Celebrating Pine Islanders: Ronnie Lolly
Lifetime islander Ronnie Lolly said he would describe himself as a commercial fisherman, who was grandfathered into his trade.
“My family goes back over 600-700 years — before Columbus ever thought he found the place. I’ve got grandparents and great grandparents buried over on Cayo Costa,” Lolly said.
His paternal grandfather was a Portuguese sponge diver and his paternal grandmother was a Blackfoot Indian, he said.
When his mother went into labor with him, he said, his parents were on Cayo Costa and a helicopter picked his mother up and took her to Lee Memorial Hospital, where he was born. After his birth, the family lived on Cayo Costa until he was 5 years old.
“We moved back over here to Pine Island and my father bought a big plot of land with mango trees and we lived in a two-story house — it was a barn house,” Lolly said.
His father died at 99 years old and his father’s mother was 107 when she died, Lolly said.
“She was out chopping wood with a hoe the last time I saw her and she was 103. I was just a little squirt. I laid up in the back of a ’56 Chevy — in the window — I had 3 brothers and a sister. Me and the dog rode in the back window,” Lolly said.
The fact that he was born and raised on Pine Island has made it unique enough for him. He said he knows every inch of the water bottom, which is hardly something anyone can say.
“If you asked me where you went today — out in the harbor — I could tell you what the bottom was underneath your boat. I know almost every oyster bar that’s risen out here around the harbor from Punta Gorda to Naples. I quit school at 15 and went down to Marathon to go fishing down there on big boats– miracle boats, king fish boats, crawfish boats,” Lolly said.
Lolly recalled conversations he’d had with his father and explained that his father was a point machine-gunner in the Army in World War II, where he became a prisoner of war.
“He got shot in the forehead — in his helmet — the bullet ran around his helmet and came out the back, but it knocked him out. When he woke up, they’d put him in a German prison camp. He saw a rabbit in there and he’d lost so much weight — he was only about 90 pounds — he said he saw a rabbit in the pen — there was about 3 feet of snow so he jumped on it and grabbed it. There was a bunch of other guys, too, so they helped him and they just ripped it apart and started eating it. He said, ‘I got to thinking, that rabbit got in, I can get out,’ and that’s what he did. He snuck out one night — went and got the closest platoon around him and told them about the prison camp and they came back and rescued the rest of the guys.
“He ended up getting the Purple Heart out of it, but he ended up with frozen feet because they took his boots — they didn’t think anybody would escape in that snow and ice with no shoes on. He ended up making it back over here and marrying my mom,” Lolly said.
Lolly described his childhood as “good ole days,” as he explained a bit about growing up, saying when he and his siblings went out in the boat with their mother, she would tie a rope around them in the event that any of them had gone over-board, she could pull them back into the boat.
His greatest wish for Pine Island, he said, would be for commercial fishermen going back to doing what they used to do.
“All we did was we tried to feed people something fresh right out of the water. Just like these farmers — they go out there and they grow fruit, vegetables and they want to give it to you fresh, but now everything is fresh-frozen. The people who were born and raised in it need to be the ones to go back to fishing,” Lolly said.