A 1940s aerial photo of Hypoluxo Island, viewed from the north,
with the original bridge that was replaced in 1950.
Photo courtesy of the Historical Society of Palm Beach County
Narine Ebersold, 87, has lived on Hypoluxo Island since she was a young wife, as seen in inset below.
Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
By Mary Thurwachter
Back in 1946, when Narine Ebersold and her husband, David, moved to Hypoluxo Island, she was a newlywed who liked to tuck sweet-smelling gardenias behind her ears.
The island was a jungle back then, with few homes and few human settlers.
“If you would have taken a picture then, you would see a lot of trees,” Ebersold said. “After the hurricane in 1947, you should have seen all the palm trees laying across the road,” she said.
Among her few early neighbors were homeowners King Hughes and Bill Swain along with Consuelo Vanderbilt, her husband, Jacques Balsan, and a caretaker all at Casa Alva.
David Ebersold was a prominent builder who constructed many of the homes on the north end of the island. When he died in 2006, they had been married for 61 years.
Narine will turn 88 in October and is still living in the fourth home he built for them, a light green, two-story house on Southeast Atlantic Drive.
“He would build one and we’d live in it for awhile and then he would sell it and build another one for us,” she said.
Her father-in-law bought Narine and David (as well as her husband’s three siblings) their first lots on the island. Each lot cost $500.
“We could have bought the whole north end of the island for $2,000 back then,” she said. “But we didn’t have $2,000.”
Although she was born in Arkansas, Ebersold moved to Florida when she was 6 months old, first to Haines City, then to Jacksonville. As a teenager, she worked at a drive-in in Jacksonville. That’s where she met David Ebersold.
“He was a lifeguard at the beach,” she said. “In those days, people were kind of bashful and I didn’t even know he liked me, but he went home and told his brother he met this good-looking girl.”
The couple began dating and married a few years later.
When the Ebersolds moved to Hypoluxo Island, they didn’t have a car and she rode her bicycle everywhere.
“I would ride to West Palm Beach and back, and I never got tired,” she said.
They had indoor plumbing, but no electricity during those early years. “We had lanterns and a gas refrigerator and I had a two-burner kerosene stove to cook on,” she said. “I must have done all right, because the kids still talk about how good the big breakfasts I would make were.”
Her husband was on the town’s volunteer fire department and served on the town council for three years in the 1960s. She was one of the first members of the Casuarina Woman’s Club.
Entertainment was simple, old-Florida fun. Some evenings, the family would walk to the beach to enjoy a bonfire. Her husband and sons liked to fish.
“I was busy raising our (four) kids,” she said. “They couldn’t wait to come home from school to fish.”
Life was good, she remembered. Except for the dreaded sand flies and mosquitoes.
“My husband used to paint the screen doors with some kind of goop to keep the sand flies out,” Ebersold said. “They were hard to see, but they sure could bite.”
When the old wooden bridge connecting the island to the mainland was torn down and rebuilt in 1950, the Ebersolds lived on a 40-foot sailboat for two years. David Ebersold traded one of his houses for a sailboat.
“He was in the Merchant Marines during World War II and sailing was in his blood,” she said. “I knew he would want to do it sometime, so we might as well do it then.”
They sailed from Miami to South Carolina.
“I was so glad to get off that thing,” Ebersold laughed.
After 68 years on the island, she says some things have changed.
Hundreds of people live there now, but Ebersold doesn’t know many of them.
“I don’t socialize much anymore,” she said. She spends her time with her children, grandchildren and her two cats.
There are still a lot of trees around. And she likes that — as long as a hurricane hasn’t blown them across the road.
Comments