughest and could take more pain than anybody. He was the one who would go to Harlem to buy heroin. Once when the dealers would try to knock him out to rob him, they beat him with "black jacks", they tried everything, but they couldn't knock him down. No matter where I went, people were always pleading with me, "could you tell your brother to stop fighting or beating on everybody?" I heard a story once how he got into a fight with a weight-lifter much bigger than him. Doc just grabbed onto this guy's long hair, hung on until this guys got tired of punching. At the end Doc threw him to the ground and finished him off. Anyone who was into the bars and drugs scene in a Seaford Harbor in the 70's knew exactly what I'm talking about. He was uncontrollable. He just wouldn't stop. There were many times I had to save him from overdosing on heroin. One time I just got him out of the hospital, he said, "next time let me die!" Many years later at a family function, he starting with me again, wanted to fight.

I was out on the bay last year I met an old family friend Richie Horton, he reminded me the time with me and Doc were fighting. Doc pulled out a knife starting to stab me while my mother watched, and she said, "good Doc, stab him more". They used to call him "Doc the bottle of wine". The heroin, LSD, cocaine, methadone, you name it. It finally killed him.

We finally got a Roger House Heater from a house that was knocked down. The only heat we had came out of the bathroom. Since the door had to be open, sometime the whole house would stunk. You have to take a bath quick or the house would have no heat. One time the sewage backed up under the bathroom floor and the floor fell in. The bathroom was connected to the burner room, you have to have boots to repair the constantly breaking down oil burner. Most repairman would not go in the sewage. Our neighbor Charlie Woodski would be the only one helped. When the wind blew hard it forced the flame out of the water heater in the bathroom, another "half-ass" operation like everything else we had. Everyone would make jokes, "we wish the house would burn down". One night Doc came home real "high", was in the bathroom for a long time, after he went upstairs to sleep, everybody got their wish. The house was burned down. My father got into an argument with the fireman, because he was stopping him from going into the burning house to get his shoes, so he could go to work the next day.

Twice in grammar school I got pulled out of class and was told I couldn't return because once I was wearing jeans with rivets, then the other time I had bid industrial boots with metal taps on the heels and steel-tipped toes. My parents bought them for me thinking those boots wouldn't wear out. Later on, I got sent to special class for students with behavior problems. Six of us "wise guys" together created the ultimate mayhem. I never laughed so hard, till I had cramps in my stomach, like I just did a hundred sit ups.

When you are working on the bay, you have to the best at everything you do, like designing and fabricating your own equipment that catches and doesn't break down. To comb eels or clamming, you have to have tremendous strength to work the 25 plus ft. long handle. Like Larry Seaman potting eels in the East River, the current running so fast you have to throw the 25 Lb. Grappling hook way up-tide to where you want because the tide would carry it away. No GPS, Loran or other locating instrument was available. Visual ranges were the only way to locate the string of traps, close to impossible in the East River. On occasion instead of an eel trap or pot, you would snag an industrial cable. You had to rig a winch to retrieve the pots with this excessive current. Sometimes the screen on the pot was no benefit to the fact the water couldn't flow through because the pot was so filled with eels, which made it extremely difficult to lift.

In the winter, you work so hard, you're sweating even without your. The problem is on your ride home your wet undergarment made you even colder. As tough and painful as it is in the winter time being out in frigid temperature, jacking fish at night in the summer time make-up for it. You would go out at night, your lights light-up the entire bottom, you can pick and choose what you wan to spear. Eels mostly, maybe a stripped bass or weakfish, plenty of fluke, flounder and crabs. Sometimes the fish are so thick your arms feel like they're going to fall off. You know you're doing good when you're knee-deep in fish. And when you step to the side of the boat and the weight from the fish shifts causing the boat to lists. All of a sudden, day light starts to appear. You put away your lights, now you're jacking under natural sunlight, no generator noise somehow makes it much better. It reminds me of what I've heard from the old-timer, the Indians used to use reed torches called "firelighting".

On the trip home, if you're lucky, there'd be so much weight in the boat, it has trouble "getting up on a plane", you know you're doing good then, it's more money in your pocket. Back at the dock we packed'em in garbage cans, drive them to Lindenhurst to the smoker Johny Munce. Before he would take them, we would still have to "slimed" the eels.