Carl: Yes, me and V (his girlfriend). Yeah. I would have been maybe twenty, twenty-two. Oh, I played the clarinet all during the thirties. I started out with an old beat-up trumpet, but I bought a good clarinet. I was a pretty good clarinet player.
Ellen: How come you got into the clarinet, because you liked jazz?
Carl: I got into jazz. When I bought the trumpet, I was more into being in the high school band. I paid about ten bucks for the trumpet-- it was an old battered-up thing-- but the clarinet was a good clarinet, a Selmer, the equivalent of a Rolls-Royce. Nellie (my mother) and I, we played Mozart sonatas (this would have been in the late fifties or early sixties, after my parents were married). After a while, she got so involved in the organ (Nell was a church organist) that we didn't have time to sit down and play. She had to practice, practice, practice, rehearse, go through the whole Sunday program on Saturday, and it just ate up all of her time, so I sold the clarinet to a nice young fellow and haven't touched a clarinet since.... My playing was a combination between Pee Wee Russell and another guy, a quiet easy guy, and Pee Wee, who was very agitated (mimes playing a clarinet frantically)... yeah, I could play pretty good.
Ellen: There are pictures of you as a fisherman, too. How did you get into fishing?
Carl: My dad would take me to Ocean View. Back in those days, you rented a boat, right at the amusement park, and black men-- you got in the boat, and they rowed you out and then rowed you back. You didn't have outboard motors in those days. You caught a bushel or so of fish, brought them home on the streetcar...
(Ellen makes a noise of disgust.)
Carl: No, it was a strange time. It wasn't unusual, because nobody had cars then. No, we'd come back with a bushel basket full of spot and croakers, then call all our friends to please come and take some fish... I fished with B for years, up till the seventies, when you kids came along. (My sister was actually born in 1961.) I wanted to spend more time at home, and by then Nellie was busy, so I dropped fishing. I had the biggest bass of the year once...I think it's that one in the picture. (When I was a child, Carl had two plaques for catching exceptional fish which were proudly displayed on the wall.)
Ellen: And you and Mom built the boat, the bass fishing boat?
Carl: We built that boat; that picture was the day I tested it. We built it-- four guys from the boat shop came over on Friday, when I wanted to launch it, and took it down from our second-floor porch, put it on ... I hired a trailer, and trailed it down to where I was going to keep it, a boathouse. Those were the first fish I caught on that boat. The boat was named the Nellie Belle. It had a double meaning-- there was a pond I was very fond of fishing at called the Nellie Bell pond (a web search indicates the Nellie Bell ponds are in Currituck County, NC). I used that boat for years and years and years...
Ellen: Did Mom ever go fishing with you?
Carl: She went with me one time. She caught a bass, as big a bass as I ever caught. A big old bass. No, she was too busy fungling with that organ... I fished with T for years and years, and all of a sudden one night, just after I got married, his wife called and said, "Carl, I hate to tell you this, but T died." Big, strong, healthy man. Heavy, big... not fat, but you know, big burly guy. Dropped dead of a heart attack at fifty-five. So then I began fishing with B, who was the associate editor of the paper then, but who became the editor. We took him up to meet the Maxwells (my mother's parents) one weekend-- Max was the associate editor of the Baltimore Sun, so I figured they'd have a lot in common.
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