Dad and My First Aquarium

I started keeping tropical fish about 70 years ago. I'm 79, so I was about 9 years old. And the way I got fish was interesting. My father was a city boy, and he was scared to death of snakes. Now, my father was no wimp. He was a very strong man and a very brave man. But he didn't think much of snakes. And as a young man, as a boy, I just loved anything that crawled and slithered and hopped and made its way across the land and in and out of pools and streams. I loved it all. And I would occasionally bring a snake into the house. There was one day I caught about a two-foot green, ribbon green snake. It was emerald green and just beautiful. thin and long. Well, my grandfather had just given me a pen fishing reel as a payment for cleaning out his broiler house at the end of the chicken season. It was a hot and smelly and very disgusting job, but my brother and I did it, and we each were rewarded with a brand new, very nice pen fishing reel. I still have mine today. I think my brother does too. In any case, I put the snake in the box that the pen reel came in, set it on the mantle, and went out to play. The way I got the story, my father came in, saw the box sitting there, decided he wanted to look at the reel so he opened the box and out popped this two foot long snake about giving him a heart attack well i guess he managed to get it in the box or out of the house or something i don't know because as i recall i never saw the snake again but a few days later he came to me and he said Son, I'll make a deal with you. If you never bring another snake in the house, I will give you an aquarium. My heart skipped a beat. That was such an exciting proposition. I agreed immediately. And we went to a local little pet shop that was located in a woman's living room. She had a bank of about 20 tanks against one wall with lots of interesting fish. in them we got a tank and a light some sand back then we used sand we didn't use gravel this was back in the gully in the late 40s a long time ago brought it all home had some little plants we put in put the fish in and as i recall everything did fine i'm not aware of fish dying although i'm sure they did but the plants grew and we had a wonderful aquarium I never did bring another snake in the house boy did I take advantage of having that aquarium by the time I was 15 I had a fish room in the basement I had golly a dozen or more aquariums I was working in a pet shop. It was in a department store. The old two guys from somewhere in New Jersey had a pet department and I took care of the tropical fish. I would bring fish home and had a great time with them. There's another story I want to tell you about pygmy oyster crabs. They were a brackish water animal that I acclimated to both fresh water and salt water, and began catching them at 15 years old in such large quantities that Merle Kohler, who owned the aquarium on Green Mount Avenue in Baltimore back in 1955, began buying these crabs from me. Well, I was going out with my grandfather in the winter when he oystered, catching oysters with nippers. These were a pair of tongs on a long two poles that he pressed together. He would feel the oysters on the bottom, catch them with these two tongs, and pull them up, and then I would rinse them off, separate them from the dead shells, pick off the little crabs that were growing on them living on them and put them in a bucket. I did this every weekend for at least one winter. I would take them home acclimate them to my saltwater and my freshwater tank and then take them in tomorrow and sell them to him for 10 cents a piece. It was a couple of hundred a week. I was making 20 sometimes 30 dollars a week selling these little crabs back in 1955. There's another story about Merle. I met him several times over the years as he moved out of his little shop to a major warehouse where he wholesaled fish and dry goods and then to a production facility where he manufactured products like takeout that he invented. Merrill and I met in 1978 when we both began working in Baltimore to try to bring about the National Aquarium, a public aquarium that would be built on Pier 5 in Baltimore. More about that later on.