Welcome readers! Over the next few weeks I will be posting stories of when I was growing up in Hardee County Florida. Hope you enjoy them and if there are any of my readers who grew up in the area I hope you will get in touch and post comments as well. I have broken them down into 4 or 5 parts and will be posted them daily till the final one. Enjoy!
My very first memories are of a little frame house in an orange grove between Wauchula and Zolfo Springs. Mr. Miller was our landlord, and I only remember his name because Daddy and Mama referred to him as that. I do remember, or at least I think I do, that for the Easter just before my second birthday he brought my brother Harley a chocolate bunny and me a little glass train engine filled with jelly beans. During that time I remember staying by myself a few days with my mother's parents in a house near the Holland kin. It never occurred to me until recently that it was because Mama was giving birth to my next brother.
After Tommy was born in July, we moved to a brick home on Old Dixie Highway that my parents called the Marvin Bailey place. I vividly remember our few months there as Daddy let me try to milk our cow in Mama's tin measuring cup, and he accidentally ran over the puppy that my great Uncle Earnest Holland had given me. It was my first brush with death.
We soon moved again to Sulfur Springs where we lived for three years during the Second World War. Daddy drove a bus to MacDill Field and brought soldiers home for Sunday dinner. We kids played war in the street and backyards and learned about blackout curtains and rationing of beef, butter, and gasoline.
As the war neared an end, we moved back to Hardee County and lived for a short time with Uncle Jack Holland, Aunt Minnie, and Grandpa Holland. Then we moved into a little shotgun house up the road from the Hollands while Daddy built our old rough house in town. He had bought an old frame house in an orange grove, tore it down, and used the timber to build a home on Eighth Avenue. I lived in that house for 13 years, the longest I've lived anywhere until this day. The house didn't look like much, but it was made of heart pine and nailed together with square (case-hardened) nails. It withstood several hurricanes, including Charley in 2004.
***********Part 2 coming soon************
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