Island Odds and Ends: A.M. Foley

Island Odds and Ends by A.M. Foley

As it has for many, hibernating for health has caused me to explore some long-neglected corners of my house. In a closeted box of files and audio tapes, I rediscovered transcribed interviews that Freddie Waller and I made in the last millennium, while researching Elliott’s Island: The Land That Time Forgot. As the sole surviving participant, I feel now is the time to share a few nuggets that could possibly have caused embarrassment at the time of our book’s publication, or that might simply have been overlooked.

Miss Leila

When I knew Miss Leila, she was in her nineties, commuting by van before dawn five days a week to a seafood packer across Fishing Bay in Toddville. After their own Elliott Island crabhouse had burned, she and her neighbors (not one of the ladies under seventy) had to ride over an hour to pick crabs, or else

retire. Their afternoon’s return trip took even longer, with the teetotaling ladies nervously monitoring the alcohol taken by the codger in the driver’s seat as they snaked home down the road crossing the marsh.

In an interview, Miss Leila’s nephew Barney spoke of her earlier career, when her father held the contract to carry bulk mail from the Vienna post office, down through Hurley’s Neck, and on to the island postmaster’s general store. In a 1990s interview, Barney said:

“Aunt Leila had a Model T she carried the mail in. Before that they carried mail by buggy and horse.

Every day, when they got to Vi-

enna, they had another horse they came off with. The first horse give out, so they switched.” [What about the people?]

“Nah, they were just sitting there.” [. . . on an eighteen-mile trip, including eight miles of log-paved, corduroy causeway across the marsh.]

“Aunt Leila used to stop in Hur-

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