Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Profile

She bloomed here

After a tragedy, a woman brought her three children to sleepy little Oldsmar. "Best thing I ever did," says the florist and artist.

By THERESA BLACKWELL
Published January 21, 2005

OLDSMAR - Like Ransom Eli Olds before her, Sunday Page is an Oldsmar pioneer.

More than 25 years ago, she looked at the Oldsmar sign on the edge of town that read "Last of the new frontiers" and decided to bring her three children and live on the new frontier.

"Best thing I ever did," she said. "Good things have happened to me here. Great people live here."

In 1980, Pinellas County residents looking for a home were rediscovering the town R.E. Olds had abandoned. The population had increased from 1,538 in 1970 to 2,608. Page said horses grazed along the bay and commerce was limited to a couple of convenience stores and a gas station. So within three years, she opened Oldsmar's first flower shop, Oldsmar Florist.

Last summer, Dorothy Larson of Oldsmar went into the shop on Tampa Road to order some flowers. She noticed a portrait in a gold frame. Larson is on the preservation committee of the Oldsmar Historical Society and immediately recognized the portrait as that of the founder of Oldsmar, R.E. Olds.

Vera Page said her mother painted the portrait. Larson thought the painting was well done and asked whether they might be interested in exhibiting it during an event like R.E. Olds Days.

Sunday Page, 60, went further when she recently gave the city the portrait as well as a small bronze statue of R.E. Olds by former Oldsmar resident Robert Daughtery. She liked the idea of helping residents connect with the real person who started Oldsmar.

"We were thrilled to have them," said Chris Steiner, Oldsmar arts coordinator.

Steiner put the statue in a display case in the lobby of City Hall and set the portrait on an easel to the side. Now the portrait is next to the replica 1901 Oldsmobile Curved Dash Runabout in the center of the lobby, and Steiner doesn't know who moved it there.

"The spirit of R.E. Olds must have wanted to be there," Steiner said, so she left it next to the Oldsmobile.

The oil portrait in white, gray and black was not Page's first painting. Though untrained as an artist, she woke up in the middle of the night in 1992 with the urge to paint. She chose a photograph of a great-aunt with feet planted firmly on the streets of Sicily as her first subject. She didn't stop painting for 10 years, rendering mostly from photographs, often of historical figures.

"It was pretty wild, I'll tell you," Page said. "I didn't know I could do this."

She finished about 60 paintings before the busy florist shop and a new project took most of her spare time.

She works at Oldsmar Florist with her children Vera and Haden Page and daughter-in-law Gladys Page. Gladys Page is married to Sunday Page's son, Ray Page, superintendent of the Tarpon Springs wastewater treatment plant. Their son, Raymond, 7, sometimes helps his grandmother, too.

At the shop recently, Sunday Page was absorbed in a flower arrangement. She added raffia, the fiber of the raffia palm, for an accent. A large white Fuji mum was the final touch.

Sunday Page started a new project about two years ago - a book about her late husband's experiences in the Korean War. She met Haden Page in a taxi in Akron, Ohio, in 1969. He had blue eyes, freckles and sandy blond hair, and he asked her to go on a picnic.

"I thought that sounded pretty harmless, so I did," she said. "And we instantly fell in love."

They got married six months later, in 1970, and two years after that, a drunken driver killed him outside the church where they were married. In 1978, Sunday Page moved to St. Petersburg with her three children. Two years later, Oldsmar was home.

Page has a "significant other" once again. Steve McKinney, 57, tall and personable, delivers flowers for the florist shop.

"Their mother got a boyfriend after 30 years; it's hard for them," Page said at the shop with her children nearby.

"It's great for me, I'll tell you that."

[Last modified January 20, 2005, 08:52:11]