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His gift gives homeowners a foundation

When the reclusive owner of Sunny Acres Trailer Park died, it could have been really bad news for the people who lived there. But he left a big surprise.

By LEONORA LAPETER
Published January 15, 2006

ST. PETERSBURG - Robert Scattergood was a willowy man with a shock of gray hair who always wore black and drove the wrong way around his one-lane mobile home park to deliver the rent slips.

The 81-year-old, who lived in a house at Sunny Acres Trailer Park, was reclusive and feeble. He sometimes stayed up all night on his computer and slept all day in a bedroom with cardboard over the windows.

Some of the residents never even met the retired TV salesman. Others, who had known him for years, would come down from up north for an entire winter and maybe talk to him once.

Scattergood, who had colon cancer and other medical problems, died in November.

A few weeks later, 27 of his tenants found his will in their mailboxes. He had left them the mobile home park that had been in his family for at least four decades.

"I never knew the man," said Mae Schell, a retiree from New York who worked in a thermometer factory and got a share of the park after coming there for less than five years. "But he sounds like the kind of man you'd want to get to know."

While many residents of mobile home parks around the state watch condo developers swallow up their communities, Scattergood's tenants can sit back confidently knowing they control the fate of their park, located off 46th Avenue N in Lealman.

Each of them will own a piece of the park, said Bryan McLachlan, the lawyer they hired to handle the transition.

Such resident-owned parks are the exception in Florida, where most are occupied by people who own their mobile homes but rent the land beneath them. About a fourth of Pinellas County's mobile home parks are resident-owned.

It would have been hard for the working-class residents of Sunny Acres to come up with the money to buy the 32-lot park, worth some $700,000 in court documents and likely more in the marketplace.

McLachlan is drafting plans for a corporation that would give each resident named in the will a share of the community.

It is a heady time for residents, many of them retired snowbirds who worked in factories or other blue collar jobs up north. Fewer than a dozen live in the park year-round.

"This was a revolutionary thing here," said Mary Thomas, 79, a retired nurse from Massachusetts whose family has been coming to the park since the 1950s. "How many people leave a park like this? He had no family that I know of. We were his family."

Scattergood and his parents moved from New Jersey during the 1940s or 1950s, depending on whom you talk to, and bought Sunny Acres. Scattergood was a traveling salesman for RCA, demonstrating TVs and early microwaves to dealers. When his father died in 1969, he ran the park with his mother until she died in the 1980s.

In earlier years, Scattergood would visit with the tenants and call bingo down at the community room. But as the years progressed and his health declined, he receded from park life and it suffered.

A drug dealer moved into one mobile home, drawing occasional flashing police lights along the little circle drive through the park. Then some tenants got behind in their rent. Scattergood was the kind of guy who never raised the rent. A few people rented mobile homes from Scattergood. Those who owned their own were paying $112 a month compared with $300 to $400 a month at other parks.

"He didn't have the wherewithal to evict people," said Ed Kessler, a 74-year-old retired technical specialist from Illinois who worked at a government atomic research lab.

"One tenant was $3,200 in arrears and he was only renting a trailer for $250 a month. And indeed, when this happens in a park, word gets around and other people started not paying rent."

Kessler and others decided something needed to be done. They got Scattergood to hire a park manager, Gary Courtney, who lived next to the park in a home. Courtney helped clean up the park and oust the rent-shirkers.

"Bob really had the best interests of the park," said Kessler, whose mother has been coming to the park since the 1960s. "He certainly didn't make money on his park. I'm sure every year the taxes went up, but the rents never went up. We were very blessed to have an owner-operator like Bob Scattergood."

Several residents recall Scattergood telling their parents he intended to leave the park to the residents as far back as the 1980s.

But no one knew for sure.

Scattergood told some of them he'd had many offers for the property, but he wouldn't sell.

In 2004, lawyer Carol Lawson paid a visit to Scattergood's home and drafted a new will that listed 27 residents and the park manager among the beneficiaries.

"He said he had no family," recalled Lawson, a probate lawyer from Dunedin. "And those people lived there for years. He didn't want them to lose their homes."

Scattergood's health continued to decline until virtually no one ever saw him. He occasionally drove his blue Buick station wagon, but he kept getting into accidents. His license was suspended.

On July 9, his birthday, Scattergood fell to the floor from his kitchen table and that's where Courtney found him. An ambulance took him away, and he spent the last few months of his life between the hospital and a nursing home. At one point, the residents worried the nursing home would take the park.

But on Nov. 5, Scattergood passed away. He was cremated and placed in an urn. Only the Courtneys attended a service at his graveside. There was no obituary, and he is in an unmarked grave, as his parents are in the same cemetery.

Times researcher Carolyn Edds contributed to this report.

[Last modified January 15, 2006, 01:48:18]