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After years of hard work, a place to rest

By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published October 11, 2005

NEW PORT RICHEY - In the old days, June and Donald Long might never have imagined their life's setting now: in a sweet Old Florida cottage on the Pithlachascotee River with their very own dock and a comfortable deck beneath a canopy of majestic live oaks.

Surely they couldn't have pictured June's garden, either: a sort of secret sanctuary entered through a jasmine-shrouded trellis, where eucalyptus mulch paths wind among native plants past a pond and waterfall the couple dug and built.

They also built the back porch and deck and gave the once-plain World War II-era house a dramatic exterior facelift - with their own hands.

June and Donald aren't afraid of hard work. They know what it's like to live somewhere really, really cold and work really, really hard to get what you want in life.

The Longs, both in their late 40s, worked for a time in a place many die-hard Floridians can barely fathom: in a U.S. Steel mill on Chicago's gritty and industrial south side.

It's where they met. And fell in love.

Donald worked as an electrician's apprentice and was on his way to becoming a journeyman; June spent her shift lifting massive steel beams onto cranes using 75-pound chains.

"We used to talk a lot around the mill, but he always saw me in my hard hat and safety goggles," she recalls. "He had no idea how I really looked."

On their first date at a neighborhood tavern, Donald walked right by June, a pretty brunette with a deeply felt smile and a way of making strangers feel comfortable within seconds.

"He always said he was surprised by what I actually looked like," she says with a laugh, recalling that night they spent talking and playing pool.

Now married 25 years, the couple wanted a better life from early on.

June, who also worked for years packing Oreos and Chips Ahoy! on the night shift at Nabisco, was one of eight siblings who saw her father, brothers and sisters work in the steel mills. Donald worked a lot of jobs, too, including repairing soft-drink machines at Burger King before he was laid off.

When they got interested in real estate ("reading library books and watching those no-money down shows on TV," June says) they realized that with a little savvy they could change their lives.

While living in Hammond, Ind., - a community so close to Chicago's steel mills, Donald says, "you can see the silver in the air" - they bought nearby apartments and rental units with a loan from June's uncle.

June worked the midnight shift and helped Donald fix up the apartments by day. They paid her uncle back with interest, June remembers. "Thank goodness for him," she says. "He was a good man who trusted us, who knew how serious and dedicated we were and that we would keep working no matter what."

That they did. They kept working and saving and eventually started making enough money that in the mid 1990s they bought their first house in New Port Richey - not on the desirable waterfront, June explains, "but in the boonies."

"We drove all over Florida looking at different areas, but in New Port Richey it was the prices that really got us," Donald recalls. "And the river sealed the deal."

Continuing to work diligently, the Longs, who have no children, also bought a nine-unit apartment building and two other houses in New Port Richey.

They purchased their 2,000-square-foot, four-bedroom river house in 1997.

Over the years, they covered it in buttery beige siding and reconfigured the roof to give it a more dramatic pitch. To lend it more of a traditional cottage feel, they added a trellis-style roof with pillars that extends over the front door and walkway. They got rid of the duplex layout and created a living space ideal for themselves and their dog, an Australian heeler-mix pound puppy named Trapper.

"We fell in love with him at first sight," June says.

They recently expanded the sprawling screened back porch with its mesmerizing views of the river.

"We wanted to bring it together, blend it together and make it a nice big home," June says. Late on an October afternoon, a fine breeze cooled the back yard, rippling the American flag on its tall pole and rustling the old oaks. June fixed sweetened iced tea and sat at a table beneath a green canvas umbrella to look at the garden she tends organically. She worries that chemical runoff would pollute the river.

"I've never used chemicals in my garden - it's just common sense not to," she says. "Why hurt the animals and the birds?"

She pulls out weeds by hand and tends to sick plants with sprays of water, soap and tea.

June, a member of the Florida Native Plant Society's Nature Coast chapter and the New Port Richey Garden Club, says her passion for gardening comes from her mother, who used to plant snapdragons and morning glories at night after her eight children were asleep.

In her own garden, her gorgeous indigenous plants grow: sleeping hibiscus, love grass, necklace pods, native goldenrod. She encourages a visitor to smell the delicious, earthy scent of dirt that wafts from her compost tumbler.

"Isn't it beautiful, so beautiful," she muses, pausing by the pond where outdoor speakers play a CD called the Vanishing Rainforest .

June, a lifelong Catholic who sings in the choir at Our Lady Queen of Peace, points out that the day is the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, patron saint of animals and the environment. Their one-fourth acre yard holds five birdbaths, three bat houses, a screech owl house, a bluebird house, a purple martin house and a bird feeder by the front entrance, where a female robin pauses to eat.

Down by the dock, where June often sees dolphins playing and manatee families congregating, she points out something else:

A reminder.

It's a street sign from the busy corner where they lived in Hammond.

"Gostlin and Cameron," it reads.

There were no trees there, she recalls. "And it was very noisy: Trucks went by night and day."

Now the couple, who are semiretired, live amid the music of the grand live oaks, an old Florida river and June's lovingly tended garden.

A yellow water hyacinth blooms on the pond. And a butterfly with the gold of late afternoon sun brushed on its wings floats on the warm fall breeze.

"To sit back and hear the seagulls and the wind in the trees," she says, "we feel like we're on vacation every day."

--Elizabeth Bettendorf can be reached at ebettendorf@hotmail.com

[Last modified October 11, 2005, 01:58:15]