Wading Through the Swamp: The Memoirs of a Bad Boy

By Dale Cathell

Wading Through the Swamp chronicles the history of the era from the time of World War II to the present, highlighting the changes in our culture over that time. The author uses his life experiences from the bad person of his early years to his times as a judge to paint a picture of the evolution of our culture. The story moves from his boyhood years growing up, his black market years in North Africa, his time as a outlaw hunter and poacher and the time spent in the sport fishing industry on the Atlantic Coast. It moves then to his years as a lawyer and a judge and the unusual and interesting incidents and cases he was involved in over the 34 year span of his time in the legal fields. A portion of the book examines the unsolved murder of Rosemary Moon McIntyre and the corruption and the abuses of a prosecutor who shielded the primary suspect from the police investigation into her murder in order to protect his own political future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496916419

Dale Cathell

The author has published two prior novels, From Lands Over and Scent of Lilacs. Empires of the Crab is his first biography. He is a native of the ‘Eastern Shore’ of Maryland and resides in Ocean Pines.   He is a judge on a state supreme court and has authored over a thousand opinions and has been published in legal publications.   He is married to the former Charlotte Kerbin and has a daughter and two sons and three grandchildren.

Book preview

BOOK ONE

EARLY YEARS

"What are little boys made of?

Frogs and snails

And puppy-dog tails

That’s what little boys are made of."

CHAPTER 1

1937

I was born on July 30, 1937, in an apartment bedroom over the shoe store on Main Street in Berlin, Maryland, a small town of around twelve hundred people located on the seaside of the Eastern Shore; the second child of Charlotte Hocker Cathell and Dale Parsons Cathell. Dr. Laws, the town’s only doctor at the time, delivered me. Dr. Laws would shortly afterwards become locally famous (or infamous) for purchasing several black bears up in Maine and letting them loose in Worcester County to begin a foundation for the return of bears to the county. It took the farmers only a year or two to kill them all.

My father was a barber, a notable fisherman, rascal and according to some, a renowned imbiber of spirits. He had attended college for a short period but had to withdraw because of his and his family’s financial situations. I have seen letters between him and his father in which he was writing home for a small amount of money, only to have the response inform him that the family was out of money, and he would have to leave college. It was at that point that he became a barber working in a shop on Main Street in Berlin.

Apparently my father, as a teenager or a young man, suffered from some unknown malady. I have seen correspondence between my grandparents and doctors at a hospital in the Philadelphia area in which the physicians are informing my grandparents that my father’s problem constituted some unknown (to them) sickness.

My mother was from a Philadelphia family with strong roots in Southern Delaware. Because of the rough economic times, she was sent to Ocean View, Delaware, to live with relatives. Apparently, she split her time between Ocean View and the home of her aunt, Florence ‘Wid’ Rogers, in Berlin where she eventually met and married my father.

Her mother (my grandmother), known as ‘Tat-Tat’ lived in Philadelphia until she died at the age of 96. In that city, at least in some cemeteries, it was and is the practice for multiple deceased persons in a family to be buried in the same grave, one on top of the other. My maternal grandfather had been dead for around fifty years and ‘Tat-Tat’ was to be buried on top of him. When the grave was opened, his casket and body were not there. We presume that grave robbers had sold him to the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. If so, he is the only one in the family to have attended that renown institution.

In December of 1940 when I was three years old, my father was admitted to the hospital in Salisbury for a hernia operation. My mother, who was pregnant and due to deliver in February, received a call five days later on Christmas Eve, notifying her that my father was dead. The death certificate said that he died of delirium tremens. Later, the undertaker is reputed to have told my family that my father had actually bled to death because there was little or no blood in his body when it arrived at the funeral home. A friend of the family told me once I was in my late teens that my father, while unattended, had rolled off the hospital bed, torn open the operation site and bled to death while a Christmas Eve party was under way at the nurses’ station. What the truth is will never be known. Forty years later, I would have unusual occurrences happen at the same hospital while I was undergoing the same operation.

I have only two or three visions in my of my real father. At this date I am unsure whether these mental images result from direct observations or from pictures of my father. One is of him diving into the ocean and the other is of him working in a barber shop in Berlin. I have also seen a picture of him standing beside my mother, holding me, but I have no recollection of ever being held by him (or by my stepfather for that matter). I have presumed that my lack of memory is due to my age at the short period of his life in which I was present.

After his death, I do remember a period in which I spent time living at my paternal grandparents (the Cathells) on the west side of South Main Street in Berlin. In the days prior to the Route 113 Berlin bypass, Main Street was also Route 113 north and south. The east side of South Main Street, with the exception of several older houses, was mostly wooded extending to the headwaters of what we now call Trappe Creek. There was very little money available and food rationing was in effect because of World War II. My grandfather supplemented whatever rations he was able to purchase by running a trap line (with box traps) throughout the woods to the east of Main Street. He would often take me with him when he ran the trap line. He dispatched the various critters with a club. We would walk back to his house, crossing Main Street on the way, with my grandfather holding my hand while carrying critters in the other hand. I can still see us walking, my hand in one of his, and his other hand carrying rabbits, the occasional racoon, and even possums by their tails. We ate all of them.

We later moved into a downscale apartment near Dr. Nichol’s office (now a bread and breakfast inn) in Berlin. My only recollection of that particular apartment was being bitten by a rat. Other than that, I retain no memories of the place.

CHAPTER 2

Christmases to Remember

It was during this time that one of my most memorable Christmases occurred. I was probably four or five years old when, for reasons unknown to me (or not recalled anyway), we went to my mother’s relatives in lower Delaware, I believe it was Ocean View, to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. There were other children there, girls, including my sister Joanne. I’m not sure whether my sister, Carol, was there. All together I had five sisters. Two by my father and three by my step-father. I had no brothers.

Shortly after daybreak, the grownups came upstairs and ushered the children downstairs to the living room. The girls began opening their presents. I was to be last as the only boy. When my turn came, I had one gift - but it was in a big box. I tore it open and inside were switches - nothing else. The adults thought it was funny. I didn’t. It wasn’t until around two in the afternoon that they took me out to the front porch where there were several packages for me with real presents inside. But it was too late.

Another Christmas that is etched in my memory occurred after my mother had remarried and involved a bicycle. I was probably around nine or ten years old when I began to deliver newspapers. It was how I got some spending money - less than a dollar a week, but enough for a Saturday afternoon matinee at the Globe Theater along with some popcorn. Back in those days, most people had their papers delivered to their homes. I would come home from school, pick up the papers and start down Williams Street or North Main Street and end up back uptown a couple of hours later. It would generally take until well after dark to finish the route, especially in the winter. It was an ‘all weather’ route. I delivered in rain, snow or sleet! Generally, in the winter time when I delivered papers to the Watson house on Williams Street, I would hear an older girl (Shirley Watson) with a beautiful voice singing. Sometimes I’d pause just to listen to her. When her mother, Mrs. Watson, noticed me, she would come out on the porch with a hot steaming cup of hot chocolate. I’ve never forgotten it. The girl with the beautiful voice grew up to marry state Delegate Mark Pilchard and became a delegate upon his death.

Often when I delivered papers to the Purnell house on North Main Street, Mrs. Purnell would also meet me at the door with a cup of hot chocolate. Her son, George Purnell, became a prominent builder in the Ocean City, Maryland area and a renown angler.

I still feel a special kinship with the two families. Acts of kindness do last forever.

In the beginning, I had to use my sister’s bike because I didn’t have one. In the much more macho times back then, I took a lot of teasing about using a girl’s bike-sometimes a fight or two would result from the teasing. Accordingly, in my adolescent mind, the bike issue was very important.

Then one Christmas morning, there was a boy’s bike for me beside the Christmas tree. It was a red and white Roadmaster with wide handlebars and white wall tires. Up to that point, it was the best day of my life. I took the bike downstairs from our tenement apartment and rode it around town for hours and hours - rode it until dinner time. I parked it outside and went upstairs and rushed through dinner. I went back downstairs, and the bike was gone. Someone had stolen it! My stepfather and I rode around town until dark looking for that bike. We didn’t find it, and I never got another bike until I bought one for myself when I was 45 years old.

To this day, I am not a ‘Christmas person’!

My mother remarried during World War II. My stepfather was from a respected North Carolina family. He had come to Worcester County while performing food procurement duties (chickens and eggs) as a soldier in the Army during the War. I presume that he met my mother during that period of time. I do know that mother and Eunice Sorin were friends and, as many girls apparently did in those war days, often journeyed to Army bases in Virginia to participate in USO activities (or whatever). I am in possession of an old photograph that shows me dressed up as a soldier, sitting on Eunice’s lap at one of those Army bases during the War.

In any event, mother and my stepfather, Richard ‘Dick’ Terrell, married and began that part of my life that created most of the memories, good and bad, that made up the foundation for the rest of my life.

CHAPTER 3

Early Youth

I know I started the first grade at old Buckingham School that in those days was the site of not only elementary grades but all grades from the first to the twelfth. It was around the second grade when my stepfather moved the family to a house on 59th Street in West Palm Beach, Florida. The house is still there. He had obtained a job with the Armor Company. By this time he had become a strict disciplinarian, as to me, and I had begun a rebellion, as to him, that would last until I was an adult.

The worst whipping I ever received occurred one evening when I had done something wrong (I don’t remember what) and was being punished by being told to stay home while the rest of the family went to a movie. I was on my way by the time they got out of sight - running away from home. I was seven years old at the time. But I was caught and put back in a bedroom. I overheard his disciplinary plans for me, so I went out the window and climbed high up into a banyan tree in the backyard and refused to come down and take my licking. I don’t know how long I stayed up that tree, but back then it seemed like forever; my stepfather, standing under the tree ordering me down, and me staying up there - until finally something occurred to me. I couldn’t live the rest of my life up a tree. After what seemed like hours, I came down and was caught as my feet hit the ground. He took me into an outbuilding, where he grabbed some pieces of wood molding in one hand and me in the other, and we began a merry-go-round that wasn’t so merry. With him holding my hand, I ran in a circle as he whipped my bare legs with the molding. After a while he stopped and I went to my room. I had not cried and as far as I can remember, I never cried during the years of my youth. I do cry now.

It was during this first year in Florida that I learned how to swim. I had been told to stay away from Lake Worth, the large bay between West Palm Beach and Palm Beach. Naturally, every chance I got I was at Lake Worth. In those days (and perhaps now), there were several docks extending into the water from this area of West Palm Beach. Two charter fishing boats tied up at one of the docks and I began to hang out (by myself) in that area. When the boats went out on charters (the Palm Beach inlet was in sight of the dock), I would often go out on the dock, sit down on the end and watch the marine life that passed by in the then clear waters. There was a huge barracuda that hung out underneath the dock and it would dash out and attack schools of mullet (or other fish) when they passed by the dock. At times it was a real show. Then one day, I got careless. I fell off the dock right as the barracuda went on the attack. As I hit the water I was I little boy who couldn’t swim a lick; within a matter of seconds I was a pint size Olympic swimmer. I don’t even remember getting wet as I swam to the shore, I was so scared of the barracuda. That was the only swimming lesson I’ve ever had.

While my stepfather returned us to Berlin about a year later, we returned to Florida a year or so after that. That time we lived in an area called West Gate between the swamp lands of Lake Okeechobee on the west and West Palm Beach to the east. Back then there were no areas of homes between us and the swamps. It was during this trip to Florida when I experienced my first job. A circus came to the area and set up about a quarter-mile away across a large canal. Some of us poor kids who couldn’t afford circus tickets decided we’d try to get some kind of work at the circus in order to get tickets to the show. Each day we’d jump in this canal (I don’t remember being worried about alligators) that was probably fifty to sixty feet wide and ten feet deep, swim across and show up at the site of the circus barefoot and soaking wet. My job was to haul water to the elephants. They drink a lot of water - but I got my ticket. I also had made friends with one of the barkers for the girlie show and one evening he let me in to see the show. Wow!

It was during this time in Florida that I learned how to do tricks with a yo-yo and entered, and won, a yo-yo contest. I can still do some of the tricks. It was also the time when I saw a man bitten by a coral snake, get his toe chopped off. I can’t remember why I was with a group at a lumber camp near the Everglades. While I was there one of the laborers was bitten on the end of his big toe by a coral snake. While we and others looked on, another laborer took an axe and cut off the toe, then killed the snake. It was explained that by the time they could have gotten the man to the hospital, he might have died. By cutting off the toe before the venom moved further into his system, they were trying to save his life. Much later when I was working on the boats and living in Deerfield Beach, Florida, I would see another coral snake that was killed by one of the guys I lived with - using a bull-whip.

Eventually we returned to Berlin. In those days, Berlin was a market town and also a distribution center for farm products through the daily train service from the depot located where the current volunteer fire department is situated. At that point there was a cross/rail branch that went to Ocean City, Maryland. But I don’t remember it being used. There were daily north/south trains that ran up and down the Eastern Shore and Delaware. I can remember taking a trip to Philadelphia on that train when I was very young.

Saturday was the market day when all the farmers came to town to sell or ship their produce and to shop for supplies. While most of the traffic was by motor vehicle, it was not unusual to see horse or mule drawn wagons come to town. It was still commonplace to see farmers plowing or tilling fields using mules or draft horses.

Just north of the train station, right after the tracks crossed main street, there was a feed mill and a small cucumber processing facility. The feed mill is still there. The feed, once mixed, was bagged, and, depending on the crop, some would be shipped by rail to other destinations. The cucumber processing facility only operated in season. Baskets of cucumbers would be brought to the small plant in trucks or wagons; the cucumbers would be off-loaded, weighed and put in a machine that washed them and it may have waxed them (but I’m not sure about the waxing). They would then be put back in baskets (or barrels) for shipping by train to northern urban markets or pickle factories on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Delaware. One of these old pickle factories with its vats can still be seen in the Sharptown/Mardela Springs, Maryland, area. There would be an adult supervisor managing the cucumber processing facility in Berlin and he would hire local youths to handle the baskets of cucumbers and put them in and out of the machinery. I would sometimes work there when I was nine or ten years old. We got paid $.25 per hour. We could make a dollar or two on a good day.

CHAPTER 4

Food Handling - 1940s

Some other memories I have of those early days contrast with the way food is disbursed in modern times. I can remember instances back in the 1940’s when almost the entire population of Berlin would walk out to the fringes of town where there were large farms to pick tomatoes (I seem to recall that it was part of the ‘war effort’). The mothers would take their children with them, sit the younger children down somewhere and have the older children help pick tomatoes. The most significant thing I can remember now, is being warned to Watch out for copperheads!

There were market days, cucumber processing, and produce shipping to northern markets. The Harrison brothers either had vast orchards, or were beginning to have them, throughout the county (and I think they may have had a partnership with Senator Bunting in Delaware with respect to fruit orchards up there). Later, in the Fall when I was eight or nine years old, I can remember going up to their cider press just off North Main Street on the west side of the road. They would load up the non-table apples into a large cider press, the flies and yellow jackets would fly right in, and the whole lot would be pressed into apple juice. The attendant would usually get us kids to sample the product to see if it’s okay. It was delicious and probably full of as much protein as sugar. There are now houses in the area where the Berlin orchards and cider press were situated.

During the latter war years, there was a prisoner of war camp outside of town, near where Stephen Decatur High School now is. The German POWs would often work in the orchards and other mostly farm operations in the county. The owners of the farms and orchards would pay the federal government for the POW’s work. What the government did with the money I don’t know. I barely remember the POWs, but do have a vague memory of their presence (I would have been 7 or 8 years old). I have heard that after the war was over and the prisoners had gone back to Germany, some of them corresponded with the farmers for whom they had worked.

After the war a large number of ‘displaced persons’ from throughout Europe immigrated to this country. The ones that came to Worcester County became productive and upstanding citizens for the most part. The president of my senior class in high school was from a family of displaced persons and went on to success as an artist. His brother is a highly respected businessman in the county as I write.

In my younger years there was one grocery store in Berlin. It was an A & P store on Main Street. It sat on the east side in the middle of the block where the antique stores are now located. It was not self-service. All of the packaged goods, mostly canned goods, were on shelves behind a counter. Bulk goods, including flour, were contained in barrels in the middle of the floor. Customers gave their order to the clerk and he retrieved the shelved goods from behind him. He had a long handled apparatus that had a grip that was closed or opened by strings attached near the butt of the apparatus. If you ordered something from a high shelf, he’d use the tool, reach up and retrieve it. If you wanted beans, or potatoes, or whatever was contained in barrels you would tell the clerk; he would use a tin scoop to get the product, weigh it, and dump it in a paper bag. I don’t remember exactly how meats and fresh produce were handled, but I believe that meat, when available, was butchered as ordered and wrapped in some type of treated brown paper. During the war years, however, there wasn’t much fresh meat available; it was mostly designated to go to the troops. During the war years the meat staple usually was a canned product called Spam, produced by Armor & Co. Even today, I sometimes keep a can around and occasionally will fry it up. As I remember it now, the store had a pot-bellied stove and there were usually men (mostly older men) sitting around gossiping.

In the winter time most of the vegetables we ate were canned. It’s hard to imagine now, with all the advancement in frozen foods, ‘steam fresh’, ‘micro-waveable’ and the like, that there was a time when there were no frozen foods (If I am remembering correctly the first frozen food was produced by Birds Eye and most people thought they were crazy). But for us, in the wintertime, for the most part, it was canned vegetables, except for an occasional cabbage.

However, there was a type of greens that we called ‘cresses’. Cresses would grow naturally in the fields from which corn had been harvested. In the wintertime it was not at all unusual to see several people walking in different corn fields with burlap sacks in their hands, bending over picking up ‘cresses’. I used to go with a great-uncle who often harvested them. He would put a ham hock in a large pot, throw a mess of cresses in, boil them down and we had some fine dining - Eastern Shore style.

Milk

In the very early days before the Acme Market opened in Berlin, I don’t recall that milk was sold in the A&P storefront on Main Street in Berlin. Milk was delivered. Many small towns on the shore had nearby dairy farms where cows were milked, then the milk was locally bottled at the farm and delivered door to door. On the outskirts of Berlin, where the hospital and nursing home are now located, there was a dairy farm and dairy operated by Mr. Powell Esham.

Mr. Esham would rise early in the morning, milk the cows, bottle the milk and deliver it on whatever schedule had been decided on by his customers. One of my chores was to go down and bring the milk to the apartment where we lived on the second floor of a tenement on Commerce Street. Often, I’d be down on the street when Mr. Powell arrived in an old small truck. It might have been a horse drawn wagon. I just can’t remember for sure. He would park along the street and emerge from the front of a truck with a heavy horizontal wire rack with a handle. The rack was divided into 8 or 10 separate compartments in which he would place quart sized bottles of milk. He’d walk down the block leaving bottles of milk where required. He would pick up the empties as he went along. Sometimes the empties would have notes sticking out the top that told him how many bottles of milk were wanted at a particular address. Sometimes there would be money placed in the empties paying for the milk. As far as I know, no one ever stole the money.

When I went to live with my aunt Wid, I had to walk down Old Ocean City Road after school. I passed by Mr. Powell’s fenced-in cow pasture. He had two large white German Shepherd dogs that he would let loose to kill, or drive off, stray dogs that were harassing his cows. Occasionally, he’d see me walking along the road to my aunt’s house and loose the dogs just to see me running. They never caught me and later I credited those dogs for the speed of foot that served me well playing soccer in Europe and North Africa.

In the mid-1950s Mr. Esham had his leg caught in a combine and crushed. It had to be amputated. He survived and later in the 1980s he was a bailiff in the Circuit Court where I was a judge.

The milk was not homogenized and several inches of cream would have risen to the top of the bottle by the time it was delivered. In the winter time the cream would often freeze and raise the lids of the milk bottle two or three inches above the neck of the bottle. The cream was especially prized because it could be used in a container with sugar, flavors and other ingredients. The container was then placed in a small wooden container and was then hand cranked in ice and salt to create home made ice cream. Later after the first supermarket (the Acme) opened the dairy farm and its delivery of milk gradually became obsolete and the dairy went out of business.

Ice boxes and washing machines

In the early part of my life there were no domestic refrigerators in our area (at least we didn’t have one) and ice boxes kept food items cool. Our ice box was maybe five feet high and separated into two or more compartments. The interior of the wooden ice box was wrapped in tin. The top compartment took up around a third of the ice box and had a ledge where the door opened. This compartment was waterproof except for holes at the bottom. A block of ice (I think around 25 or 50 pounds in weight) was placed in the top compartment.

In the compartments below the ice were kept the milk and other items needing a cool environment. As the ice melted the cold water would drip down into the other compartments, dripping over and cooling the contents. At the very bottom was a compartment where the drip-water eventually accumulated. This compartment was removable and would be emptied periodically into the kitchen sink. There was, of course, no freezer. It wasn’t needed because there weren’t any frozen foods and no one, as far as I know, was even contemplating the freezing of foods, at least locally.

The ice was delivered to each house when needed by deliverymen from a local ice company. I don’t know how the company produced the ice. The ice truck would come down the street, stopping periodically. The driver would use ice picks to cut an appropriately sized hunk of ice from a larger block. He would then use heavy scissor - type tongs to grab the hunk of ice. The iceman came into the houses and placed the ice block directly into the ice boxes.

I don’t remember when we got our first refrigerator, but even then it had no freezer compartment.

The first washing machine I remember was a big washing tub with a scrub board. The engine was my mother. Not long after that time, my mother got an old four legged top loading machine without a lid. The tub stood on four legs and had an agitator in the middle. Water would be heated on the stove and dumped into the tub along with flakes of some kind of lye soap, the device would be turned on and the agitator would twist back and forth. When the operator, my mother, figured the clothes were clean the machine was turned off and the tub was drained via a tube into a bucket and the soapy water would be emptied in the sink. Clear water would be dumped back into the tub, the agitator would be turned on and the clothes would be rinsed of soap residue. On one side of the tub there was attached a two roller device. The edge of various items of clothing would be inserted between the rollers and the rollers would be activated (I can’t remember whether they were activated by hand or by the motor.) and the clothes would be drawn through with most of the water squeezed out by the rollers. Sometimes the clothes would be hung up on an indoor type clothes line apparatus, but I can also distinctly remember my mother putting bunches of washed and still damp clothes in baskets and going to my great aunt’s house where she would hang the clothes up to dry on an outside line. When dry the clothes would be gathered, taken back to the apartment and those that needed ironing would be ironed.

In one lifetime, in this country, the entire method of providing clean clothes has changed.

CHAPTER 5

Fishmonger

Berlin also had a fish monger. There was a one-armed man, Capt. Wilkerson, who I think was the father of Bob Wilkerson, a successful Ocean City restauranteur. Mr. Bob Wilkerson (the son) was a very short man but accepted no limitations as result of his size. I have heard a story about Bob Wilkerson getting shot. According to the story he was playing cards underneath an Ocean City hotel when an argument ensued. One of the other players pulled a gun and as he pulled the trigger Mr. Wilkerson grabbed the gun. When it went off, Mr. Wilkerson was shot in the scrotum. Mr. Wilkerson then pistol-whipped the shooter unconscious with the gun, and proceeded to drive himself into lower Delaware to a doctor who could be trusted not to report the injury. The bullet was removed and Mr. Wilkerson drove himself home. There were tough guys in those days and toughness did not depend upon size.

The father, Capt. Wilkerson, had a wheeled cart with a hanging scale on the side and a cleaning board on the top. He would load the cart with fish, and sometimes muskrats or rabbits, and wheel it around town. I can still hear him yelling fish, fatback, trout, hardheads, rock and sometimes he’d be yelling rats today. My mother would sometimes give me some change or on occasion a dollar or so and send me down to get fish or muskrats. We’d usually get what were called back then ‘fatbacks’, because they were usually the cheapest fish - sometimes ten cents or less per pound. Today, as far as I know, no one eats ‘fatbacks’. Their modern name is mullet and they are used exclusively as bait. Back then they were a staple for poor people. Sometimes my mother would have me get muskrats, usually for around a quarter a ‘rat.’ She’d fix them, and we’d eat them. But, they were not my favorite - then or now.

Muskrats were trapped primarily for their fur. After they were skinned the meat was sold throughout the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Their present status as an epicurean delight is peculiar to the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Muskrat dinners are routinely held as fund-raisers up and down the ‘Shore.’

Capt. Wilkerson was not handicapped very much by only having one arm. He had a nail attached to a