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My name is Veronica Roser McCullough and I presently live on top of a remote mountain in North Carolina.
I have lived in this very peaceful environment for 10 years and for 16 years previous, I lived in the Florida Keys.
I am a retired US Merchant Marine, and a retired marine biologist and professional scuba diver.
I was the CEO of a corporation called Conch Republic Aquatics Inc. for 15 years and I logged over 10,000 dives. If you have been to any public aquarium anywhere in the world, like one of the four Sea Worlds, Miami Seaquarium or Epcot, then you have undoubtedly seen one of millions of fish, sharks, stingrays, or giant eels I have collected and shipped, most by jumbo cargo planes to aquariums all over the world.
Anyone who has lived in the Florida Keys knows that life there is a tropical paradise. It is more like living in the Caribbean than anywhere in the US. I spent the majority of my time underwater, but when I was on land, I tended to my large aviary full of exotic breeding birds and my large greenhouse full of orchids, bromeliads, and air plants.
My property was more like a zoo with a 100 big tanks outside full of tropical fish within a jungle of tropical plants and birds.
People often asked me why I sold out and left. The answer is complicated, but for the most part, the Keys are just not what they used to be. There is no peace and quiet there anymore. Too many people, too many hurricanes, and global warming is killing the reef.
I have been procuring antique and vintage jewelry for almost 40 years now. How I got started is not your typical story. Most people inherit the collecting gene from a parent or grandparent, and that is true with me as well, but it goes much deeper.
I grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and my grandparents owned a large marina. My grandmother ran a large marine store and tackle shop and there were a lot of yachts in the marina. On every occasion such as Christmas, birthdays, and special parties, people in the marina often gave my grandmother what we now call vintage costume jewelry. Because she ran a marine store and there were lots of metal fishing tackle boxes, in her bedroom under her bed, were lots of tackle boxes full of jewelry, all of which I played with growing up and later inherited.
Before I landed in the Florida Keys, I went to private school, both Mercersburg Academy in PA and Severn School in MD. When it came time for me to pick a college, I didn’t know what I wanted to go to school for, like most 18 year olds. I only knew that I wanted to see the world. Many girls back in the 1970s elected to become airline stewardesses, but flying was not my cup of tea. I was born with web feet and raised on the Chesapeake Bay. My father and grandfather had fishing boats, crabbing boats, and oyster boats and I spent all my spare time learning the life of Bay fisherman. I raced on sail boats out of Annapolis and loved windsurfers, and I was the first woman to ever windsurf across the Chesapeake Bay.
I got accepted to the US Naval Academy, but there were no women there at the time and thousands of gung-ho men. Instead, I was able to get into another maritime school called the Lundeburg School of Seamanship in Piney Point, MD. From there, I went to work as a chef on oil tankers in the US Merchant Marines and travelled all over the world for 5 years.
It was the sailors, on all the ships I worked on, who got me hooked collecting and selling. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were no women aboard ships in the Merchant Marines or in the Navy. In some ports, I was allowed to go ashore, but in many, I was kept hidden aboard ship. I thought I was a prisoner, but the captain knew I was a liability. I was a young blonde American woman who refused to wear anything other than cut off jeans shorts and a tank top when in port in hot, tropical, 3rd world countries. The captain didn’t want anyone in these ports to know that there was a woman on the ship, for fear I would be kidnapped and held for ransom. I had to fight to keep my job every day, constantly being told women were bad luck on ships, and the only place for a woman on a ship was the figural bust on a bow sprint.
All the guys knew how much I liked to shop in ports of call and that is how I got the name 3 Cab Ronnie, because I bought so much stuff I had to call 3 cabs to get all my stuff off the ship! Goods overseas were cheap. Things like perfume, jewelry, clothes, and all kind of local handicrafts.
Sailors in port have nothing else to do put spend money. In ports where I was kept a secret and confined to my room, all the guys felt sorry for me, and started to bring me little gifts. They started out little, but over time, I knew what to tell them to look for. Oriental rugs, carved ivory, paintings, gold figurines, jewelry, and unique pottery and art glass. Back then, no customs or anyone came aboard to look for these sort of things and as long as we weren’t smuggling drugs, no one cared.
On one ship, I had been told about the riches to be found in Burma long before I got there. Some of the guys were going to take me shopping when we got in port. They dressed me in 3 pairs of Levi jeans, one pair on top the other, gave me all their old Playboy magazines and old shirts and shoes that had logos on them like Nike or Adidas.
They took me to the bad side of town, to a dark and dingy hashish bar where most of the men there were miners in the gem mines. They did the asking, and I stood there frozen and terrified because I had blonde hair and everyone was staring at me. They motioned for me to come, and in a dark back alley, a man produced a small pouch from his pocket full of uncut Burmese rubies. My sailor buddies told me to give him everything I had, so I began taking off jeans and handing them over. I gave the man the bag full of Playboy magazines and shirts and shoes, then we ran out of there and hailed a cab.
Back on the ship, there was a chief mate, a big burly Greek man, who had a lot of connections in NYC. He had been sailing on ships for over 30 years. He told me where to go and what to do to sell my rubies. While anchored under the Verrazano bridge, I climbed down the ladder. This was not a gangway, but a rope ladder that swang in the breeze like a leaf. I got on a little launch boat that took me to the NJ side, then I caught the Ferry to Battery Park. I walked up through China town, then hailed a cab to up-town Manhattan. I was in search of an old Jewish jeweler.
Two hours later, I found him in a little cubby hole of a shop. I told him who sent me and showed him the rubies. He looked at them under a loupe then he went into the back. When he came out he put $ 7,000 cold hard cash in my hand. He motioned with his hand for me to leave, and he never spoke a single word. I walked out the door and I was a young woman in the middle of Manhattan with $ 7,000 in my pocket and what did I want to do?.... Shop of course!
I was hooked. I was a hopeless addict now. Over the years, I learned that sailors on ships made much more trading and selling than they ever did in wages. So I traded and sold like a crazy lady where ever I went around the globe.
Life at sea on ships was always a dangerous occupation. There were many ship board accidents in 20-30 foot seas. People broke limbs, fell over board, and some were killed in freak accidents. It didn’t get really dangerous until one day, while in port at the Navy base in Panama City, and man dressed all in black came up to me and handed me a card and said, “ Welcome to the Naval Reserve.”
I had no idea WHAT he was talking about but soon learned that the Texaco supertanker I was on had just been commissioned by the Navy. No longer would we be carrying crude oil. We would now be carrying jet fuel, in secret solitary passage, on behalf of the 10th Naval Fleet. It was the fall of 1983, right after over 240 Marines were murdered in Beirut.
No one on the ship was told where we were going. The crew was very busy going over all the rules and lessons we were taught in school about how to handle our very dangerous cargo. No metal on deck, except the filings in your mouth. No steel tip boots. No belt buckles. Brass tools only.
One night, near the Persian Gulf, we went black. No running lights and cover all port holes. To see on the deck, you could only carry a cylamlume light stick. When the monster shadow of a Navy tanker ship appeared, we swang over the hoses and pumped jet fuel to them for 8 hours, both ships running side by side 100 feet away from each other, in total, out of this world, blackness.
The next morning, surface to air missiles were blasting over our deck and in the distance, a large ship was on fire and engulfed in thick black smoke. No one on the ship knew what was really going on, but it appeared were in the middle of a war. It was a secret war, the Iran-Iraq war in the early 1980s, and none of us knew how we got there! I made 3 runs to the secret war zone, each time seeing more ships on fire and more missiles above my head.
We had been picking up our jet fuel in St.Croix every time, and running it all the way around the bloody horn of Africa getting beat to death in rough seas. After the 3rd trip, we were told to go to Key West, to Truman Navy base to get more jet fuel. For the three week journey back through the Atlantic and the Caribbean, I watched the dolphins play in our wake every day, and knew I was going to quit.
Key West would be a good place to get paid off and go ashore for good. After 5 years of living out of a duffle bag at sea, I was ready to try my webbed feet on dry land. Especially now, since exotic ports of call were a thing of the past, and I was in the middle of a war I didn’t understand.
I got my big fat check for my miserable war pay at sea and rented a suite at the Marriott. I put on my bathing suit and went to the Tiki bar and asked the bar tender to make me a pitcher of frozen margaritas and keep them coming.
I sat on in the beach in a lounge chair and watched the sun set as ships sailed away in the distance and I said goodbye to them. Before I drank my first pitcher, a long haired hippie in cut off jean shorts came stumbling drunk down the beach, singing a tune I recognized. Back then, no one knew who he was, but I knew from the song he sang he was every sailors idol. He sat down and started talking to me, and I knew my life was about to change forever. I was suddenly, and gratefully, wasted away in Margaritaville.
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