Westside Stories: Warrington Boys reunion rekindles memories of lost Pensacola

They were still the older and cooler Warrington Boy ‒ the group I met on Saturday at long-standing Warrington Civitan Park on lovely Bayou Davenport. Certainly older and cooler than my group of fellow Warrington yardbirds who rode our Huffys on the same streets they once commanded a decade-plus earlier ‒ Lakewood, Kalash, Paulding, Winthrop and the long horseshoe street the Moon Brothers grew up on, Rue Max.

So when I went to Warrington Boys seventh annual gathering, I still felt like the squirt who was just entering first grade at St. John the Evangelist Catholic School on Navy Boulevard while they were graduating from Escambia High School or starting at what was then called Pensacola Junior College, now Pensacola State College. When they were already bridge-jumping at the Navy Point Bridge, my friends and I were still riding tricycles, if that.

The Warrington Boys are now a Facebook group where members share stories and photographs of the Warrington they knew and loved. There are 117 members and once a year, the group gathers for a fish fry, fellowship and to share memories.

About 30 or so of the Warrington Boys ‒ average age seemed to be in the mid-70s ‒ showed up for the gathering at a park they were all well-acquainted with. Many learned to ski right there on Bayou Davenport. They went to Cub Scout and Boy Scout outings there at Civitan Park. As they got a bit older, they did more.

"This place is a special place for a lot of us," said Elton Killam, 74, who like most of the Warrington Boys of that era, attended Escambia High and other neighborhood schools such as Turner-Lee Day School, Warrington which was near Civitan Park but closed in 1975 and was later demolished. "I parked here, I fought here, and I danced on this sacred ground."

Wayne Hooton, 75, is the current Warrington Boys organizer, taking over from previous honcho Richard Bathurst.

"We were the first generation after World War II," Hooton said. "We grew up in Moreno Courts, Edgewater, Navy Point, Corry Heights, Beach Haven, Lakewood and all these areas that made up Warrington. We all knew each other, and our parents knew each other. It was just a real tight-knit time."

At Saturday's shindig, the Warrington Boys checked on each other's health. They glanced at old Escambia High yearbooks from the 1960s and 1970s and marveled in the captured vibrancy of their youth.

Stories were swapped. I found out that Warrington Boy Mike Gay, 75, went to St. John the Evangelist Catholic School for first grade like I did. We even had the same first teacher ‒ still my favorite ever ‒ the wonderful Mrs. Steckel. (That's all I knew here as. She was Mrs. Steckel. Who would have thought she had a first name? Becky.)

Mrs. Steckel taught at the school from 1951 until her retirement in 1984.

Gay doesn't live far from the Warrington school now.

"Five houses south of here," he said from Civitan Park, which itself is within short walking distance of the school. "It was a such a great place to be. We had our own town, our own community. We had clothing stores, movie theaters, restaurants. We'd ride bikes to go hunting and fishing and be around the water all summer long."

Though separated by a dozen years or so, there were still so many common touchstones for the elder Warrington Boys and those from my Bicentennial era. Many of our fathers worked at nearby Naval Air Station Pensacola. Sometimes, our mothers, like my own, worked civil service and worked on local bases too. We all played baseball on the many ballfields at the Warrington Youth Athletic Assocation grounds on Paulding. They mentioned playing for teams such as Carver Drugs and Campbell Pharmacy. My era was Florida Garbage and Warrington Hardware.

We had paper routes, riding bikes through still-dark streets before school and chucking heavy papers towards front porches. Some older kids might have had their first car and threw papers from their vehicles. For me, it was from a 1957 VW Beetle when I was 16.

We skateboarded with clay wheels and primitive wood boards down "Devil's Hill," though I forgot to ask the Warrington Boys if they called the slight-little hill at the end of Mandalay Drive by the same ominous moniker as we did.

Even when we leave, our roots remain in Warrington.

"My mother was born at the mouth of the bayou," said Mark Anderson, 71, as he helped fry up mullet and gizzards for Saturday's reunion. "My grandmother lived off of Sunset (Navy Point). I jumped that bridge more than a few times."

You wouldn't really be a Warrington Boy if you hadn't. (That does not apply to modern times, so youngsters, don't even try. It was different then. It's against the law to bridge jump now. Apparently, safety wasn't invented until at least the 1980s. And bike helmets? No really, that's a question. We didn't know what they were.)

"Go to each one of these guys, and they can tell you something special they remember," Hooton said. "We hitch-hiked. We rode our bikes everywhere, even out to East Hill. You can't do that anymore. It was just a safe time and a great time and great place to be a kid."

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Pensacola Warrington neighborhood residents gather at Civitan Park