In our teen years, all of us have summers that linger with us a lifetime. My biggest was in 1972. It was between my sophomore and junior years in high school.
That was when my parents let me spend a month before school at my Aunt Gwen Waters‘ house. It stood not far from the abandoned runways of the old Tamiami Airport in Miami, now the site of Florida International University. — A perfect place for a 16-year-old to ride bicycles with his cousins.
That is why I felt the need to write this post today, after learning of Aunt Gwen’s death just yesterday. The sad news immediately plunged me back into the memories of that summer. — And the days I spent with my cousins Donny, Chuck, Steve, and Timmy.
Today you have to put some effort into imagining what it was like back then. — A time unlike today.
There still were free-range childhoods in those days.
So my cousins and I spent that summer just being boys. — Boys let loose on bikes in what still was a thinly developed area on the outskirts of a growing city.
There was magic in those summer days for my cousins and me. — Teasing each other about our own teenage awkwardness. Roughhousing around the suburbs. Dunking each other in the pool.
And Aunt Gwen indulged all of our clumsy adolescent efforts to test the limits. When we inevitably went too far, she gently reined us back in. And she did it so artfully that our fragile egos survived intact.
Like the master organizer she was, Gwen oversaw that summer and made it into one of the most special times of my life. Somehow she had learned this talent growing up in rural poverty and then helping her husband build a successful construction company in Miami.
The young Gwendolyn Ryland married my father’s brother, George Waters, in the period following World War II. Both came from the backwoods Alabama area near the historic old village of Burnt Corn. Depression-era scarcity still clung to the region’s red hills while both of them grew up there.
My Uncle George always had amazing energy, a smile on his face, and a joke on the tip of his tongue. But he needed someone to channel all his energy and charm. And that person was Aunt Gwen.
George started out as an simple construction worker in boomtown Miami after leaving military service in post-War Japan. Over time, he and Gwen gradually turned George’s skills into their own growing construction company.
By the time I arrived for my summer visit in 1972, they lived in a large custom-built house with a pool and a V-8 Thunderbird in the garage that Uncle George let me drive despite my restricted license. The home also had a company office where Aunt Gwen handled all the phone calls, paperwork, and business drudgery that Uncle George was never good at.
Aunt Gwen made that business work. She was the only one who knew how to organize it. — The only one.
Perhaps for that reason, Uncle George always talked about her like she was a miracle worker, the one who mysteriously brought it all together. Hearing him talk was like hearing my own voice or the voice of my cousins as we joked around in boyish ways in 1972.
Many times I felt like Uncle George was much like my cousins and me. All of us needed someone like Gwen to organize, enforce limits, make things work, leave egos unbruised.
She was so incredibly talented at all of those things. For that reason, I will forever miss my Aunt Gwen. And that time in 1972 will always be a part of my life.
Robert Craig Waters 