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Richard explains that his surname comes from his great-grandfather, remembered in his family as “Captain Seamans.” Richard’s father, Lewis, was also a seafaring man. Living in southeastern Pennsylvania, Lewis Seaman sailed along the intracoastal waterways and off-shore waters of the eastern seaboard .1 Following one of his excursions as a charter captain in the Chesapeake Bay, Lewis left his home community of Chester, Pennsylvania, and sailed into Florida. Lewis Seaman arrived in Kissimmee in the late 1890s. He ¤rst found work with Kissimmee’s founder, Hamilton Disston, the Pennsylvania entrepreneur who purchased four million acres from the State of Florida in 1881 and cut a canal system into Florida’s central region of swamps, scrubland, and prairie. Disston and other founders drained the wetlands and developed the land to support farms and fruit groves, thereby opening up areas in central and southern Florida for further settlement. By the turn of the century, Richard’s father was hired by William McCool to work as a caretaker of “McCool’s Grove,”an orange grove located in the new subdivision of Kissimmee Park on the eastern side of Lake Tohopekaliga. Lewis married Lula Irene Sharpe in 1902, and they ran a small farm while he tended the orange grove and supplemented his income by working as a market hunter and sailboat captain on central Florida’s lakes and 55 4 “Your Word Was Your Bond”  An Anthology of Tall Tales The words of a man’s mouth are deep waters; the fountain of wisdom is a gushing stream. —Proverbs 18:4 inland waterways. When Richard was born in 1904, the family had a daughter named Queenie Husky Johnson from Lula Irene’s ¤rst marriage to Abner Johnson . The Seaman family history records that Queenie was named for a Seminole princess. She, Richard, and his younger sister, Anne Elizabeth Seaman, remained close throughout their lives. An intriguing aspect of the occupational folklife of watermen is that even today business deals often are conducted by word of mouth. Towboat captains commonly explain that the majority of their deals in picking up and dropping barges along the rivers are brokered through verbal assent. This system of commerce is viable because the community of workers along America’s rivers and inland waterways is a tight one. Captains recognize each other by simply acknowledging whose vessel is plying the water, and disreputable characters are soon exposed. Dishonest riverboat captains soon need to seek other means of gainful employment. This social norm of maintaining honest business dealings is also a strong value within farming communities. The expectation of honesty in human relations among river workers and farmers reveals why honest speech was less a positive value and more a social demand in Richard’s home community. Honesty was an integral component within the system of neighborly survival, and it was essential for holding his community together.2 Explaining the importance of telling the truth in Kissimmee Park, Richard af¤rms that people were expected to remain true to their word because “your word was your bond in those days.”He explains that lying meant more than prevarication. A dishonest person could lie by simply not being trustworthy. “If you said you were going to do something, then you did it,” Richard asserts to explain how words were to be sealed with action. Telling a lie in word or deed would ruin a reputation, for chances were that the untruth would soon be exposed. Lying also violated the social contract that chartered the system of cooperation that families depended upon for their survival. Finally, a lie violated a commandment from God. Although there were no churches to attend in his home community, Richard was raised not to bear false witness because doing so would fall short of Divine expectations revealed in God’s Word. Richard Seaman believes that writing a history means that one must honestly engage the pursuit of telling a true story. He thinks of history in highly visual and objective terms. He makes both explicit and implicit abstractions about what he presents, but his theory of history is rooted in a rigorous science of the concrete. His sharp memory is authenticated by historical records. Period photographs of Kissimmee match his descriptions of orange groves, scrubland, Lake Tohopekaliga, the town, and the little community. Archival recordings and  chapter 4 56 ¤eld notes fully support that the tunes in his repertory were all played in central Florida prior to the widespread introduction of mass media. Recordings...

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