Member of pioneer family turns 100

Dan Stoutamire helped tend the first bridge to Clearwater Beach and later owned his own hardware store.

By BETSY BOLGER-PAULET, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published March 9, 2002

Dan Stoutamire celebrated 100 good years of living last week with friends at the church where he has been a member for nearly 80 years.

Stoutamire joined First United Methodist Church of Clearwater soon after he came here in 1922 to help his brother tend the first bridge that connected Clearwater with its beach.

More than 100 people, some of them members of some of the area's first families, were on hand to celebrate the life of this Clearwater treasure, a Southern gentleman who hasn't a formal bone in his agile body.

He is quick to stop people from calling him Mister: "I'm no Mister, thank you. I'm Dan."

He said he was born on a "cold, frosty morning in Tallahassee," March 3, 1902. Dan Stoutamire was the first of 10 children born to Elizabeth and Mordaki Stoutamire, from a hardy Florida pioneer family that had originally come from Charlotte, N.C., well before the Civil War.

Stoutamire remembers milking cows and helping his grandfather cut the timber and build the first Methodist Church at Jackson Bluff in Leon County.

"I got my college degree when Papa went to town and left me with my brother, Lawrence, to build a fence around the acreage, and it came out perfect, complete with gates and posts," he said.

Eventually he moved to Clearwater, where his brother was the tender of the wooden bridge that crossed the bay from the end of Seminole Street to the north side of Clearwater Beach.

"My brother said he wanted me to help him take tolls and turn the stile, but first I had to wash his dishes," Stoutamire said.

Lawrence Stoutamire had accumulated quite a pile of clutter as he maintained a bachelor's existence in the little shack that served as the tender's quarters.

"It took me days to clean up the mess," Stoutamire recalled.

Going to the beach was the thing to do in the swinging '20s, and that made for plenty of work. The brothers counted 2,000 cars on a typical Sunday.

It didn't take long before Dan Stoutamire got bored with living on the rickety bridge, collecting tolls and manhandling the large metal key that swung the bridge open to allow boats to pass underneath. So he took himself to town and got "a paying job at Smith's Hardware." He worked there for about 14 years.

"I decided if I was ever going to make any money I might as well open my own hardware store," he said. For 20 years he owned and operated Stoutamire Hardware on N Fort Harrison just a few doors down from Cleveland Street.

In 1928, he married a "dark-haired angel" he met at church, Winifred Grable, a descendant of pioneer families who had settled in what is now the Seminole area.

The couple lived in a large guest house with seven bedrooms and seven bathrooms on Jones Street, close to the North Ward Elementary School where Mrs. Stoutamire taught for 38 years.

The Jones Street house often hosted guests, some of whom came south every winter for more than 10 years.

One son, John, lives in Houston. The Stoutamires' youngest, R. Grable, who became Pasco-Pinellas Circuit Judge, died at 51. The widely admired jurist had told no one of his terminal illness as he silently battled brain cancer for five months. Judge Stoutamire worked until two days before he died Oct. 24, 1994.

The Stoutamires had celebrated 59 years of marriage when Winifred Stoutamire died in 1987.

Several years later, Stoutamire started to court a friend from church who had lost her husband 10 years earlier.

Dan and Norma Stoutamire will have been married 10 years in May. "We've had a great second time around," said a smiling Norma Stoutamire, 15 years Dan's junior, who came with her first husband to this area more than 50 years ago from Michigan.

Dan Stoutamire owned and managed several housing units in the area and worked at Clearwater Plumbing until his eyes started to fail him. When he turned 92, Norma Stoutamire said, "I finally put my foot down and told him: That's enough; stop working!'

Although he is now legally blind, his health is great.

"His doctor tells me he could be around another 10 years, and although he can't see the pretty girls, he tells me he can "feel them,' " Mrs. Stoutamire said. "I don't mind. He's my Dapper Dan."

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