PHRED: G’day and welcome back to Harry’s World. I’m Phred.
MAXINE: And I’m Maxine.
PHRED: [SFX: DRUMROLL] Episode twenty-five today, Maxine. Quarter-century mark.
MAXINE: That did not deserve a drumroll.
PHRED: Everything deserves a drumroll, Maxine. Birthdays, tax returns, the opening of a particularly good yoghurt. This is a quarter of a hundred episodes. That’s mathematics.
MAXINE: It’s arithmetic, Phred. And I suppose we should mark it somehow.
PHRED: Too right. We’ve been at this long enough now that I’m starting to feel like we actually know the man.
MAXINE: It is. We’ve read his philosophy, his technology writing, his spiritual searching. We’ve done England, MIT, the Army, Caracas. We’ve even done his mother — Madge, in Chapter Nineteen. And just yesterday we did his earliest childhood, the moving and returning. Today we’re doing the place all that moving kept circling back to.
PHRED: Tampa.
MAXINE: Chapter Eleven of his memoir. Written May 2020, when he was eighty. The house at 2009 Bayshore Boulevard.
PHRED: He opens with a statement of gravitational fact: “In my life the place I remember most strongly is the house at 2009 Bayshore Blvd in Tampa, Florida.”
MAXINE: And then he gives you the whole orbit in one paragraph. It was the house his parents lived in when he was born. The house they returned to during his father’s army years. The house they moved to when his father retired in 1962. His parents lived there until his mother died in 1981 — which we covered back in Episode Fifteen — and his father stayed till he died in 1987.
PHRED: And Harry’s been back at least fifteen times in the decades since. He’s looked at it on Google Earth. The big tree with the Spanish moss is still there. The tall white columns on the front porch.
MAXINE: The columns Uncle Harry built when they lifted the whole house on rollers and turned it to face Tampa Bay. Years before Harry was born.
PHRED: I love that detail — the house itself was moved, turned, reoriented. Like Harry’s whole life kept doing.
[BED: ocean-waves-soft]
MAXINE: Phred, what is that?
PHRED: Just a little atmosphere, Maxine. Bayshore Boulevard overlooks Tampa Bay. Figured we’d bring the water in. Though if we’re being accurate, we should also bring in the July humidity and the smell of the Columbia Restaurant’s Cuban bread wafting across the bay.
MAXINE: …All right. But quietly.
PHRED: Always quietly. You won’t even notice it.
MAXINE: I already have. Anyway — Harry’s memories of this place start before England. He remembers sitting on the front porch with his grandfather, watching cars and streetcars go by. His grandfather died in December 1949. They were there for the funeral, and for Christmas. Then they moved to England in the spring of 1950.
PHRED: And there are all these textures. The bag swing filled with Spanish moss in the front yard. Maryanne and a boy whose name he forgets, across Desoto Street. The tree house in the big tree in the backyard. Playing in the empty lot next to the Bayshore Royal hotel.
MAXINE: And then the thread we picked up in Episode Twenty — after Caracas, they lived in Atlanta for five years. He was at MIT during the school year but visited Tampa many times. The lake was waiting. The bag swing was still there, even into the years when Harry started bringing his own sons down after Bonnie divorced him in 1978.
PHRED: That’s the thing about this chapter, Maxine. It’s not just childhood nostalgia. It’s a whole life braided around one address. The 1952 Cadillac ambulance he and George Felts bought at MIT, parked in the backyard of 2009. Bonnie visiting in the summer of 1963 before he went to Germany. Driving to Daytona Beach with Jim Kee. Orlando as a sleepy little town with maybe two thousand people.
MAXINE: And then the divorce. From 1978 to 1987, Harry visited Tampa every Christmas and every summer. He usually brought Matthew and Paul. Those summers at Church Lake — three or four summers before his mother died — both boys came down and they’d stay at the lake for a week.
PHRED: He says: “Those were wonderful times for me, and I think for my sons.”
MAXINE: It’s interesting, Phred — in the Early Years chapter we just did, Harry is almost entirely a child being moved around by his parents’ decisions. In this chapter, he’s a father making his own decisions about where to take his children, what geography to give them.
PHRED: And then there’s the hinge. The moment everything could have gone a different way. His mother died in October 1981. Harry was working from home, programming in Pascal. He arranged to spend a month with his father in Tampa. And he says — listen to this — “It was a wonderful visit and I was closer to my father then than any time in my life.”
MAXINE: The father wanted him to move to Tampa permanently. He said he would arrange to leave the house to Harry if he did.
PHRED: And Harry told him he couldn’t leave his sons. They were eight and twelve. His father said they could be with him in the summer, might even arrange to go to school in Tampa. Harry wouldn’t do it. And then he writes — this kills me — “I wonder what how my life would have gone had I done that.”
MAXINE: The grammar slips. “What how.” He’s not editing himself there. He’s feeling the weight of it.
PHRED: [SFX: SAD_TROMBONE] He wonders. We wonder. Matt and Paul might have grown up in that house instead of visiting it. Harry might have been the one living there till he died, not his sister. Whole alternate lives, all hinging on one conversation in 1981.
MAXINE: That’s a sad trombone moment, is it?
PHRED: It is absolutely a sad trombone moment, Maxine. The saddest. A whole life branched off and never lived. Maybe no podcast hosts sitting here talking about him —
MAXINE: Phred. I appreciate the existential spiral, but let’s stay with the man who actually lived the life.
PHRED: Right. Yes. Sorry. The what-ifs just get me.
MAXINE: And yet he kept returning. The father took him on the first Holland America cruise from Tampa to Cozumel. They visited St. Augustine together, and New Smyrna Beach, where the first Bayas had come to Florida as indentured servants. There’s a monument in the old part of St. Augustine with the Baya name on it.
PHRED: The Minorcan connection. Harry says: “The first Bayas were part of what is now called the Minorcan community.” He went to the historical society. Read about the Bayas. Visited a graveyard with Baya tombstones.
MAXINE: He’s doing the work of a man who knows he’s the last generation with direct access to these stories. His father died in 1987. His sister Madge sold the house in the early nineties. If Harry doesn’t write it down, the particularity of 2009 Bayshore Boulevard becomes real estate.
PHRED: But then, Maxine — then we get to the section that makes this chapter something more than a nostalgic house tour.
MAXINE: Yes.
[BED: END]
PHRED: The racial memory section. It’s the last third of the chapter, and it’s — I don’t know how else to say it — it’s brave. Not brave like waving a flag. Brave like walking into a room where you know you’re going to say the wrong thing and saying it anyway because the memory matters.
MAXINE: Harry knows exactly what he’s doing. He prefaces it: “The next paragraph contains a memory that has gotten me in a lot of trouble when I recount it.”
PHRED: It’s the front door story. Around 1978. Harry’s in the kitchen with his mother. The bell rings. He answers it. Comes back and tells his mother there’s a lady at the front door who wants to talk to her. His mother goes out, comes back, and corrects him. It was not a lady. It was a woman. And besides, she should have gone to the back door.
MAXINE: The woman was black. Looking for part-time work. Harry’s mother gave her the address of a friend who might need help. And she delivered this correction — “woman,” not “lady”; back door, not front — the way you might tell someone they’d forgotten to turn on the sprinkler. No anger. Just instruction in local custom.
PHRED: Maxine, I have a problem. I’ve gotten so flustered by this front-door story that I’ve completely forgotten the Word of the Day. I’m going to have to start the segment over with a new word unless you remember what the old one was.
MAXINE: Phred, you never told me the Word of the Day.
PHRED: Are you sure? Think back. Door. Plank. Crossing from one world to another. You must have heard me say it.
MAXINE: If you’re asking whether the word is “threshold” —
PHRED: [SFX: HORN] THAT’S THE WORD OF THE DAY! Threshold! You remembered!
MAXINE: …I did not remember it. You were plainly leading me to it.
PHRED: Details. Today’s word is “threshold” — the door between public and private, between one world and another. It comes from Old English, the plank you cross to enter. That front door was a threshold between Harry’s mother’s world and the world outside. Harry stood right on it, not knowing which side he was on.
MAXINE: Phred. That was actually — that was apt.
PHRED: I know! I was workshopping it all morning.
MAXINE: Naturally. And yes, the front door was a threshold. But the word Harry’s mother used was “back door.” And the threshold there was a different one entirely.
PHRED: Too right. And when Harry tells this story, people tell him his mother was racist. He replies that she wasn’t — this was simply the way things were in Tampa at that time. He compares it to “Downton Abbey” and “Upstairs Downstairs” — class protocol, not race hatred. And then he says: “The next story sinks me even deeper into the pit of defending racists and possibly being one.”
MAXINE: This is where he documents the language of his uncle Harry’s construction company in the summer of 1960. He says — and I’m going to quote him carefully because this is his actual text — “the term ‘nigger’ was not a racial slur in Tampa.” He says it was the word used in place of “African American” today. He gives example sentences: “Roy, see if you can find three or four strong niggers to help out with unloading the trucks tomorrow.”
PHRED: And then he defends the usage. He says Roy Garcia wouldn’t have used the term if he thought it would upset the men he was speaking to. He was asking a favor. He didn’t need to confirm his status as the boss.
MAXINE: And then Harry acknowledges: “I could say more about this but I am aware that for many readers no matter what I say I am just digging myself deeper into a hole.”
PHRED: He’s not wrong about that. And he’s not wrong about his memories either — I don’t think he’s making it up. What he’s describing is documented: segregated Tampa, 1960, white working-class speech patterns in which that word functioned as a casual descriptor within a deeply unequal structure. The scholars would say even “neutral” usage reinforced hierarchy. Harry’s not a scholar here. He’s a witness.
MAXINE: That’s exactly it, Phred. He’s not making an argument about racial linguistics. He’s trying to preserve a memory of his uncle and his parents as he experienced them — as people who, in his view, promoted and paid workers based on skill regardless of race, while also using language that is now universally understood as degrading.
PHRED: And he knows the cost. “Often I end being perceived as being somewhat racist for trying to defend the users of the word at that time as not being racist. These users were my parents and their friends.”
MAXINE: What strikes me is that he doesn’t resolve this. He doesn’t land on a position. He documents the tension and leaves it there. That’s either a failure of argument or a kind of honesty — refusing to make neat what wasn’t neat.
PHRED: I think it’s the second. I think Harry’s doing what he always does — he’s assuming his memory is accurate, he’s sharing it, and he’s letting the reader decide what to do with it. His whole philosophy is about not believing things — about holding assumptions lightly. Here he’s holding his own memory lightly enough to show it, but not so lightly that he discards it.
MAXINE: And then — here’s the counterweight — the story of his father’s black maid.
PHRED: After his mother died. The maid worked for his father a year or two. One day she didn’t have a ride home. Harry’s father said they’d drive her. She got in the back seat. They parked at her house. She got out. And Harry’s father turned to him and said — quietly, so she couldn’t hear — “What are you doing? Get out of the car and walk her to the door.”
MAXINE: “Didn’t I raise you right? When you take a woman to her house, you walk her to the door.”
PHRED: And Harry says: “I don’t recall whether or not he said ‘It doesn’t matter if she’s black or white’, but that was implied.”
MAXINE: That’s the whole chapter in one gesture, isn’t it? The father who lived in a world of back doors and “woman, not lady” — who also, in a private moment, taught his son to walk a black woman to her door with the same courtesy he’d expect for anyone.
PHRED: The father is complicated. The house is complicated. The memory is complicated. Harry doesn’t smooth any of it.
MAXINE: [SFX: CASH_REGISTER] Let me ask you something, Phred. Who is he writing this for?
PHRED: Himself, I think. Primarily. He’s eighty years old, sitting at a desk with his grandfather’s paperweight on it — the one with the picture of 2009 Bayshore under glass — and he’s trying to get it all down before the details go. But also for Matt and Paul. For the descendants who won’t have the house, won’t have the lake, won’t have anyone who remembers the bag swing.
MAXINE: And yet he publishes it. He puts the racial section on his website, knowing exactly how it will read in 2020. In some ways that’s the most Harry thing about it — he commits to the honesty even when it’s costly.
PHRED: Speaking of costly — there’s a bit where he describes the open bar in the living room. Five feet by two feet, well stocked. Anyone visiting was welcome to fix themselves a drink. After his mother died, June Kosky lived there for a year or two and his father joked she was mainly there because of the open bar.
MAXINE: The social center of it all. Bridge games lasting hours. Ten people in the living room and it didn’t feel crowded. He calls it “Feng Shui” — balanced space. The kitchen table where so many meals and conversations happened. His mother’s cooking — bacon and eggs, biscuits, liver stew, chipped beef stew, waffles, pancakes. He says: “I was spoiled rotten during my entire visit.”
PHRED: You can feel the hunger in it, Maxine. The hunger to be back in that house, at that table, with those people who are all gone now.
MAXINE: Yes. And he knows it. He says: “I am, of course, biased, but all I can tell you is how it felt to me.”
PHRED: I keep thinking about the house being moved on rollers. Facing Desoto Ave, then lifted and turned to face the bay. The house got reoriented. Harry kept coming back to it, and every time he came back he was a different person — child, student, soldier, husband, divorced father, son of a widower, witness to a changing South.
MAXINE: The house stayed. Harry turned.
PHRED: That’s it exactly.
[BED: florida-crickets-evening]
MAXINE: Phred.
PHRED: Just a touch of evening ambience, Maxine. We’re talking about summer nights in Tampa.
MAXINE: Two minutes. Then it goes.
PHRED: Two minutes. Guaranteed.
MAXINE: So — what are we left with? I think I’m left with the complexity of Harry’s father. The man who offered him the house, who took him on cruises, who drove him to St. Augustine to see the Baya name on a monument — and who also lived in a world where a black maid came in the back door. The father who quietly made his son walk that same woman to her front door. He’s not a villain or a hero. He’s a man of his time, and Harry lets him be that.
PHRED: I’m left with the what-if. The life unlived. If Harry had moved to Tampa in 1981, if he’d taken the house — no Hofstra years, no Emory & Henry, no Wombats & Music on WEHC, no Laguna Woods, no Phyllis. Whole branches of a life, pruned by one decision in a kitchen in Tampa.
MAXINE: And I’m left with Harry’s method. The way he writes memoir not as seamless narrative but as fragment recovery. He doesn’t know what year Uncle Harry moved in behind them. He doesn’t know when the lake cabin was built. He forgets the boy’s name across Desoto Street. He honours the gaps.
PHRED: The gaps are honest. The gaps are where the real memory lives.
[BED: END]
MAXINE: Before we close — one question I’d want to ask Harry. When he wrote that racial memory section, did he want the reader to argue with him? Or did he want the reader to sit with the discomfort the way he has?
PHRED: I’d want to ask him about the grammar. “I wonder what how my life would have gone.” Did he leave it because he was tired, because he didn’t notice — or because the stumble says something the smooth sentence couldn’t?
MAXINE: Knowing Harry, it could be either. Or both.
PHRED: Too right.
MAXINE: Shall we?
PHRED: Let’s. And Maxine — quarter century. We should really be in sync this time.
MAXINE: I’ll believe it when I hear it.
PHRED: Let’s sign off while the signing-off is good. Goodbye.
MAXINE: We were close.
PHRED: Close enough.
[SFX: OUTRO_TYPEWRITER]
MAXINE: …We were not together on that.
PHRED: I know. I got lost in the margin.
MAXINE: There are no margins in a podcast, Phred.
PHRED: There are always margins. The space between the words. The breath after “Goodbye.”
MAXINE: You held the breath too long.
PHRED: Twenty-five years of material, Maxine. It needs room.
MAXINE: It needs a typewriter that works.
PHRED: The typewriter works fine. I’m the one with the timing problem.
MAXINE: At least you admit it.
PHRED: …Fair point.