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 Alcee Taylor |
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Neriah Taylor was a boat-builder. "My dad built anything from pole skiffs to shrimp boats," says Alcee, who has lovingly preserved his father's oneroom workshop. Boat-building tools - planers, bracing bits, pipecutters and files -- line the walls, remnants of a day when smaller boats were carefully hand-crafted of aged cypress. On two sides are original workbenches that straddled a railway track that brought boats right up into the workshop. On display now is a 20-foot-long "donkey boat" built in 1938, so-called because donkeys and mules pulled fishermen and nets in similar boats along North Carolina's shallow coasts. Nestled inside are cotton nets with cork bobbers. A cypress skiff built by his dad in 1932 is stuffed in a corner. And that's just a preview.
The 79-year-old retired commercial fisherman grew up working just a few steps away at Bell Fish House. Alcee recalls gutting fish as a kid for 10 cents per 100 pounds when the going rate for ice cream was 15 cents a pint. Alcee and a couple of kindred malcontents organized a strike, determined to net a raise that would satisfy their sweet tooth. The strikers got their ice cream. During World War II, he joined the Navy Seabees, a construction battalion of 325,000 men "fighting and building" on six continents and more than 300 islands. Alcee spent most of the war in the Pacific, building airstrips and roads, from Guadalcanal to the Admiralty Islands and Okinawa, before returning home to Cortez to fish. Like Alcee, Cortez has managed to retain its native charm and unhurried pace in an otherwise rushed world. But increasingly, the outside world is encroaching. Moviemakers borrowed Alcee's house for the 1998 remake of Great Expectations starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke, turning it into the childhood home of the aspiring young artist Fin. In Out of Time, filmed near Cortez and scheduled for release in 2003, Denzel Washington plays a small-town Florida sheriff. Alcee is unfazed by the attention, but his ever-growing collection includes an odd assortment of movie memorabilia: a discarded tennis shoe, an empty bottle of Strohs, and a photo of his wife Betty and Hawke. Visitors are welcome most any day, but may wish to call ahead as neither Alcee nor his Boatworks follow a rigid schedule. Taylor Boatworks is located at 12304-46th Avenue in Cortez, 941-794-2582. |
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The Ambassador of Cortez holds court most afternoons on a breezy fish dock sandwiched between the A.P. Bell Fish Company and the boatworks his father started in 1914. With a voice thick and smooth as molasses, Alcee Taylor regales visitors and folks venturing off the beaten path with tales of a rugged little fishing village struggling to preserve a near-forgotten way of life. The Taylors were among a handful of families from Moorehead City, North Carolina who settled in Cortez in the early 1900s - along with the Guthries, Jones, Smiths, Fulfords, Pringles and Bells, whose historic fish house still anchors the town of Cortez (pop. 4,500) near Bradenton Beach. Alcee was born there in 1923 and still lives in the house his dad built on a foundation constructed of driftwood plucked from area beaches following the Great Storm of 1921.
Taylor Boatworks is stuffed to the gills with all sorts of marine relics and ordinary stuff that paints a vivid picture of a life lived on the water in old Florida before the invasion of strip malls and sprawl, cigarette boats and manicured shorelines. "It's kind of got out of hand," says Alcee of his weathered, off-beat collection. Yellowed invoices detail lumber and boat purchases dating back to the 1920s. Faded photos vie for attention alongside dusty boat lanterns, bailers, nets, and a glass-bottom scallop box used to spot tasty mollusks in wind-swept waters. Mixed in are an assortment of pots and pans, a Louisville Slugger baseball bat, signs - like the one his brother Leo posted warning visitors to "Enter at your own risk" - and a favorite item of Alcee's: an old cross-cut saw used to cut ribs for boats.