Tales of Growing up in Inverness 1945-1960

By Ashton Hester

This book contains a collection of stories about various events in Inverness during the period of 1945–1960, which the author hopes will bring back memories for some old-timers and provide some insight about the way things used to be for younger people.

Some of the stories include getting lost on Gospel Island at the age of three, taking a tour of the town and visiting various stores circa 1950, Little League baseball coming to Inverness in 1952, movie star Forrest Tucker attending a movie at the Valerie Theater while making the movie Crosswinds, the exciting 1952 race for Citrus County Sheriff, a human fly coming to town and climbing the courthouse, and Citrus High School sports highlights from 1954 to 1960.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796012217

Ashton Hester

The author, longtime reporter, photographer, editor Ashton Hester would like to compile another book or two containing more years, if health and stamina permit.

Book preview

Leaving Inverness to Go to War

When the United States entered World War II the day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, my father, J.A. Johnny Hester, was local manager for Florida Power Corporation in Inverness. He and my mother, Polly, lived in a one-story white wooden house on South Osceola Avenue which today (2019) is one of only three houses on that street between Main Street and Highland Boulevard that survived the extensive demolition of the 1990s that transformed those two blocks from a residential neighborhood to a parking area for the hospital.

If you turn onto South Osceola from Main Street, on your left will be the parking lot beside the former Woman’s Club building. Next will be a stately old two-story white-wooden house, and then another two-story wooden house painted yellow. Then comes the house where my parents lived. Actually, none of them still serve as houses; they are now occupied by businesses.

My father was 35 years old when the U.S. entered the war, having been born in 1906 in Scarboro, West Virginia. His father was a coal miner but in 1915 he was fired for purportedly associating with union organizers, and the family moved to Dade City, Florida. He died of black lung before I was born, and my grandmother operated a small dairy in Dade City to support the family.

My father went to work with the telephone company as a lineman at the age of 16, in 1922, and a few years later took a job as a lineman with Florida Power. He first worked on a roving line crew that built power lines into rural areas of northwest Florida.

In 1935 he was working in Wildwood, living in the Majestic Hotel, and he met my mother, who lived in Wildwood, at a dance. My mother’s family was from Savannah, Georgia, and she was born there in 1912. However, her father was a saw mill operator, and he decided to move to Wildwood around 1915 because nearly all the trees around Savannah had been depleted, and there was still an abundance of trees in central Florida.

So I owe my existence to one of my grandfathers associating with union organizers, and the other running out of trees to harvest.

Anyway, after the U.S. entered the war, my father, like so many others, entered military service. He joined the Seabees, where he could contribute his skills as a lineman and an electrician.

I was not born then but I was on the way. My mother decided she would go to Savannah to live with her oldest sister and her husband, who had no children, in their apartment until the war ended. They lived at 20 East 31st Street, between Bull and Gadsden streets. Their apartment was on the third floor of an old three-story red-brick building.

I was born on July 30, 1942, and I came to truly love Savannah. We would often go to Tybee (Savannah Beach) to go swimming. I was fascinated by the blimps over the ocean, and after I was old enough to understand what the war had been all about, I realized the blimps were looking for German submarines.

My uncle told me that the way Savannah got its name was that one day a woman named Anna was swimming in the ocean and started drowning, and people on the beach started shouting, Save Anna! Save Anna! I believed that until I was maybe ten years old.

My father was deployed in the Pacific theater, as the Seabees followed the combat from island to island, and I never saw him until the war ended and he came home in November 1945. I was three years old.

* * * * *

We moved back to Inverness and he reclaimed his job as local manager for Florida Power. We lived on North Pine Street (which today is called Pine Avenue), one block off of Main Street, in a housing complex owned by Mr. Brown. I don’t know his first name but his friends called him Brownie. He also owned and operated a shoe store on Main Street. He was one of Inverness’s few Jewish residents, although his wife was a Gentile. He was a very nice man and was always kind to me and the other neighborhood children.

The housing complex, which occupied the eastern half the block, consisted of four one-story white wooden houses and a two-story white-wooden apartment building that contained four apartments. Mr. Brown and his wife and teenage daughter lived in one of the houses. Our house was side-by-side with an identical house, with the two being separated by a lane about ten-feet wide. If you were sitting in our dining room you could speak, through the screened windows, with someone sitting in the dining room next door, without hardly raising your voice. Both houses had a screened front porch, and we had two rocking chairs on our porch. There was a large oak tree in our front yard, and as a result of the shade, grass would not grow well and the yard was mostly bare.

Behind the two-story apartment building was a meadow bordered by a few oak trees, that occupied the western half of the block. There was a path diagonally across the meadow, which had been worn by pedestrians taking a shortcut. Along that path was a wide gopher hole, with an occasional gopher coming out and crawling around. There was also a large ant hill. During the summer an abundance of multi-colored phlox (pronounced flocks) would cover the area. To me, that was really a fascinating meadow!

To momentarily leap ahead a few years: In 1956 Mr. Brown died and in 1957 Mrs. Brown sold the property to a developer who cleared away the houses, trees and the meadow, and built a row of connected stores, facing southward, from one end of the block to the other. Everybody called it the shopping center. It remains there today, with Connors’ Gifts & Accessories at the western end.

The only structure that remains on that block today that was there prior to 1957 is the one-story wooden house on the northeastern corner, which today houses a business establishment. It was not a part of Mr. Brown’s complex.

Anyway, returning to 1945, the Florida Power office was located in the same building as the Bank of Inverness (Brannen Bank) at the corner of Main and North Pine streets. They occupied the first floor, and the law offices of George and Manny Scofield occupied the second floor. Of course today the downtown branch of Brannen Bank occupies the entire building, which has been extensively renovated and is unrecognizable from the way it used to look.

My earliest memories of Inverness are that my father would drive my mother and me out on Gospel Island and we would walk in the forest and I would wade in the lake. I was fascinated by the squirrels, and my father tried to catch one by rigging up a wooden box propped up by a stick, with some nuts on the ground as a lure. But the squirrels didn’t fall for it. I was also fascinated by the tiny minnows in the shallow water, especially ones that were white with black stripes.

Incidentally, I called my father Daddy at the time, but at the age of seven I began calling him Pa. That was because I went to see the movie The Yearling at the Valerie Theater, and the boy called his father Pa. I was kind of good-humoredly imitating him.

An Impromptu Walk on Gospel Island

My mother had a friend named Grace Nolan, whose home was at the intersection of North Apopka Avenue and the road that leads to Gospel Island, and one afternoon shortly after we moved to Inverness, she went to pay her a brief visit. She parked the car beside the curb and told me she would be right back. It was a cool day. However, time went by and I got impatient and decided I would get out and go into the house.

Somehow, as I was walking across the yard, I became disoriented and wound up in the back yard, and then as I tried to return to the front yard, I veered off course and got on the road to Gospel Island. (Even today I’m a terrible navigator.) As I kept walking, I got further and further from the house, and soon I was out on the open road. Not able to think of any better alternative, I just kept walking.

Back then, of course, that road passed through undeveloped wildnerness, with only an occasional house, and was very sparsely traveled. I came to the bridge, which was then wooden and had only one lane, and walked across it. A little further on was another, much shorter bridge, which I think was just a culvert underneath the road, and an elderly black man was standing there, fishing.

Where are you going, boy? he asked me in a friendly voice.

I replied, I don’t know, which was the most honest answer I could think of.

As I kept walking, night began falling, and all of a sudden I saw the headlights of a car coming toward me. The car stopped and a man I recognized as being a friend of my father, Hillman Boswell, told me in a friendly voice