Jeannie Weller Cooper – Shooter Giggers: Diving and Spearfishing in the Florida Panhandle in the 1950s
By Jeannie Weller Cooper, Photography By Savannah Dean
This slim self-published paperback is a collection of personal reflections of eight local Panama City men. They were boyhood friends who grew up on the waters of St. Andrew Bay and Gulf of Mexico in the 40s, 50s and 60s during the early years of the sport of spear fishing, skin and scuba diving. Published by Bradley Pitts and his sister Corinda Pitts Marsh, the book chronicles the adventures of the boys who were free to roam oak-lined trails leading down to the bayous, their mothers’ confident in their ability to swim. When Bradley’s mother wondered where he was, she relied on Dieboy, the family dog that trotted ahead, to show her where Bradley could be found.
The boys, grammar school graduates from the Cove and St. Andrews, were first introduced to the sport at the end of World War II when service men returning from the Pacific brought back primitive masks, fins, and spear assemblies. Wartime shortages taught the boys to use whatever they could scrounge to build their equipment. Ronnie Grooms found an old book by Hans Hass, a diving companion of Jacques Cousteau. Bert Gwaltney’s dad had a subscription to Popular Mechanics. The boys were hooked; reading about the sport sparked their imaginations as they attempted to fashion dive masks from cardboard and goggles out of oak. In St. Andrews, some cousins rigged up a crude Hawaiian sling out of coat hangers and tire tubes from the school bus barn. The gun was a go, but grandma came after them with a window stick for touching her good scissors. The book is filled with vivid descriptions of adventurous dives and the bounty of huge fish the boys speared or gigged in local waters, often in places that will be familiar to readers. Particularly exciting adventures involved the boys’ attempts with some success to build dive helmets from a five-gallon bucket and then a water heater.
The tales are well laid out, the photographs
informative and attractive. Ronnie took many of the photos with a Brownie Hawkeye, putting the camera in a plastic box for the underwater shots. It was these photographs that first drew me to the book as they captured my favorite things: old pictures of the Cove neighborhood in Panama City, its bays, and its beaches. I wish I’d had this book to read to my children as they were growing up on Beach Drive and Harmon Avenue here.
About Jeannie Weller Cooper
Jeannie Weller Cooper was born in Atlanta, Georgia. Moving to Panama City, Florida in 1999, she has participated in non-profit work with local educational, historical, and environmental groups. Ms. Cooper produces multimedia presentations for schools and civic organizations and has written for online journals, print, radio, and television. She is the author of Panama City’s Historic Neighborhoods: The Cove (Arcadia Publishing, 2002) and Panama City Beach: Tales from the World’s Most Beautiful Beaches (History Press, 2011.) Ms. Cooper teaches swimming, enjoys running, and any other activity that keeps her in St. Andrew Bay and its tributaries, the Gulf, or the Atlantic.