00:00:00.710 - 00:00:34.890

Do you want to start back in 1954 when I first came here? Well, let's just start, just for the purposes of this tape, if you just want to introduce yourself, tell us when and where you were born, all that kind of stuff. OK, Joe Breslin, born as a Mother's Day present back in 1946 in Philadelphia. And I have been coming to Avalon, I was coming to Avalon, I started in 1954 for a week with an aunt and uncle because I had missed my summer vacation because of an operation.

00:00:35.090 - 00:00:49.390

But anyhow, I came down here and there was no one here. School had already started, the few kids that there were, were in school. There were roads that weren't in yet. The changes have just been phenomenal.

00:00:50.130 - 00:01:38.090

I came down in 19... My dad built in 1958, we built a home at 18th and 1st, and there were no other houses on the street at the time, in the 100 block or the 200 block. 18th Street, as a matter of fact, wasn't even through, and between 18th Street and 16th Street, there was the remnants of an old park that was called Mosquito Park. There was groundwater in the middle of what would be the 100 block of 17th Street, which is where the epicenter of Mosquito Park was.

00:01:38.710 - 00:01:57.870

We used to cut through all the bushes and weeds. We would go over to 20th Street to meet up with the Sylvester's and play ball with them at 19th and 1st. Once again, there may have been two or three houses around in that few square block area. But that was it.

00:01:58.090 - 00:02:19.750

Like I said, no streets, very few streets. The streets that were in were dirt, and the ones that were paved, such as 2nd Avenue, 1st Avenue, and Avalon Avenue, were paved with liquid asphalt. Tar, really. The guy would come around with a wagon and just lay down hot tar oil.

00:02:21.910 - 00:02:31.750

And that's how the streets were. That's cool. So you said your dad built a house in 1958? 1958.

00:02:32.070 - 00:02:42.450

And you were about 12 years old at that time? I was 58, so yeah, I was about 12 years old. Did you start living here full-time at that time? No, no, no, no.

00:02:42.490 - 00:03:01.730

We came down here in the summertime only. We still lived in Philadelphia. There were a total of 11 of us. So the home that we built was a two-story, and it is still standing at the corner of 18th and 1st on the southwest corner.

00:03:02.490 - 00:03:11.570

The color has changed at the roof, but that's about it. What color was it originally? The color was gray originally, or green originally. It's now gray.

00:03:13.870 - 00:03:25.290

And is it still your family's home? No, no. After my dad died in 1968, he died down here on a weekend when he was visiting. He came down to visit me.

00:03:25.650 - 00:03:50.250

I started my teaching career that year in Wildwood. He came down and had a heart attack over at Mrs. Bainbridge's house when he was visiting her to help her with her will, and he died. My mom and the rest of the kids were down that weekend. So it was a terrible, lonely ride home back to Philly.

00:03:51.250 - 00:04:02.210

I'm sorry to hear that. Did you say there were 11 of you doing 11 siblings or your whole family? No, 11 siblings. In the home, it was neat.

00:04:02.550 - 00:04:24.930

Tozour built it from a company that was prefabbed. It was the Mallon Company and Hilco Homes from down near the airport in Philadelphia. They shipped it down partially constructed. One of the first of that were the roof rafters, et cetera, were already put together.

00:04:26.990 - 00:04:40.010

There were three rooms upstairs. One was a small room. That was my grandfather's room because he lived with us too. The other two rooms were dormitories, boys' dorm and girls' dorm.

00:04:41.750 - 00:05:11.550

We were allotted a 30-inch wide bed each, which was sufficient because we didn't spend much time in bed. When we were down here, we were too busy down at the beach playing ball. We played little league ball when we were down here and working too. I started working as a paperboy back in the late 50s, early 60s.

00:05:12.590 - 00:05:28.770

Then I got a job at Tridico's Pizzeria. I was working there as an oven tender when I was on 21st Street. We had Tridico's Pizzeria, Lowell Schimek's Market. Dr. Garcia had just come into town, and he had an office there.

00:05:29.930 - 00:05:56.220

Mr. Wright had his Atlantic Gas Station halfway down the block, which is now where the Seagrill is. Across the street, there was a hotel, a small hotel. I believe it was the Holly House that the Ripps owned, or Schulte, rather. What year was that that you started working at Tridico's?

00:05:56.220 - 00:06:22.320

I started working at Tridico's around 1960. I worked there through high school and into college. In college, though, I went into the Marine Corps Officer Candidate School. When I came out after my first summer away, the postmaster in town, Stan Holmes, came up to the door and told me that he needed me because I already had clearance.

00:06:23.220 - 00:06:39.340

He needed a mailman. One had been hurt. Billy Roccia, R-O-C-C-I-A, had been hurt at a fire a couple days before that, so he was down a mailman. Since I had gotten out of the Marine Corps, he figured I had a service duty.

00:06:39.340 - 00:06:49.060

I would be cleared. He asked me if I wanted a job, and I asked him. I was really gutsy of me at the time. I said, how much does it pay?

00:06:49.100 - 00:06:58.260

He said, I don't know if it's $1 or $2. I said, oh, I'll take it. That was big money. I started at the post office then.

00:07:00.260 - 00:07:29.940

I had also worked, when I was working for Mrs. Tridico in the pizzeria, I had worked during the day for her husband in his golf station at 30th Street, which is where the police station now stands. There was a golf station on that corner, and right across the second avenue at the time was Sam's Market. I worked during the day at the Gulf station and at night at Tridico's Pizzeria. Then I went into the post office.

00:07:30.080 - 00:07:44.600

I stayed there 13 summers. Then when I came down and started teaching, I worked part-time during the winter, Christmas time, and went back to it full-time in the summer too. What was it like to work as a postmaster? Oh, man.

00:07:46.380 - 00:08:03.320

When I had the south end of town to deliver, I hated it. The houses were about two blocks apart each. They were hidden by weeds, half of them. You had to walk through the weeds to get to the house to drop the mail off.

00:08:04.180 - 00:08:30.120

We didn't have RFD boxes at the time. I was dropped off in the morning down by 80th Street, and I started my walk back up and down the streets. Like every 10 blocks or so, the postmaster had dropped what we called a relay bag, which had mail in it for the next 10 blocks. As soon as I got my first 10 blocks done, there was a bag of warm mail waiting for me loaded up, down, and delivered.

00:08:30.260 - 00:08:53.440

I walked all the way back to about 37th Street, delivering the mail. When they added the lagoons on 42nd Street, I was still delivering mail. There were times when I got lost back there. When I was driving by then, I was in one of the Jeeps on the right-hand drive vehicle.

00:08:55.440 - 00:09:09.700

Bonita [Avalon History Center Curator] would be interested in that since it's the English style. Anyhow, I would go back there to drop off the mail, and then I would say, wait a minute, what street am I on? Am I on Pelican Drive? Am I on Heron Drive?

00:09:09.880 - 00:09:25.680

Where am I? Because I wasn't used to it yet. Then I would have to come back to 3rd Avenue, turn around, get my bearings, and start over again to get back. At what point in time did that area become more developed?

00:09:29.320 - 00:09:52.580

That would have been in the early 70s, I would say, was when that really started. Early to middle 70s started building up. It was part of a project which was supposed to take up almost all of Avalon Boulevard on the way in. They were going to fill in the wetlands.

00:09:54.600 - 00:10:18.420

Tito Macchia had a plan to develop that with housing, but the state put the kibosh on that. In the meantime, the rest of the town was starting to develop. It was growing. While I was working in the post office, Ed McMahon was living at 18th Street and the Beach.

00:10:19.240 - 00:10:40.900

He was working with Johnny Carson at the time on television. This one night, I'll never forget it, McMahon had come back from a vacation, and Carson was mocking him on Avalon. He said, what do the people do down there? There's nothing down there.

00:10:41.000 - 00:11:01.460

I've been there. Ed said, oh, we keep very busy. McMahon said, yeah, you probably go to the post office and watch them cancel the stamps for excitement. The next day, the post office was packed with people trying to watch us in the back as we were running the mail that we had collected during the day through the stamp-canceling machine.

00:11:02.200 - 00:11:28.640

It was funny. Ed McMahon also had, his son and daughter had a puppy. The puppy loved, it was the only dog in town that I knew at the time who loved a mailman. We had treats, we carried treats with us, but there were times when I was bitten, even after I'd given the dog a treat, but Ed McMahon's puppy, Michael, his son, the puppy followed me.

00:11:28.960 - 00:11:42.760

I had to pick him back up, put him in the mail jeep, bring him back, knock on the door and say, follow me, I can't go on. So they would take him. I'm sorry, Joe. So anyhow, that kept going.

00:11:42.940 - 00:12:10.240

In the meantime, I was teaching English over at Wildwood Catholic, which I started in September of 1968, and I retired in 2004, in June. So I put in 36 years of teaching at Wildwood Catholic. I joined the fire department in 1969. My first fire was a fatal fire at 39th Street and Ocean Drive, 39th and 3rd.

00:12:10.720 - 00:12:30.280

There was a young fellow who was killed in that fire. We had other fires which were fatal. The first one that I was aware of was Tommy Thompson at what was called the Ice Factory. That was at 7th Street and 3rd Avenue.

00:12:33.240 - 00:12:47.480

Pop, I can't remember Pop's last name, but Pop owned a store. It was called Pop's. It was at 22nd and the Boardwalk, and he died in a fire of asphyxiation. Pop Gallagher?

00:12:48.560 - 00:12:57.880

That's who it was. He owned the Boardwalk then. It was Pop's place, but that burned down. It was never rebuilt.

00:12:58.760 - 00:13:24.300

Then at 27th Street, you had Buckley's Arcade. You had the Oasis Restaurant, and you also had a gift shop. Then at 29th Street, of course, you had a buildup area with the Avalon Movie Theater, where we used to go to the dances up on top of the movie theater at night. Mr. and Mrs. Art Ridler ran that.

00:13:25.240 - 00:13:54.720

Their son became a policeman on the police force, and he was the one who won it in 1962 for throwing firecrackers. Anyhow, let's see, Fire Department. Tell me more about working for the Fire Department. Your first fire was a fatal fire, but it's a volunteer?

00:13:55.200 - 00:14:22.900

It's totally volunteer. Did you sit at the firehouse and wait, or did you sit at home on a radio? When I was young and gung-ho, I used to listen to the radio, and I could hear if we were being dispatched before we were actually dispatched. But for the most part, it was the town siren, which got everybody coming down to the firehouse, because we didn't have pagers at the time.

00:14:23.660 - 00:14:36.120

We did get what were called instalerts. They were boxes that were like the old-style transistor radios that you would keep in your home. You couldn't carry them around with you. They were electrical.

00:14:36.740 - 00:15:03.320

They would go off with the weirdest noises, and Terri will tell you, when we were first married, she couldn't get used to it at first. In the middle of the night, they would start squawking like me. We would respond to the firehouse where we had a chalkboard, and we wrote down on the chalkboard where the fire was, and then whoever was the driver. We weren't assigned.

00:15:03.480 - 00:15:15.040

I was not assigned. I was not a driver until I was in the department for years. In the beginning, I was an interior man. I used to go in, and I was one of the first SCOTPAC men.

00:15:16.560 - 00:15:39.660

There were a group of us that were young, and we all trained together up at Seagirt. We used to travel and take a weekend each fall to go up to Seagirt to school. We learned how to use the SCOTPACs, so we started going into buildings as they burnt. It's scary.

00:15:39.660 - 00:16:15.700

It really is, but when you know what you're doing and you're aggressive like that and you keep your head on your shoulders, you're usually all right. My second fire was the Stone Harbor 96th Street fire where half of the South Block burned up. That would have been in 1969, or it would have been in the late summer of 1969. 45th and 10th, all the way up, three-quarters of the way up the block, burned down.

00:16:16.060 - 00:16:22.560

Now, did the Avalon Department cover also Stone Harbor? You worked together? We worked together. We were mutual aid.

00:16:22.680 - 00:16:38.000

If we needed help, you called our police department because the calls went to the police department. The police department dispatched us. They also had the fire radio, so we could talk to the police department. They would call Stone Harbor's police department.

00:16:38.120 - 00:16:53.660

Stone Harbor's police department would dispatch the Stone Harbor Fire Department. It always worked well. We also had mutual aid agreements with Cape May Courthouse and CI. Excuse me.

00:16:54.280 - 00:17:01.480

No problem. Would you like some water? No, thank you. I should be used to this from teaching, but I'm out of shape.

00:17:02.140 - 00:17:21.960

Do you still work with the fire department? Yes, but now I'm simply a driver. I got a 45-year plaque the other night at our banquet, but now I don't go in. My job is to get the young fellows there safely so that they can do the job that they have to do.

00:17:22.340 - 00:17:33.480

I supply them with the water, and I get them home safely. Is there anybody else at the fire department that has been here for that many years? Oh, yeah. There are a few.

00:17:35.600 - 00:17:59.980

Carmen Scarpa has been there almost as long as me, but he started in Sea Isle, and then he transferred over when he moved to Avalon. He still goes in, but he's in better shape than I am. There are some other guys who have been in there as long, but they're not active anymore. So I guess Carmen and I are the oldest of the active guys.

00:17:59.980 - 00:18:07.960

Wow. Longest tenure. There are fire police now who are older than us. Well, some of them are older than us.

00:18:08.120 - 00:18:20.200

Most of them are younger than us. I guess you have enjoyed your time with the fire department. I like to help people. That's what it's all about.

00:18:20.380 - 00:18:55.520

It's helping your neighbors. With the fire department, I've also been involved with Maris Stella Church when it was only 25th and 1st, and the people on Sundays were standing outside of church because they couldn't get in because there was no more room. That's when you knew Avalon was growing exponentially. It was getting bigger, and that would have been in the later 60s, 70s.

00:18:55.520 - 00:19:19.400

Then when I bought my lot in 1970, well, 69, I bought it across the street. There was nothing from 15th Street and Dune Drive to 12th Street, Ocean Drive to Dune Drive. There was nothing over there except Matalucchi's concrete factory. There was a concrete factory?

00:19:19.480 - 00:19:27.180

There was a concrete factory at 13th and Ocean Drive. Matalucchi brothers owned it. In the 70s? In the 60s and the 50s.

00:19:28.360 - 00:19:49.660

Tony Matalucchi, one of the brothers, Phil Matalucchi and Tony Matalucchi owned it. Tony kept his Palomino there, and every year at the Baby Parade or Fourth of July Parade, whatever parade there was, Tony was the grand marshal usually, and he would ride his Palomino down the street. Wow. It was a beautiful horse, beautiful.

00:19:52.240 - 00:20:07.400

Tony and Phil's mother owned the Tasty Freeze, which was one of the first establishments along Dune Drive. It's still there. Right. Probably the only one that's still there, original.

00:20:08.880 - 00:20:21.140

So you were talking about the house you live in now, right? Built that in 1970. It would be a ripdown right now. And that is on which street?

00:20:21.320 - 00:20:45.760

That's on 15th and Dune on the southwest corner, 15th and Dune. They wanted the number at 1508 Dune Drive, but our front door is on the front. Our front's on 15th Street, and the house runs lengthwise up towards Ocean Drive. So we said, wait a minute, we're not on Dune Drive.

00:20:45.860 - 00:21:08.580

I had got into an argument with the borough over this, and finally they gave in to me and let me call it 210 15th Street rather than 1508 Dune Drive, because our garage was on Dune Drive. I wonder why they would even care. I don't know, but they did. We won that little fight.

00:21:08.580 - 00:21:33.300

I don't know, what else you want? So let's see. I think that you worked as a dispatcher in Stone Harbor. In 1970-something, I started as a dispatcher in Stone Harbor, and then they put me out on the street because I was older at the time.

00:21:34.980 - 00:22:16.800

Can you tell me about your experience of the 1979 storm as you were a dispatcher at that time? When people were calling up, this was during the summer, it was a hurricane that was coming up, I believe, I hope, because when people called up and I was sitting on the desk, I would tell them if you are uncomfortable, then perhaps to make yourself more comfortable, you should leave. But you don't have to leave, and you left that option open to them, and that was a big thing with the chief of police, Bill Donahue, at that time. We don't want to scare them.

00:22:17.760 - 00:22:32.440

Well, they were already scared, so you want to keep them calm. Tell them, if you feel more comfortable, then why don't you? You'll feel better. And then you come back in a couple of days, and you'll be all right.

00:22:32.520 - 00:22:44.020

Everything will be fine. We'll be back to normal, etc. That was one of the things you always tried to do. I had a lady one night when I was dispatching, it was 3 o'clock in the morning, called up, screaming.

00:22:44.160 - 00:22:52.020

Her baby had stopped breathing. Her baby had stopped breathing. She didn't know where she was. She had rented, they had rented a place.

00:22:53.200 - 00:23:03.680

They had just moved in that day. It was a Saturday night, Sunday morning, so it was 3 o'clock on a Sunday morning. And I said, well, where are you staying? Where do you live?

00:23:04.360 - 00:23:09.640

I don't know. I don't know. We ended up, one of the policemen told me, get her to turn all the lights on. I did.

00:23:09.720 - 00:23:22.200

I told her, don't hang up the phone. Turn on every light in the house. Great idea. I had two guys out in the patrol cars at the time, running up and down the streets, trying to see which house was starting to light up.

00:23:22.580 - 00:23:41.420

Boom, they got it. We had the rescue squad there within five minutes, because I had already toned them out. I was smart enough, I thought, to tone them out, get them on their way to the firehouse, pick up the rescue squad and put up the ambulance and then get going. They did.

00:23:41.580 - 00:23:52.780

They got the baby breathing again. And the baby was fine. But that was scary. I was like jelly after a while with that.

00:23:52.780 - 00:24:20.660

It was a long time calming down. I also had a first in on a kid who was killed by a car who was riding his bicycle in between the two bridges in Stone Harbor, the free bridge and the toll bridge. On a Saturday night at about 11.30 at night, he was riding his bike back from Wildwood from a date. And he went out into the street, into Ocean Drive, and hit a car head-on.

00:24:21.640 - 00:24:41.780

That was brutal. It was brutal. So, I mean, I've had good moments. The lifesaving awards that I got down there, there were two of them, three of them, three of them were good.

00:24:42.340 - 00:25:00.100

When I was elected to council here one night, we had a guy who took a heart attack while he was addressing council. And it was Harry DeButts. I did the compressions. Harry DeButts did the counting.

00:25:00.540 - 00:25:12.960

And Dave Haberle, who was the director of recreation at the time, he was doing the breathing on the guy. And the guy lived another eight years. He was dead. The rescue came in.

00:25:12.960 - 00:25:21.600

The paramedics came in. They put the monitor on him. They had nothing. This was before we had AEDs, defibrillators.

00:25:22.180 - 00:25:29.420

They put the monitor on him. He didn't have a heartbeat at the time. And they kept working on him. Boom.

00:25:30.000 - 00:25:41.900

The guy was brought back. But it was Amy Kluskin said, I have never seen people move so fast as you three guys did that night. You were boom. Because it was Joe Cohen.

00:25:41.900 - 00:25:51.700

He said, I don't feel well. And with that, he started down. I guess we were down there. One member of council, Harry DeButts, who was director of public works, and Dave Haberle.

00:25:51.960 - 00:25:55.800

Wow. So we pitched in. Yeah. And it worked.

00:25:56.080 - 00:26:03.020

Good. So you were on borough council. Yeah, I spent 15 years on borough council. When were you elected?

00:26:03.320 - 00:26:18.600

1989, May of 1989. And I served until 2005 in January when I stepped down to go into the courts to help Mary Monks, who was the court administrator at the time. So what was it like to be on borough council? It was interesting.

00:26:18.980 - 00:26:36.960

It was enjoyable helping people. I didn't like when people came in with an attitude that, hey, I pay the taxes here. I pay your salary. Look, we're all in this together.

00:26:37.580 - 00:26:51.040

When they come in with an attitude, I don't like it. So there I bite my tongue. And I still try to, but I'm not always successful. Sometimes I will tell a person off.

00:26:51.940 - 00:27:07.960

But on council, I was able to work with the people. We put in a new water meter so that the borough didn't shut down for two weeks while the guys from public works were going around reading water meters, which they had to do. These could go around electronically. They were read.

00:27:08.340 - 00:27:18.200

They also were able to tell us when we had leaks. And people knew their bill was going to be up. There was no estimation. They knew exactly what the bill was going to be.

00:27:19.140 - 00:27:39.700

We could tell them if they had leaks that they could shut it down and take care of the leak. Along with Dick, well, the crew that's in there now, except for John McCorristin, I worked with. Nancy was elected the same year as I was. Dick Dean had been elected two years before me.

00:27:39.800 - 00:27:56.400

Chuck Covington came on about two or four years after me. Dave Ellenberg took my place. He took my place on council. So what made you wish to step down?

00:27:57.140 - 00:28:14.160

Well, I thought it was time for fresh blood. Right, and also the fact that Mary Monks, whom I knew from the neighborhood, from the mail route, from church, because you get to know all the people down here. That's one of the neat things about living down here. You get to know a lot of the people.

00:28:15.460 - 00:28:31.920

Mary was getting up in age, and she needed help. So they were advertising for somebody to go in, and I said to Marty [?], and he said you had to step down. I said, okay, you bring in somebody who's good. I'll step down and go in there.

00:28:32.140 - 00:28:49.800

Okay, fine, and that's what we did. So now I'm in there since 2005. So I'm in over 10 years now. So that was all the specific items that Terri thought he might like to talk about.

00:28:49.980 - 00:29:06.940

Of course, if you remember anything else, you're welcome to just talk. But I did just want to kind of ask about your general impressions. You started coming to Avalon regularly in 1958, and you're still here now. If you were just describing the community, like what was the feeling of being here?

00:29:07.020 - 00:29:19.620

What was that like in 1958, and what is it like now? There were families in 1958. There were families through the 60s. Families would come down.

00:29:19.620 - 00:29:37.580

Wives would stay at home, mothers, and they would bring the family down. The fathers, the husbands would commute. My dad commuted back and forth to the city, and plenty of others did, but they took the train, and they used to party on the train. Well, not in the morning.

00:29:37.620 - 00:30:06.340

In the morning, they all slept in the train on the way up the city. At night, though, they would laugh and play cards and stuff on the way down. The train would take them to Cape May Courthouse. Mr. Tozour, Bill Tozour Sr., the current builder who lives on 19th Street, his dad used to drive a public service bus, and he would go over in his bus, pick up the people coming into Avalon at that train, and bring them in and drop them off.

00:30:07.000 - 00:30:30.540

When we were little kids, or when we were kids, the kids used to like to holler, Beep your horn, Mr. Tozour, beep your horn. He would lay on the air horn for them. But because they were families, the kids all got along well together. The parents would go out on Friday night or Saturday night, dinners and stuff.

00:30:31.220 - 00:30:41.380

They got along. Families got along very well. Now the difference is that there aren't as many families. If they are, they're not here all summer.

00:30:41.880 - 00:31:02.200

They're only here for a week, maybe two, and then they're back to whatever. Group rentals we did not have at the time. We didn't get the group rentals until in the 70s. That's when we started getting them.

00:31:03.100 - 00:31:10.780

That was because the rents were going up. Avalon was getting a reputation too. We had the Bongo Room. We had the Catacombs.

00:31:12.520 - 00:31:33.960

The Princeton was older people at the time, but the Avalon Hotel was for the younger generation. Gallagher's Pub, which is where I met Terri, because she walked past me one night, and I sniffed and I said, Excuse me, ma'am, is that Chalamar or Emeraude? She said it's Chalamar. So here we are 43 years later, still married happily.

00:31:34.720 - 00:31:42.220

Just because I snot her perfume. That's great. She was a weekend warrior. She was a shoob.

00:31:42.780 - 00:31:50.220

She was down early on weekends. When did you get married? We got married in 1971. I met her on June 20, 1969.

00:31:52.300 - 00:32:15.880

We were on and off again, just dating and stuff. I really got serious around Thanksgiving of 1970 when I knew that I was in love with this girl in 1971. In August, we got married. As a matter of fact, the night I proposed to her, she went out on a date the next day because she couldn't break it.

00:32:15.900 - 00:32:36.960

She had had the date to get on Eagle's Game with a widower, and she told him then that she was seeing someone that she was getting serious with, so they had to knock her off. But she did go out on that date, and I won't let her forget it. Did you have children? We had three.

00:32:38.740 - 00:32:58.120

Two girls and a boy, Mary Beth, Megan, and Joey. Mary Beth is now a lawyer with the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington. Megan is a CPA stay-at-home mom in Virginia, and Joey is the beer meister at Whole Foods in Devon, PA. They all went to Georgetown.

00:32:58.900 - 00:33:16.000

Terri and I went to the poorhouse. Sound like good kids, but none of them wanted to live in Avalon. Mary Beth would love to, but they can't afford it now. So they're kind of driven out?

00:33:16.740 - 00:33:25.960

Yeah. Well, their jobs took them elsewhere. Their schooling took them elsewhere. Mary Beth would love to own property down here.

00:33:26.040 - 00:33:37.580

She comes home maybe twice a month. She lives in Maryland now. She was in Virginia. She moved to Maryland, so she's only two hours away from here rather than four hours.

00:33:40.320 - 00:34:00.640

So I think you were giving me a chronology, and you had gotten up to 1970, and we were distracted by Terri. So what has happened then in terms of the town evolving since the 70s or 80s? Well, it's grown. The houses, people want the bigger houses.

00:34:00.900 - 00:34:30.500

They want all the air conditioning and HVAC systems, so the houses are bigger because there's more in them. It's no longer, you know, like a three-bedroom rancher that we used to have, but that's a part of growth. The people who live down here year-round are wonderful people, the people who come down for the most part. I love my neighbors.

00:34:30.680 - 00:34:47.000

We get along very well with the neighbors, and, you know, we try to do like they'll get in touch with me after a storm or something and tell, you know, what's it look like, and I'll tell them. I took pictures. I was out taking pictures of the places. Here's what yours is, but no damage, checked it out inside, outside.

00:34:47.480 - 00:35:10.360

We have freezing weather. I go inside if I have keys, and I never put names on their keys, just the first name, that's it, so that if anybody breaks into my house and steals the keys, they'll never know what house they go to. I'll go in, flush toilets, run the water for a while and make sure that the water's flowing and that there are no leaks, take a quick walk through. Everything's fine.

00:35:10.440 - 00:35:14.980

Shut everything down. Boom. There I go. You know, and you keep in touch with the neighbors.

00:35:16.600 - 00:35:34.260

People have trouble with trash. That's one thing. People will complain, you know, I got down to 15th Street to drop off the trash and it was closed. You know, well, they could ask people who live here year-round, can you put my trash out for me?

00:35:35.120 - 00:36:07.180

I used to make, I had a job when I was in college, a big apartment building near Russellville that I took their trash out every Sunday night. There were like 55 cans of trash that I put out, and then on Monday afternoon when I came home from school, put them back. I do it here with people. If people say, you know, I can't get the trash out, got it, got it, you've got it, Ralph, you know, whomever, I put it, got it, you're covered, don't worry.

00:36:07.760 - 00:36:19.120

You do it, you pitch in. It's a small, small enough town, you help your neighbors. That's the American way. And with that, I got to get back to work.

00:36:19.600 - 00:36:22.080

Okay. Okay. Thank you for your service.