6 Year Old Skipper Saved By A Drunk Monkey

This story is not as funny as the title implies.  In fact, except for its relatively happy ending, it’s a horrible tale. So I worry that my tone may be too flippant  — even decades removed. Dear reader, I beg your forgiveness in advance.  I offer this story, not as a joke, but as a lesson from history that sometimes men turn out to be more resilient than we think they might.

Here goes:

Growing up around Galveston during Prohibition years in the United States,  William Curtis Scherdin didn’t have benefit of a case worker from Child Protective Services (CPS didn’t get started until the ’70’s.) or any other sort of government appointed mentor. Who knew a drunk monkey could be a good stand-in?

William’s father was a Gulf Coast bootlegger who often had his son in tow on  boat trips across the Galveston Bay with his illegal cargo. Young William, his father, and a crew of helpers would regularly meet a supplier near Texas City, load their liquor onto a small ship, and sail it to a hideout on Bolivar Peninsula, more than an hour away.

This, of course, is akin to a 21st century drug dealer taking his 2nd grader along on runs, and I’m guessing that thought horrifies just about everyone who contemplates it. CPS could surely expect a call or two, if a parent were to try something similar today.

Nevertheless, William’s son Eddie Scherdin (my wife’s 73-year-old cousin who lives in Sweeny, Texas) speaks nostalgically of these days. And he seems especially proud of what his father said happened on one particularly interesting  trip to Bolivar.

Family legend has it that one day in about 1914, when William was just 6 years old, his father and the other crew members found themselves delayed at their dock for several hours with a shipload of booze. (Eddie says he thinks it was because of dangerous weather, but he can’t be sure.) William’s father was as well established a drinker as he was a bootlegger so, to pass the time, he liberally sampled the cargo — and encouraged the other men to join him. By the time the ship was ready to leave, none of the crew were sober enough to pilot it.

So William, the grade-schooler, became the captain that day.

Gadzooks! What have I done? I can hear chatter from my local CPS office already. I can even envision a worker paying me a visit soon.  Per Texas law, I may have just put myself in legal peril. Not officially reporting one’s suspicion of child abuse is a serious offense these days, and I’m not sure even it matters that both parent and child have long since passed on.  (Eddie, I guess they could be coming for you, too!) Well, the damage is done, I guess. I might as well keep going.

No one can be sure of whether William was energized or traumatized by this wild ride across the bay. About the only sure detail of this trip is that boat, crew and cargo all, apparently, arrived intact. Imagine that!

But Eddie says the experience did help launch in his father an intense love for alcohol that lasted through his adolescence .

“My father grew up around alcohol, and he loved it from the very beginning,” Eddie says. “But” (here’s where the monkey comes in, finally) “he quit drinking as a very young man.”

That last part deserves repeating.

Despite a childhood surrounded by booze and drunks on illegal  rum running trips, and despite the drama of steering an illicit ship across a bay at such a young age, and despite having no one to intervene in his disturbing life,  William managed to “quit drinking as a very young man.”

Astonishing. Who would have thought?

Here’s how it happened.

One day about 15 years after his adventure upon the bay, William and his brother, both accustomed to the delinquent life by then, ended up drunk in front of a monkey’s cage at the Houston zoo. Having nothing better to do, they sat and drank and watched the monkey for more than an hour before deciding upon their next bit of fun. “Let’s get this ole’ boy drunk,” one of them said.

The two coaxed the animal to the cage’s bars and slipped him a beer. (And no one at the zoo tried to stop this, Eddie? “Well, zoo’s back then weren’t like they are today.”) The monkey downed the bottle, and came back for more. And more. And more. And more.

“Pretty soon that damn monkey was drunk as a skunk. And he was doin’ all kinds of crazy monkey business all over that damn cage,” Eddie says.

And that’s when the monkey saved William’s life.

“When my father got a good look at how crazy that drunk monkey was, he thought, I must act like that all the time, too,” Eddie said. “So right then, he decided he wasn’t ever going to be like no drunk monkey ever again. He never picked up another drink. That damn monkey saved my father’s life! Mine too, probably!”

William passed away in 1960, and we’ll never know whether he would have welcomed the type of “intervention” that would have likely come about had his childhood happened, say, 70 years later. But we do know that he lived to tell the tale to his son, who now shares it nostalgically with us.

Perhaps it is okay after all to just let God work His strange magic in our world.