Saturday Morning Market

There is nothing I like better than going to the Saturday Morning Market in downtown St. Pete. Every Saturday morning from October through May, the city closes off Central Avenue between 1st and 2nd Streets and transforms Central into an old time market place from days long gone by.

Just like Alice's Restaurant, you can get anything you want at the Saturday Morning Market. There is food of every description. There is art, there is kitsch, there are chairs and clothing and massages. There is coffee.

There is music. For the last couple of years, there are two live music venues. When one takes a break, the other one starts right up. Yesterday we had a blues band in the main music area and a Caribbean steel drum band in the other.

But hands down, the best thing about the Saturday Morning Market is the people. There are of course the musicians who are working far from their normal working hours. The market opens at 9 AM. I defy you to get hold of any working musician you know before noon. There are the vendors, who must arrive at 0 Dark 30 to get set up. And then there are us other folks.

I have to admit that people watching is one of my all time favorite pastimes, and the Saturday Morning Market certainly does not disappoint in that regard. But what is really, really great about the Saturday Morning Market is how it takes the place of the Town Square.

I like to sit at one of the tables in front of the main music venue. There is terrific people watching from there. I particularly like the parents who get their kids to dancing to the music. They are sooo cute. Eventually someone will come along and ask if one of the seats at the table is available. Of course I always say yes. Unless of course when it isn't. But if it is, and I get really lucky, the person will join me at the table. That's where the real fun begins.

Two weeks ago, I had been sitting down at the table for some time and was beginning to feel the urge to move around some. Just about that time, an elderly gentleman wearing a Korean War Vet ball cap asked if he could join me at the table. I replied that he was certainly welcome, but that I was just getting up to leave. As he was black and I am white, I felt uncomfortable at the idea of getting up just as the gentleman was sitting down. I tried to make it clear that I was not leaving on his account.

Much to my good fortune, when I went to sit down at the Market yesterday morning, my elderly gentleman with the Korean Vet ball cap was back, pretty much where I had left him the week before. I sat down, we struck up an inconsequential discussion, and the blues band began to play. That's when I saw my friend Linda pushing her bicycle. Now Linda had just completed a cross country (yes that's not a typo, a cross country bike ride). So me being the smart mouth that I often am, asked her what she was doing so close to a bike so soon after her excellent adventure.

Thus began a brief but very interesting conversation. Linda is also executive director of the local domestic violence shelter, and she reported back to the St. Pete Times periodically on her bike trip progress. I introduced her to my new friend with the Korean War Vet hat. He gave her his full name (he had only given me his first name). Linda said, oh yeah, I know who you are. It seems my new friend Charles is an active neighborhood activist. (Is that redundant?) Charles lives in a neighborhood that has been largely neglected by the City. As often happens in such neighborhoods, it has seen more than its share of crime. Charles has been very active in attempts to clean the neighborhood up. Who knew?

So, of course the topic of Charles and my conversation shifted immediately to his neighborhood. The neighborhood contains the once world famous City Tennis Center. In the good old days, it hosted one of those must attend tournaments on the woman's tour. I have seen Chris Everett as a 16 year old on those courts. Billy Jean King, Yvonne Goolalgong, Margaret Court Smith and a host of others. A dear, dear friend of mine, who passed away just a few years ago, taught many a tennis lesson on those courts. My friend Dan Sullivan was a very fine tennis player in his own right, in the days of Pancho Gonzalez and Bobby Riggs. Yes Bobby Riggs was a legit tennis player once. One of the main courts at the Tennis Center is now named for my friend Dan Sullivan.

One of the best programs going on in the City right now is the after school tennis program for neighborhood kids at the Tennis Center. Supported by local tennis fans, as well as the likes of Jim Courier, who has given a lot of his time to this effort. The program is hugely successful, giving hundreds of kids every week a chance to learn how to play tennis and how to compete within the rules. Youngsters who are learning to play tennis are not out stealing cars, or dealing drugs. (At least not while they are playing tennis).

This has gotten me to thinking of my misspent youth. Those days, kids were pretty much left to look to themselves for recreation. but there were always other kids around and places to play baseball or football. There were basketball courts and tennis courts, pretty much everything we needed. All of this was provided by the City Parks and Recreation Department. My parents could shove me out the door in the morning confident that I would find some non criminal activity to keep my mind and body occupied and that they wouldn't have to worry about me until supper time.

Now the City has more parks than ever before. What don't they have that is working so well at the Tennis Center? They don't have anyone around to help the kids get organized around one event or the other. We always at least had the older kids who'd already been around the block and knew how to get things going. This is pretty much a skill that can be learned, but it does not come naturally to a lot of kids.

Maybe if our City would put a little more effort into seeing that our kids are entertained or are entertaining themselves in sporting contests or otherwise recreating, we wouldn't be wondering why we can't hire and retain enough cops to deal with the crime problem in this City?