A century of adventure

            On Wednesday, Apalachicola's Spero Buzier, the oldest living commercial fisherman in Franklin County, will celebrate his 100th birthday.

            Last week, he and his family were kind enough to share stories of his career on the Gulf with readers of the Times.

            Capt. Spero was born Feb. 11, 1909 in Cedar Key to Greek immigrant sponge fisherman Panayiotis (Peter) Buzier and Alice Knowles, of Apalachicola.

            "He and my mother separated and I came to Apalachicola for the first time when I was about 6 or 7," he said.

            After returning home, his mother met and married Henry Rosalis. When he was about 9, the boy moved with his family to Miami.

            "You couldn't drive to Carrabelle in those days. You had to travel by shrimp boat. I remember seeing the boat's engine running," he said. "We slept on the beach and then went to Miami by train."

            By the time he was 12, the family had moved again to Jacksonville, where he worked as a paperboy, buying 10 papers for a quarter and selling them for a nickel apiece.

            Later the family moved to Biloxi, MS where, Buzier remembered, he got his first long pants.

            He remained with his family - older brother, Costa, and three sisters, Helen, Cleo and Angelina - in Mississippi, working as a commercial fisherman. After his stepfather died, he helped take care of his mother and small sisters.

            He captained a fishing boat for the first time when he was 16. At age 24, he met Hazel Clara Lashley in Biloxi and married her on Dec. 2, 1933.

            The couple moved to Gulfport, when Spero continued to fish. Later they had a son, Peter, and a younger boy Spero, who died of pneumonia when he was only 6 months old.

Fought "The battle of Algiers, New Orleans"

            After enlisting in the Navy in 1941, at age 32, Buzier was sent to New Orleans to work in the Navy Yard. Initially, he disagreed with his commanding officer, but in the end, his knowledge of boats saved the day.

"That helped me in the long run too," he said. "When I went into the Navy, it didn't take me long to make chief petty officer."

            Because of his vast experience on the water, he entered the service as a first class boat's mate., sending him to work on a tug boat carrying passengers between the Navy Yard and the nearby neighborhood of Algiers.

            "The captain was an old service man with hatch marks up to here on his arm. The tug had an old Atlas and Imperial engine and it didn't have a clutch. It would run forwards and backwards but you had to stop it to switch directions. He didn't know how to regulate the speed," said Buzier.

"When we'd come up to a dock, he'd stop and then have to start it again, stall it out or run it into the pier. I had had plenty of experience with those engines on shrimp boats. When I tried to tell him what to do, he got mad and sent me back to the personnel office. I wasn't in the office no time ‘till they wound up coming and asking me could I run that tug. I told them I could as easy as throwing a rabbit in a briar patch," said Buzier. "I spent most of the rest of the war running the tug. Later when people asked where I fought, I told them in the battle of Algiers, New Orleans."

Buzier was one of three captains who piloted the shipyard's two tugs during the war. In addition to ferrying workers, the big boats moved mine skimmers, destroyers and landing ships into and out of dry-dock for repairs.

While he spent most of the war at home, he eventually rotated out and served in both the Atlantic and Pacific theatres. He was chief boatmate on a destroyer escorting 30 merchant ships to Bizerte, Tunisia in 1943. On this deployment he also went to the real Algiers, the Rock of Gibraltar and saw the beautiful, blue Mediterranean Sea teeming with colorful fish.

"There were a bunch of ships that had been sunk in the harbor at Bizerte," he recalled. "We chased a sub one time and dropped a depth charge on it but we never knew if we got her."

            On returning to the states he reported to the Philadelphia Navy Yard where he saw snow for the first time.

            His next assignment was to the US transport ship Matthews, deployed to the Pacific. He was on the transport when it carried Navy construction crews to Hawaii by way of the Panama Canal. Later the boat carried amphibious forces on several invasions. He was at Okinawa when the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

Barely escapes death while shrimping

            After the war, Capt. Spero returned to Apalachicola with his wife and son. He worked as a shrimper aboard his first shrimp boat, the Spark Plug.

            One fateful night, he and a member of his crew barely escaped death when a freak storm struck, when they were traveling along the coast of St. Vincent Island between Indian Pass and West Pass.

            `"We passed all the other shrimp boats heading back to shore. They told me about the bad weather, but I wanted to go through Indian Pass so I kept on. By the time we got there, it was so rough we couldn't get through. We had to go back.

            "The sea hit the boat so hard it would give you whiplash. A huge wave washed over the deck and took me and another man overboard. The nets were washed overboard too. They were hung up in the doors and I was hung up in the nets. That propeller went by me just as pretty while I was underwater.

"The boat had turned around and was headed toward the beach. There was one man left aboard. He was able to grab the net and drag me in as he passed us. The other fellow was able to survive by filling his slicker up with air to help him float. We was able to pull him in as he floated past. We dropped anchor and went below. We was about half drowned. We used to sleep in the engine room. When another wave hit and washed the slide that covered the hatch overboard, water came in everywhere. We knew we couldn't stay anchored over night.

            "They decided to try and run the boat aground. The tide was low, so they knew if they beached the boat it would be possible to get her free at high tide the next day. Then they discovered they couldn't draw in the anchor. Capt. Spero gave one of his crew a butcher knife.

            "I told him I was going to start up the engine and to wait ‘till a wave had washed over the boat. When the sea runs over the deck, jump up and cut the anchor line. He did and we beached the boat. We ran it right up into the pine trees. In those days, there was a watchman on the island to protect the deer. We walked down the beach and spent the night with him in front of a big fire. The next day, everybody was thinking we were gone. The Coast Guard sent a big ship to look for us. They anchored offshore and ran up a line to pull the boat free," he said.

            Buzier took her home and rebuilt her good as new.

Quick with his fists

            There were adventures on land too. Buzier had been a prizefighter while in the service, and that experience stood him in good stead on several occasions. He was known to enjoy the occasional brawl.

            "One guy hit me and broke my nose, later on, another fella hit me and straightened it out," he said.

            Once in a juke joint in Eastpoint near the site of the present-day Apalachicola Bridge, Capt. Spero got into an altercation over a lady from Carrabelle.

            "I was dancing with her. I couldn't leave her by herself out on the floor but my wife got mad. She was boiling. She said ‘Why don't you just make a night of it?' I knew it was time to leave so I followed Hazel back to the table, but the other girl's boyfriend came over and said ‘What the hell's going on here?'

            "I said ‘Come over here and I'll show you.' I hit him so hard; he hit the floor and slid. Everybody said ‘He's dead.' I said ‘He's all right. Just throw a bucket of water on him.' He had a friend who come running over and I said ‘See your friend? That's how you're gonna be.'

            "My wife took her shoe off and she was standing there. Somebody asked her what she was doing and she said she was going to help me. The guy said ‘Lady, don't do that. He's already killed one man.' She fainted dead away. When she came to, I asked her why. She said all she could think of was the electric chair."

            On another occasion, his daughter said, the family was in Key West and Capt. Spero took her and her mother out for a lobster dinner. When they came on a man sicking his dog on a smaller one, Buzier, an animal lover, intervened. The man grabbed him by his collar.

            "That was his bad mistake," said Buzier. "He should have hit me. I knocked him down and he landed over by his brother. He didn't try to come back but he started explaining that he was trying to stop the dog from peeing on his lobsters. Anyway, we never got our lobster that night."

            In 1950 tragedy struck. His 16-year-old son, Peter, ventured up the river with a friend in a small boat. When the boat capsized, the boy drowned attempting to right the boat but managed to save his passenger from drowning.

            Pete was an excellent swimmer, but his companion could not swim. Pete gave his friend an empty gas tank to use as a float. Then, while diving to free the engine of his boat, he became entangled in a rope and couldn't surface for air.

            "That like to killed me," said Buzier. "That's when I left Apalachicola and moved to Texas."

Builds a home, and settles down

            He and his wife moved to Aransas Pass and Capt. Spero attempted to start a new life, even changing the name of his boat to the Capt. Pete.

            He worked the Gulf Coast from Port Isabel Texas to Key West aboard the Texas Pride and once again, he was involved in a mishap at sea, and once again, emerged a hero.

            "We were fishing off Port Isabel. Just as we were picking our net up, I looked out of the wheelhouse window and saw a boat about a half mile from where we were. When the doors come out of the water, I looked out again and it was gone.

            "I was working with Jamie Vause. He got on top of the wheelhouse and saw the boat turned upside down in the water. We had shrimp in both nets but when he saw that, I knew we had to let them go. There was a man on top of the hatch and another hanging onto a rope.

            "I seen this other guy pop up right then. That was the captain. He had been trapped in the cabin when the boat overturned until the space filled up with water and released the air pressure so he could open the doors. He had two wetbacks on there with him headed to Texas. I had to go take them off and put them ashore in Port Isabel. If we hadn't gone right then, the one on the hatch would have been OK and the one on the rope might have made it but the captain would have drowned. I think he'd gone down three times when we got there. We rolled up a mattress and put him over it and let the water run out of him.

            "We lost everything, the shrimp and the nets. The boat belonged to a man named Vern Crotts. He wasn't happy, the nets cost about $500, but he couldn't say nothing because we saved their lives."

            Over time, the Buziers were able to open their hearts again and in 1952 they adopted their daughter, Deborah.

            In 1959, they moved back to Apalachicola and Capt. Spero built a home and continued his pursuit of the maritime trades. He constructed several shrimp boats in his backyard working not from plans, but from experience and knowledge of boats.

            In 1977, at age of 69, he "retired from retirement" to construct his last vessel, working side-by-side with friend August Mombert. Each man built a 40-foot shrimp boat, Mombert working from plans and Buzier from memory.

            After his retirement, Buzier developed an interest in golf. While he refuses to wear conventional golfing clothes, he has a distinct talent for the game and spent hours practicing his stroke both on the links and behind his home on 24^th Street. His daughter reports he has made several holes-in-one and has brought home a few trophies as well.

            Today Capt. Spero retains his independence living in a trailer with his Chihuahua named Boots. Nearby live his daughter and her husband, Dave Davis; his grandson, James Dansereau is a daily visitor. James takes him coffee every morning and fixes his breakfast, then sets down and listens to Capt. Spero's stories.

            "We sit with him every day and listen," said his daughter. "And every time I listen to him I learn something new."