Shirley Muse
Interviewed by Jesse Glasshoff October 12, 2012
Glasshoff
Okay, we’re on. So—let’s see. Today’s date is October 12th, 2012, and it is 10 AM and we’re here at the [UCF] Public History Center in Sanford, Florida—formerly the Student Museum. Uh, my name is Jesse Glasshoff. I’m a graduate student at the University of Central Florida, and I’m interviewing Shirley Muse. Do you want to introduce yourself, Shirley?
Muse
Good morning. I’m Shirley Muse. I’m the collections person in charge of the collection, and I’ve been here for 13 years—almost 14—and loved every minute of it.
Glasshoff
All right. Well, we’ll go ahead and jump right into these questions. So how did you—how’d come to be working at the museum?
Muse
Well, Serena [Rankin Parks] Fisher, who was the director of the museum in 1999, um, asked me if I wanted to volunteer, ‘cause we were both media specialists together, and I worked at Sanford Middle School, and I knew a lot of the old timers here and their children, and I’ve enjoyed it very much, because I could follow it up over here and see pictures of the grandparents and etcetera [laughs].
Glasshoff
So what—what has been your involvement in the museum? You said you’re the Collections Manager right now. Uh…
Muse
I have been doing all the numbering of the pictures, cleaning the glass, putting them back with new labels, trying to make the print larger so that older people can read it without having to get right up to it, and then if they want a copy of it, they’ll tell me, or if they can identify someone in the picture that is not identified, then they will get in touch with me, make a note, and take the number down, then we go get the picture, and then I take it apart and put in the identity of that person that we didn’t have, and it helps a lot, and they’ve identified family members, and they’ve identified classmates from way back when, and it is really very, very satisfying to do.
Glasshoff
Now, is that—is this the same job you’ve always had here?
Muse
Yes.
Glasshoff
Or have you done…
Muse
I have done only that, because I was the only one that[sic] knew about cataloging, because I’m a retired media specialist. So it’s all gone into the computer and we are getting there…
Glasshoff
[laughs].
Muse
Eventually, to the end, I hope.
Glasshoff
[laughs] Okay. Well, it sounds like a pretty big task, and it sounds like you’re the right person for it.
Muse
I love it. I love it.
Glasshoff
I think everyone else agrees, because you’re the person doing it.
Muse
[laughs].
Glasshoff
Uh, so what—what kind of people—since you’ve been here, what kind of people do you see visiting the museum?
Muse
Well, we have visitors to the area, especially those that may be putting their car on AMTRAK to send back up north, or to pick up their car from the trains, and then they come into town and want something to do, and we are listed, I believe, at the [Historic Sanford] Welcome Center, and also maybe at the Amtrak Station. Then we have the old-timers that want to come back and look at the pictures and think about the old days, and then we have students.
Glasshoff
Okay.
Muse
So we have quite a…
Glasshoff
So tell me a little bit about the students.
Muse
The students—we have mainly K[indergarten] through—well, we mainly have fourth- graders, ‘cause we are with the fourth-grade curriculum.
Glasshoff
Uh huh.
Muse
And we teach to that, but then we have a lot of other students that[sic] come in for the events that we have, and they like to look at the pictures that go into the rooms and peruse what we have on display.
Glasshoff
So—since you’ve been here for quite a while—you have been volunteering for quite a while…
Muse
Uh huh.
Glasshoff
What would you think—what would you say has changed in the museum since you’ve been with them?
Muse
Well, for many years there wasn’t much change, but now that we have UCF [University of Central Florida] as a partner, things are changing for the better, and they are just doing a tremendous job, and I can see that it will go on and prosper and, I think just get better and better, and we are changing things now that we didn’t have the people to do it before, ‘cause there was only like a handful of us volunteers—maybe five or six that worked in the building, teaching the classes, and all of that, but I was the only one doing the cataloging, but then there were the gardeners, and they strictly stayed out in the Pioneer Gardens. So it’s been so many more people helping now, and we can see a real difference taking place now.
Glasshoff
Okay, what was it like when you first got here?
Muse
It was very quiet. We didn’t have many visitors. Well, we first had quite a few visitors for a while, but then when fourth grade would come, we were not allowed to have visitors at the same time, because we couldn’t have them intermingle with the students at that time, and that was, uh, school law to keep the children from wandering off or talking to strangers and everything, and we had to always abide by that.
Glasshoff
So…
Muse
Yeah.
Glasshoff
Just to make sure I’ve got it clear: when you first started, fourth-graders weren’t coming in, and then, shortly thereafter, they were?
Muse
No, they’d been coming in for years.
Glasshoff
Oh, they were?
Muse
Yeah, I misstated that.
Glasshoff
Oh, okay.
Muse
Yeah, yeah.
Glasshoff
That’s all right. I misunderstood you.
Muse
Yeah, but they’d been coming—that’s the main thing—the main that, uh, we did.
Glasshoff
Yeah.
Muse
Was with them, but then as soon as they left, it was open to the public, but then when the economy went down, we had to close down, and only had three days, we had to cut if off early, uh, so…
Glasshoff
Okay, when was that?
Muse
That was I think about three or four years ago. We had to start closing at 3, which didn’t give you much time, ‘cause the children were here until 1:30, and that was only an hour and a half, and a lot of people would have liked to come in, but we couldn’t allow them to come in until 1:30, but many-a-times—I will say—the director stayed until 4 and 4:30 on their[sic] own, to let those people go through and give them a tour. So I—I had to hand it to them.
Glasshoff
[inaudible].So kind of in line with that, who do you—who would you say the exhibits are targeted towards? What are the goals of the exhibits?
Muse
I—I think most of the goals of the exhibits are the fourth-grade curriculum, and the geography of Florida is included in that, and the history of the Native American, and also the pioneers—the early people that settled Florida, and—and that[sic] was[sic] the main ones, and that fit into the curriculum at that time, and I think now it’s been broadened more, since we have other people coming in, and we’ve got new ideas, which we needed, and I think we also have welcomed it, because you get a little stagnant if you don’t have new blood brought in, and I think that’s been very good.
Glasshoff
And it, eh—so would you say since you’ve been here, the exhibits have generally been the same?
Muse
They have generally been the same. There’s[sic] only been a few small changes when we got something that was really pertinent to that room, then we set up a little bit of a—a new part to that room, but that didn’t happen too often, because we weren’t really on the map that well. We didn’t get the publicity that we’ve gotten now.
Glasshoff
Can you give me an example? You said that every now and then, maybe one little part would change?
Muse
Well, um, they were talking about, um, fossils, and one of our, um, gardeners was very interested in fossils and came from a part—a place in Georgia that they’d a lot of them. So when he went up there, he brought back a whole lot of them, and then they put this sand box in and then they put the fossils into the sand so the kids could take little rakes and find them, like they would out in the desert, you know, when looking for things. So that was a new one that was nice at that time, and I can’t tell you exactly when it was.
Glasshoff
That’s okay.
Muse
[laughs].
Glasshoff
That's why we write things down [laughs].
Muse
[laughs].
Glasshoff
So what do you think they’re meant to teach, uh—these exhibits? What—they’re directed towards the students?
Muse
Well, the Pioneer [Exhibit: Before the Settlement of Sanford] room showed how they lived, and how big of space—because we have a small, pioneer, log cabin. We have the cooking utensils that they used at that time in there. We have, uh, like, um, the—the pots that they used on the fire. We have, um, certain clothing. We have an old, pioneer-time nightgown that was actually donated, uh, just about—oh, about a year ago. The lady had two of them, and they’re really tattered and torn, but we washed them, and we hung them up in—one in there to show that they wore a long-sleeved, uh, long nightgowns and long to the floor, you know, and then they, uh—we put one also into the, uh, Grandma’s Attic. Yeah, so it was very neat, because the kids didn’t ever think about what they would sleep in [laughs].
Glasshoff
Right[?].
Muse
But it—it was fun, and the kids got a big kick out of it. Yeah, and if they just learn a few things, you know, and then they go home and tell their parents. Usually, they come back with their parents and their sisters and brothers to see it on their own.
Glasshoff
Yeah.
Muse
It’s nice, yeah.
Glasshoff
Well, what, uh—through all the exhibits you’ve seen—and you’ve seen all of them really, since you’ve been here—which exhibit was your favorite?
Muse
My favorite was Grandma’s Attic.
Glasshoff
Grandma’s Attic?
Muse
‘Cause I had a grandma that[sic] had an attic like that.
Glasshoff
What was it like?
Muse
Well, the Grandma’s Attic—it used to have wallpaper, but they’ve since taken that down, and they’d pictures on the wall, but they were crooked, just like they would be if Grandma had put them up there to store them, and they got crooked. Grandma didn’t go up there to clean it. They just let them hang, and they were just out of the way, and then there was[sic] toys in the attic, and you would know which ones were yours to play with, and they saw that, and then they showed, uh, cooking utensils that Grandma used in the kitchen area, at that time. They had, uh, the irons that you used to heat on the big, uh, stoves that had coal in it or wood-burning stoves, and then they have the iron that they would have to put the coals in the iron and do it, and, uh, they had a coffee grinder there. They ground the coffee to let the children see that. They made candles also, so the kids could see how to make the candles, and everybody got a turn to dip it, but we had to be careful of that—and you might get burnt. So we had to take that out, much to our discouragement, but sometimes you’ve to do that for safety problems. Yeah, but it—it was just fascinating, because there were instruments that were hung from the ceiling on wires, just to keep them out of the way, you know, ‘cause Grandma stored all of that stuff up in the attic, you know, but it—it looked like a real grandma’s attic. Yeah, and everybody—I think the majority of people liked that one. It brought back a lot of memories. You had the old-fashioned toys—the ones that were made of iron and they were very heavy, but the kids still played with them, you know, but, uh, we had a little bit of everything, and we always let them play with the toys. We had, um, the old, um, wood toys that you could—I forget what they were—but they had this—pieces of wood—it was called something. I cannot remember what it was, but you always had to get it back together and it clicked. It was really neat, and the kids had never seen something like that. I should have brought one with me. Yeah, but I didn’t think about it. Yeah.
Glasshoff
[inaudible].Thinking about the exhibits and the changes through time, which parts of the museum do you think had the most impact on the children that have visited—the K through 12[th grade] children?
Muse
I think the Geography [Lab: Where in the World Are We?] room, because the map of Florida is large enough they can walk on, and then they have to learn the names of the cities and where they’re located, and then they have kind of like tops—there's holes driven in the actual map, and you have to take the top that has the name written on it. Pensacola—they learned that it went up in the panhandle. Um, Tallahassee was up north—part, and then there was Miami, and there was Orlando, and they’d to put the right one—the answer— in that position, and they loved doing that, because it was big enough they could walk around it and look, you know, and then actually put that in themselves, like they named it, and they felt real good about that in fourth grade.
Glasshoff
Mmhmm.
Muse
And then I the second best was Grandma’s Attic. They liked the interaction, because they always gave them time to play with the toys and pick them up and touch things, because that’s how we believe, that you should be able to touch things.
Glasshoff
Mmhmm. So aside from the children that have visited, uh, how do you think, uh—how do you see that the museum has had the most impact on the larger community?
Muse
Well, I think Sanford citizens that have been here for years love to come back and reminisce, and they see the houses that they used to walk by on their way to school, because they are still here in the pictures the same. A lot of them in Sanford have been restored and that’s just beautiful thing, but they can come back, and they find people on there that[sic] they haven’t seen in a long time, and it brings back memories, and if you get two or three of them from the same class, they start talking, and they really enjoy it, and they end up spending several hours here many-a-times, particularly the older people, because they are just so excited to be back in their element of time, you know? Yeah, and that toy with the blocks was the Jacob’s ladder, and I know a lot of people would know exactly what I’m talking about. Yeah, there.
Glasshoff
So the decisions to make changes in the, um, museum that have happened recently—and through the time of the museum since you’ve been here—how do you feel that the larger community has impacted the goals and the direction of the museum?
Muse
Um, that’s a good question, because not many changes were made for many years, ‘cause we didn’t have the people to do—to make the changes, and we didn’t have an assessment of what we needed. We didn’t have time to do that, and it’s something we are working on very diligently right now, and I’m very pleased about how it’s going, but at the time, we were so shorthanded, and we weren’t all professional museum people, and that makes a big difference, ‘cause you don’t realize exactly what goes into making a museum meaningful to that community until you start studying it like we are now, and it's really, I think, had a big impact on everybody working here, and I find we all are working together as a good unit, and that’s—makes me feel real good [laughs]. I really do.
Glasshoff
So how has the museum affected your life?
Muse
Well, my husband passed away, um, in 2007, and I find if I don’t get here to work at least two days a week, I get down, because I meet all the people here, I have something that's purposeful in my life, and I’m seeing things coming to fruition, and that makes me feel real good, but I’ve always liked detail-work, and I always feel like anything that has to do with books and pictures and things that have to do with one particular area has got to be a good situation to present to the public. I really do.
Glasshoff
And how has it—how has it affected the way that you understand Sanford?
Muse
I find the people are so friendly and so happy to know that we treasure them and their city as something very worthwhile, and has been very, very, um, very instrument—instrumentally with the—sending things from Jacksonville, the transportation, the steamships all here, and then it's disseminated out along the—the coast—the east coast, the west coast of Florida, and it’s been very interesting for me to learn about it, and they, I think, are proud that we are studying this and keeping track of all the pictures and everything, so that we can look back and see it, and General [Henry Shelton] Sanford—he lived right here in Florida, right at the top of the hill here for many years, and he has a real connection to this city, and I’ve been amazed at how many people have visited his grave up in Connecticut, and we have pictures of that downstairs on the Sanford, uh, bulletin board right outside the office, and the man came and brought me the pictures all on a CD, and I made copies of them with his permission, and I—I thought it was very exciting, and then when people come in and see it, they’re even—they say, “Oh, that’s new,” you know, and I say, “Yeah, we got those by him giving them to us,” and it was wonderful. Yeah.
Glasshoff
So kind of moving in a different direction now [laughs]—you’ve worked here quite a while, and you’ve seen a tons of people come and go. Uh, who do you think was the most memorable person to you that has come to visit the museum?
Muse
Well, I think, Mr. Douglas Stenstrom, who was born here in 1921, and he passed away in 2010. He was a fantastic person, and he—he was in the World War II in the South Pacific. He attended the University of Florida, the University of Virginia, Stetson College.[1] He was a county judge, he was a state senator, and he did many more things than that, and he would come and sit and talk with us when we had an event, and he’d sit for an hour or two, and when he left, he always left a check for us to put into the—the—the bank for keeping this place going, because he was very attached to it—both he and his wife, and they were lovely people, and with all that education and everything, he always found time to stop by, and we just really delighted in him, and I think everybody did, because you couldn’t walk by him without saying something to him, ‘cause everybody knew him. Yeah, it was wonderful. He was a wonderful man. Plus he has a school named after him out in Oviedo, Stenstrom Elementary. Yeah, he[sic] a very generous gentleman.
Glasshoff
So kind of moving away from that, uh—do you’ve any people in mind that[sic] might have gone to the school here that we could contact for future projects at the museum?
Muse
Well, to tell you the truth, Jesse, I gave a whole list of them to Dr. [Rosalind “Rose” J.] Beiler, and they are a lot of the people—the Stiffys—and they are local people that have been here for years and donated their time in many schools and for many activities, and then, um, there’s, um, Bill Robinson. He’s a local person that lives here, and he is just as friendly and happy a man as I’ve ever known, and he went to school here, and his picture’s down one of the bulletin boards downstairs. Plus there is a number of other ones, but I—I can’t remember them all, but I did give her a long list of them with phone numbers, and how to get a hold of them.
Glasshoff
That’s good news [laughs].
Muse
[laughs] In fact, you could get that list, if you’re interested, from her. I’m sure.
Glasshoff
Do you’ve any ideas about spreading the word about the history harvest?
Muse
Well, I think one of the best ways we could do it is to get The Orlando Sentinel columnists—there’s, I think, a Kay—Kay Richardson or—or something. I can’t remember her name, but there’s[sic] several columnists that[sic] do stories on this, and also The Sanford Herald, and if they would do a piece on it and tell ‘em we’re looking for people to bring in things for this, um, um, history harvest, I think it would get out real quick that way, because most people take that Sanford Herald, and if—if they don’t get The Orlando Sentinel—I know friends do, and they pass it around the neighborhood, but I’m sure there would be a lot of people that would be interested in it if they explained what it was and what they want to do. I think it would be great, and I’m excited about it. I really think it will be great.
Glasshoff
Well, thank you for doing the interview. I think that’s[sic] all the questions I have.
Muse
You’re quite welcome.
Glasshoff
Is there anything that you wanted to say—that you wanted to add?
Muse
No, I’m just so happy with the partnership that we have. The people that are coming to work and help are so good, and they are doing a tremendous job, and it makes me feel so good that it’s going to be carried on for years to come, really.
Glasshoff
[inaudible].
Muse
Yeah, I really am.
Glasshoff
Okay. Again, thank you for doing the interview.
Muse
You’re quite welcome.
Shirley Muse
Interviewed by Jesse Glasshoff October 12, 2012
[1] Present-day Stetson University.
Dombrowski
This is an interview with Bette Skates, the church historian for Holy Cross Episcopal Church in Sanford. This interview is being conducted on July 8, 2010,[1] at the Museum of Seminole County History. Interviewer is Diana Dombrowski, representing the museum for the Historical Society of Central Florida.
Skates
Good.
Dombrowski
I just have some basic questions first. Your name is Bette Skates, but where and when were you born?
Skates
I was born in Philadelphia[, Pennsylvania] in 1933.
Dombrowski
Oh, wow. What brought your family to Florida?
Skates
My father’s ill health, which is what brings most people to Florida back in the day.
Dombrowski
Yeah. That’s true. When did you move here? Did you grow up in Central Florida?
Skates
I moved to Sanford in 1944.
Dombrowski
Oh, okay. What was it like? Could you describe it? Was it very big? Was it busy?
Skates
Sanford was a railroad town. And my father worked for the railroad—is the reason, besides the fact that his health was not good, and he needed to get out of the North. And he was a Georgia boy to begin with. So he wanted to come south. And so when he had this opportunity to work for the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, at the freight station, he was very eager to accept the job. We came in on a train that they call the—well, there’s two of them. One was the Orange Blossom Special, and the other was the Champion. And this was the passenger train from the North—from Philadelphia and New York. All points north.
When we came into the station, my mother had never—well, yes. Mother had been south before, but we hadn’t, as children—very young children. I was ten—nine or ten. And when we pulled into the station and got off the train, the humidity hit us like it was going to knock us out. And I said, “Oh. Let’s get back on the train.”[laughs].
Dombrowski
[laughs].
Skates
And that was before air—trains were air-conditioned too, but—but it was still cooler on the train.
Dombrowski
Wow.
Skates
So my dad said, you know, “This is nothing. This is fine. This feels wonderful. Get used to it.”
Dombrowski
[laughs].
Skates
[laughs]And my mother—she’s just kind of being quiet and fanning herself. We had this—it—it was the old station that was on—on Ninth Street, and they’ve since torn it down.
Dombrowski
Oh.
Skates
On Ninth and, uh—well, it was just Ninth Street. I guess there was side street, but I don’t recall. right off of French Avenue. Because then the tracks still all—we still had tracks running all over downtown.
Dombrowski
Hmm.
Skates
They’re—they’re not there now, because back in the day, when trains first came in—all of the wharves and the produce—everything came in to downtown to the river. So, um, we had—let me get back to my story. So we got off the train and my sister and I—and she was a year younger than I am—and we both started—“Something smells funny. What is it?” My dad said, “Oh, that’s sulfur water! Oh, come over here, girls!” He says. “Come over here!” And here’s a water fountain, right up against the train station. I think it was a brick train station. Right there, it’s all green inside, where the water is coming out. And we’re looking at this saying, “Oh, this smells so bad!” You know. We’re holding our noses, and he’s getting very annoyed with us. “Take a taste of that water. That’s healthy water. That’s better than drinking that Schuylkill River water you’ve been drinking in Philadelphia.” Of course, my mother is being as she always is—long-suffering. And she said, “Well, they can taste it if they want to.” We tasted it and we almost gagged! Sulfur water—the first time you ever taste it, is horrible. You do get used to it. And you do realize that it is healthy.
Dombrowski
Okay.
Skates
But, it’s all the water fountains in the city. And there were water fountains in the parks, and there was one in front of the [First] Baptist Church [of Sanford], and different places. They were all over town. And they were all sulfur water.
Dombrowski
Wow.
Skates
So you did get used to it.
Dombrowski
Oh my goodness. So was the smell everywhere too?
Skates
Everywhere. Sulfur smells like rotten eggs.
Dombrowski
It does. Yeah. I remember we went to the [Ponce de Leon’s] Fountain of Youth [Archaeological Park] and they were giving it out, you know.
Skate
Yes, yes. But it’s supposed to be good for you. So, we got off the train there. And we—I think we took a cab, because we didn’t have a car at that time. And we went to an apartment my father had rented. And I guess I need to say this too, because these are the things that people that haven’t lived here don’t understand or can’t get used to. When we got to the apartment—we had an upstairs apartment. A lovely old two-story house in Sanford just two blocks from where I live now, by the way. And the whole upstairs—this was during the war—and every house in Sanford had been made into apartments and efficiencies, because the Navy base[2] was here, and housing was a premium.
As we started to go up the stairs, and on the porch was a burlap sack that had something in it. My dad said to me, “Bette, grab that bag and bring it upstairs.” We had our suitcase and everything. I went to pick up the bag, and roaches came out of the bag. They were flying roaches and they were flying all over. I don’t know how many. It might have been two, but it seemed like a hundred. Of course, I dropped it and screamed and had a hissy fit, a good Southern expression. Someone had left a bag of oranges there for us. And, so roaches, of course—so that was my introduction to Sanford.
The apartment was lovely and it was cool with oak trees. Of course, I found out that oak trees breed roaches too, so we had roaches flying in the windows and things like that. Yeah, like the water, and the humidity—you try to get used to it. I don’t think I ever got used to the roaches. But that was my introduction to Sanford.
Dombrowski
How long did you live in the apartment?
Skates
We lived there for four years, and then my mom bought a house. And my father was ill. I mean, he was very ill, and he knew he was dying. My mother opened a beauty shop downtown, just in 1956, because she knew that she was going to have to support the family. He died in ’56. So she had her beauty shop for 25-30 years in Downtown Sanford.
Dombrowski
That’s really nice.
Skates
She’s the one that could tell the stories [laughs].
Dombrowski
Okay [laughs].How has Sanford changed when you were growing up there? It was a big railroad town, and your mother, it seems, was there for a very long time. Did you see it get busier? Or develop more?
Skates
Yes, development. The stores that I remember, as growing up, are—I was trying to think if there are any that are still downtown. But, coming from a big city, it was very nice that we could walk everywhere. Ride bicycles.
We went to school at the grammar school and then at Seminole High School, which was just up not too far from my house. I mean, everything was convenient. It was very nice. It was a good, homey feeling, and everybody was friendly. It was a very nice place to grow up, I think. And the schools—my father did not think much of the schools, but then again, in the South, schools hadn’t really caught up by that time. It took quite a few years for them to catch up to what we had been used to. But it, you know, was a nice place to grow up. Very nice.
Dombrowski
That’s—that’s nice [laughs].
Skates
[laughs] Yeah.
Dombrowski
What was it like for your mother to set up the beauty shop? Was it very difficult? Or…
Skates
It was very difficult. My grandparents—her mother and father—had lived in Philadelphia. And they had, um—they sold their property up there and came down, just after my dad died, to live with my mother. I know—to help her. We didn’t realize it, at the time, but, um—and they helped her with finances for the beauty shop
Dombrowski
Okay.
Skates
So that was—it was very nice. And they lived with us actually, until they both died. They lived with my mother. Um, So that was, um—that was the way she could do what she did. The beauty shop was, um—what—what she would charge for what—for the work she did—I wish I had a price list. But I remember one time, she said something about a dollar and quarter for a manicure. We all said, “Is that all?” She said, “If I had charged a dollar and a half, they wouldn’t come back.”
Dombrowski
Oh, wow.
Skates
So, I mean, the prices were—were—were really…
Dombrowski
Different.
Skates
Different.
Dombrowski
[laughs].
Skates
[laughs] Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. But it was her—her hopes[?]—her beauty shop was in the Montezuma Hotel, which that building has burned down since…
Dombrowski
Oh.
Skates
Then. It was a big hotel that was built here in the 1880s.
Dombrowski
Hmm.
Skates
It was about four blocks from the river, and People would get off the steam ships and walk up the little hill and—to the hotel. It was called the “Bye Lo Hotel,” at the time—I mean, at that time. It was later changed to the Montezuma. But it was—when Mother had the beauty shop there, it was a little spooky
Dombrowski
Really?
Skates
It was old, you know?
Dombrowski
Yeah.
Skates
And—and there’s a lot of people who still lived there. But, uh, it burned down a few years ago. [inaudible]…
Dombrowski
Hmm.
Skates
About 12 years ago, I guess. So, uh, that was—that was a loss, but it was the first hotel in Sanford that had a swimming pool. Maybe the only…
Dombrowski
Oh, wow.
Skates
One. It was in the basement…
Dombrowski
Oh, okay.
Skates
Of the hotel.
Dombrowski
That would be cool.
Skates
Yeah.
Dombrowski
Yeah.
Skates
So that was neat. Later, they, uh, put a furnace in the swimming pool and didn’t use that anymore. I never saw the swimming pool with water in it.
Dombrowski
[laughs].
Skates
I did see it with a furnace in it.
Dombrowski
Oh [laughs].
Skates
But, uh, um…
Dombrowski
Um, Where did you go to school? Did you go to college?
Skates
Yes.
Dombrowski
Okay.
Skates
I did. I went to Stetson University, um…
Dombrowski
Oh.
Skates
I started at Stetson in 19well, let’s see. I was going to OJC—Orlando—it was Orlando Junior College. I went there for a while, and then I went to Stetson. It took me—I—I figured this out one time, but I don’t remember. Let’s see. 70—It took me about—I hate to say too much, because I—I—it took me a long time to graduate. I got married when I was 18.
Dombrowski
Oh.
Skates
I went to college, and I spent three months at Middle Georgia College, up in, uh, Cochran, Georgia. My cousins, uh—my dad’s sister wanted their daughter to go, and she wouldn’t go. She was homesick. And they said, “Well, if Bette would come and go with her, she would go.” So I went there, and I spent three months. Had a wonderful time. Made the Dean’s List. Was just doing fine, except I had a boyfriend, and I was in love
Dombrowski
Aww [laughs].
Skates
[laughs]. And my moth—the woman’s—the—the—the boy’s mother kept saying, “Well, I was married when I was 18,” So I decided that it was good enough for her, it was good enough for me. So I married him. So…
Dombrowski
Oh.
Skates
I went to college in between having my children.
Dombrowski
Oh.
Skates
Every time I could get, uh—I could find some money, or get a loan, or—there—there were student loans—there were [Federal] Pell Grants we could get. They—Loans were much easier to get in those days, so I could get student loan. So I would go to school for a while and then I would get pregnant again. And then I’d…
Dombrowski
[laughs].
Skates
Go to school for a while and then I would get pregnant again.
Dombrowski
[laughs].
Skates
This went on until 1964—well, it—let’s see when. I don’t remember how many years. But I finally started teaching when I was—when it was, um—it was 1965, I think.
Dombrowski
Oh, okay.
Skates
So it took me a long time to get certified to teach, but I did. And then I taught for 30 years in Seminole County.
Dombrowski
Wow.
Skates
Yeah. Which has been exciting.
Dombrowski
How many children did you have?
Skates
I have four children.
Dombrowski
Oh, okay.
Skates
Yeah. So I was kind of spacing this. Finally—I might want to censor this—finally about 1968, my husband got tired of it. Anybody, I guess, could understand that. He said—he didn’t sign on for that. So that was alright. But we managed, very well, and thank goodness I had my education so I could support my family. So it was good.
Dombrowski
So you taught in the school system for 30 years. What was it like in the 60’s? What was integration like?
Skates
My first 10 years, I taught out in Geneva [Elementary School].
Dombrowski
Oh, I like Geneva.
Skates
Oh, I love Geneva. I still hear from those kids. They’re great. Of course, they’re not kids. They’re grown. It was wonderful. It was probably the best teaching assignment you could have for a beginning teacher. Because by that time, I was 35 when I started teaching.
I was trying to think of how to put this. The schools had not been integrated much at that time. I don’t remember the year that I had the first black student, but I had a sweet boy. Now I was teaching fifth grade. He had come up through the grades. There was only five grades—five classrooms—at Geneva.
And the first year that I taught there, I taught in the auditorium, because there was no place. So what they did was take out the first couple rows of seats and let us set the classroom up right in front of the stage. Which was good until I got a couple of kids that were a little bit older than they should have been in fifth grade—a boy and a girl. And next thing I knew, they were behind the stage, and I had to go get them. They were good kids, and they really didn’t do anything bad, I don’t think. But I would have been in big trouble.
But anyway, the first black child I had—I was going to say I’ll never forget his name, and I did. What a sweetheart he was [laughs].
Dombrowski
[laughs].
Skates
But he was just testing. He was testing us, going to see if the system was going to work. He was a nice kid. Good parents. If I called his parents before he left school, by the time he got off the bus at home, they were back at the school to see what he had done or hadn’t done. Because he didn’t like to do homework and he didn’t like to do class work. Guess he had just been allowed to get away with more than he should have. But he wasn’t used to me. Anyway, he was a nice kid. Yeah, it was interesting, and the children we had at Geneva—the black and the white children—were I think just the salt of the earth. I mean they were really good people. Parents were country folks, most of them at that time. Now, later on, when UCF [University of Central Florida] opened, we started getting a different group of children. Their parents were more educated. They were professors and people that worked at the college. And so by the time I left Geneva, it had changed a good bit.
My two younger boys, I brought with me to Geneva, so I taught two of my own children in fifth grade. Which was—everybody says, “How is it working?” I said, “It works fine.” No problem. They were good kids to begin with. It worked out. It was fine. That was good too, because, that was, at the time, in Sanford. My two older children—there were a lot of problems at schools in Sanford, with the integration. They started busing—I don’t remember the year. When I was going to Geneva, my daughter was being bused to what used to be an all-black high school—Crooms High School—which they did just to integrate. And that was wrong. Because the kids—the black kids were not happy, the white kids were not happy. And the black teachers and the white teachers were all upset about it, but they were busing the kids across town. So I’m driving to Geneva ten miles away and my daughter is in a bus driving across the city, and I don’t know where she is and what’s happening. It was worrisome. But it all worked out. It just took time and a lot of patience on both sides. It should never have been separate to begin with, but we have to fix our mistakes.
Dombrowski
So tensions were high?
Skates
Very high.
Dombrowski
Was it ever violent?
Skates
Yeah. There was violence. A lot of it was threatened. You know, just like, if you go down this street, we’re going to throw rocks at the bus and things like that. That was very worrisome. And my oldest son, when he was in ninth—and well, high school. It was ninth grade at Crooms. But when he was in ninth grade and tenth grade—all through school, he was a big boy, and had red hair. And it was a novelty. He got a lot of—he did his best to stay out of trouble, but trouble came to him. And of course, he tells me now he got blamed for a lot of things he didn’t do, but I’m not going to go there. You know how kids are. Anyway, he hung in there. His high school experiences were very bad. Very bad. Yeah. It was real sad. But my daughter didn’t seem to have the problems. She was also redheaded, but she seemed to go with the flow easier. He was a target. You know, a big guy. But he’s not a fighter. He didn’t want to fight, but anyway. We got through it [laughs].
Dombrowski
Good [laughs].Did you all live in Sanford at the time? Did you drive to Geneva and back?
Skates
I drove to Geneva. Yeah. I bought the house that I’m still living in, in 1958.
Dombrowski
Wow.
Skates
Yeah. So I raised my family there. And just last couple years ago, we celebrated our 50th—I said, I’ll never have a golden wedding anniversary—so we celebrated our golden anniversary living in the house. So the kids got together and each one did something. But anyway, they have a photograph of the house framed in a beautiful frame that my grandson found when he was working for the College Hunks Hauling Junk. He found a frame and on the bottom of it my daughter wrote in gold, “Thanks for the memories.” So it’s very nice. I have it hanging over the piano. It’s very nice.
Dombrowski
That’s wonderful. So it’s downtown?
Skates
Yes. It’s downtown. If you go—First Street is the street where all the commerce is, where the business is. I live between Eleventh [Street] and Twelfth [Street] on Park Avenue. And Park Avenue’s the main street that goes down to the lakefront, and used to be [U.S. Route] 17-92 back in the day. That is where traffic went through the town. It’s in the historic district.
The house was built in 1924. It’s probably more than anybody wants to know, but it’s called a “Craftsman Airplane Bungalow.” Because the upstairs is one room, and a bathroom, and it has 12 windows all the way around. So it looks like you’re looking out airplane windows. You’re not. They’re regular windows, but anyway, that’s what it’s called.
Dombrowski
That sounds really cool. I love Craftsman style.
Skates
Yes. It’s really nice. I have pillars on that house that are real unique. They’re made out of coquina.
Dombrowski
Wow.
Skates
Yeah. My fireplace—the chimney is made out of coquina. And it’s much higher than the first floor. It goes up past the second floor, because the second floor is sitting kind of in the middle of the house. It’s really neat. You’ll have to come see me.
Dombrowski
This sounds like a real Florida house.
Skates It is a real Florida house. Yeah. For a good many years we didn’t have air conditioning, so we had what they called an “attic fan” that’s up in the second floor attic. When you turn it on and you open a window in each room, one window—it sucks the cool night air in and keeps the house cool. Only it slams doors, you have to be real careful, because doors get sucked. You get slamming doors all day. But it was neat. I don’t remember being miserable.
Dombrowski
Well, good.
Skates
I don’t remember being exactly hot. So it must have worked.
Dombrowski
Were you a member of the church since you moved here?
Skates
No. We were Lutheran when we first moved here. My sister and I had both been confirmed in the Lutheran Church in Philadelphia. And so I convinced my husband that he should join the Lutheran church, and so we went as a family until he left. And well, the kids were teenagers, and you know how hard it is to get teenagers to go to church. So I just decided that I had always loved the [Holy Cross] Episcopal Church, and I loved the architecture, and the history, and Jesus. I’m sorry, Jesus. I get carried away. But so we—my daughter and I, and my youngest son—all joined the Episcopal church. My two older sons were not interested. But they were grown by that time, and I didn’t feel like I could force them to do that. They had to want to do that. And I’m still a member.
But how I got the job as historian, I made the mistake of correcting someone. You know how when someone says, “Oh, it was 1873—2, or something?” I said, “No. it was ’73.” “We need a historian. You’re—you’re it. You’re going to do it.” [laughs].
Dombrowski
[laughs].
Skates
I said, Oh, my gosh. I should keep my mouth shut. [laughs].
Dombrowski
[laughs].
Skates
But I love it. I’ve been doing this since, um, [20]04.
Dombrowski
Wow. Okay.
Skates
Yeah. So the church, they said, had no written history. I’ve—I’ve found all kinds of stuff, so it’s—I’ve collected it. I’ve got it together. I write a news, uh, article each month for our church newsletter that goes out every month, telling, you know, whatever it is I found out recently about the church. And so it’s—it’s a good thing. I enjoy it.
Dombrowski
Could you speak a little about the church? When it was founded, you know?
Skates
Yes,. This was General [Henry Shelton] Sanford’s church. When General Sanford—Henry Sheldon Sanford—came to this area in 1870—probably 1870. It was after the Civil War, and he was trying, as a lot of—I don’t want to call them “carpetbaggers,” but some people do. A lot of people—wealthy northerners—came down and tried to make their fortune, or another fortune. He had been ambassador to Belgium. They called him a liaison. Liaison? That doesn’t sound right. Well, anyway, yeah. I guess he was. But he also was a spy for the Union Army during the war—the Civil War.
Dombrowski
Oh, my goodness.
Skates
And he was traveling around going to different foreign capitals, trying to get some of those countries to send ammunition and guns to the North. So there’s a whole big story that I haven’t even started on of his spying for the North. But when he finished up with that job—I guess he retired from that job, because he was probably in his 50s then, I think. He married a beautiful lady. She was living in Belgium, but she was from the United States. The Sanford Museum has a huge, gorgeous painting of the home they lived in, in Belgium. It looks like a small—like maybe the Queen might have had that summer home, or something. It was beautiful. We have friends in Sanford that have visited that area and that house, and they’re using that house as a retreat for nuns now. Anyway, General Henry Sanford—he became a general, because he gave some cannons to the state of Minnesota, because he wanted a title. So the Governor of Minnesota [Alexander Ramsey] made him a general.
So, anyway, let’s see. Let me get back to the church. So he bought a lot of land down on the lakefront. He was right for his time, that Sanford—and of course it wasn’t called Sanford in those days) —that this area, Mellonville, was going to be the “Gateway to South Florida.” Because all supplies—food, you know, everything that people need to start up a homestead—they would have to buy in Sanford. So he had a lumber mill. Somebody else had a grocery store. I mean they had all things people, you know, the pioneers, would need.
He bought orange trees from all over, and he planted orange trees. One of his groves—his first grove [St. Gertrude’s Grove] —was downtown right on the lakefront where there’s apartment buildings and city hall and things there now. Citrus didn’t do too well there. The soil apparently wasn’t good enough, and so they moved out to what he called Belair [Grove], and that’s out towards Lake Mary, around the lakes. So, his Belair Groves[sic] were very profitable.
About 1873, he decided that there needed to be a church. He and his wife, Gertrude [Dupuy Sanford]—now, Gertrude didn’t come here much, because this was not her cup of tea. And when you see pictures of her as a young girl, she’s absolutely beautiful. Beautiful clothes, and very high class. And they had about five children and they were all born in Europe. She didn’t come here often. But he planted Belair in orange and lemon trees. He had a grove manager whose name was Reverend Lyman Phelps. General Sanford was from Connecticut. And he convinced this Episcopal priest to come down to start a church. Well, he did, but he also made Lyman Phelps his agent and his farm grove manager, because the man had a background in botany too. The man was very, uh,—he was very versatile.
When, um—when General Sanford—I call him “General Sanford”. A lot of people say he—he doesn’t deserve that title, but it just comes easy to me, for some reason. It—it denotes a lot of the things that he did, other than just being Henry Sanford. Um, so they started to build this church, and Mrs. Sanford wrote to all of her wealthy friends, and in her letters, she said, “Please, um, help us build our dear little church.” And that was her—the way she called it—their “dear little church” in San—in—in this city. Someone, finally, along the line—a friend of his daughter—[inaudible] said—said, “Well, we should call this city ‘Sanford,’ after you, Mr. Sanford.” And Mr. Sanford said, “Ha. What a good idea.”
Dombrowski
[laughs].
Skates
[laughs]. And I don’t remember the years that that was—that was started. But, so anyway, by 1873, they had completed the church. Lyman Phelps and Reverend Holeman—H-O-L-E-M-A-N—um, were priests there. And they had, um, services that—these priests—I—when I read their—in the diocesan records, there’s—they had to keep records of what trips they went on and where they went. They rode horses, walked—horse and buggy—through Florida sand, which anybody that walks through it knows that—there was[sic] highways. The only way you went were by animal, you know, roads, where animals, or maybe the Indians, had made them. Um, they went to, um—but they went all over Central Florida. They went to Eustis, to Longwood, to Orlando. They started the St. Luke’s Church in Orlando, which is now the Cathedral [Church of St. Luke]. They went all over Central Florida, uh, especially Lyman Phelps. Um, But he—they were, um—it just amazes me, when I read their exploits, and the alligators…
Dombrowski
[laughs].
Skates
You know, the mosquitoes, the—oh, my soul. But, um, anyway, so that’s how the—the Episcopal church got its start. That church—that was built in 1873. 1880, along comes—and they called it a “tornado,” and I haven’t been able to say that it wasn’t, but I think it was more like a hurricane, and maybe a tornado—a tornado was [inaudible]. It blew down Mrs. Sanford’s dear little church.
Dombrowski
Oh.
Skates
And we have pictures of it. And the—the steeple is laying on the ground, and the church is still standing, but it’s—it’s—it’s damaged. So they got busy. Mrs. Sanford raised some more money, and by, um, 1880, they had built another—well, yeah. It was 1873. By 1880, the church blew down. By 1881, they had a new church built. That church survived until 1923, and it burned down.
Dombrowski
Oh.
Skates
So they—1924 and ’25, they rebuilt it. So the church standing on that property is still on the same property that Sanford gave us. That church now was built, uh, in 19—1924, it was completed. It’s, uh, what they call “Spanish Mediterranean” [Architecture]. It’s…
Dombrowski
Oh.
Skates
Very Spanish-looking. It’s a very pretty church.
Dombrowski
Where is it?
Skates
It’s on the corner of Fourth—Park Avenue and Fourth Street.
Dombrowski
Okay.
Skates
And the parish hall was built by 1926. So one of the things I always thought was interesting, when they first built—or probably the second church—in the side where they had some room, they put orange trees so that in case times were bad, they would have some money. They would have a way of getting money still.
Dombrowski
Aw.
Skates
That was kind of interesting.
Dombrowski
Um,I do have a question. I don’t know much about the church in Sanford. Is it the main church for the city? Are most of the people in Sanford Episcopalian?
Skates
No, no. They’re not. Probably back in the day, it was the only church, but then of course, the South is mostly Methodist and Baptist. And right now the street—Park Avenue should have been called “Church Street.” Because there’s the Episcopal—well, first, a block closer to the lake was the Congregational church. But since they’ve moved that—they tore it down and moved down Park Avenue. The next church was Holy Cross. Then, next door to us is the [First United] Methodist Church [of Sanford]. Right next door to that is the [First] Baptist Church [of Sanford].
So on Sunday mornings, we used to have a real traffic jam down there. Not so much anymore. No, Holy Cross—I think it’s like all the churches. They’re struggling. But we’re still here. We have two services, an 8 o’clock service and a 10 o’clock service. If we had everybody at 10 o’clock, we would have a good crowd. But when you separate it into two—the people who go at 8 o’clock won’t come at 10. The people who come at 10 o’clock won’t go at 8 o’clock. So our priest does two services. And yeah, it’s a busy little church. We have a fairly good-sized Sunday school, considering Sunday schools are hard for churches these days too. So, probably at one time it was the center of the area, church-wise, but not anymore.
Dombrowski
In your time as a historian there, have you—reading through the documents and that sort of thing, have you noticed any trends in how many members they had? Like when UCF came, did more people come to the church?
Skates
It was the biggest—the largest crowds that we have ever had was through the war years when we had a Navy base in Sanford. And that started up as a training base for carrier—for planes to land on carriers. I’m not as familiar with the history of the Navy base, but it closed at the end of World War II, and it was a big drop in the congregation. But then when [the] Korea[n War] came back, they started the base up again. And a lot of those people too have been Navy people—very sophisticated—have been all over the world. Lived in many different places.
So those are the people we seem to pull in more than the people that grew up here. Most Southern people are Baptist. My dad’s family—they were all Baptist. But it’s different. Different churches suit different people. I mean, you want whatever it is that makes you feel the presence, or that you feel that you need, that’s where you should be. So I’m very ecumenical. I can, um, belong to any church you want to [laughs]. But Holy Cross is lovely. And the services are beautiful [laughs].
Dombrowski
Uh, how involved has the church been in the community? Do they hold a lot of, have they held a lot of events?
Skates
Sanford—Holy Cross—was the “Guiding Light for Grace and Grits,” which is to feed the homeless. It’s a feeding program that we had at Holy Cross. And I can’t remember these years, it’s been going on for a long time. And we had it at Holy Cross. Every Wednesday night, Holy Cross would feed, oh, a hundred people. But it would depend on the season and what. Homeless people from all over. And not just men, but families. People would come to eat.
A few years ago, we wanted to remodel the parish hall, which is where the kitchen is. And we opted to find another place to hold the Wednesday night feedings—dinners, I should say—and that was—that was hard, because the people at the church—and we have some people who are so dedicated to this—they finally found that the City [of Sanford] would let them use the [Sanford] Civic Center. It costs, I think, $200 a month or something like that. We have to pay the City for that. So now they’re feeding them down there. And also, during the transition when the parish hall was being refurbished, and the kitchen was—when we had a new priest—he really has done a lot. I mean, he has Wednesday night services, and so they had a meal there on Wednesday nights, and classes and everything. So that kind of made them want to keep the “Grace and Grits” out there. And Holy Cross wasn’t the only one that does this. I must explain this. Every church—not every church, but many churches in Sanford—there’s a Methodist church, St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Lake Mary, the [All Souls] Catholic Church [of Sanford]. All of them.
Dombrowski
Just a minute here. Just to make sure.
Skates
All of them have people that come and help so we’re not doing it by ourselves. Did it run out of battery?
Dombrowski
No. It’s working. No. It’s working, I just wanted to make sure that the whole thing had recorded and everything. I’m sorry.
Skates
But anyway, it’s a whole city thing. There’s a whole lot of people involved in this. So, yeah. We do that. We also have our new priest—well at least not that new anymore. He’s been here 2 or 3 years, and he’s very much involved in helping the homeless. They call it “SACON[sp].” I couldn’t tell you what it stands for, but they go to different places in the neighborhoods and help homeless people get ID cards. Because if they don’t have an ID card, they can’t—well, there’s a lot of things they can’t do. They can’t even get shelter sometimes, if they’re going to shelters. So this has been a good thing. And helping—it’s helping the city to know what the population is of the homeless, and where they’re staying and what they’re doing. So that’s a good thing. He was just very much involved in that.
We have some kind of a health thing one day a week at Holy Cross in the mornings, where people can come. I’m not really sure what, I guess I shouldn’t say anything about it, because I’m not sure what that is. I don’t what the group is that’s doing it. But yeah, Holy Cross is involved.
Dombrowski
Uh, is there anything about the church that you’d like to discuss that we haven’t covered?
Skates
We have a lot of memorials in Holy Cross that I’ve been trying to—and this is a hard job. We actually have two memorial books that from the beginning people have—the gifts of love that they’ve given in memory of someone that they lost. But when I go to the memorial books, there are items in there that we no longer have. We’ve had a couple of break-ins over the years, so they’ve lost some things, and then there’s items that we have that aren’t listed. So we’ve endeavored to work on this. I was trying to take pictures and it’s just one other job that I haven’t finished. It takes a lot of time to do that. And I really—I could get help—old-timers, because I’m not an old-timer there. They’ll say, “Oh no, I remember that was given in memory of so-and-so.”
Right now, I’m working on—when the church was rebuilt in 1923-1924, the altar and the pulpit at the front was very plain. I can only tell from pictures, but unattractive. And in 1940, sometime, a member of the choir—and I’m still working on this. This is one of those strings you have to keep following and try to see if you can come to the end—was killed in an automobile accident. And he is—what’s the word? They have said that he had given in 1945 money to buy a new altar. A new altar, and reredos behind the altar, and an altar, and chairs. We have a lot of furniture, because it’s a very formal church. I don’t think you call it “High Episcopal.” I think some people might, but we have a good candelabra, good communion-ware. A lot of stuff. And anyway, this man—apparently there was a big brouhaha that the vestry wanted to put a new roof on the church, which is a tile roof—which always needs work—or to buy the altar furniture. And just recently I talked to a lady, who’s in a—a Heritage [at Lake Forest] nursing home out here, who was telling me about this. I didn’t know this story. And she said, “Oh, my goodness.” She said, “Everybody was fighting, and everybody was mad. They wanted the roof.” “No, no. We want the altar.” Well anyway, the altar people won out, because the priest wanted the altar…
Dombrowski
[laughs].
Skates
Redone [laughs]. So, uh—so I’m still working on that. And, as, uh, oral tradition says, that that money was used for the new altar-ware—altar and furniture, I should say—um, by this man, who gave it, But, um—in honor—in [inaudible] —yeah. In of our members who fought in World War II.
Dombrowski
Okay.
Skates
So I asked one of our older members if he remembers that. He says, “Oh yeah, there’s a plaque up there in the front of the church someplace that tells all the members that died. I’m sure it says something about ‘in memory of’ that.” Well, the plaque wasn’t there, so several ladies started on a search of the rooms, and they found the plaque. Only, it wasn’t a plaque. It’s a big framed picture with 70 names beautifully written by someone on there, with little gold stars next to five men who were killed during the war. But I still don’t know if it’s a memorial to them for the furniture. So I’m working on that, because I have the big memorial plaque reframed and I guess we’ll rededicate it one of these days when we find out what’s the story on it. But there’s things like that that come up when someone will say, “Well, who gave that baptismal font? What was that all about?”
Or, we have two things in the church—this is interesting—we have two things in the church that we know for certain were there in the first church. That General Sanford gave: a crucifixion picture that he had bought in Belgium and donated it to the church. That picture—and we were trying to get an idea of the value of it—and the man that we had restore it said, “It’s not worth a thing. All it’s worth is what it’s worth to the congregation. But as far as famous artist, no.” It’s the crucifixion. Even after it as restored, still doesn’t look very good. Because it went through the hurricane the first time. Through the fire the second time. Someone rescued it. So it has—the restorer said it has water damage. So that was something that we know General Sanford physically probably touched, and that it was there. The other thing is a small lectern, where they put the Bibles on, or the prayer book. And that’s in the chapel that was given by Reverend Lyman Phelps. We think he built it. He made it in memory of his wife. So that’s pretty interesting to have two things back a hundred and how many years—138 years or whatever it is.
Dombrowski
Oh. That’s very special.
Skates
Yeah. It is special. So it’s the history. I mean, I could go to any church. I love—just love churches. But I love the history of this church. It’s—and I’m sure that if I were in Philadelphia I’d go to Christ Church I went to Williamsburg [,Virginia][3]—my mother and I—we went to the—oh, what was the name of that Episcopal church[4] there? It’s so beautiful in Williamsburg.[5] Where Patrick Henry gave his speech.
Dombrowski
In Virginia?
Skates
In Virginia. That was—so it’s the ambiance. It’s what you feel. It’s very interesting. And I do get excited about it [laughs].
Dombrowski
I’m just going to check the battery one more time. Oh, it looks fine. Whoa. I didn’t notice the bars. They change as I talk and get closer. But the battery’s fine. Okay, great.
So, uh, you’re a historian there. It sounds like you do a bunch of different things.
Skates
I’m kind of a detective. There’s not a day goes—well, a day—there probably is. But not a week goes by that someone says, “Bette”—well somebody asked me the other day, “Isn’t our,”—we have a huge bell on the bell tower—“Isn’t that bell called ‘Raphael?’” I said, “No, I don’t think—that’s not the name of the bell.” And he said, “Oh, I’m pretty sure it is.” Well, now I have to figure it out. Is it or isn’t it? Or, people will say, “Well, where did the bell come from?”
Oh, and then we have this magnificent organ of Ferrante[sp] Brothers organ from—I can’t remember where it’s from. I want to say Canada, but I may be wrong. It was installed in 1947, and this is just a magnificent piece of furniture. Ferrante[sp] Brothers. I believe there’s another name that goes with that. I guess I can’t remember. But anyway, it doesn’t matter. This is not a test. That was put in in 1947, and I’ve forgotten how many pipes there are for it, but—oh, more than 100 pipes. There’s pipes and pipes. Pipes that you can see over the choir loft, but there’s also a whole closet full of pipes. Our organist—she knows how to play it. It’s just beautiful. So that was—I don’t know where the money for that came from. As far as that being a memorial, or something, I don’t know. I don’t think so. So many things are, but that’s not. But someone will say, “Well, what year was the organ installed?” Or, “Where did it come from?”
So I—yeah. I do. I have to have a little notebook in my pocketbook and I keep writing it down and then I have to go back and research it. And I have a lot of friends too that have been long, long-time members there, so I usually go to them and say, “Do you know anything about this?” And some of them will say, “No, I don’t know.” Or, “We’ll look it up.” But we have—and I’m trying to get all the histories together and put them in one place so it’s pretty organized. It’s fairly organized, but not as much as I would like to have it done. But I’ve saved all the newsletters[sic] columns that I’ve written over the years. I have them each in a different notebook with acid-free paper so after I type them I print them off and put them in the folders and so I’ve got all that. So that’s a pretty good history right there. It’s good. Did I answer the question? [laughs].
Dombrowski
Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Skates
Also, I must give credit to Alicia Clarke at the Sanford Museum. We have much help from her. And then some! Sorry.
Dombrowski
[laughs] No. I don’t mind at all. I know we’ve been talking for a long time now, but if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to find out more about what your time as an educator was like Seminole County.
Skates
Oh, I think I had the best 30 years that you could have had really, because it was—right now, I have friends, my neighbors. I have a lot of friends still teaching, and it’s very different now. It’s very different. We had—the wonderful thing we had that teachers today don’t have, and that’s freedom. You can’t say—if Johnny brings in a whole bag of shells that he had his mother just collected at the beach, we can’t dump those shells out and sit down and go through them and maybe catalog them or talk about them or what can we do with it. There’s no way of being spontaneous, because teachers today—if that child brought that in, I would have to say, “I’m sorry, you’re going to have to put that away. We don’t have time to look at that.” And that bothers me a lot. Because I really feel like the teachable moment is when the kid is interested. And if nobody is interested, then there’s no teachable moment.
It’s—when I was teaching at Idyllwilde [Elementary School] one year, the kids found a dead rabbit on the playground. I have a friend who had just moved here from Chicago[, Illinois], and she was working with me at the time. She was getting ready to take over half of my class, because I had 45 kids in my class. And they had hired her to take part of my kids. But she tells me about this every time she thinks about it. She said, “So, the kids wanted to know what to do with the rabbit.” And I said, “Well, we’re going to have to bury it. Let’s bury it.” So we got a shovel from the janitor and the boys dug a hole right outside the classroom door. And buried the rabbit. Well, they got to talking about what was going to happen to the rabbit in the ground. Well, of course the kids—and these were fourth and fifth graders—they would say, “Well, the bugs and the worms are going to eat him,” and so forth. So, just before school was out, the boy that dug the hole said, “Ms. Skates, can we dig that rabbit up? See what’s left? See if we can find his bones?” And I said, “Well, that’s a good idea. Let’s do it.” So we did. We couldn’t find it! This kid dug up a whole are as big as this table. Couldn’t find a thing left of the rabbit.
Dombrowski
Oh, my goodness.
Skates
But that sounds—and it would probably almost be silly to some educator—but those are things that—what did they learn? Well, we could put a whole bunch of things on the board. We learned this. We learned, you know—what is this? So, or you know—well like the space shuttle. We had classes when the Space Shuttle [Challenger] blew up. We all went outside on the playground to watch the space shuttle go up. And this was—what was this? [19]89?
Dombrowski
Oh, I have it here. No, I don’t.
Skates
But anyway, we were all out on the playground, watching, and we saw it went up, and we saw all these stars and everything. The kids were all saying, “Look at that. They’re putting out stars,” all kinds of things that kids would think of. And my fellow teacher was standing next to me, she said, “I think we ought to take the kids in.” I said, “Okay.” So we take the kids in. Well, she happened to have a little TV set in her closet. And we brought that out to see what had happened. And we could do that. You couldn’t do that today.
Dombrowski
That’s true.
Skates
She brought it out and we set that out between our two classrooms. We watched it all day long. The kids—it was very sad. We all were grieving. So we grieved together. So, what is this? How did this happen? All we could do was speculate. We didn’t know. But what would you, you know, you…
Well, first off, I think taking time outside would probably take time away from teaching about the FCAT [Florida’s Comprehensive Assessment Test].
Dombrowski
I was going to ask how you think the FCAT has influenced—okay.
Skates
You know, every week, teachers, back in the day—and I retired in [19]97. Every teacher gave a test at the end of the week. You would take your math book and go through—and everything that I had taught in math that week—the test would be on Friday. Same thing with spelling tests—on Friday. Social studies on Friday. And we did teach social studies. We did teach the Constitution. We did teach early American history. We did teach that. I think that, in fifth grade, we stopped at the Civil War, but that’s all we had time for. So, you gave the test. At the end of the week, you knew what the child had done. By the time you correct those papers, you knew that Johnny and Mary and Susie were having trouble with multiplication. So next week, let’s zero in on those three and their multiplication tables. How hard is that? I mean, why do we have to do what they’re doing now? I don’t understand.
Dombrowski
I don’t want to interject my opinion too much, but my mother teaches middle school. And so I’ve heard a lot about FCAT, and a great deal about how it’s changed. She used to teach in New York and it’s very different.
Skates
Oh, yes. I think, even now—well, this friend of mine that came down—she wasn’t a friend at the time, but now she’s my best friend—from Chicago, you know. She’d said, “Oh, my gosh. These schools—they’re so far behind! In Chicago in fifth grade, we were doing this.” And you know, well, it takes a long time. I mean, you know, the [Great] Depression hit the South harder. The agricultural society makes a difference. Kids are not—they may be working in the fields some. I mean not so much in my time, but it was just different. And it takes a long, you know—I think this a lot about even the ship of state, it takes a long time to turn a ship around. And it takes a long time to turn the education system around. It’s like it’s the biggest boat you ever saw and you’re just trying to turn it around and make things better. I think we’ve come a long way, but I think there probably still is a way to go.
But now we’ve got—it’s so muddled with this FCAT and this—pushing, pushing these kids. My grandson goes to a parochial school. Goes to St. Luke’s Lutheran Church School in Oviedo. He doesn’t have that stigma hanging over his head. He’s going in third grade. He loves school. He’s a good student. And he struggled to begin with. He had problems with his reading. But if he were in the public school, he would really be in trouble. First off, he’d be going into the third grade. You have to take the FCAT. If you don’t pass that, you have to repeat third grade. Well, his handwriting is very poor, what are you going to do about that? But the private school—they give them more time. They also give them more one-on-one situations. I don’t know. I’m just so that glad that his mother and father—my son and his wife—are so wise. And it’s a sacrifice. It’s a lot of money every month to keep him in private school. He’s their only child, which is a good thing. It’s tough. Your mother is right, and she’s right in the middle of that FCAT business in middle school.
Dombrowski
Uh, you mentioned the Challenger accident. Are there any other events that stick out in your mind, that you remember teaching or going through with your students?
Skates
What did we have? [John F.] Kennedy’s assassination didn’t affect me, but it did my children. They were in elementary school and Kennedy was assassinated—my two older ones. They were talking about this, not long ago, about the atomic bomb scare with the Cuban Missile Crisis. They were talking about the duck-and-cover. You know, an atomic bomb is blowing up over your state, and what do you tell the kids to do? You tell them to get under their desks and cover their head[sic]. That involved them. I wasn’t teaching in ’63. Let’s see, what else could there be? Thinking back to Kennedy, I can’t think of anything else.
Dombrowski
Okay. Did UCF opening or Cape Canaveral opening change…
Skates
It did. I think it changed. With the Cape, with Geneva—the school—when we started getting the influx of people moving to that area. The fathers were engineers and the moms worked, most of them, over there too. Those were great kids. I don’t know, maybe because the parents were involved in scientific things like the engineering and everything. Every couple years, it seems like they come up with something new. Your mother can relate to this too.
They taught us what they call the “New Math.” And I’d only been teaching a couple years and we had this great, and I still have the book—a great big blue book about New Math. Well first off, we were supposed to be teaching the metric system, and that was because of the engineering thing, I think. But they had—I remember one of the fathers was an engineer and he came to school and I was struggling as much as the kids were. They gave us the course in the summer and we were supposed to start teaching it in the fall. So I really didn’t—nobody had a chance. The father came in, he said, “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” Now, how do you talk to an engineer? And I was honest with him, “Well, yes. I do.” I said, “We had six weeks.” I think we had a course. And I said, “Not as much as I’ll know at the end of this year.” And he said, “Well, my son doesn’t know what the hell’s going on.” I said, “Well, I am really sorry.” But he was very nice about. But he really kind of put me on my toes. Which was a good thing. I’m glad he did. But by the end of the year, I even knew what prime numbers were [laughs].
Dombrowski
[laughs].
Skates
In fifth grade, you teach addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. I figured the fact that I could multiply and divide fractions—I was pretty smart [laughs].
Dombrowski
[laughs].
Skates
Don’t go beyond that. Oh dear.
Dombrowski
I just have a couple specific questions left. If you wouldn’t mind, just because it’s a personal history about you, what were the names of your children—are the names of your children?
Skates
Phillip, Pamela—well, he’s Jimmy. And the youngest is Bill. They all have their given names, but that’s what we call them. They were—Phillip was born in [19]5—he was born ’54. I have a nice little rubric here. Pam was born in ’56. Jimmy was born in ’58. And Bill was born in ’63. I think I was busy going to school there or something.
Dombrowski
Uh, where—which schools did you teach at? You taught at Geneva.
Skates
I taught at Geneva. That was my first assignment. Well, I went to Southside, which is a school in Sanford right near my home—was where I did my internship, and that’s where my kids went to school. And that’s an old—that was—when I bought my house, that was the best school in Sanford. And that’s the reason I bought that house. It’s now been turned into—what did they call it? A nursing home. Golden Years nursing home. It’s a lovely school. It’s built in a square and in the center is an atrium. And all the classrooms are built around the atrium. And down in the basement is the lunchroom, and up a little flight of stairs in the auditorium. It was a very nice plan for a school, but it’s a nice plan for a nursing home, I guess. But they closed the school, because they built new schools and whatever. But my kids got to go through that, which I was glad for that. At least the two oldest ones did. And then the other two came with me to Geneva. What was the question?
Dombrowski
Oh. Which schools have you taught at?
Skates
Oh, and then I went, I was at Goldsboro [Elementary School. This was a good thing. When I left Geneva, and I had gotten my Master’s in Exceptional Education, and I wanted to teach learning disabled children. And the principal at Geneva, for his own reasons, said he wasn’t going to have a special ed[ucation] class. Well, it wasn’t true, but that’s what he told me. So I had this Pell Grant that I had used to get my Master’s, that if I taught at a [Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965] Title I school, which I don’t know if you know that means now, but it was a school that had more free lunches than any other school or something like that. So the principal at Goldsboro called me and he said, “If you come and teach the learning disabled children at Goldsboro,” he said, “I can sign off on your student loan.” So I spent two years there and signed off all that my Master’s cost me. I mean, I had not paid for—he would sign off the loans—the superintendent would sign it off…
Dombrowski
So they would pay for it.
Skates
So they paid for it. So that was very good. I don’t know if that’s what you call a Pell Grant. I’ve forgotten. But I taught there two years and then the principal from Idyllwilde called and said they had a new wing opening up. They call it the E Wing—Exceptional Ed. Wing. And would I come out and do their SLD [Specific Learning Disabilities] classes. I said, “Oh, yes.” So that’s where I was when I retired.
Dombrowski
Okay.
Skates
That was good. I—those were good years. They were all good years.
Dombrowski
Well, good.Those are all the questions and topics that I have. Is there anything else you’d like to speak to that we haven’t?
Skates
I don’t know. I think I’m probably boring you.
Dombrowski
[laughs] Well, no. This is a good time.
Skates
Now, how are they going to work this? Are they going to have a library?
Dombrowski
Yeah, I think I’ll just…
Skates
Right.
Thompson
So, if you would like to give us the story of how you got to Sanford.
Lee
I was born here.
Thompson
How did your oldest relative get to Sanford?
Lee
My grandmother, after my grandfather died in Mount Olive, North Carolina—she had four girls and two boys. And Mr. Nathan Garner from Sanford was a friend, and he was visiting when my grandfather died. And he had a grocery store down here, so my grandmother bought half interest, and they came in 1910. My oldest aunt didn’t come, but then the next one, Aunt Marty [Roberts]—she came and she roomed at Miss Bessie Long’s. Do you know Miss Bessie Long? Her house was on [North] Oak Avenue right across from the park. The Higgins’ house was next door and Aunt Marty roomed there.
And my uncle roomed in Captain Mark’s house which was on [East] Third [Street] and [South] Palmetto [Avenue]. They had the grocery store on First Street. And then Mr. Garner’s son didn’t want to be in the grocery store, so Uncle James [Roberts] bought him out and changed the name to Roberts’ Grocery.
Mother was in the first class to graduate from Sanford High [School] in 1913. And I graduated in 1942 and my children graduated in the [19]60s. and then my grandson graduated, so there were four generations that graduated. They changed the name from Sanford High to Seminole High [School]. That’s how we got here.
Thompson
Now did you work in the store?
Lee
No. I never worked, except at home. Right after I got out of high school, I worked at the ice plant[1] for a while, but I didn’t work there too long. I got married. James [Lee] went to Stetson [University]. He got back from the [United States] Army in December 1945. Our first son was born in DeLand, when he was going to Stetson.
Donaldson
How did you meet?
Lee
His sister lived in Palmetto, right behind us. And she was a friend of Mama’s. When he came back from the war, I met him and it worked.
Thompson
How long have you lived in this house?
Lee
Mom and Daddy built it when I was three years old, but I just lived here ‘til I was married. And then James and I—after Mama died, we owned the house over on [West] 15th [Street] and [South] Oak and that’s where we raised our children. After Mama died, we moved back here. I’ve been here ever since. This house was built in 1926. It’s 85. It’s younger than me [laughs].
Thompson
Well, it isn’t holding up as well as you.
Lee
It might be doing better [laughs].
Donaldson
So how long did y’all go steady before you got married?
Lee
From December ’45 to September ’46. You know, he had been overseas for three years. He was ready to live [laughs]. Go to school and have a family. I was too.
Thompson
When you live through such a traumatic thing as the [World] War [II], you learn what’s important. Was he in the Pacific [Theater]?
Lee
India and China. He was over there, and my brother was in the Pacific too. Then when the Second World War started, my daddy was the shop superintendent of the Crown Paper Company, when they used to print all the paper that they used to wrap all the oranges in. and then when the war started in ’42, they asked for all scrap metal to be sent back. And Daddy was in the [American] Legion [Campbell-Lossing Post 53]. And there was a cannon in front, and Daddy helped dismantle it, and that’s when he got spoke[sic] to make my rolling pin with.
See, I graduated in ’42, and that’s when you always got a hope chest [laughs]. And mother was crocheting me a bedspread. Since Mama was making the bedspread, Daddy wanted to make something to go in my hope chest, so he had that spoke so—and they had a shop in the Crown Paper Company, so he could make my rolling pin.
Thompson
So your daddy made that rolling pin? Is it signed?
Lee
No. I wanted to get a picture of the cannon, and I had a hard time. But I went down to the museum, and I started finding things, and I’ve got quite a bit of information on it.
Thompson
Did they turn that cannon in during World War II for the metal?
Lee
Yeah. For the metal and it had been used in the First World War and they put it in front of the [Legion] Hut when they built it.
Thompson
Well, tell me how your father got involved in the legal system—in the jails, corrections…
Lee
Well, it was my husband. Well, he graduated from Stetson with a business degree, but then he went to Rollins [College] and got a Master’s [degree] in Criminal Justice. When he was in the Army, he was in the military police and was interested in all that. When the Parole Commission advertised for people, he applied, took the test, and passed, and was hired. Then we went to Orlando for a little while. And then when an opening came in Sanford, he wanted to raise our family here, so we came here and then he was with the state for 32 years.
Thompson
Did he ever have any parolee problems—coming to the house?
Lee
No. My husband was very good. People liked him. I remember after he was retired, and we were living here, we wanted to put a fence down the side in between the houses. And they said we couldn’t put a chain-link fence, and he went down and talked to somebody, and he said, “Well, you know, we wouldn’t put just an old chain-link fence. we’d put a green one down. We could put a barbed wire one down. It’s not prohibited.” The man said, “What?” And he said, “Yeah. I looked it up.” We got our fence [laughs]. It’s a nice fence. In fact, the people that live there, when they came home, they didn’t even notice it, ‘cause it was green and it was pretty, you know.
Anyway, the head of one of the departments said, “Mr. Lee, you don’t recognize me do you?” And James said, “No. I’m sorry. Should I know you?” And he said, “Well, I’m one of your success stories, and you told me…” He was very young. “I should think about what I wanted to be and start working toward it, and then try to get an education and become that. and here I am. I’m the head of the department.” I don’t know what department it was or anything, but he came home and said, “You know, I didn’t recognize—he’s a man now. He was a boy then. That was great.”
And another time—this was funny—is when the post office was Downtown. I still call it the post office. Not the one on Lakefront. the one on First Street.
Thompson
Where the Historic [Sanford] Welcome Center is now. Okay.
Lee
He came out to the car and he had the funniest look on his face. and I said, “What’s the matter?” He said, “I just got a Father’s Day card from this elderly man that was so old, he didn’t have his regular birthday. So Daddy figured out and got him a birthday…” And he said, “This is your birthday.” So he sent Daddy a Father’s Day card [laughs]. He had a lot of stories. I don’t remember too many of them, but he did have a lot. He said he was going to write a book after he retired, but he never had time.
Donaldson
Now how many kids do you have?
Lee
Three. Cathy [Lee Dingle], Linda [Lee Maliczowski], and Jimmy [Lee]. They were all under three—we had one, two, three. He retired and we’ve enjoyed it. And then he got sick, but everything’s okay.
Donaldson
How many grandkids do you have?
Lee
Well, we have five now. And then we had four great grandchildren. And when we add the in-laws, including me, there’s 18 of us. You know, it multiplies.
Donaldson
And do you get together?
Lee
Yeah. Maybe we don’t get all together at the same time. But Mendelson’s getting married, but it’ll be about a year. He just got engaged. He’s a nurse at the Florida Memorial [Medical Center] hospital in Daytona [Beach]. They grew up so fast. I’ve had several parties here in the yard, and she wants to have an engagement party in the yard now. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, [inaudible] Sawyer’s had a pasture out. And they had horses in it, but the horses were not where they had the parties. but they had what we call “pasture parties.”
Donaldson
Mm-hmm, I went to them.
Lee
You did? Wonderful. Anyway, it was a lot of fun. But then we all got old—they don’t have pasture parties after you get old.
Thompson
Describe a pasture party. What is a pasture party?
Lee
Well, it was a pasture. And then Blake [Jones]—Joyce’s husband—he had a grill out there and a real small trailer and electricity. And he built picnic tables and a thing over it, and had a shed that he could keep chairs in. and when we went, we all took something—potluck. The men would cook on the grill and it was a lot of fun.
Thompson
Did people ride horses or did you play games?
Lee
No. The kids—but I’m talking about the old folks. We didn’t ride horses. We just talked and laughed and had a good time. Then we lost quite a few. And last summer, we lost a couple: Elizabeth Steele and Joyce Adams Jones. And I thought it would be a lot of fun to get all the old people back together, so I had a backyard pasture party. But I didn’t want anybody bringing potluck, so I had [inaudible] catering. I said, “We’re too old to try to cook and bring things.” We took a lot of pictures. we really had a good time.
Thompson
When you had these, was it for Fourth of July or Memorial Day or things like that or spontaneous?
Lee
Spontaneous. It was always on the weekend, because some people were still working. and it was a lot of fun. I had pictures of when we were young and we took pictures at the backyard party.
Thompson
Have you all followed the tradition?
Dingle
Well, she had one here in her yard recently.
Lee
It was in November. And now they’re all saying, “When are you having the next one?” Well, our helpers had to get over the last one, because I couldn’t do that much they were having to do it.
Thompson
So it’s gone down to another generation. The leaders of the pasture party.
Lee
Anyway, those of us that were in it had a wonderful time. Benny and Louis Austin, Gladys and Doug Stenstrom, Joyce and Blake, of course. And Margie and Leo [inaudible], and [inaudible] and Charlie Smith. Ken and Mary McIntosh were here. Paddy [inaudible], Dr. Bill White. Even when James and I were at the beach and they had a condo[minium], and upstairs they had a meeting room. I called all the folks and said, “I’m having a beach pasture party.” so for a couple of years, we had a beach pasture party [laughs]. They’d all come over to the beach and go up to the 7th floor…
Thompson
It sounds to me like you’re the social director of the group.
Lee
No. I really wasn’t. But I did have the extra parties where everybody came and brought something. but Joyce and Blake and Margie really started it. They had the real pasture. I never had a real pasture. Did it in the backyard or the beach. It was Benny[?] and Phil Logan and…
Thompson
All of these people that you’re naming—when your husband—when you were in Orlando, and he said, “I want us to move to Sanford and raise a family here,” were all his friends here? What is Sanford to you all?
Lee
Sanford’s home. We grew up here, we went to school here, and most of these people we went to school with.
Thompson
And did they leave and come back also?
Lee
Some of them left and came back. Now, James and I weren’t gone long. We were at Stetson for three years and then…
Dingle
I was in the third grade when we came back here. I was eight. We were probably gone 10 or 11 years.
Lee
But we were always coming back. You know, Mother and Daddy were right here in this house, so we were here a lot—most every week. And never felt like we had gone away. He did want to live here and raise our children.
Thompson
How many people were in Sanford when you came back? When I opened my restaurant in 1981 there were 20,000.
Dingle
Really, just 20,000?
Lee
That’s a lot more people.
Thompson
But it still has that small-town feel to me. The people we’ve talked to—I’m trying to get that feel of what was Sanford that brought everybody here.
Lee
Well, like Margie and Leo [inaudible]. He was in the Navy. They were gone a long time, but then they came back. but then a lot of people stayed anyway. Joyce and Blake went to California, but then they came back.
Dingle
I think, as time goes on, when you’re younger, you want to leave and go to another town. And then you go to some big place and it’s not very friendly and a lot harder to get around. and you feel uncomfortable and you say, “Sanford wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. Let’s go home.”
Lee
And you know everybody. Sometimes I go to town and I don’t know anybody and that feels funny. Our group—all of us—us pasture parties—we get together all the time.
Thompson
Gladys moved to Jacksonville, right? Does she ever get back down?
Lee
Yeah. She comes down. Of course, she came down when Ralph [inaudible] died. He’s her cousin. She’s coming down in April. Joyce and I have a birthday party for about four of us, but we couldn’t do it this time. But we’re going to do it—I think George said we were going to do it in June. Gladys couldn’t come for a while. She was sick, but she’s okay now. and we’re going to have a belated birthday party for Linda Roth. Linda Roth was a pasture girl [laughs]. Linda is Leroy Roth’s wife. They were pasture party people. Linda has moved down to where her daughter lives, but she’s coming back.
Dingle
She just moved right before Christmas right?
Lee
Yeah. It’s hard to believe she’s not sitting in church every Sunday. She’s going to church down there.
Thompson
Now, your kids were too young to have gone through integration of…
Dingle
We were the class. Ingrid was the first person to be integrated, and she was in our class—Ingrid Burton. We were in junior high school. I remember pulling her across the street. she did not want to come. She was the only—in that whole school. We were upstairs in science class looking out the window, and they were pretty much pulling her across the street—her parents. She was the one they chose to be integrated. I’m sure she was very smart. She’s a schoolteacher out in Lake Mary. She came back here. There were only several black kids in our graduating class. Maybe about five or six in the whole class, I believe.
Thompson
Of high school?
Dingle
Of the class of ’68. There weren’t that many.
Donaldson
Because integration was ’71. Forced integration was ’71.
Dingle
It was either 8th or 9th grade when she came. so she was with us for about five years.
I was on the yearbook staff and I was the editor my senior year. I don’t think there was a black in the senior class, because integration started in my class. Henry June—I remember him.
Lee
That must have been hard for those children.
Dingle
Ronald Thomas—I didn’t know him. At least Henry had someone. There were only two black students in the senior class of ’67.
Thompson
Did you have any black friends or know any blacks?
Lee
No. see, at that time, my mother always had help. We always had maids. And as I had my children, I had Ines. She worked for me for 25 years. We’re still friends. I send her a birthday card with a check and a Christmas card, and she calls me. When I lost James, she came here and she came to his funeral.
Thompson
And you didn’t have any of the prejudice? That is wonderful. With what we’re going through now,[2] there’s a lot of talk.
Lee
And see, to me, that’s not Sanford. I feel terrible that they are misrepresenting things, and they’re not telling the truth about Sanford, because I had never known that. When Charles and I were little…
Dingle
There were eight in our junior class. That’s Ingrid. I don’t know if they all stayed and graduated, but Viola Jordan—we were in PE [physical education] together.
Lee
My brother was two years younger than me, and he’s been gone 20 years. But Mama had—and he loved old Catherine, and she used to take him down to the lakefront to fish before he ever started to school. We were close to those that were there and worked for us.
Thompson
Where did they live?
Lee
They lived either in Georgetown or Goldsboro[?]. Now, when Aunt Ruth lived on Second and [inaudible], there was a two-story house. I don’t remember why it was built. It was used—downstairs had been for the wash. And then there was the upstairs that we had as a playroom. But then later, when we were in high school, Aunt Ruth had a maid that lived downstairs. It wasn’t like that movie—I haven’t seen it but…
Thompson
The Help?
Lee
Yeah. I haven’t seen it, but Cathy saw it. She said that somebody asked her if she knew anything like that, and she said she never knew anything like that in Sanford. We didn’t.
Donaldson
It wasn’t an accurate portrayal is what I heard.
Thompson
It was in some areas.
Lee
See, we’re not Mississippi or Alabama.
Thompson
You go to Mississippi, you go to Alabama—this is your story. But my mother’s from Mississippi, and her mother had a boarding house. And they had black maids that came in, and they literally lived in shotgun houses. You could shoot a gun straight through the house and go out the back door. Lived across the tracks. Absolutely, there was the line. That was very much in the small town of Mississippi, when I was a child. It was absolutely amazing to me, because I was a Navy brat. Born in the Dominican Republic. The only white child anywhere around and lived in California and New York. You know, very cosmopolitan compared to Mississippi. Yeah. but in Tennessee, we didn’t have that at all.
Lee
Cathy said that. She saw it with some of her friends and she said, “Was it like that in Sanford?” She said, “No.”
Dingle
Like what? Drinking in bathrooms?
Thompson
Separate bathrooms and drinking fountains.
Dingle
Well, I remember as a kid in Orlando going to Sears[, Roebuck & Company] through the back door. We would park in one parking lot, and go back and there was a water fountain. one was black and one was white.
Lee
I do remember water fountains.
Dingle
They called it “colored” then. I remember we’d go in there, there’d be nobody there, and there’d be three of us and we all wanted a drink of water. And we were wanting to go over there and we were told that we couldn’t go over there. that that wasn’t our fountain. And I remember going, “But why not?”
Thompson
Did they have a fountain guard?
Dingle
We were just told not to use that. “Here. this is yours.” “But there’s three of us and I want a drink.”
Lee
I do remember it was separate there, but not in homes. You had a maid. She used your bathroom.
Thompson
And of course, I guess you didn’t notice that they wouldn’t be in touch at drug stores. They couldn’t come through the front door. They had to go to the back door to get their prescriptions.
Lee
I didn’t know that. No.
Thompson
They wouldn’t let them. They wouldn’t serve them if they came in through the front door.
Dingle
I do remember that they had their own entrance in the movie theater. There was a wall. There was the downstairs part and then the balcony had a wall in between, and on one side, it was this section, and on the other, there was a door, and that’s where the blacks would come in. The theater was divided. We thought that was so weird.
Thompson
We never had that.
Donaldson
Well, you see, this is what she and I were talking about. So many people were saying, “It just didn’t seem right.” and it seemed like such an injustice. How did it last so long? And how were there that many people who thought it was the right thing to do if everybody I meet says, “I felt like it was an injustice”?
Dingle
It’s just like when any law is made. It’s easy to make the law, but it’s hard to change it. These were laws. It was just, “Put the wall up.”
Thompson
Really and truly, I’m going to give us the credit for it, because I think men would just go along. And I think the women finally stood up and said, “I want my friend to be here.” We weren’t the militant—we were quiet and easing into it. The men were militant.
With everything that’s going on right now, we’re seeing more openness. We’re seeing more blacks downtown. We’re seeing more people speaking to each other. I was at the post office—the guy in front of me was black. The person behind me was black. They all looked me in the eye and smiled at me. Said, “Hello.” and I said, “Hello” back. I don’t know if they wouldn’t have at another time or maybe I’m more sensitive to it now, because of what’s happened.
Now, let’s go to the past a little bit. Can you tell about being in the [inaudible] Club?
Lee
Well, I wasn’t in the [inaudible] Club. I was just there. Gladys invited us. I took my picture with them, but I wasn’t one of them as a youngster. I think they were younger than me. Gladys was younger. I think Gladys was 12 years younger than Florence [Stenstrom], Violet, and me.
Thompson
Now was Florence Doug’s first wife?
Lee
Yes. And they were the first pasture party people. After she died, he married Patty [Stenstrom] and she was a pasture party person.
Donaldson
Which grade school did you go to?
Lee
I went to Southside Grammar School, junior high, and then high school.
Donaldson
Break that up. How many years did you go to Southside?
Lee
Four years—two. Junior high was two and high school was four years.
Donaldson
Who was your first grade teacher? I’m just curious, because my dad and I had the same one.
Lee
At the time, she was Ms. Chapman, but then she got married and she was Mrs. [inaudible], and they belong to our church too. When we moved back over here, she was substituting. She had a kindergarten, and the children would stay with Mama, and Mrs. [inaudible] would let them come and stay in her kindergarten. It didn’t matter if they were students or not. She loved us.
Thompson
Can you think of the scariest time you ever had? Gladys tells the story of how frightened she got when she saw the Ku Klux Klan on the corner of Melonville [Avenue].
Lee
I remember one time, Jimmy was sick. They had to do a bone marrow—I remember Cathy went with me. Cathy always wanted to be a doctor. She’d even keep her eyes open whenever the doctor would do something to her. I’d always close my eyes. I remember that I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t say anything. I remember I was listening—that they were saying that they had to do the bone marrow test. and after they did it, it was alright. His white blood count was normal in the bone marrow test. I remember being scared then.
I wasn’t scared when I had the kids. Of course, I was awake when Cathy was born, because all three were Caesarian [sections]. But hers had gone too far, so they had a tent in front of me, and the doctor asked me, “Do you feel that?” And I said, “Yes. it feels like you’re running a pen down my tummy.” When I heard her cry, he started doing something and I said, “Are you getting another one?” This was 67 years ago. I didn’t know anything back then. He said, “No. it just takes longer to sew you up than to cut you open.” I can remember all that very plainly. I always thought everything was going to be alright.
Thompson
What’s your happiest memory? What memories always make you feel great?
Lee
Getting married, having all my children, moving back to Sanford. I was thrilled. And buying that house over on 15th Street. The dining room was fantastic. It had beamed ceilings, and stained-glass windows, and a built in buffet all the way around it. The floor was striped—dark wood, black and gold.
Thompson
Like inlaid wood? Oh, man.
Lee
And I remember James said, “Honey, we can’t heat this house.” It had 12-foot ceilings, you know. And I said, “Honey, that’s alright. I’ll put my coat on and I’ll go sit in the dining room and say, ‘This is why we bought the house.’” That was a happy time.
Thompson
And how long did you live there?
Lee
Well, honey, it felt like I lived there longer. It was just 18 years, but the kids all went to school and college, the girls got married, I lost Mom and Daddy. You know, so much happened. I’ve been here since ’79.
Dingle
It was ’78 or ’79, because I got married in ’76. and then we bought the house from them when they moved back here. We sold the house about eight years ago.
Lee
You see, they had it for longer than we did, but it seemed like we lived there longer, because so much happened. It just seemed like I’ve been here since then, and I’ve had all the grandchildren, but of course, we had grandchildren over there. You lived there like 27 years.
Dingle
And before that.
Lee
And you lived there before that, because you grew up there.
Thompson
And did you love the dining room just as much?
Dingle
Oh, yeah. It was a great house. It was huge though. I have a son and he is now 23, and he was a big person. And we were gone all the time. Because of baseball and all these things and it was just too big of a house to take care of, and we decided it was time to find a smaller place.
Lee
You see, I was there all the time, and all the neighbor kids were there and my kids too. I had Ines. she worked.
Dingle
And when Joshie [Dingle] was little, there weren’t any kids in the neighborhood. We had to import them.
Lee
If they ever put it on the [Sanford Holiday] Tour [of Historic Homes], y’all should go. I can’t go back. I just don’t want to see it again.
Dingle
She means since it’s not in the family anymore. It’s a beautiful house, and they’ve done a lot of work since they got it.
Lee
It was 14 rooms and look how many outside doors. If I was there by myself, I could not live there by myself, like I can here.
Dingle
I can. It was easy.
Lee
I remember when James and I wanted to move back here, Linda said, “If you ever sell this place, I go with the house.” I remember her saying that.
Dingle
So I bought the house instead. I always said the house had a protective blanket over it. It was protected.
Thompson
It just felt that way.
Dingle
I could walk through the house blindfolded. I would walk through it in the dark with no problem. I knew where I was going. When the tornado hit here, I was out of town when it happened, and Daddy called me from here. I was visiting a friend in Washington, and Daddy said, “You need to come home. The tornado came.” that was when Sarah [Dingle] was born, or about 35 years ago.
Thompson
Would this be in ’83? The real bad hailstorm…
Donaldson
The hailstorm was in ’83. The tornado was in the ‘90s.
Lee
The tornado was later.
Thompson
I think they were at the same time, because I was looking at the sky and it was green.
Dingle
It was a hailstorm, but it was also a tornado.
Lee
It went all the way around the house, because we had to have all the windows and screens replaced.
Dingle
Yeah, but that was here. Over there, we went back and nothing, except some of the roof, was—a friend of mine, Cindy, was staying in the house when I was gone, and she left work. She said she drove home and there was stuff all over the place. it had been getting bad. She thought, “Man, I’ve got to get in that house all by myself and it’s dark.” She first went in and didn’t try to turn the lights on, because she knew there wouldn’t be any. and then she walked in the room and forgot and turned the light on and they were all on. We didn’t lose power. we didn’t lose anything.
Donaldson
And that’s Cindy Slaten Lee.
Thompson
What about the hurricanes? Were you living in that house when they had the four…
Dingle
I remember living there during Hurricane Donna. That was when we were kids. I was living there when—I remember that I cooked everything in my freezer, because I was afraid it was going to go bad, because we were going to lose power. and then it didn’t go bad and I had to have all these people over to eat all the food. I remember that was the only time we boarded windows, because we always taped windows. But it was supposed to be bad, and that house is three feet off the ground and then the windows are humongous. we went and got plywood and boarded up that house. It was just me and my husband, and I was there holding the boards, and then the hurricane never came. But I would rather be prepared. I was in the other house when the other four came. They weren’t fun.
Lee
But, you see, in this house, the worst we had was when there was a hailstorm and it went all around the house. When it comes to hurricanes, I never worried. This is a well-built house.
Dingle
I made her come to my house during those four hurricanes, and the next time, she said, “I’ll stay home. You have to come to my house next time.”
Lee
You know, when I was little, I remember telling Daddy, “I’m scared somebody will come.” And my Daddy would say, “Honey, don’t worry. If anybody comes, as soon as morning comes, and they see you, they’ll bring you right back.”
Donaldson
Tell her the story about the pond.
Lee
Well, my Daddy built the pond in the ‘30s. My mama wanted it, and we went to Daytona and got the Kokino[sp] rock, and it’s still there around the pond. Heidi has to take care of it by herself. She’s got three lots. I’ve just got two. She comes over and takes care of my pond. It’s got fish, water lilies, and I’ve got stuff blooming in the pond. In the early ‘30s, you might find more ponds around. They were popular. People liked to have them. Mama’s fish were tame. Mine aren’t tame. Mama could put her finger in the water and wiggle it and the fish would come. When I come by the pond, mine hide.
Dingle
Well, maybe because they think that you’re going to eat them like the owl did. Heidi has an owl that lives in her backyard and he’s eaten some of the fish.
Lee
It’s a natural habitat over there. It’s a shame she isn’t really out in the woods, you know. She’s got a plaque from the state that says her backyard is a habitat.
Calvert
My middle name is Calvert, which is my mother’s last name, and she and I are related to the Virginia Calvert, and that goes all the way back to Lord Baltimore.[1] The first one was George [Calvert] and the second was Charles [Calvert]. Anyway, one of my crazy relatives tried to sue the City of Baltimore, claiming the land was his. Needless—he didn’t get very far, and of course, there was a Calvert whiskey at one time, and they have one of these genealogy books—it’s an advertisement—and they got up to my mother and me, and they didn’t carry it on any further, so I stopped drinking their dang whiskey.
Phyllis
You never did anyway.
Calvert
But that’s my story. I’m going to stick to it.
Thompson
Well now, Lord Baltimore came from England, but Calvert whiskey—I thought that was scotch?
Calvert
No, it was a blended one made by a Canadian.
Thompson
So your family is English?
Calvert
All English.
Thompson
So how’d you get to Sanford?
Calvert
I’m in the engineering business and we came down here. One of the senior partners, Just Deets[sp], visited a Northern client of ours in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, by the name of Cecil Osier, and we had done work for Cecil up there doing developments, and he was down here building a bunch of manufactured homes that don’t look very nice, but they’re over on Summerlin [Avenue] around there—those little box homes? And Deets stopped by to see him, and he told Deets that the city didn’t have a sewage plant at the time, and he said that they were going to interview for an engineer to design the sewage plant and that we should apply, and so Deets went down and met old Leffler and Busch[sp] —two of the old families in Sanford—and they were in a partnership. Busch later became [inaudible] engineer.
Thompson
Leffler—was that the Judge [Kenneth Murrell] Leffler?
Calvert
It was his brother. His older brother was an engineer. We formed a partnership with them, and I was sent down here to do the inspection. Decided I liked the place and came down and started an office. Over the years, that turned into what now is CPH—Conklin, Porter, [&] Holmes [Engineers, Inc.].
Phyllis
And when he came down to inspect this sewage plant, we had gone down to my grandmother’s in Southern Florida…
Calvert
I came in 1963.
Phyllis
My son is fourth generation Floridian. I was born in Florida. My dad came down here to help build houses back up after the 1928 hurricane, so he met my mother and they got married and had me, and then I was only here six months, but I lived up North about 35-40 years.
Thompson
Where was your home up North?
Phyllis
In Southern Illinois.
Thompson
And that’s where you came from too?
Calvert
No, I came from Northern Illinois—outside Chicago.
Phyllis
And we met at the University of Illinois.
Calvert
I came home from [the] Korea[n War] and went back to school working on a Doctor’s degree, and went to a church service—a social event—and met her there, and that’s how…
Phyllis
Immediately, we knew we were for each other [laughs].
Calvert
That was a long time ago. We were married 55 years ago.
Thompson
So how did you know right away that he was the one?
Phyllis
Well, he looked good and he had a graduate degree, and I decided—and he was a Christian. I thought he was, and he was, because we met in a Presbyterian church there on campus, and I just thought, “That’s the right one.” I don’t know what he thought, but anyway, we got married.
Calvert
The program that evening was on Korea, and of course, I knew much about that.
Phyllis
So he was sitting there by me telling me all of this stuff about Korea and I thought, “Oh, this man sounds so fascinating.” [laughs] So we married and lived up there about seven or eight years, and then he came down and we said, “Let’s go visit grandmother.” And he had never been to Florida and he said, “Oh, this weather is so nice down here. I wish we could start a branch office down here.” and that’s what he told the firm up North and they said, “Yes, go down and start it.” So he did.
Calvert
I was general manager up there.
Phyllis
Here, he was in business with William Leffler for a short period of time, and then William decided that he didn’t want to be in engineering. Very bright, bright man, but he decided he wanted to go back and farm or have his properties out near Osteen or something like that, but the amazing story is that we came here right about when integration was starting in the schools in the early Sixties and William…
Calvert
I got somewhat discouraged by the situations and decided that even though I had a good client base, that I wanted to go back up North, and I went back to see if I could get my old job back and the company said “Yes.” But in the meantime, the city manager and Lee Moore called up there and said, “We don’t want you to leave.” And they said, “If you come back, we’ll let you design a marina for us.”
Phyllis
So he designed the marina and it was built in ’67, and the amazing part about that was that, at that time, you could dredge part of the stuff up from the lake and make the 13 acres of ground that the hotels and stuff are sitting on. Today, you could not do that. They would not let you dredge up and put more land…
Thompson
So you deepened the lake by taking the…
Calvert
Dredged it up and built an isle, and then the roadway and all to it and I designed the dry storage building out there and the docks—the whole thing. That was a long time ago.
Thompson
Well, we’ve had a lot of stories about what happened in integration and what the situation was with the blacks—what happened?
Calvert
Well, I was with William Leffler, and we were going to Eustis and he had—well anyway, we got shot at by a bunch of black folks. He had a citizens’ white council…
Phyllis
He belonged to the White Citizens’ Council, which is the KKK [Ku Klux Klan].
Calvert
No, no. They are two different organizations. He belonged to both, and a car pulled alongside of us and somebody pulled out a gun and shot at us, and we chased them—of all things. I didn’t have any interest in that. I was in Jim Spencer’s—the bar—when the first blacks came in there, and that was something.
Thompson
How did that happen?
Calvert
Many of the regular customers got up and left, and they were ignored for a considerable period of time, and they just sat there and waited, and finally the owner did go and asked them what they wanted. It was a very awkward situation, but they did get served. Most of the customers left.
Phyllis
At that time they were trying to integrate the schools here and William Leffler had a…
Calvert
Honey, let’s not get into that.
Phyllis
Well, anyway—it was in Time magazine.
Thompson
It’s history.
Calvert
Well, first I had an experience. Our son was a gifted student up North and we got down here—that was one of the disappointments. The schools here weren’t anywhere near as good as the Northern ones and he was in a gifted class up there, and I noticed that the textbooks said, “For average and below students.” That bothered me badly, because he wasn’t average or below. So I went in to see the superintendent of the schools and said, “How do you expect to raise that level if you keep teaching for average and below?” And it was Ray Milwee, and he said, “Well, that’s what our students are—average and below.” I said, “Don’t you want to change that?” He said, “You can’t change that.” So I had absolutely no luck, but later William went in and his daughter had a black teacher—the first black teacher in the schools—and he didn’t like that at all. Wouldn’t accept it, so he went in and confronted Milwee with the same situation, and Milwee wouldn’t change it so William hit him. Beat him up and it made Time magazine. It was quite a—and he pleaded—the funny thing is I got a jury summons to be a juror in his trial. I went over to the courthouse and I knew the prosecuting attorney well, and he said, “Cal, what are you here for?” I said, “I came to be a juror in William’s trial.” and he said, “Like hell you did.” He went in and got the judge to dismiss me, and that’s, of course, what I wanted, but it was funny.
Phyllis
And at the same time, the neighbors we had up North where we lived—it was a mixed neighborhood. There was a Chinese family, a black family—and I will say, they were culturally put together. Well, we did have a man next door that drove a bread truck, but mostly—being a university town, they were mostly intellectuals. When I went to school, in Southern Illinois, I went to school with—with black children all the time and thought nothing of it.
Calvert
And when we came down here, the only people that really were see[sic] was controlled by the old landowner families, and socially, we were not accepted. We were Yankees and not accepted, and our first friends here in town were Jewish people and some of the blacks. They’re still friends of ours today.
Phyllis
In 1985, when Mayor Bettye Smith started the Martin Luther King[, Jr.] choir[2]…
Calvert
We both saw the Martin Luther King choir for 20-something years [inaudible], so we’re culturally adept.
Phyllis
But they weren’t used to that, and I had a birthday party for my daughter, who was six at the time. So I told her, “You can invite six children from your class to come to the birthday party.” and one was a little Stallworth girl—like Mill Stallworth’s daughter—a black girl, and a lovely, lovely person, and when they went outside to play a while, and somebody—a passerby or neighbor, but I won’t say who. It certainly wasn’t Connie Williams, because she is very culturally non-prejudice[sic] at all, and it wasn’t Rosita Jacobson, because she lived across the street and she was Jewish, so she wouldn’t have said anything, but somebody else said, “I wanted to tell you that we don’t mix socially with the blacks here.” and I said, “But we do.”
So that set us back a couple of steps, but then one of our Jewish friends, the Tetenbaums, got us into a barbecue club, which was out in what is now in Hidden Lake, and they introduced us to some people out there, and we got in, not because we were trying to get in, but anything to have people be a little more friendly[sic] to us.
Calvert
There’s quite a story about the marina in some respects, because the [Sanford] City Council didn’t have a tenant or anybody to rent or lease anything to when they started and decided to build that. That took a lot of guts.
Phyllis
On whose part?
Calvert
I’m the [Sanford] City Commissioner. The newspapers was urging them to—the Gilos, who were the publishers at that time—were urging them to and they had no tenant—nobody to lease or rent anything to, and here they were going to build an island, and during construction, they got a marina operator to do it, basically, with ash and oil.
Phyllis
But he designed the marina with floating docks so the water [inaudible].
Calvert
So I give the [Sanford] City Commission a lot of credit to have the nerve to do that and to proceed with the project, and it’s been a huge success, and I never did a job where we got as much construction for—it was the whole thing, including some of the buildings—only cost a million dollars—building it all up from nothing.
Phyllis
He designed that dry storage building—that big building that has the stripes on the side. At that time, some hotel came in and it’s changed hands a lot.
Calvert
It’s a motel now.
Phyllis
We lived on the lakefront at that time. We just rented a house, because we weren’t too sure if we were going to be able to stay or not. That’s when we first came, and after the marina thing, he got some jobs for being city engineer for places like Eustis.
Calvert
Well, I had those before I went up North—a whole bunch of the cities and counties around here.
Phyllis
[inaudible] and gave us a base to stay, and I would’ve thought too that it would’ve been very courageous for that lady black teacher—whoever she was—to walk into that Sanford Middle School or Seminole High [School]…
Thompson
Was she in it when it was Seminole High—as the first black teacher? Or was it…
Phyllis
I don’t know. William’s daughter was not a little, tiny girl, because knowing William...
Calvert
Other things that I thought were noteworthy is, for instance, the Central Florida Zoo [and Botanical Gardens].
Phyllis
When we came, it was downtown.
Calvert
One block right behind the [Sanford] City Hall. You could make quite a story about the moving of that and the...
Thompson
I’ve never heard that story—how it happened.
Calvert
Well, they had a zoo behind the City Hall, right down the lakefront there.
Thompson
I saw an aerial picture of it and thought it was much larger than it was. It’s very small.
Calvert
And the woman’s name was Hood—that was the curator there. He worked for the city and she did, and her whole job was to tend to the zoo, and they had one lion and you could hear him roar. You could hear him and then they decided—well, a bunch of businesspeople facilitated the Central Florida Zoological Society[, Inc.], and a number of us contributed money, so that we could relocate it. I put up several thousand dollars to the Sanford Atlantic Bank and so did others, and that served as seed money to borrow against to relocate and build the Central Florida Zoo. I had connections with contractors so I went to C. A. Meyer and Amick Construction[, Inc.] and leveraged them into building the roads in and doing all the earthwork for the original zoo. That was quite a contribution. It was all donation and the two of them—C. A. Meyer and Amick Construction—donated all the work to build the road and do the earth or the original zoo, and I was one of the founding directors of the Central Florida Zoo.
Phyllis
Both he and I had served on the zoo board at one time or another.
Thompson
Did you all have anything to do with the actual moving of the animals?
Calvert
No, my thing was contributing the money and doing the construction of the roads and all of the earthwork out there. There were many other people around town. Doug[las] Stenstrom did. Glenn McCall, the druggist, did. Dr. Hickman, the dentist from Maitland, was involved. I don’t really remember all the other people. That was the way that the zoo got started.
Thompson
What was the reasoning for moving the zoo? Did somebody donate the land?
Calvert
I think it was bought. It was bought. Right along there was Leffler land and a bunch of it was Kirchhoff. Now, have you ever talked to Bill Kirchhoff?
Thompson
No, I haven’t.
Calvert
Beside the stories of the marina and the zoo, the other one that I know a lot about is the historic trend or the beginning of the historic movement in Sanford.
Thompson
The historic trust?
Calvert
No, ot the trust. The whole idea of historic preservation becoming a forefront program in Sanford, and Sarah Jacobson was the one that started that whole thing, and she got me again, Doug Stenstrom, Don Knight, Glenn McCall—a bunch of downtown businesspeople—and we applied and got money to do historical surveys, and the state sent a[sic] historical architect and a plain historian and they worked out of my office. They’d go looking at all the insurance records, titles, and deeds, and all the interesting things they could find out about the buildings. That went on for a couple of years, because they’d come back and they’d found out the railroad magnate [Henry Morrison] Flagler had owned this and that—it was an old train station, and that’s the Piper Building, and they’d find all this interesting stuff about all of the other old buildings.
The first thing we did was we got the whole downtown district on the Federal Register of Historic Places.[3] It was first a downtown district—one of the few in the state for a whole downtown district, and we had to do all of these surveys and then we moved to the area behind it—the [Sanford] Historic Trust. We got that designated as a residential historic district. Now the people in the historic trust didn’t have anything to do with that. They formed the historic trust after all this was done, and I, in my many travels, kept thinking about park benches, and I picked out a bench from various places that I’d gone, and bought one for 900-and-something dollars, and had it brought here, and the city liked it, and it’s one of those—it’s downtown. They use that on the waterfront and everywhere. Then we got grants and formed a Downtown Historic Development [inaudible], and we got grants—the owners would apply, and we would sponsor them, and they got grants to fix up the facades of many of the buildings, and you’ll also see then when we have a historic board later. I was chairman of the [Sanford] Historic Preservation Board that the city conceived, and we got plaques that were put on all of the buildings that you see downtown. Then the historic trust came into being. They came later and formed their historic trust for remodeling the buildings and all of the homes. Then we had a few—Bettye Smith and I did a local one for the St. James AME [African Methodist Episcopal] black Church. They’ve got a local historic designation. That whole thing started with Sarah[?] Jacobson and a bunch of us, and that’s been very successful. Now the historic trust people kind of take the credit for the whole thing, but they didn’t start it. They did a good job.
Thompson
Well, I think they have done a good job, but the city—I don’t know if you noticed, but the City of Sanford and the Sanford Historic Trust did the first Cultural Preservation Award and gave that to the City of Sanford for what we’re doing today.
Phyllis
I started in 1973. My mother and two other little ladies and I started the Meals on Wheels program. I have a newspaper clipping showing a picture of us...
Calvert
We’ve done that longer than anybody in Seminole County—the two of us.
Phyllis
I’ve done it ever since then—36-37 years, and I think, because of that, I got the Jefferson Award [for Public Service] for this area, but there were others in other areas and Orlando and everything that got it too, and so, when it went statewide, of course, it wasn’t only that that got me the award.
Cal and I had done so many things around town—you know, volunteer things— ‘cause that’s really what we live for—is volunteering. He’s done about a 150 pro-bono engineering jobs for little churches, or the crisis center, or the Salvation Army sign out front and things like that. At one time, they gave him the Topper Award and, at the same time, they gave me the Dr. Luis Perez Humanitarian Award the same night, and I didn’t expect that. I knew he was to get the Topper Award, and so I didn’t say anything to him about it and then when we got there, I knew. I had some relatives coming, because I knew he was going to get that award. Then they started out with the humanitarian award first, and they got up and started talking about this woman—who was me, you know, and I thought, “That sounds like me.” And they were giving me this award and I said, “You’ve got this wrong. I’m not supposed to get this award.” and I didn’t want to say it and take all the—my husband, and they said, “Oh, but you are. This is the humanitarian award.” And I felt so disheartened, because I thought, “Gee whiz. I thought they were going to give him the Topper Award and here they’re just giving me an award,” and it turned out later in the evening that he got the Topper Award.
When we started this Meals on Wheels program—I don’t remember which church, but I think it might’ve been the First Presbyterian [Church of Sanford] downtown, which we were members of—and they decided they wanted to start a Meals on Wheels program and there were only four of us ladies. You could only take about eight people yourself, so there must’ve been 35 people, and we got the meals from the hospital, and they had them in these big, green plastic containers, and so we’d have to collect those from the clients—we call them “clients.” It was all-volunteer stuff. The next day and take those back—sometimes during, sometimes not, and then get the other meals. And, as the years went on, the mothers of these other ladies were 20 years older than I, so they’re all dead now, but I have a newspaper clipping of when I started, but 10 years after I started it, he started it, ‘cause he was retiring, but he’s done it 10 years less than I have.
Calvert I still do pro-bono engineering. I’ve done over 200 projects. There’s an awful lot. I’m still doing them.
Thompson
We‘ve known that you’d been doing those pro-bono when we had to have the engineers—pay an engineer to put up the risers for the theater.
Calvert
Well, I did the first one for what they now call the Wayne-Densch Theater.[4] I did the first structural study there that they used as a credit to the Federal Government to get their grants. Then I did structural inspections both on main theater and the building next door they later got.
Thompson
Well, how did you get into this wonderful, giving spirit?
Calvert
We both believe we were put here to help other people.
Phyllis
Our mission is just to help other people. We get the fun out of it, because it’s the one-on-one thing that’s important.
Calvert
It keeps us occupied. It’s something worthwhile to do.
Phyllis
We’ve been on lots of boards, but I say, “What you get on boards is a lot of splinters.” We’ve been in the Martin Luther King choir for 25 years. Bettye Smith started that. She was the one that got the Sanford Woman’s Club[5] integrated, and that didn’t go so well with many of the ladies that dropped out, when she brought in these lovely, fine four ladies. Because they were saying, “Well, you bring in one like that and who knows who they’ll bring in.” It’s the fear thing, and then Rosita Jacobson was in the club at the time, and they had a time getting Rosita in, because she was Jewish. They asked me to join for many years and I knew they were so segregated. I just didn’t want any part of that, but I used to say, “That’s the Sanford White Women’s Club.” but that changed over the years and these lovely black ladies are in and the Jewish ladies.
Calvert
I have another story to tell and it’s about the rescue mission.
Phyllis
The Rescue Outreach Mission [of Central Florida] on Thirteenth Street.
Calvert
They had kind of a ramshackle operation out there. Mother [Blanche Bell] Weaver was running it with the help of pop and it was really a rag-tag thing. She started out by being a cook and ran the restaurant on Thirteenth Street.
Thompson
And everybody went there.
Calvert
That’s right, and one day she walked into our office downtown and said, “I understand there’s a man here that likes to help people.” [laughs] And I ended up helping her. I donated land. I bought some lots and donated the engineering, and we built the women’s and children shelter, and I was, for 21 years, on the Board of Directors of the rescue mission. Mother Weaver founded that, and her church over there also founded it. That’s quite a story too, because she started out by having children just come—she kind of adopted them and they moved into her house with her. She was preaching at this church, and then she got the idea of founding a homeless shelter and started it, and then she called on me and then together saw about building the women’s and children’s shelter. Much of the money came from one man, and he should be talked to if he will talk to you, but he’s very, very generous.
Thompson
And who is that?
Calvert
Mike Good. Briar Construction.[6] Every organization that I go to and am part of, such as the Children’s Home Society [of Florida]—I’ve been on that board, and I look to see who the big givers are. Mike Good is at the top of the list.
Phyllis
Soon after we first came here, Thelma Mike was, until just recently, administrator at the Good Samaritan Home [of Sanford]. That’s just an assisted living center for people and they—somehow, the Good Samaritan Home hadn’t noticed they hadn’t paid their taxes for some time...
Calvert
They hadn’t paid their withholding and their unemployment and that stuff. They were in big trouble and the whole city got together and bailed her out.
Phyllis
They owed the government about $100,000. The whole city—respecting her so much—came forth and got people here and there to raise money, and they let her off.
Calvert
They raised considerable money.
Thompson
My first employee stole a lawnmower from the Good Samaritan Home. He started working for me after he got out of jail. He had to pay restitution to the Good Samaritan Home, and I told Thelma that story and she laughed and laughed. She said, “If he needed a lawnmower, I would have given him that lawnmower.”
Phyllis
We both started out in a choir when we first came here, because both of us had sung for years and years, and we have been singing in the First [Presbyterian] Church [of Sanford] downtown, and then about 1991 it had a split over a pastor and it...
Thompson
They moved over to Markham Woods Road.
Phyllis
No, that one’s a great one. That’s where most of these people downtown went. We went to another church for a year.
Calvert
We didn’t originally. We went to Oakland, followed our choir director.
Phyllis
We didn’t want to make an exodus—Markham Woods, because Markham Woods was started by Dr. [inaudible] and in 1985, they were—when did you join?
Thompson
That would’ve been years ago. We lived just a block down from the church.
Phyllis
We came there in 1991, and been in that choir for all those years too. We’re about at the place where we don’t do solos anymore.
Thompson
Well, what about your children growing up here, and do you have any family stories of the kids?
Phyllis
Well, our kids stayed out of trouble, so I guess we don’t have any stories. Our daughter is almost 48 now. She’s in California and she’s a veterinarian. We’re in the process of getting a home for her. She has MS [multiple sclerosis] and she’s partially disabled, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at her. She swims a lot, but she can’t work full-time now. She’s moving back here after 20 years to live with us. She’s single. We have a son in Orlando who works for the city at [Orlando] City Hall.
Calvert
It’s a funny thing about him. He played guitar for years and he had a rock band in high school and before, and he and Ricky Bowing—they used to—that room up there that’s now our music room was open—it was a breezeway, and they used to practice there and I remember getting out of the car way over at her mother’s house and I said, “Oh, there’s somebody playing ‘Proud Mary,’ just like Charles and his band did.” And all of a sudden I realized it was them. I decided right then that we had to enclose that breezeway and make a room out of it [laughs], and we’ve had all kinds of animals in our backyard. We’ve had horses there.
Phyllis
Well, the horse would only stay overnight one night, but she had [inaudible] brought it in—brought it right down 46. At that time there wasn’t that much traffic, and then she got ready to take it back out and it was starting to storm and I said, “You better not go now.” so she left the horse in the backyard.
Calvert
There was a pig back there for a while, when Robert [Conklin] had his heart surgery. She sent him a piglet from Tennessee and the pig grew up in the backyard and got huge in three months, and we had a judge there and the head of the code enforcement next door, and we had a pig in the backyard, but only for three months. Voley was sitting there on the couch talking to us one day and we were talking about Robert having to have a new valve. He needed to have heart surgery for a valve, and we were talking about the possibility of them using a pig valve, and right at the minute we said “pig,” the pig went, “Oi” right behind—and he turned around and looked, but he didn’t get it. He didn’t understand.
Phyllis
A pig valve only lasts about eight or nine years, because that’s all...
Calvert
They use them on older people. Now they use cowbells[?].
Phyllis
He had a metal valve at the age of 17. Now he’s the one that lives here in town and he works for NAPA Auto Parts, and he’s a manager of parts at OIA [Orlando International Airport], the big airport down there, for the ground vehicles, not the airplanes. He’s certified as an ASE [Automatic Service Excellence] mechanic, which he did for a few years, but the heart thing was too much for him.
Calvert
We always said, “We have one that can fix your car and one that can fix your cat.” [laughs].
Phyllis
So that’s the three kids, and the one in Orlando is project manager in the engineering department for the City of Orlando, and then the veterinarian daughter is going to move back here.
Calvert
The story there is he wanted to be a sound engineer and he had gone to Stetson [University]. Then he kind of went to music, and he went to Denver[, Colorado] to take recording engineering. Then he decided to go to—he got accepted to go to Berkeley College for Music[7] in Boston[, Massachusetts], and he went up there and he called me on the phone and said, “Dad, you won’t believe this, but they said I have to start over as a freshman. They won’t give me credits for the other stuff.” And I said, “Charles, go back inside and ask a different person the same question.” And he did and we just held the line open and he came back after a little while and he said, “Yes, they said I have to start over as a freshman. I want to come home.” and I said, “Okay. Come on. Under that circumstance.” Anyway, then he came back and he served as a soundman for a local band that played all over the United States that went by the name of Root Boy Slim. They were really quite good.
Phyllis
And [Root Boy Slim and] the Sex Change Band.
Calvert
Yeah. Well, they called it that. He traveled to New York City, [New York] and Baltimore and all those places as their soundman, and he got hit on the head with a beer bottle and it was a tough, tough life, because those people live on the thin edge of everything. After that, he called up and said, “Dad, I decided I want to go back to school and be an engineer like you.” [laughs] So he moved back.
Phyllis
And of course, they accepted all his LAS [Legal Assistant Studies] stuff at University of Florida. So he got a Master’s Degree and got really good grades. His sister got her veterinary medicine thing from there in 1991 too, but she wanted to go to California, because they were paying a little bit more at that time, but she didn’t realize how much more expensive everything was. Having been there, the climate is good for her, because it’s not as humid as here. After 20 years, and now that she’s partially disabled, she feels she ought to be a little nearer her aging parents, since we’re over 80 and we just think it’s time to—she said one time, “Well, I think within the next five years, I want to move back to Florida for sure.” I said, “Ruth Ann [Conklin], if you want us to help you move, in five years, we’re going to be about 87 years old.” She said, “I’d better move now, hadn’t I?” I said, “Yes, I think so.” You want to tell her the story about you, Gino [Pelucci], and the fundraising?
Calvert
Well, I—he doesn’t even remember who I am, and I worked with him and for him for years. Even before Heathrow—way back—I did a bunch of factories for them up in other states and my cousin, Bob B.B., was the general manager for Chung[?] King, when he decided that he shouldn’t be running it anymore, and he hired my cousin, who was a board member of Campbell Soups,[8] and he was high help in things. He ran Chung[?] King, because Gino was very volatile. He would run around handing out 100 dollar bills or swearing loudly at people and stuff, and he wasn’t what you would call a “consistent” manager. My cousin used to tell me that Gino had hundreds of ideas that would come into his mind all the time, and he would write my cousin notes about, “This is an idea.” and at the end of the day he’d send another note: “Forget all those ideas.”
Phyllis
When Gino was featured at one of these Boy Scout[s of America] dinners, and he was a speaker—and this was maybe three years ago or something—Cal said he needed to go over and say hello to Gino. He went over to say something to Gino and Gino acted like he didn’t even know who he was, and then he said...
Calvert
And Brenda [inaudible] was sitting there and she said, “Gino, this is Cal Conklin. He was your engineer for Heathrow. He did all the engineering in Heathrow for you.” And Gino looked up at me and still no recognition. I said, “How about—you remember Bob B.B.?” And he just lit up, because he remembered that. I don’t think he remembered me, but he remembered the guy who had run Chung[?] King for him.
Two stories about him that I think are kind of funny: I would attend many of his board meetings at his request. Most of them there was an accountant and a lawyer and so forth, and there were all kind of “yes-men” with him. We were having a meeting, and a young man came to make a presentation, and it wasn’t long, and I knew he wouldn’t be interested, but he said, “Young man, does foul language offend you?” And the young man said, “No.” He said, “Why you dumb son of a bitch.” He just lit into him and cussed him out up and down and back and forth. Every foul word you could think of.
When the Presbyterian Church downtown was having a building program—when they put the Fellowship Hall and they redid the sanctuary—I was the special gifts chairman. General Hutchinson was the overall chairman, and one of the people I had to call on, besides Warren Patrick and a bunch of other, was Gino Pelucci, and the only reason we did was his daughter would come to Sunday school once in a while, and the preacher was with me,[9] and I walked in and Gino said, “Hey. I’m glad to see you.” We shook hands and he said, “You’ve got a rendering of what you’re going to do. That’s good.” And he got down on his hands and knees and began pointing to the rendering and telling me all of the things I should say to anyone I was presenting to. He was going to teach me how to make a presentation. “You should point out all the good features that you’re going to be in this program.” And then I got down on my hands and knees right there alongside him, and the preacher’s standing there and they’re just incredulous. You can just imagine the scene. When we got ready to finish up he said, “And now the most important thing, Cal. You must remember that when you call on people—you’ve got to ask for enough. Remember.” And he didn’t seem to realize that I was going to do it to him. I stood up and tried to recall all of the things he had said, and I went through it as well as I could, and I asked him for $40,000, and his jaw dropped about a foot, and he said, “Cal, you asked for enough.” When we bought this house, his pilot was also trying to buy it. Gino didn’t really want him this close. He used to stop and talk to me all the time.
Phyllis
Within the last year, when they go by—they aren’t usually driving—they have a driver or something. They often wave while[?] we’re out in the yard.
Calvert
He used to stop and talk, but now he’s lost his recollection of what my part and background was.
Phyllis
He had Hubert Humphrey come to his home, when Hubert was running for vice president.
Calvert
Even when he was vice president, he was down here.
Phyllis
They’d come from the airport and go by here, and our son had one of those etch-a-sketch things, where you put the little dots—and he hung it in the window.
Calvert
Little Gina [Pelucci] came here to play with Ruth Ann.
Phyllis
Gina Pelucci came over here to play with Ruth Ann, and brought her pet mouse—a little black and white thing. Of course, our daughter loved animals, and we did too, and it didn’t frighten me or anything, but when she got ready to go home, she couldn’t find the mouse, and we never did find that mouse. I’m sure it’s hiding around here somewhere. [laughs].
Calvert
Well, one thing that is funny is that everywhere I go people tell me I look like Jimmy Carter. Well there’s a picture of Jimmy Carter right up there, and when we went to Panama, we were going through customs, and as I approached the customs thing. The guy hollered out, “¡Jimmy Carter ahí!” All these people came running around, and I thought, “I’m just going to go along with it.” A woman wanted to have her picture taken with me, so I put my around her, smiled, and took a picture with her.
Phyllis
‘Cause he didn’t know any Spanish, he couldn’t say, “No, I’m not Jimmy Carter.” It would sound like—it happened at the resort...
Calvert
It happened six times on one trip. I got invited into the bar for a drink and all sorts. He’s a big hero, ‘cause he’s the one who turned the [Panama] Canal over to them.
Phyllis
He thought if he said no when they wanted their picture taken, and he didn’t speak English, it would sound like, “I’m Mr. Big and you’re paparazzi. Get away from me.” So he’d just smile and let them take his picture.
Calvert
One lady—I never did understand that. Well, I’d go shopping in Wal-Mart, and very often somebody will tap me on the shoulder and say, “Here, I’m going to go home and tell my folks that I went shopping with Jimmy Carter.” The City of Sanford does a great deal. The county does not. The county feels they have to go to Orlando to get the big engineering firms, and it’s very strange, and of course there’s competition between cities and the counties, and there always has been. We started out doing both, but in your local area, you usually end up doing one or the other and we’ve ended up doing all the cities essentially.
Phyllis
We bought it out. Us[sic] and the porters and the homes bought it out and...
Calvert
We bought it from CRS and a national firm. Clark Deets[sp] was sold to Richardson and then to CRS—Rawlins and then CRS.
Thompson
So there were several owners before you?
Calvert
Clark Deets was the original one I went to work for in Urbana, and my professors were the ones that started it. They resigned from the college and hired their better students, and there were three of them. A structural man, a civil man, and an environmental or sanitary man, and I was actually one of the very first ones they hired, and we made a big business out of that and got into the 200 range in the country, and then I came down here and saw it and thought it’d be good to make a branch, and then the company got sold and ended up with CRS [inaudible]. They did the big arenas. The big one in Gainesville, and they were mainly doing things in the Middle East in the [United] Arab Emirates. All of that fancy stuff there, and they had no idea what our business was here. I mean, it was all local. They just didn’t understand. It wasn’t the kind of business that they did, and when we decided to go into business for ourselves, I said, “We may be able to get this for a song.” And the other two just wanted to leave and I said, “No. Let me have a try at it.” So I went down there, and we paid $35,000, and we got all of the new business, and they even paid us 5 percent of the collections for three years, and so they ended up—we were roughly 10 percent of their organization and they ended up paying us to take it away from them.
Phyllis
And this was 1981, when it first became Conklin Corps.
Calvert
And the other two worked for me.
Thompson
And I opened up the Rib Ranch in 1981 and I retired in 2008. My husband was ill and he died last year. I was lucky to be with him at that time.
[1] George Calvert.
[2] Correction: Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration Chorus.
[3] Correction: National Register of Historic Places.
[4] Correction: Wayne-Densch Performing Arts Center.
[5] Correction: Woman’s Club of Sanford.
[6] Correction: The Briar Team.
[7] Correction: Berkeley College of Music.
[8] Correction: Campbell Soup Company.
[9] Virgil Bryan.
Youngers
Hello, my name is Stephanie Youngers. Today is November 12, 2010. And I am interviewing Mr. Ed L’Heureux here at the Museum of Seminole County History. How are you today?
L’Heureux
I’m fine today.
Youngers
Good. We would like to begin by asking where and when you were born.
L’Heureux
I was born in Gloversville, New York. Upstate New York. In May of 1939.
Youngers
And how did you make your way into the Florida area?
L’Heureux
My dad and mother moved from New York to New Jersey during World War II. He was in the Coast Guard and my mother inherited some property in Central Florida at the end of the war when her uncle died. And we came down to seek it out. We sold a little farm in New Jersey, and loaded things on a truck like the Okies going to California, and came to Florida with no turning back. And we didn’t like the property. My mother didn’t like it. It was rattlesnake-infested. But we decided to stay, because we liked Florida.
Youngers
Oh, well good. And about how old were you when you…
L’Heureux
I was five. Five years old.
Youngers
You’ve been here a long time, then.
L’Heureux
Since I was five.
Youngers
You might as well be a native.
L’Heureux
I wish I could claim the other five years.
Youngers
Whereabouts did you live when you moved here?
L’Heureux
We moved to Winter Park. Winter Park.
Youngers
So, wow. When, I mean, do you have memories of Winter Park, as far as the way it looked, and…?
L’Heureux
Oh, absolutely. There were wooden sidewalks on two blocks in Winter Park, just like Little House on the Prairie. You know, out west in that TV show. Wooden sidewalks. You’d clop along, and then they were torn down about two years later to make way for a bank, but it was a frontier town.
Youngers
Really.
L’Heureux
All the old cars were still around. People came in the winters and went back up north in the summers. A couple of garages close to Park Avenue in Winter Park, you would see the old Pierce Arrows and Cadillacs and Packards that were there. They’d take the train back up north and leave the car here for next winter. So it was a sleepy, beautiful little town in those days.
Youngers
Oh, wow. Well …it’s still a pretty little town.
L’Heureux
It still is. It still is.
Youngers
It definitely has gotten much larger.
L’Heureux
Yes. Regrettably.
Youngers
Did they have any kind of local gathering or events or anything in Winter Park that you attended?
L’Heureux
One of the first things I remember were fish fries. They had mullet fish fries. The Lion’s Club put them on and brought concrete blocks to the grammar school playground. Put wooden planks on top for tables, and concrete blocks and wooden planks for benches, and they’d cook this mullet and they’d deep-fry this mullet, you could smell it a block away. And it was delicious.
Youngers
And it was a whole town event that everybody attended?
L’Heureux
Well, it could have been a town event. Anybody could come and pay maybe for a dollar for the dinner. And the Lion’s Club put it on about three or four times a year, and everybody came and they strung lights on the playground. Those naked yellow lights—the little bulbs—and a little music in the background. And it was tremendous.
Youngers
Oh, very neat.
L’Heureux
The whole fish fry. Yeah. I remember it.
Youngers
So, the schools you attended?
L’Heureux
Winter Park Elementary, which is part of Rollins College today. It has been torn down now. But old Winter Park Elementary and Winter Park High School was built in 1923. Went to all three public schools there and loved it dearly. It was a great town. Great town. Nobody locked their houses or their cars. Literally.
Youngers
Wow. You can’t do that now.
L’Heureux
No. You can’t do that now.
Youngers
So, did you go to college from here?
L’Heureux
I went into the Army right after high school, and got out fairly soon, had a little period of time. Went to Stetson University up in DeLand about 40 miles away. I went to DeLand and graduated with a history degree there, went on to law school, and moved back to Orlando and Winter Park and have been in that area ever since.
Youngers
And you still live there now?
L’Heureux
I live in Winter Springs, which is close. It’s north. But that whole area has been my home for the longest time. When I give speeches, they say I’m a native when I’m introduced, but I can’t claim that first five years.
Youngers
Sure you can.
L’Heureux
Wish I could, but…
Youngers
Did you work as an attorney when you came back?
L’Heureux
No, no, no. I never practiced law at all. I dropped out before I was through. There was a lady there—I fell in love with her and we both didn’t like the law that much, for some strange reason. We both dropped out and we were married just under 40 years.
Youngers
Oh, wow. That’s good.
L’Heureux
She passed away in ‘03 of cancer, but we had a long life together.
Youngers
Good. What did you do, as far as a career and things?
L’Heureux
I was in the insurance business. I had an insurance agency. I had a Nationwide Insurance agency. I never liked business particularly, because I was trained a[sic] historian and I always wished that I’d been closer to that. And now, late in life, in my sixties and seventies, I’m a public lecturer on a myriad of Florida topics. And I write books. I’ve written 15 books, and I’m doing what I should have done as a younger man. And late in life, I’m able to do what I wish I had done earlier. So it’s kind of nice.
Youngers
So, you’re writing books. Is that just a passion you always had?
L’Heureux
Yes. I had a joint major in Stetson—History and English. And I always wanted to write books. And I always wanted to write books about Florida—novels. And in my insurance career, which was somewhat boring—I hate to say that, but it wasn’t really a stimulating thing for me. I had a family to raise, kids to raise, and I went through it and did it and was able to accomplish it, but the fire was not in the furnace. And my dad saw that melancholic hue when I was in my early forties, and he said, why don’t you dust off your pencil and pen and write again like you did in college? Because in college, I wrote for the paper. Wrote feature articles for The DeLand Sun News, up in Stetson at DeLand. And one day, I was out walking in a field and I saw a story. It just came to me. And I wrote it, and I wrote a second and third and fourth, and took it down to Rollins College, to a friend of my dad’s who was in the English department, and he thought they were very good. And my career was launched.
Youngers
So you’ve been doing this now since you were in your forties?
L’Heureux
Yes, yes, over 20 years.
Youngers
Oh, very nice. And when you do public lectures and things, what do you talk about?
L’Heureux
I have a slate of, oh, about 35 topics. All aspects of Florida history. Current, old history. Civil War. Seminole Indian Wars. Many of the industries—citrus, cattle, timber. The early founders. The early explorers. The treasure coast. Over 30 lectures I’ve crafted and researched and I deliver all around to all manner of places.
Youngers
And you do them at the local colleges?
L’Heureux
Yes, I do college level. Civic clubs, retirement centers, private organizations—business enrichment for companies that want to enrich their employees with a lecture. All kinds of ways and things. And I’m doing that now, currently in retirement, and I love it.
Youngers
Well, you said you were married, and you mentioned you had children. Do you have a special courtship story?
L’Heureux
Yes, I do, as a matter of fact. Funny you’d ask that. It’s not staged. I’ll never forget it. We were in law school together. And I had noticed her, because there were three women in the law school, and the rest were men. And she cut a pretty nice figure and I noticed her early on. And we had never spoken. We had seen each other and she had noticed me and I had noticed her. We were both freshmen. She had come in a semester before me. I had come in on the off-semester. And oh, maybe two or three weeks had gone by, and I had heard that everyone was dating her, and I found out that nobody was. It was just a rumor. We sat next to each other on a bench before class. The first words she said to me were, “I wonder what colors eyes our children will have.”
Youngers
Oh my.
L’Heureux
Just like that. Just like that. And for once in my life, I was speechless. She said it just like that. And the answer was blue and brown, but not on the same child. So we had a son and a daughter, and they were brown-eyed and blue-eyed. The first thing she ever said to me. So I guess that’s a courtship story.
Youngers
That was very forward. And that’s right.
L’Heureux
That’s exactly what she said.
Youngers
That’s awesome.
L’Heureux
It just—I wonder what color eyes our children will have.
Youngers
That’s very good.
L’Heureux
Isn’t that amazing?
Youngers
Yes, that’s awesome. And do you have any special family heirlooms or keepsakes that your kids share? Do your kids share your passion for history?
L’Heureux
Not particularly. That’s strange. They don’t. My wife was trained as a journalist. And I had the English major, and History, and I had been writing. We both were writers. She wrote in industry.
My son is a[sic] entrepreneur of sorts. He’s a very successful businessmen. He went to Georgia State [University] on a tennis scholarship and was an excellent student all the way along. And he operates and owns a company. And he’s a businessman and a coach. He coaches his daughters—my granddaughters—in lacrosse. And he’s steeped in the business world, but also with his church and philanthropic things. He likes history, but not with the same passion I have.
My daughter is in the insurance business. Similar to what I did for a long, long time. I think mine was 27 years—something like that. And she’s got two children. My son has two children. She’s too busy to read much about history. So I don’t think—even though they’re smart children, they were exceptional in school, and I don’t think they have that historic bent. That happens a lot. But they’re both successful in their own right, and I’m happy about that.
Youngers
You all lived in Winter Park for a long time. Do you remember any historical events that happened?
L’Heureux
Yes. I do. A couple I could mention. Rollins College had a very close union with Winter Park. They were joined at the hip, and they loved each other, and they just cooperated all the way through. It was wonderful to see. Rollins had something called The Animated Magazine” where people would come and speak and tell their life story, or a portion thereof. Some of the greatest notables of the age came. And I was selling newspapers there as a young boy, in my teens and even younger—10, 11, 12, 13. And I saw some great people. James Cagney, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings—the writer—Mary [McLeod] Bethune—the educator—all kinds of people from all walks of endeavor. And that made a great impression on me, because I knew some of these people. I knew their plaudits, I knew their successes, and yet I could see them speak from a stage. And here I was scurrying around trying to sell newspapers there. They held it every winter, in one of the months without a lot of rain. They held it outdoors in February. It’s usually cool. And I remember in the early days, when I was just a little boy, the women and men would come all decked out. Women would wear hats, you know, all women wore hats until somewhere in the ‘40s—‘50s, I guess it was. And they’d wear their fox stoles with little beaded eyes, you know—and foxes, all heavy coats in the winter time. And men would dress up with hats. I remember that. And I think I got a lot of history from that.
One thing from my youth that I recall, when Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote The Yearling, the famous book which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1939. The movie came out in the late ‘40s. With Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman. And the theaters thought so much about it that they decked the theaters—the lobbies—in a Florida motif. Hanging moss, they had a possum in a cage, they had a raccoon in a cage, they had palmetto bushes in there, just like the big scrub that she wrote about. And it was—everybody was decked out in old frontier days, and you walk in the lobby, you thought you were at Cross Creek, where she lived. And you can’t get that today.
Youngers
Oh my. And that’s the theater in Winter Park?
L’Heureux
Well, the theater in Winter Park, the Colony [Theatre], and the theater in Orlando, the Beacham [Theatre]. Today, you’ve got a multiplex. You know, you’ve got 20 little theaters. Nobody talks to anybody, you just go in, and there you go. And you can never get that today. But they thought so much of her movie, after she won the Pulitzer Prize. They decked the lobby of the theaters in Winter Park and Orlando in a Florida backcountry theme. Literally. You know, you could see a possum in a cage, and a raccoon, and moss dripping down, you know. Palmetto bushes, which were cut up and put in there as props. So I remember those things.
Youngers
Wow. Were there—when you were attending school and things, during the times of segregation and things, do you recall anything as far as when those differences came in? Were there any notable things in the Winter Park area or even Seminole County area that you remember as far as that?
L’Heureux
Well, I remember never playing ball against any black boys or African-Americans. Never. You know. They had their own schools. And it was a shame, because they were great athletes. I never interacted with them in high school in any manner. We knew where they were, they knew where we were, and we were friendly to them, you know. But I look back and remember the colored restrooms, where they were marked “colored,” where the African-Americans had to go to separate restrooms.
I remember my dad’s business. He was in the trucking business. And he would hire casual labor every day down in Winter Park in Hannibal Square. And we’d go down there and they’d come up to the door of his car and ask whatever he was paying, and they’d negotiate the pay, and then they’d get in the back seat and go for a day’s labor. When I was out on the trucks with him—because I worked on my dad’s truck from the time I was 12 years old—hauling freight, hauling furniture. We’d go to a diner, and get something to eat sometimes at lunch, and if we didn’t bring our lunch. And the black laborers would have to sit out back. Sit down on the ground out back. And my dad would order a sandwich for them. They would go through the kitchen, go out the back door, and they’d sit and eat it out back. They weren’t allowed in to sit.
Youngers
And they didn’t even really have a dining area?
L’Heureux
No. There was no dining area, even. And we took the bus a lot in those days, from Winter Park to Orlando. I used to go down to Orlando to a bookstore—McVicker’s—go down to the theaters there when I was a small boy—10, 11, 12. On the bus, by myself. If I use “colored,” “blacks,” “African-Americans” —it’s interchangeable, because they called themselves those things at various times. But they would come on the bus, and they’d march right to the back of the bus. And sit, and there’d be no question about it. And if one was sitting and a white woman came on and there was no place for her to sit, they were expected to give up their seat.
Youngers
Wow.
L’Heureux
So I was in the terrible segregation days. Grew up in it. It was terrible. I loathe the fact that it took place. I would like to have interacted with them. I played baseball—sports—in high school. We never played against blacks ever, that I can ever remember.
Youngers
Once they made that change, how did the community react?
L’Heureux
Well, some fought it for a long time, because they always wanted something to lord over people. You know how people are. A lot of people embraced it, were happy about it, and glad it came along. But it was a very begrudging thing. It didn’t happen overnight. We had Brown v. the Board of Education—the lawsuit and the legal argument at the Supreme Court—but it wasn’t like turning a light on or off, you know, all of a sudden. There was a transition period of several years. Several years.
I remember when I was at Stetson—my senior year, I was in charge of homecoming. And we had a black entertainer come from New York for a homecoming dance and a concert. His name was Roy Hamilton, and he was excellent. He wasn’t quite as famous as Johnny Mathis in those days, but this is in the late ‘50s—‘59 or ‘60—and I was in charge of getting him lodging, for he and his wife, and his bass player, and his piano player. And no motel would take him. No motel would take him. And I had to put him up in a couple of houses in the black section of DeLand. And this—this guy was a New York entertainer, he was an RCA Victor recording artist. He was big. Roy Hamilton, back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. And I couldn’t find lodging for him. He drove—drove down from New York and I was so embarrassed. No hotel would take them. So, to answer your question, it was a long process. It didn’t happen overnight.
Youngers
Wow.
L’Heureux
It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?
Youngers
It is. It is. Is there any other things, like those type of events, that you can recall? I mean, I know the history of just this area—they had the freeze, and they had hailstorms, and the fires, and hurricanes, and things.
L’Heureux
Well, hurricanes, yes. I can tell you stories about the hurricanes. The Weather Bureau [National Weather Service] was so embryonic in its stage, and so much in its infancy. We didn’t have good rapport with the Weather Bureau, because they didn’t have good rapport with the storms. And we had our radios in the early days before TV. We had our little Philco radios. And they’d scratch and you could barely hear them sometimes.
And the indicator of hurricanes was not somebody coming on the TV or the radio to tell you, it was the Australian pines. Australian pines were brought to Florida as a windbreak. And also, a windbreak against hurricanes. And also, because they looked kind of pretty in margins of road and along canals and this kind of thing. My dad had Australian pines on our property. Our warehouses were next to our home, because we lived in a rural part of town. And the Australian pines would whoosh and you’d hear them make a sound that was different than just a little storm. The hurricane sound was unmistakable. It was a wail—an actual wail. And we’d hear it, and then we’d say, “There must be a storm coming.” And a lot of times, it’d be a hurricane. It would be a hurricane, and this was the late ‘40s, the early ‘50s. And I can remember some terrible storms that came through Orlando. Rowboats on the street, you know, and the water off, the lights off, for days. But the early warning for hurricanes was so backward, because we didn’t have the technology for it. And we missed school all the time. And it would rain for days when the storms were around. I remember distinctly, storms in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s that were rough that came through here. Trees down, and power out, but we had no notice. It wasn’t like the hurricanes in ‘26 in Miami and ‘28 that came across Lake Okeechobee. When they were there, you knew they were there. But not any notice. And even in the ‘40s and ‘50s, we had almost no notice of hurricanes.
Youngers
Wow. Wow. That’s—kind of makes you wonder what we would do without these things.
L’Heureux
Exactly, today.
Youngers
You were saying earlier too that your father ran a trucking business?
L’Heureux
My dad had a trucking business, and there’s a great story there. He bought an old truck—a 1934 Ford—in New Jersey, where we had our farm. He was in the Coast Guard and almost farmed by night. He farmed with the lights on on[sic] the tractor. He’d farm at night, because we was trying to make a living. And my mother would take the produce and sell it downtown. In an old Pontiac car with a running board, and my sister and I were three, four years old, and we’d go with her.
He bought this truck to transport our belongings from the farmhouse to Florida. My mother inherited this property out near Rock Springs, out near Apopka. And he had money from the sale of the farm. And he built our house that summer. The war was over that summer. And the goods coming in, like [inaudible] nails to build a house were slow. My dad had never built a house. My dad was afraid of nothing. He built a house and not knowing how to do it. He built it. The footers, the concrete block foundation, the rafters—he just built it with the help of two men from town, and had a little money from the sale of the farm.
The summer—and by fall, the money was low, and he had no job. The house was up, we were in the house. So he took the truck down to the railroad station, when the Rollins co-eds were coming in for the year. And in those days, almost nobody drove a car to college. You took the train. Literally. And Rollins was a fancy, expensive school, even in those days. He met somebody down in Winter Park. “I’ve been here all summer. I need a job.” “We built our house. We’re in our house. I need a job now.” He had that truck. The man said, “Why don’t you go down to the train station and walk down through the cars when they stop and tell them you’ll haul trunks to the college—to the dormitories?” He said, “Taxicabs have been doing this for years.”
So my father took his truck down there, and in competition with the taxicab drivers, he walked up and down the train saying, “We’ve got a truck outside to haul your trunk.” So he started hauling trunks to the college for about 10 days, till everybody was down and school was in session, and he was out of work ,because he had worked for 10 days. So he ran an ad in the paper in Winter Park. He had a caption that read, “We will move anything”. And he put it in the paper with a phone number—four digits. You could talk to the operator. And this was right after World War II. And he set up a moving business. And he was in the moving business 28 years.
Youngers
Wow.
L’Heureux
Trucks and warehouses, and that’s how he had his start.
Youngers
Wow, that’s really cool.
L’Heureux
I think so. He had a truck and no job, and he put the truck to work.
Youngers
Wow. And your mom—did she stay home?
L’Heureux
She stayed home and ran the office. And he was in the early years out there in the truck, hauling with everybody else. And then he graduated to giving advice and direction behind the scenes as he got older and his business grew—flourished.
Youngers
Wow, that’s a really cool story.
L’Heureux
I think so.
Youngers
Well, is there anything that you would like to discuss that I haven’t really brought up?
L’Heureux
Well, yes. I guess. Let’s see. I was very fortunate in living as a young boy and young man through probably as wonderful a time in Florida history as there could be. That was from the end of World War II until the early 60s, when all the riots started and all the national trouble with the Vietnam War. There were about 15, 18 years in there that were just marvelous. And I—it was all my grammar school years, my high school years, my college years. It was just a remarkable place to grow up. It was remarkable.
I would ride my bicycle—you are not going to believe this. Nine and 10 years old, I’d ride my bicycle two and a half miles to Downtown Winter Park, go to the police station, and say, “I was going to lock it in one of their little racks. Would they look after it?” I’m telling you the truth. I was taking the bus to Orlando for the day. And I’d get on the bus at age nine or 10, by myself. You know, you never thought about bad people. You never heard of them. And I would go to Orlando on the old bus, go to McVicker’s bookstore and buy a Hardy Boys book. They were popular then. Go to a Saturday matinee and see Roy Rogers and Gene Autry and eat popcorn and Coke. Spend all day in Orlando. Go by the Cub Scout den, the Yowell Drew Ivey’s—a great department store. Look for the next badge I was going to get, or a new hat, or whatever. And come back in the afternoons, after being in Orlando for six or seven hours, claim my bicycle from the police rack, unlock the thing that locked it, and ride home at night, and be gone all day. Nine, 10 years old. I’m telling you the truth. Nobody thought a thing about it.
Youngers
Wow.
L’Heureux
Today, you couldn’t even—I was in grammar school! I remember going once when I was 10 years old to Orlando with a $10 bill for Christmas presents. And I bought my dad a fishing lure at Denmark’s Sporting Goods store, which was a landmark—Denmark’s. I went to the Yowell Drew Ivey’s, and bought my sister a little gift, a Nancy Drew book. Because Nancy Drew was like Hardy Boys. Nancy Drew was for girls, and Hardy Boys was for boys. And I went over to Dickson [&] Ives, went up the floor in an elevator, and bought my mother a nice handkerchief. And I had lunch down there. I had bought a gift for my sister, my father, my mother. And went to the movies and came home and still had change from the $10 bill.
Youngers
Oh, my goodness.
L’Heureux
I remember it, I was about 10 or 11 years old.
Youngers
Wow.
L’Heureux
And it wasn’t that I was particularly brave or anything. It was just that you didn’t have any worries. Nobody accosted you or anything. There was never any trouble. I’d go to Orlando alone for the day.
Youngers
Wow. I don’t even go to Orlando alone right now.
L’Heureux
Exactly. Exactly.
Youngers
So, you’d mentioned too that you had served some time in the army?
L’Heureux
Yes.
Youngers
Did you serve in the war?
L’Heureux
No, no. I’m not particularly proud of that, but it wasn’t my fault. I had the wrong age. I was too young for [the] Korea[n War] and too old for [the] Vietnam [War]. Now, I would have been old enough for Vietnam, but I was married by then, had a child by then, and I didn’t go.
But I signed in the Army Reserves when I was in high school. I went to Reserve meetings when I was a junior in high school. And senior. That’s pretty young to be out there—a soldier with men. I was only 16. And then I went in the active duty after high school. And got out—and we only went six months to active duty, and we were in Reserves seven and a half years.
And I was going to go to Davidson College in North Carolina, because some friends went and I was accepted there. I came back in January, after six months in the service, from June to January, and some friends talked me into going to Stetson for just a semester. Because if I didn’t go to school, I was going to be on my dad’s trucks hauling furniture. I promise you—I hated to go home on the weekends form college, because I’m going to be on his truck working. So I said, “Going to college is better than working on Dad’s trucks.” So I went to Stetson and liked it and never went to Davidson. I went on through Stetson the whole time. But that’s how that worked out.
We used to—when I finally got a car at Stetson, I could get a tank of gas a week if I’d come home and see Mom and Dad. It was only 34 miles from DeLand to Winter Park. And I would run the gas down to near the E-mark, because I knew how far it was. There was a Pure station in our neighborhood—an old Pure station—and I could get a tank of gas. And of course, I always bought my dirty linens home in a big duffel bag for Mother, you know. I would, time and time and time again. One time, I got down to Casselberry, and I thought that I was going to run out of gas. And I pumped nine cents. Nine cents of gas. And the gasoline was about 32 cents a gallon. I got enough to get me home. Nine cents!
Youngers
Oh, my goodness.
L’Heureux
There are more, you know, people that are older—a hundred years old—remember the early 1900s, which is even more archaic than what I’m talking about. But you asked me what I remember. That, from end of World War II until the Vietnam War, America was at its zenith, its power, its influence, its peacetime.
And it was a marvelous time to grow up in Florida. Florida was booming. The tourism was starting. The [Lockheed] Martin Company came to Orlando. The Cape [Canaveral] was starting to make some rumbles, and Orlando was really growing. I know in my graduating class—and my sister’s—we were about the same size, the year before me. We were 56, 57, 58. We’re all about the same. Two or three years later, the class size had doubled, because of the Martin Company and all the Allied Aerospace Company [Allied Aerospace, Inc.]. People were flooding into Florida in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. But it was a great place to grow up. I miss it. It’s gone. It’s gone.
Youngers
I can understand that. Do you remember when they first built [Walt] Disney [World?
L’Heureux
Oh, yes. I remember “B.D.”—“Before Disney”. Oh, I do. I do. I went into the brokerage business and met a man who made a lot of money by being on the inside looking out, and bought land as a speculator. He ran a service station in Beverly Hills. And he owned it. He was blue collar, but he owned it, and all the stars would gas up there. And he flew an aircraft, along with a couple of his buddies. Had a little piper cup group. And the word is, that Disney was coming east. They had Disneyland, and they were coming east, and they thought it was going to be St. Louis[, Missouri]. Proved not to be St. Louis, because Mr. [Adolphus] Busch from Busch—Anheuser-Busch [Companies, Inc.], heard something that they weren’t going to serve beer, and he said something at a big gala unveiling, “you can’t come to St. Louis and not sell beer.” And Walt Disney didn’t like that. So St. Louis was crossed off.
The next option was either Ocala or Orlando. So this man from California that owned an old Standard Oil gas station—he was a thousand-aire, he wasn’t a millionaire. He knew some of the stars. And they leaked that this area might be it. So he and three of his buddies flew—took a month off—flew piper cubs[?] to Orlando Executive Airport—the old airport—checked into a motel, hired Kelly [Service, Inc.] girls to post themselves in the various county seats—Kissimmee, Tavares, Sanford, Orlando—to see if anything unusual was being recorded— anything deeds or anything. They ate four meals a day, trying to eavesdrop scuttlebutt. They got their hair cut every week whether they needed it or not. They got their shoes shined. They wanted to be where scuttlebutt was, where gossip was, because they were trying to bankroll the buying of land if Disney was going to buy in Orlando. They’d meet every night and confer. “How’d your day go?” “Where’d you go?” “Oh, I ate four meals in restaurants,” and this and this and this. And they’d move the Kelly girls around every day. The girl that was in Orlando would be in Sanford and then the next day she’d be in Tavares so she wouldn’t be suspicious. And they had a map they put across their bed in the motels there. “Where were you?” It was like a war. They were trying to find out if Disney was coming here. So then money was going.
This is a true story. He gave this story in my living room. In fact, I did business with him. He’s dead now. I shouldn’t use his name. The money was up, and darn it, we didn’t find it. Nothing. Because it was really—only three people in town knew it. The man in charge of The Orlando Sentinel, the man in charge of First [inaudible] Bank of Orlando. I mean, it was like keeping the A-bomb secret. Because Disney knew the prices would escalate.
So here’s the story. And it’s true. They checked out of their motel rooms. They got their planes at Orlando Executive Airport. And they had flown during the month around to see what they could see from the air too. They flew out to present Lake Buena Vista that had a wind sock little airstrip there owned by a family-kind of a mom-and-pop business. Little wind sock, you know. And piper cubs[?] would land. A place to gas up. So they landed there to gas up. It was a two day flight to California. They were flying to Texas and then on to California. Little piper cubs[?], they go about 120 miles an hour, tops.
Youngers
Right.
L’Heureux
There was an old boy there at the little airstrip with an old cracker hat on, piece of straw in his mouth. You know, and he was making conversation with them. And they were glum, because they were there and spent a month’s salary and nothing. And this guy—and this is a true story. He told it in my living room. You could hear a pin drop. This guy said, “What’s going on around here? Mr. Brown down here, he’s got his farm for sale. Mr. Smith down here, he’s under option with some other people, and Mr. Miller down here, he’s selling out too.” “And Mr. C.”—I’ll call him “Mr. C.,” because he’s gone. I want to protect him. He said, “Oh, really? Oh really, really? People around here auctioning their farms? Yeah, we don’t know what’s going on. It’s crazy over here right now.” Well, it was at Bay Lake, right by where it was. And they came in and made some deals with farmers under the rug, and so Mr. C. and his buddies got back in the airplanes, went back to the motel, which was on Colonial Drive—across from a place called Ronnie’s Restaurant, which was famous—checked back into the motel, and redoubled their efforts, and found it.
Youngers
Oh, my goodness.
L’Heureux
And they begged, borrowed, and stole every buck they could from California—their friends, their relatives. And in two short years, they were all multi-millionaires. The guy at the gas-up station at the little family-owned airstrip spilled the beans.
Youngers
Wow.
L’Heureux
Now, that’s a true story, and isn’t that a great story? Yeah, it’s funny, but…
Youngers
It’s great that that’s how you find out stuff, though. It might not be in the middle of the city. It might just be…
L’Heureux
That’s right. They had Kelly girls they hired. They were everywhere. Listening—listening in the corridors of courthouses. All of them got fat, he said, because they were going in every restaurant, every diner, trying to sit and hear something, you know. They got their shoes shined when they glistened, you know. Got their haircut too often. They just wanted to be places to get gossip. Because they’re trying to bankroll big money. Thirty days—nothing. They leave town, they gas up, and the guy at the place spills the beans. And he said, “It was the greatest thing he had ever heard.” He said, “Oh, really? This, Mr. Smith and Mr. Brown?” That probably was not the names, but those were the names he used. It was somebody that was selling out to Disney. And this was all prior to the announcement. So they went back, and said, “We found it.” And it was Bay Lake. And they found it. And they searched for 30 days and couldn’t find it.
Youngers
Well, now, did it really help the area? Initially it brought in a lot of income, and…
L’Heureux
Well, I’m an environmentalist. You know, my books have that theme. I love nature. I love the outdoors. And yes, it’s done a lot of good, but I like the old Florida. I write about the old Florida. The backcountry roads, the way it was, you know. The animals. Not that we had them running loose, because we had cattle fencing and all, but I guess it’s helped. If you’re on I[nterstate Highway]-4 in gridlock, and a tractor-trailer’s across the way and you’re two hours late for an appointment, you’re not liking it. There was no turning back once Disney came. It was just—it was just frantic. It was the most frantic thing I’d ever seen. The people coming in here with jobs, and the growth, it was just unbelievable. I like the old Florida. I like the old days.
Youngers
Wow.
L’Heureux
But that story about Mr. C. is a true story. I did business with him and we had him out to the house one night for beer and popcorn, and had some of my friends over, about 10 of us. Maybe a little more. And we all sat around listening to him tell that story. And that’s just a fantastic story.
Youngers
It’s hard to imagine what Florida would be like without that aspect of it, especially Central Florida.
L’Heureux
Well, it would have grown despite Disney. It was growing early. The Cape—the aerospace industry really took off after the war and in the early ‘50s, it would have grown without Disney. People had pensions. They had retirements for the first time. And they wanted to get out of the cold. So it had started to grow long before Disney. But not at the rate that Disney brought after that. When they came, it was much different than it would have been. It would have been a gradual increase. It wouldn’t be like it is today. But it still would have been a very big state. So we can’t blame Disney totally.
Youngers
No. Well, if you don’t have anything else.
L’Heureux
Stephanie, I think this has been fun. And enjoyable. And to learn that you came from the Okeechobee area, which I know also. And I went to college with many people from the towns around Lake Okeechobee—La Belle—also and I so enjoyed being interviewed by you today.
Youngers
Well, good. I’m glad.
L’Heureux
Thank you.