Bill: Aruba

These are photos from an album I put together in 1976 or so called “Bill – The Story So Far,” supplemented with photos from an album that my Mom put together for me about a year later. This post covers our time in Aruba, 1964-1966.

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My memories of Aruba are scattered but were revived in early 2018 by Sue making a request of Laurie and me to recount our Aruba memories. The families of Sue’s daughters, Susanna and Jill, journeyed to Curacao and Aruba for a vacation and Sue thought it would be fun to share family memories of Aruba. I contributed a handful to an email chain, and we got together for a call. At that point, I found that my memories were very different than Sue and Laurie’s and they, in turn, added and refreshed ones of their own.

That exercise in memory sharing helped me realize that I am the lone holder of a number of personal and family memories, particularly those involving Mom and Dad after Sue and Laurie went off to schools and their lives. I am the last witness to these small life events. It was one of the moments that impelled me to start this journal, partly as a way to capture remembrances and stories before they are lost irrevocably. I may not have all of them exactly right, but they are now my stories to tell. My hope is that you, dear reader, will at some point find them mildly interesting, entertaining, or perhaps of some small use.

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We moved to Aruba in 1964 when I was six. There were no direct flights from the States; we took a KLM jet flight from Miami to Curacao, stayed overnight in Willemstad, and then took a short hop on an old KLM DC-3 propeller plane to Aruba. It was not uncommon for people to get to the island by Grace Line ship, at the tail end of the days when you actually took a ship to get to a destination, not just a circular cruise. Once we arrived, we found Aruba to be a small, arid rock with some beautiful beaches and not a whole lot else.

There was a big Esso refinery, Lago, on the southeast end of the island near Seroe Colorado where there was a “colony” of Americans and other expats (see interesting Lago website with lots of history and photos). At one time it had been the largest refinery in the world, processing Venezuelan oil. That community was dwindling by 1964, much smaller than it had been, and other than school we didn’t have a whole lot of contact with the folks there. Dad was in Aruba to open a new Esso Chemical fertilizer/ammonia plant closer to Aruba’s main town of Oranjestad. That’s where we lived along with the two other Esso families who worked at the same plant, the Abreus and the Macanultys (though I think the Macanultys came in our second year).

We had a nice house right on the main drag, Lloyd G. Smith Boulevard, directly across from the beach. It was an open air house, built to catch the tradewinds; we had window air conditioners in the bedrooms but otherwise the house was open and comfortable as long as the wind blew. There was a nice front porch that looked toward the beach and the sunsets.

Today, the house is gone and the airport is much expanded, but we were near where the runway today hits the water. In 1994, Barb and I returned to Aruba and I took the following four photos of what I think was our house and the beach. I might be wrong about the house, but it was in more or less the right place.

The beach, what’s today called Surfside Beach, was much more open with no trees, buildings or pathways. It was just an extension of our front yard, never crowded with people. There were much better beaches on the island for anyone interested in sun or swimming. Even in 1994 the beach was not greatly developed. It changed substantially when they expanded the airport runway in 1997.

Sue and Laurie were with us for the first year in Aruba; Len by this point was married to Richard Molinari, living in Miami and had Scott in April, 1965. Sue was in her senior year of high school and I guess Laurie was in 10th grade. I was in first grade and stayed there through half of second grade.

It’s hard to believe we were only there for less than two years. It seemed longer, in mostly positive ways. We had a good time there. For me, Aruba was exotic, odd, isolated and a little desolate. Maybe it matched my personality a bit, though I was far too young to think about it…that’s what 50+ years of hindsight will bring. Mostly, for me, Aruba was a place of small adventures for a small person.

We had a dog, Dimitri, a lovable mutt that Laurie helped save from a Lago family that was moving away. Dimitri was a friendly dog who loved to roam around the beach across the street, get sand and sandspurs in her coat, then come back in the house and roll them off on the carpets. Mom used to hate that, but could never actually hate Dimitri. Among Dimitri’s most endearing qualities, she could tiptoe on the iron railing on the fence in front of our house like a goat on a tightrope, and she would vigorously greet Dad each evening with an excited tail wag. Dad said that no one was as glad to see him as Dimitri was. He was probably right.

Winifred was our housekeeper and cook, though I don’t remember her cooking anything…nor do I remember Mom cooking, for that matter. We ate, obviously, but I can’t recall a single meal at home, just a few special places we’d go for nights out. In any case, Winifred lived in small quarters just in back of our house and had family elsewhere on the island. She was not the friendliest of housekeepers and I don’t think she got along particularly well with Mom or Dimitri, but she stayed with us pretty much our whole time in Aruba.

One evening, possibly for New Year’s, there were fireworks to be shot off the beachfront. We all gathered on the beach with a crowd, including Dimitri, waiting for night to fall. When the time finally came, the first firework shot up into the sky and, just as fast, Dimitri shot back across the street into our house, terrified. It took a long time, but we finally found her cowering under Winifred’s bed in the little room in back, as far away from the fireworks as possible. For Dimitri, even Winifred was less scary than those fireworks.

There’s a picture of me sitting in the living room of our Aruba house. From time to time, I would take the smallest of the nesting tables in the photo and use it as my lectern for Presidential speeches. Even though President Kennedy was shot in 1963, before we went to Aruba, I would imitate his speeches. I would get one of our little green Funk & Wagnall’s encyclopedias as my text, set it on the lectern, and proceed to give lengthy ad hoc speeches on matters of the day. Mom and sometimes my sisters were appreciative audiences. I’m not sure what sparked me to do this, other than occasionally seeing Kennedy on TV. I don’t think I ever imagined being Lyndon Johnson, though I seem to remember stealing his phrase, “My fellow Americans.”

I also remember a photo of me in that living room with a blond wig and Laurie’s guitar imitating the Beatles, whom we’d seen on the Ed Sullivan Show. With luck, I may someday find that photo. Beatlemania was just getting started and reverberated all the way to my 6-year old self. That thought, and the speakers by the Christmas tree in the adjacent photo, conjure up other memories of listening to a lot of folk music via my sisters and even Dad who found some of it acceptable. Records by Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul & Mary and the Kingston Trio played frequently and seeped into my musical substrate. See more in my Cultural Memories posts: 1963-1964 and 1964-1966.

In that same living room photo, on the chest in the dining room, you can see the Atmos clock which Dad got for Mom in Aruba, and we still have in our living room. It’s a special design, running off changes in temperature and humidity, and still sells for $1,000s according to the Internet. One of Aruba’s great virtues, then and now, was duty free shopping, especially for European items. The clock may have been the priciest acquisition we made there, but Mom also got started collecting Delft figurines, not to mention the little gin-filled Dutch houses KLM would give away on flights. She ended up with quite a collection, often snagging them from visitors who came through. I’m not sure where those have ended up, but there’s evidently a vigorous online market for them today.

For the first year, Sue and Laurie joined me in commuting every day from Oranjestad to Lago and the Seroe Colorado school. Laurie remembers that we had a driver, Frankie Booey, who drove us every day until Sue got her license. Sue and Laurie reminded me that the high school was in a separate building, a few blocks from the elementary school. Both schools gave everyone two hours for lunch and most kids went to their homes. We Oranjestad refugees would meet in front of the bowling alley that was adjacent to the high school parking lot. I don’t think the bowling alley was open at lunchtime, we just sat in the shade under the awnings, surrounded by cactus, pipelines and iguanas. Every now and then some of us would go to other kids’ homes, but most lunches were at the bowling alley with us and a few others. I’m not sure why that was the case, but it’s my most vivid memory of school in Aruba.

I was in first grade but had a little portable chess set and would take on all comers, especially at lunchtime. I’m not sure if I learned chess in Florida, but I got hooked and played it pretty intensely while in Aruba. I even had a couple of books on strategy and would read up on different moves. My interest fizzled shortly thereafter, but for a while I was a budding grand master.

Another activity I associate with Laurie is my getting involved in baseball games with the high school kids. Laurie was friends with one of the boys on the team and they let me play sometimes. I’m not sure who we played against (baseball has since become a big deal in Aruba, with a number of major league players hailing from there), but they were real games with umpires and everything. I played as far out in right field as possible. I never caught a ball (too scary) but I could retrieve anything hit on the ground. My real skill was coming to bat. I was so small I presented an almost an impossible strike zone for the pitchers. I would usually either get walked or get hit by pitches. I remember getting hit by far more pitches than I actually hit.

Sue graduated from Seroe Colorado and Laurie finished 10th grade the same year I was in 1st grade. The school was still contracting, so in 1965 when Sue left for Simmons College in Boston, Laurie also went north to the Cambridge School in Weston. I actually have no idea how she ended up there — that would be a good story to get from her at some point (cue for her response).

I remember staying at Len’s house in Miami, en route to the Cambridge School the next summer. That was the summer of my 16th birthday, and I don’t remember another trip that year. All I remember was pining about leaving my boyfriend in Aruba and sending him Beach Boys records and seersucker shorts, of all things, via Mom and Dad.

Oh, the reason I went to the Cambridge School was because Bernadette Reiss, who sat in front of me in math class in South Miami Junior High, had gone off to boarding school there the same year that I went to Aruba. We weren’t at all close but I guess we kept in touch because we had leaving Miami in common. When the school in Aruba told us that they wouldn’t be able to provide me and Annie Quarrels with an 11th grade (we were the only ones left after most American families were sent away that year), I applied to the Cambridge School because it was the only boarding school I knew. When Sue ended up at Simmons, Mom and Dad decided it would be good for us to be near to each other.

Per email from Laurie

In the summer of 1965, we must have gone to Boston for the first time to get them set up in school. When we returned to Aruba, I was in my own little world.

Several of my prominent Aruba memories involve Dad and his catamaran sailboat. I’m not sure when we got the boat; Sue and Laurie don’t seem to remember much about it so maybe it was after they left. It was a Hobie Cat, probably a 16-footer because it had a mainsail and jib. I never went on it alone, always with Dad. He would park it on the beach and bring the sails and rudders in the house. We spent many afternoons scooting around in the small bay in front of our house. At first, it was just a matter of getting out, having fun, and literally learning the ropes of sailing. My main job was to trim the jib and act as ballast, jumping from side to side and not getting hit by the boom. Hobie Cats are fun because they’re very fast, maneuverable, and pretty easy to sail. When they catch the wind, you can ride on one pontoon, hanging off the high side like in the picture. Go too fast and you can tip over, which we hardly ever did, though in some cases we had to let go of the sails and rudder to come to a flopping stop. There was a reef some small islands protecting our lagoon and we were careful to never go beyond the reef into the deeper, rougher water. As long as we were zipping around in the lagoon, going back and forth parallel to shore, things were good fun.

The west end of the lagoon merged into the harbor of Oranjestad where there was traffic of fishing boats and occasionally a freighter or cruise liner. One day, we strayed on the catamaran a little further toward the harbor traffic than usual. We tacked around in the tradewinds and were bouncing our way back toward our regular part of the lagoon when we suddenly heard a loud HOONNKK of a ship’s horn. One of the Grace Line cruise ships had departed unbeknownst to us and was gaining rapidly. We looked behind us and straight up at what looked like the Titanic bearing down on us. I had visions of John Kennedy’s PT-109 being split by a Japanese destroyer. Dad was able to veer away toward shore and we were safe…and probably not in very much trouble to begin with. I’m sure my memory is exaggerated but it seemed like a near-death experience at the time.

Eventually, Dad rigged up a couple of fishing rod holders and we began a routine of trolling up and down the lagoon. That’s when the sailing started to become a little less fun and more like a chore. On one occasion, he actually caught a good size fish, maybe a mackerel 2 or 3 feet long, big enough to bring back in and eat. That didn’t happen often and we really didn’t have anyplace to put the fish. It immediately became my job to hold this slimy, still-flapping prize of a fish on the deck of the catamaran as we bounced our way back into shore. I was doing my best until a bounce of a wave and flap of the fish combined to let the prize slide overboard. Dad exclaimed, “Oh, Willy!!!” I don’t recall doing much fishing on the catamaran after that, though I think it spurred Dad to rig up an ice chest on the deck to hold any future catches.

Sometime later, I received the gift of a beach ball from someone. I was quite delighted by the large, multicolored ball, maybe 2-feet across; I think Dad maybe helped blow it up for me, so he was a little invested in it. I was playing with it out on the beach when a gust of offshore wind took the ball out into the water past the first cut of waves, further than I could swim. Dad must have been on the beach and heard my cries. We hustled the catamaran into the water to rescue the ball which was skittering out toward the reef and rougher waters. We caught up to it very near the reef. Dad was steering the boat and managing the sails; it became my responsibility to scoot up to the front of the catamaran’s deck and catch the ball as we went over it. We were getting very close to the reef and it became apparent that we would only get one shot at the maneuver. Dad guided us right up to the ball, I grabbed for it, and had it for a half-second before it slid under the boat and out the back. We had to veer quickly away from the reef and by the time we did so, the ball cleared the reef and was on its way to Venezuela. I garnered another “Oh, Willy!!!” and have lived the rest of my years with the sting of his disappointment and without the ball.

[Note: I recently discovered a document describing these catamaran adventures that I originally wrote in September 1994. My writing style was more florid then, but the stories have stayed pretty consistent over the years, or at least my memories of them have.]

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Other odds and ends I recall about Aruba:

• The beaches on Aruba were (and remain) truly lovely, though I honestly can’t remember spending too much time on the really nice ones. We used the somewhat scruffy one across the street from our house as a launching point for Dad’s catamaran. We would occasionally go to the island’s only high rise, the Aruba Caribbean Hotel (now the Hilton Aruba Caribbean Resort where we would return in 2018 and 2020), to use their pool and beach…or maybe that was when we knew visitors staying there. There were two other small beach hotels, the Basi Ruti and the Divi Divi. And there was Baby Beach on the Lago side near the Esso Club. Other than that, the Aruba coastline was rocky and rough, particularly on the north side of the island.

• The Caribbean Hotel had a nightclub with dinner and international acts that I would get to tag along to once in a while. One evening it was a very glamorous Connie Francis who came over to our table, popped me on her knee and sang a torch song…maybe it was even her hit, “Who’s Sorry Now.”

• The Esso Club at Lago was another occasional destination for dinner and sometimes a movie. One evening they showed Jerry Lewis’ “The Nutty Professor” which terrified me. The Professor was weird enough, but when he transformed into the scary Hyde, I crawled under my seat and spent the rest of the movie hunched down on the floor. I’ve always hated horror movies. Around that same time we went to Disneyland where the Phantom of the Opera character stalked on Main Street outside the pseudo movie theater. I would deliberately walk on the farthest side of the street to stay away from that guy.

• There were a limited number of restaurants on the island, but one that was a pretty big deal was the Bali, a floating restaurant in Oranjestad. It served rijsttafel, the Indonesian buffet feast that featured lots of exotic, spicy foods. I enjoyed going and got hooked on krupuk, or fried shrimp chips, which would be my whole meal because I couldn’t handle any of the spicier dishes.
• There’s a family story of the time there was a strike at Dad’s fertilizer plant and he had to work there for a number of days straight, running the whole plant with a skeleton crew of other management types, including loading and unloading ships. I didn’t know much about it at the time, but evidently it was a big deal. Not big enough to show up in Google searches nowadays, though.
• There used to be a spot on the windier, rougher north side of the island where they would regularly dump trash into the ocean for sharks to eat. That was a spectacle we would sometimes travel to go see. It’s clearly not a sanctioned practice anymore but it’s funny that folks now say it’s an “old wives tale“. It may have not been an everyday thing, but I remember the seeing dumptrucks drop their load and people shoveling it off a rocky cliff into the violent water. I recall it attracting more seagulls than anything else; the water was generally too rough to see sharks.
• To the extent that I paid attention to the local community, which I admit was very little, Aruba was an odd mix of Dutch and a Creole sort of Antilles culture. On the radio and in the streets we’d hear Papiamento, the local hybrid language that jumbled Spanish, Dutch, English and other languages together but was incomprehensible to us. We used Dutch guilders for money, celebrated Christmas with Sinterklaas and Black Pete who came to town on a fireboat (the whole Black Pete thing struck me as odd and wrong, not to mention scary, even then), and celebrated when Queen Juliana came to the island in 1965. There was very little sense of Aruban or native history. Roughly equally celebrated and notorious were an abandoned gold mine in the middle of the island and a wrecked freighter offshore that was said to have been sunk by a German U-boat (though evidently it was actually a German ship that was scuttled by its crew). Both were low-grade tourist attractions but were about all that could pass as historical items in my memory. The island’s most distinctive geographic feature was Hooiberg (Haystack), a lone hill in the middle of the island. It had steps to walk up and afforded some nice views of the hot, arid little rock that was Aruba. There was also a Natural Bridge over the ocean on the north side of the island that was a tourist destination. Unfortunately, it collapsed in 2005.
• Among my clearest and happiest memories of Aruba were gathering on our front porch in the evenings for cocktails and to watch the sunset. Even Mom and Dad would relax, have a drink and some snacks, watch the sun hit the horizon and hopefully a fire to light up the sky. Sometimes it was clear enough to see the mountains of Venezuela in the far distance, once in a while with lightning storms shooting small, distant sparks. Sunsets have been a magical time for me ever since.

We left Aruba to move back to Coral Gables in the middle of my 2nd grade year, probably around February 1966. I’ve been back a few times with Barb — so far I’ve written about trips in 1994, 2018 and 2020, and Barb went in 2016 with Allie, Kristen and Sara. The island has changed greatly in the intervening decades. In the time we lived there, tourism was just starting to take hold as a dominant industry. Now it is the island’s whole existence, for better and worse.

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