"I'll Be Back by Noon"
The street was still dark when the porch lights came on at 2735 and 2740 Leroy. Rupert Ray Harrell, known as Ray, and Jimmy McFerren lived across the road from each other, close enough to wave from their front steps, and they had been fishing together more times than anyone could count. A few blocks away, in the house at 2734 Main Street, John Ostrosky set down his coffee. He was a patrolman with a rare Sunday free, and his wife Margarita and their little girl were still asleep. (Imagined detail.)
The boat was Jimmy's: sixteen feet, painted light green, with a thirty-horse Evinrude clamped on the stern. They had loaded rods, bait, an anchor on a long line, a spare can of gasoline, and three lunches wrapped at three kitchen tables.
In the McFerren house Jimmy took his jacket from the hook. He had panelled that living room himself after he came home from the war, where he'd served as an Army MP in Italy. He and his wife had been married fourteen years.
From the record: "When he left Sunday morning he said 'I'll be back by noon.' He went out the door. He liked to fish and the three of them went fishing all the time." (Mrs. McFerren, Tampa Morning Tribune, Jan. 31, 1956)
Ray and Nina's daughter Christina was nine. John and Margarita's daughter Sandra Lee was seven. Nina and Margarita were sisters, Abreu girls from West Tampa, so the two little girls were cousins. If the men were back by noon, or two o'clock at the latest, there would be the rest of the Sunday afternoon at home.
Ozona sat on the Pinellas shore just south of Tarpon Springs. The three of them slid the boat in, and Ray, the mechanic, the one who knew engines, bent over the Evinrude. (Imagined.) Later, Ray's brother-in-law would tell reporters the motor had been sticking in low gear and that the men had planned to fix it themselves. Jimmy's family would say the opposite: the motor ran perfectly and could only be started in neutral. Nobody now can say which was right.
The morning came up mild. In Tampa it would reach seventy-seven degrees with no rain. Out on the water the Gulf lay flat.
From the record: The day "was so calm that you could read the label of a beer can floating in the water." (Coast Guard Lt. Paul Smith) · Weather was "ideal"… "light winds, but the Gulf 'was almost glassy.'" (Lt. Cmdr. Thomas M. MacWhinney)
They ran northwest past the low line of Anclote Key and its old iron lighthouse, out to where the water turned from green to blue and the bottom fell away to six or seven fathoms.
They cut the motor and let the boat drift. The anchor stayed in the boat with its long line coiled. Three rods went out with baited hooks, and the lines slanted down into water too deep to see the bottom. Somebody said lunch could wait. (Imagined.)
Nobody knows what happened in the next few minutes. Nobody ever will. Here is how the men who knew these waters best, a sponge-boat captain, the Coast Guard, and a police detective who was also family, thought it most likely went:
A small boat on a glassy sea can feel as steady as a dock until someone stands up wrong. Maybe a rod bent double. Maybe someone leaned out for a tangled line, or reached back to start the engine and it caught in gear and lurched. One man went over the side into water that in late January is barely sixty degrees. It drives the breath out of you. Jimmy McFerren could not swim. Ray Harrell was a skin diver and John Ostrosky was a young policeman, and men like that go in after a friend without thinking.
An empty sixteen-foot boat with no anchor down doesn't stay put, even in a light wind. It slides away a little faster than a man in a wool jacket and boots can swim. The bow line went over the side and trailed in the water, out of reach.
(The paragraphs above are imagined. They follow the most likely explanation, not a known fact.)
Capt. George Billiris was bringing his party boat home to Tarpon Springs, a Greek sponge-port family boat that took winter visitors deep-sea fishing, when someone pointed out a small green boat sitting alone on the water.
From the record: The boat was found "about eight miles out from Anclote, with no occupants aboard, but two deep-sea fishing rods baited with lines over the sides." · "Three untouched lunches were wrapped up and resting under a seat." · "a 30-horsepower motor still in gear… The motor was not running."
Billiris circled, searching the water, then dropped anchor beside the empty boat and waited for the Coast Guard so the spot wouldn't be lost. He had spent his life on these waters, and he would tell the newspapers what he believed:
"They wouldn't have a chance," said Billiris, "if they were thrown into the Gulf where I found their boat… The water there is six and seven fathoms deep, 10 miles from shore."
Later that afternoon a smaller fishing boat pulled a jacket out of the water. The laundry mark inside read "Harrell."
Noon came and went at home, then two o'clock. Then the telephone rang. (Imagined; the clippings don't say how the families learned the news.)
By evening the relatives had gathered on the McFerren lawn. Mrs. McFerren was one of nine children, and her brothers and sisters stood watching every pair of headlights that turned onto the street. Across the road, in the Harrell house, Margarita Ostrosky had come to sit with her sister Nina. None of the three wives would sleep that night or eat the next day.
"I wish," said Mrs. McFerren as she waited in her living room, "they had found the men, not the boat." · "This is just a nightmare… We've been married 14 years, it just doesn't seem possible he's missing."
Ray Abreu was a Tampa city detective. His sisters Nina and Margarita were married to Ray Harrell and John Ostrosky, so he was brother-in-law to both. He had driven to plenty of houses to tell other families bad news. That night he took a boat to Anclote Key with his brother Armando, a third Abreu who had lost two brothers-in-law, and Nick Julian, Jimmy's brother-in-law, to look for his own family. They carried spotlights. Fog rolled in off the Gulf.
"We looked around the dock and there's a house on the key. We yelled and we went in the old lighthouse. I'm hoarse now from the yelling." · "We looked Sunday night, but you couldn't see your hand in front of your face in the mist. It was everywhere." (Nick Julien)
"This is the first time that I've searched for my own family. Before, I've been the one to notify other families… now it is hitting home." (Det. Ray Abreu)
At dawn the Coast Guard came: helicopters, a big Grumman Albatross amphibian, a crash-and-rescue boat. Hillsborough and Pinellas county crews searched in planes and boats. On Monday afternoon an inflated life preserver turned up drifting in the area. Then the fog came back and sent everyone in. For about a week the Coast Guard searched the Gulf for hundreds of miles north and south. Then it stopped.
The family kept going. Nick and John Julian took Jimmy's green boat back out and ran it all day, and the motor never missed. Ray Abreu kept organizing boats and an airplane. "We've got to find them," he said.
What came instead were rumors. The men had been seen alive on a tidal island. They had been shanghaied onto a tramp steamer. An enemy submarine had taken them. Their bodies had been found with their throats cut. Each story was checked, and none of them was true. Each one reopened the wound.
"I wish people would help us search instead of telling all these stories." · "I wish people would not spread these rumors and cause our family more trouble." (Det. Ray Abreu)
A month later an anonymous man telephoned the Tribune. He said he had seen a gray boat pull alongside the little craft and had heard shots, that he was "leaving the state," and then he hung up and never called back. John Julian's son Ronnie had noticed gray paint marks on the gunwale. Police counted more than three thousand gray boats on the bays between St. Petersburg and Tarpon Springs. The Coast Guard helicopter that reached the scene within the hour had seen no other vessel.
The newspapers moved on. The families couldn't. Without bodies there was nothing to bury and no proof of death, and the insurance could not be paid. Two little girls, cousins, grew up waiting for fathers who never walked back through the door.
"The families, left without a breadwinner and unable to claim insurance until some proof of death is established, cling to the small hope that their men may somehow, somewhere, be alive." (Tampa Morning Tribune, Feb. 1956)
"If the boat could talk," said Julian, "we'd know what happened and the waiting would be at an end."
From the records (not the clippings): A Veterans Affairs burial index lists John Ostrosky, S/Sgt., Army Air Forces, World War II, born June 12, 1922, died January 29, 1956, at St. Mary Russian Orthodox Cemetery, Summit Hill, Pennsylvania. Since he was never found, that is almost certainly a memorial stone. Margarita never remarried and died in Tampa on June 26, 2000. Nina never remarried either. She died March 5, 2008, at 95, still Enelina "Nina" Harrell, and was survived by her daughter Christine. Both marriages were wartime ones: Ray, born in Arkansas in 1916, married Nina on a license issued in Florence, South Carolina, in January 1944, and John, born in Coaldale, Pennsylvania, married Margarita in Hillsborough County that June. The Social Security index gives Ray's death as January 1956.
The clippings were pasted into a scrapbook and kept. They are the reason the day can be reconstructed: a policeman, a mechanic and a truck driver, neighbors who had fished together for years, went out on a calm Sunday and said they would be home by noon.