out of the sand and filled cracks with some rope-like caulk that Pop gave me. I got it to float, but Pop thought it was still unsafe for two reasons. One, the wood was rotted and two, I couldn't swim. So Pop taught me how. He tied a rope around my waist and threw me overboard from the dock in front of the store. Now I knew that Grandpop couldn't swim either (even though he spent most of his life on the water). Remarkably, that was not uncommon with some of those watermen. So I asked Pop, "What happens if the rope breaks?" He had a puzzled look to that question, so I was quickly dog-paddling. With only a couple of these lessons, Pop said I was OKjust a few hundred yards away was another street with a few homes that people referred to as "Franklin City." One of those homes was where my dad was born. The short answer to my questions turned out to be .... OYSTERS !

"Around 1850 a wealthy businessman from New York anchored his schooner off the coast of an estate just south of Greenbackville owned by a prominent farmer named Henry Clay Lindsay. That night the New Yorker scraped the bottom of the bay to check the water's depth and came up with the biggest oysters he had ever seen. He offered Lindsay $1.35 a bushel (or twice the going rate) for as many as he could ship to New York City. As good as the offer was, Lindsay