Life of a Caxambas Kid – Part One

When Chester Pettit reflects on his childhood in the Caxambas settlement on Marco Island, it isn’t multi-million-dollar homes and condos he remembers. His memories are of a much simpler time. A bygone era that he and his family played a major role in.

"My first memory,” Chester Pettit, 68, ponders, "I reckon was having a fishing pole in my hand, going with my dad fishing. My dad was Lawrence Arthur Pettit, a commercial fishing guide. We had the fish camp in Caxambas. My grandpa actually built it and my dad helped. And the family was just raised there.”

The lot - just over an acre - that Pettit’s fishing camp occupied was part of a 4.3-acre, $10.79 million sale in April of 2022, at the time the highest-priced lot sale in the island’s history. It’s a sign of the times. 

Back in 1949, when Barron Collier, the county’s namesake, moved most of the homes and their occupants from the Caxambas townsite across the island to Goodland, it was Pettit’s namesake grandfather, Chester Pettit, who refused to sell his fishing camp.

Pettit said his family only sporadically spoke of the famous migration across the island that dramatically increased the population of Goodland while practically wiping out the population of Caxambas. The modern development of the island, starting in the mid-1960s by the Deltona Corporation and its leaders, the Mackle brothers, is what sticks in Pettit’s craw. It was the low-water mark for Caxambas, in his opinion.

"What they did was like all big business,” Pettit asserts. "They starved us out. They kept my dad in court with a lawyer for seven years. We weren't able to put the money back into the fish camp. I wish I didn't have the feelings I do for the Mackles. I hate hating. I won't say I hate, but I come as close to hating them as I come to hating anybody. Everybody has their own opinion. How was that one place going to make a difference? What difference was that fish camp going to make in their grand scheme of things? I mean, I don't understand it, but they wanted the fish camp gone.”

"I can't help the bad blood,” Pettit said, shaking his head. “To show you how petty they were, Oscar Espejo and the boys flying the mosquito planes were told to cut them off before they got to the fish camp and not to cut them back on until they were past the fish camp. Oscar comes over there to the fish camp all the time. And he told my dad, 'There ain't no way we're going to abide by that, Lawrence.’ So they devised a plan where it gave the appearance that they shut them off, but they continued to spray. And that's, to me, that's awful."

Pettit didn’t like what was happening to the island, which at the time had only three small settlements, at Caxambas, Goodland, and Marco (now known as Old Marco). He was used to visitors coming to fish, then leaving.  He wasn’t used to them staying.

 "To me it was just pure disgust,” Pettit said. "I reckon right from the get go, I didn't like all the new faces coming. And you know, it's one thing when they came and you knew they were leaving, but these faces were staying one after the other after the other. And then there were all the construction workers.”

Pettit loved the sparse population of pre-development Marco Island, especially the Caxambas settlement and his family's fish camp.

"The whole family was there,” Pettit said. "Got to see my grandpa every day. Unfortunately, I was only five when he passed. By the time I remember him, he had kidney trouble and he had gone blind. Any time we went anywhere, like to Naples or something, I got to sit on his lap.”

Pettit vividly recalls the fish camp.

"Our house set out in the water on stilts,” he said. “As you come up from the house on the stilts, there was cottage number four, cottage number three, cottage number two, cottage number one. And then what we called the big house, which was the main house that sat there. And then there was the building where the store originally started, next to the big house. And then there was a duplex that sat there. And you would have had to have seen the walls to believe them. You could part your hair in the reflection. I mean, it was just beautiful. Beautiful walls and floors. Every year we had to go in there and help my grandma strip them and re-wax them. It was just cool living there.”

“Once my grandpa died, my dad decided to move the store down to our house where we'd been living so that the fishermen wouldn't have to walk all the way up there,” continued Pettit. “So they could just pull up in their boat. He figured it was costing us. So we moved the store down there and we turned the store into like a two-room apartment deal and that's pretty much the layout of it."

Pettit said the clientele of the fishing camp was predictable.

"Most of them were coming over from Miami on the weekends,” he said, "and they'd bring a cabin boat over, and they'd tie it out and they'd have a dinghy and they'd bring the dinghy over and tie up at the store and leave it for the week. One gentleman, Dudley Horn, he owned a meat plant over in Miami. And every time he came, he brought some of the best tasting sausage you have ever put in your mouth. And I'm not crazy about hot, but, man, I liked that hot sausage. It was delicious.”

Pettit recalls as a child when the American crime-adventure television series Everglades! staged an episode in Caxambas between 1961 and 1962.

"It starred Ronny Hayes,” Pettit said, "he was a game warden and he patrolled the Everglades. Well, they came in and planted palm trees and everything there in Caxambas at the fish camp. It was one of the funniest things I ever saw in my life, I never will forget that. They were doing an episode where people were importing exotic pets through the Everglades, and he is trying to stop them. Oh, well, they brought in an ostrich. That ostrich got loose at low tide. Right out from the house. Nothing but mudflats. Watching that crew trying to catch that ostrich. And on top of that, our dog was out there helping chase the ostrich. So it really made for quite a scene.”

Pettit’s father ran a store at the fish camp. There was a bar with a unique name inside the store.

“It was called the Snake Pit,” Pettit said.  "My brother and I were out riding bicycles one day and I'm behind him and he runs over this rattlesnake, and I see it curled up. Well, I immediately turned my bike around, went and got my mom. She came out and chopped its head off with the hoe. It was a seven-foot rattler. About yay big around,” he said making a circle with his thumbs and forefingers about four inches in circumference. "So my dad took and got a piece of cypress and had the skin mounted and hung it over the bar. Thus everybody started calling it the Snake Pit”

Pettit said the Snake Pit, with a clientele that consisted primarily of fishermen, could get rowdy at times.

“There was no law around,” he said. "Les Bins hadn't even arrived yet, so it could get pretty rowdy sometimes over there. My brother, myself and my dad, were in the store one day and a bunch of motorcycles came in and I guess they decided they were going to rob the place. I was about eight. Still young. My brother was a year and a half older than me. And he was sitting up where the register was and the dude pulled a knife and my dad grabbed him, grabbed his gun out from underneath the counter, and my brother was coming down on him with a butcher knife."

Pettit had respect for his father’s fishing ability. It seems Lawrence Pettit was a bit of a fish whisperer.

"My dad,” Pettit said, "he used to go out and he'd come in and we'd go down and we'd help him get the fish out of the boat and all and help him filet them at the dock right there. So we'd just filet the fish and throw the remains over. But one day he goes out and he comes in and here's this fin behind him. Big old tarpon. So every day he'd come in with that boat like it was sitting out there in the pass waiting to hear that boat come in. That winter, it disappeared. Come spring, my dad goes out and comes in and there’s two fins behind the boat. Now you're going to think I'm lying to you about this, but I swear it's the truth.

“Suddenly they're gone again. Next spring, three fins. The daddy, the mom and the baby. It got where my dad could take and hold the fish. He's the only one I'd ever seen do it before. He'd hold that old tarpon. You could watch him. He'd come up with that old mouth open up. It got where he'd just set sideways and let him rub him down. Dad put the law down. Nobody touches the tarpon. Well, my mama decides she has to weigh that tarpon and see how big it is. So she's out there and sure enough, she hooks him. I went and got the knife. I said, 'Daddy said no!' And I cut the line. I remember I was seven, because my mom left shortly after."

Pettit’s father was abusive.

"My dad was a pretty mean man,” Pettit said. "Rubber hoses, shovels, whatever he could get his hands on other than his hand, he'd hit you with it. He wasn't going to hurt his hand. He didn't just hit once or twice, neither, once he got started. Oh, man, I watched him.”

"I honestly feel that I was hellraiser myself. I had a lot of anger in me because of it,” Pettit said. “My mama had hair that came down to her ankles. And I used to sit and help her brush it. I mean, I love long hair because of it. And I've watched him there at the fish camp wrap his hands in her hair and drag her across the sand spurs and the oyster shells and all. But we survived. And finally I got big enough and he had remarried. And my step sister comes into my room one night and she says, 'Chester you've got to stop him.' I go out and he smacked my stepmom’s head into the stove, and she's knocked out and he's putting the boot to her. So I push him back and I said, 'Hey, dad, come on!' He just pushes me back and starts again. I pushed him a little more forcefully. This time I fought. I'm 15, okay. And I ain't grown a bit since I was 13. When I pushed him the second time, I said, 'Come on, Dad, act like you got some sense.' He says, 'I'll do the same to you.' When he come at me, I saw a look in his eyes that really scared me. And I knew I had no other choice. One of my greatest regrets, even though I had no choice, is having hit my dad. But I really didn't have a choice. I figured he was going to do the same to me. And how awful. It was pretty tough.”

"My brother carried a scar on his lip till the day he died from my dad's fist. My dad was just evil to me. To take a piece of water hose and beat somebody with it is pure evil. There's no other way I can describe it. Therefore, I can't respect him. It's simple as that. As bad as I hate to say it. I'm going to have to answer to my God one day. Because of the things I witnessed my dad doing. The beatings. There is no true love there. You know, he was my dad. He helped conceive me. I guess I'm a cold son of a gun. I just can't say I love my dad. I can't. All the bad things I remember about him. Oh, I can go down the long list of things. Other than him being a great fisherman, commercial guide, I know nothing else good I can say about him."

Chester spent a lot of time with his brother Larry, who was a year and a half older.

“Him and I always had trouble,” Pettit said. "I was a little bit bigger than he was. He thought I should listen to him. And I didn't think I should listen to anybody. It was always a bad habit of mine."

Pettit remembers a game he and his brother played on the shell mounds of Caxambas.

“Me and my brother,” he said, "they had them clam shell mounds and there was mangroves around. We came up with this wonderful game, king of the clam shell mound. I loved it. You get out there in the mangroves and you try to sneak up. I don't know if you've ever walked through the mangroves. It's pretty hard to do without giving yourself away.”

One time during a king of the clam shell mound game, his brother hurled a clam shell at Pettit’s head.

“It was like a Frisbee,” Pettit said, "I see this clam shell and all of a sudden it split me open. It laid me open, it laid me open good."

Larry came to Pettit’s rescue once when he was 10 and riding a bicycle that his mother bought for him.

"She sent me a bicycle for Christmas,” he said. "I tried to get my dad to help me put it together and he said he was too busy. So I got it together.”

He took his new three-speed bike to the top of what is now known as Indian Hill, the highest point in Southwest Florida.

"They had just paved from the top down to the bottom,” Pettit said. "And then it turned back into oyster shell. I thought I was a big boy and I rode up there and pushed the bike up to the top. So I get going down the hill. Well, I hadn't tightened the handlebars tight enough, and all of a sudden, I'm just holding the handle and I'm going down the hill, and I didn't know what to do. It had a handbrake, so I couldn't really get to the handbrake. And whenever I reached the bottom, I came to a stop. Well, the bike comes to a stop. I went sailing and landed on the oyster shells. I hear a car coming. So I jump up and I grab my bike. Three guys. They stopped. One looks at me and says, 'You live around here, son?' I said, 'Yes, sir, over at the fish camp.' He said, 'Well, I think you better get home.' So I was pushing my bike. Pretty soon I hear my brother hollering. Here he comes on his bike. He took one look at me. I guess I should be thankful he didn't pass out because usually at the sight of blood, he would pass out. He just turned around and took off to the house. Pretty soon, here comes my dad in the station wagon. For about a month and a half my grandma was picking shell out of my face every day. I mean, I had tore it up. I’m surprised I’m as good-looking as I am today,” he said with a laugh.

Look for Part Two of “Life of a Caxambas Kid” in the July 13th edition of Coastal Breeze News.