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January 2009 |
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 Staff photo/Angela Weaver
Sadie Cramer, left, 6, and sister Tiley Cramer, 8, walk home from East Elementary School Monday afternoon. Monday was the first day back in session for students in St. Marys.
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Discovering Dickman |
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Thursday, 11 September 2008 |
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Photo provided
Albert and Marj Freytag, of Minster, pouring over some of the information they have collected about Marj’s great uncle, Joe Dickman.
By BOB LAMMERS
Special to TEL
MINSTER — I first learned some of the Joe Dickman story from a great-nephew, Henry Dickman, of Minster. When I expressed interest in putting together a story, he gave me a newspaper clipping of a story on Uncle Joe and a couple of photographs.
He told me to contact Marj and Albert Freytag, Minster. Marj is a great-niece of Joe Dickman. The Freytags have done extensive research on this man and visited with him numerous times. They graciously shared all of the information they had so that I could try to put together a complete story. I also want to acknowledge Fran Stahl, managing editor of a Marco Island newspaper for using much information she wrote in her article, March 1, 1995, Hermit Heaven-Marco’s Past Relived in the Eyes of a Colorful Loaner; Betsy Perdichizzi, writer of Island Living, Marco Island Sun Times: April 1, 4-20, 2005 Joe Dickman, “Hermit” of Kice Island, Ms. Perdichizzi is also the author of several books about Marco Island and Judy Parent, great-niece of Joe Dickman Debuque, Iowa.
I express my deep appreciation to these people for their help and their writings that so colorfully bring to light the saga of a Minster man for today’s readers of The Community Post and The Evening Leader.
Try to imagine what life might have been like in Minster back in the 1920s. Now imagine that you are the second youngest son in a family of 10 children. You are working in your father’s business—the Kramer Dickman Creamery. Can you see that maybe life is not exactly a “bowl of cherries” for John Herman and Joseph Dickman, who were in their 30s? Unlike many other young men in this small town, Joe decided to make a change in his life — a rather dramatic one.
He announced to his family that he was leaving home and heading for China. He packed a few meager belongings and hopped on his motorcycle, heading for California where he had relatives. His immediate family and other relatives would not see or hear from him until over 45 years had passed and that was by accident.
It’s not that his family didn’t try to locate him either. Marj Freytag, of Minster, a great-niece of Uncle Joe was part of that attempt.
“ In 1931 my Grandma and Grandpa Dickman, his brother, Charles Henry Dickman III, my parents (Mr. and Mrs. Raymond C. DeLaet) my sister and I drove to California in a model T Ford looking for Great Uncle Joe,” she said.
Marj does not remember much about the trip. She does remember crossing the desert at night with a water bag hung on the car.
“There were no roads across the desert so we followed the telephone poles.”
She also remembers visiting with the California relatives.
“We couldn’t find any trace of Uncle Joe,” she said. “Grandpa and Grandma Dickman and his siblings were devastated. It’s sad that most of them died before we gained any knowledge of what happened to Uncle Joe.”
Little did they know that Uncle Joe was a lot closer to Minster then California. He was in Florida on Kice Island from 1929 to 1960. Joe, in a newspaper interview in 1967, says that he met a man named M.S. Kice in Los Angeles in 1929. Kice was a land speculator and owned Kice Island (next to Marco Island) in Florida. He asked Joe to go to that island, settle in, promising him that he would come down and develop the island.
Dickman explained, “I made the trip on my motorcycle. Took 30 days to make 3,000 miles. When I got here there was no way to get to the island so I sold it for almost nothing. Wasn’t worth much by then anyway.”
“I never saw Kice again. The depression got our big project. Got a letter from him once in a while, kept sayin’ he was comin’ and to hold on.” Mr. Kice told me I’d get in on the ground floor.”
Joe chuckled as he related his tale to the interviewer, “and I really did. I’m still there.”
While he was waiting for Kice, Joe went to work on the island. He put in pilings and built a two-story clapboard house on a knoll overlooking Caxambas Pass. The house had a free-flowing well.
He squatted there fishing, guiding other fishermen and hunters and selling seashells for over 30 years. He was very good at sea shelling, especially left-handed conch shells. Although he lived alone, he never considered himself to be a hermit.
“Long time ago, some city folks came out and asked me if it was true there was a hermit on the island,” he said. “I told them that I’d be here 20 years and never seen one!”
Joe lived in his little wooden house for 10 years after that.
It’s now 1960 and Hurricane Donna blew ashore on Kice Island, destroying Joe’s home. So after 30 years, Joe moved into a 17-room abandoned boarding house, known as the Barfield home in Caxambas on Marco Island. It was located on what became known as Dickman’s Point. Later the house burned and Joe moved into a small trailer at a fish camp. He was suffering from arthritis.
“I was sorta happy to be ashore and seeing people every now and then,” he said. “I get along fine with my neighbors. I like people as long as they don’t come in bunches. I just stay out of the current is all.”
While on Marco, Joe decided to register to vote but that did not go well. As Joe put it, “I registered to vote but I refused to pay the poll tax. Then they put an item in the paper that I was delinquent. I’ve never been interested in voting since then.”
He made his living digging and selling sea shells.
“The government owes me nothing,” he said. “Since there’s been Social Security I never made enough to come under it or pay an income tax. And I’m a veteran of nothing but life itself. I dig and sell a few shells, although it’s pretty tough work out in the mud for the best of ‘em. I have my boat and I know where the fish are. I get along just fine.”
“Of course I could go offshore, grow a beard and drift in with a Cuban accent and get $100 a month as a refugee from Castro, but being just a home-grown American I’m entitled to nothing and I want nothing,” he said.
Dickman told the reporter that he spoke seven languages, having learned English and German at home. Friends believe he learned other foreign languages by listening to his short-wave radio. He had a Spanish-English dictionary that he studied, but remarked, “There was nobody around here then to practice on.”
The development of Marco Island bothered Dickman. He remembered a time where there were only three fish houses on the island.
“They gave some guy a plaque for being a champion fisherman for taking out 20,000 pounds at a time,” he said. “Champion robber is all he was.”
Dickman noted that a wildcat used to sleep in the sun in his front yard, but said he is gone, too.
“The bulldozers scared the wildcat away,” he said. “Funny, I tramped around Wyoming and the California desert for years looking for a wildcat. Never saw one until I came here.”
Although the development of Marco Island irritated him more than anything else, he told of one joke at the expense of the developers. “Mackle ( the developer) has to spray to keep the mosquitoes down so he can get customers. I get the benefit of that.”
They’re going to build…what do you call them, condominiums? Yeah, that’s it. But I don’t need them. They own the shore now and you can’t get near the beach. They keep trying to buy this place and the saloon. Some day they will, I suppose. I don’t know what I’ll do then. Find some more paths, if there are any.”
Back in 1967, there was a yellow building on Caxambas Channel you could get a fishing guide, live shrimps and other fishing necessities including a drink.
“I go down there for a little nip now and then, Dickman said. “I listen to the people. If they say anything interesting I stick around. Mostly they only talk about wine and women and how much whiskey they drank the night before. That isn’t very interesting.”
Dickman did not like being called a hermit. “Fella named Tebeau from Miami (probably Dr. Charlton Tebeau, chairman of the history department at the University of Miami at that time) called me an emeritus of a sea shell picker. He hit the nail on the head. Another fella called me a plutocrat. Of all the damn things to call me!”
So how did Joe Dickman’s family finally make contact with him?
In the 1955 and 1956, Casey Kohnen, a bachelor from Minster and went fishing in Florida, ran into Joe while he was still living on Kice Island. When he returned to Minster he told Marj and Albert Freytag about the incident.
Marj describes what happened next.
“Since the early 1950s we had vacationed in Naples for two weeks every year,” she said. “We decided we would visit him on Kice Island on our next trip. We told my aunts (Joe’s nieces and a nephew about Joe and several of them came to visit him in 1960. We visited with Joe every year from 1960 until his death from cancer Jan. 12, 1971 at the ripe old age of 90.”
“On our first visit to Uncle Joe at the old, abandoned Barfield house in Caxambas, Joe invited us to stay with him, but we declined, Marge said. Albert noted, “Uncle Joe’s pants would have stood up all by themselves.”
On their numerous visits, Uncle Joe would relate some details of his life and activities on Kice and Marco Island.
“Joe told us about a power shovel digging 20 feet deep at Caxambas and still finding oyster shells. The nearby town of Goodland has rows of oyster shells piled up 5 feet high. He told us they had open sided sheds where Indian women shucked oysters and then threw the shells outside. When the pile got too high, they just moved the sheds.”
Joe also told the Freytag’s about some sailing ships that were loaded with heart of pine boards which had sunk after hitting a reef. Joe and a friend, Bud Kirk, took their boats and salvaged all of the wood off of these ships and built seven houses — one of which was for Bud.
Another great-niece, Judy Parent, 65, Debuque, Iowa, made also made a trip to visit Joe Dickman in 1960. She related her experience to Marj Freytag in a letter dated June 2, 2008.
It reads, in part:
I was interested in reading that you were able to see Dickman Island (this would actually be Kice Island) on jet skies. I don’t think I would have the nerve to get up on a jet ski. I saw Dickman Island when I was 16 and Uncle Joe took us out in a little boat with a makeshift motor.
This was in August 1960. In the boat were Uncle Joe, my mom, dad, myself and aunts Dickey and Genie in the tiny little rowboat with the unreliable motor on it. My mother, who was always terrified of water since her cousin drowned at Lake Loramie when she was a young girl, thought for sure that all of us were going to drown on the way out or back, but I was fascinated by the entire experience. My father was an expert swimmer, I could float well, but my mom and aunts G. and B. couldn’t swim at all.
Uncle Joe had met us in the Everglades at the bait shop and led us to a little dock in the swamp where he had the small boat waiting. The path we walked to the dock was made of broken clam shells. I could feel the sharp edges of the shells through the soles of my tennis shoes and was amazed that Uncle Joe was walking barefoot on the path without any apparent discomfort.
He was wearing cut off slacks and was shirtless. His skin was a deep brown tone and looked like leather. He had a straw sunhat on his head. On the drive to the bait shop through the Everglades, my father had to stop the car at one point while we waited for a very large, and very slow alligator to cross the dirt road from one swampy side of the road to the other. Uncle Joe warned us not to stray from the clam shell path as we followed him to the boat.
When we reached the island, we visited with Uncle Joe for several hours in his little cabin on stilts. I remember that there was a shelf under the ceiling around the shack and on that shelf was a collection of souvenirs from his life. He served us Nabisco ginger snaps cookies and a burgundy wine. There were boxes of sea shells piled outside at the entrance steps to the shack. It appeared that some he was sorting and some had already been boxed up to take to shore for a mailing to a seashell jewelry factory in Pennsylvania.
Uncle Joe took me for a walk along the beach to find shells that I could take home with me. He told us that the island, which was about one-half mile wide and one mile long, was building up slower on the one side than it was washing away on the other side. He predicted that the next hurricane to hit the island would wash it away. A little one month after our visit, a hurricane hit the island and proved him right.
While he was still living, Joe had the pleasure of having an island named after him—Dickman Island and Dickman Point. Although he never lived on Dickman Island, south of Marco, he likely visited there often in his shelling expeditions. Dickman Point is at the west side of Kice Island where his first house was located. Both can be found on nautical maps of the area.
Joe made a lot of friends on the islands. One couple was Ernest and Gladys Otter. Joe and Ernie laid up a left hand conch shell sea wall which still stands today on Addison Court. He lived at a fish camp on Osceala Court in a trailer after the old home was no longer habitable, even by Joe’s standards.
“On our first visit to the fish camp Uncle Joe invited us to stay with him in one of the fishing cabins,” Marj said. “In the cabins there were just boards for a bunk and the stench of rotting shells was overwhelming. We declined his gracious invitation.”
When we would leave Joe each year we would stop by his favorite bar and grocery and leave some money as a credit for Uncle Joe. They told us he lived on sardines, crackers and beer.
We have made many friends in South Florida over the years. We hope to be able to write a book about them in the near future.
When Joe got cancer he lived with the Otters until he required full time care. He died in the Greater Naples Nursing home. He is buried on a knoll in Old Marco Island Cemetery.
Marj relates one final anecdote about Uncle Joe.
“When Joe’s family found out where he was living, they sent him a check for $1,600, his share of the sale of some lots the Dickman family owned on the east end of Minster,” she said. “Joe took the money and put it in the Marco Island Bank. He never touched it after that. When he died, that’s the money they used to bury him.”
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Last Updated ( Monday, 15 September 2008 )
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