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Obituary

Longtime Scout and union leader

His Ybor City Boy Scout troop was the council's first integrated one.

By MARTY CLEAR
Published April 21, 2006

BELMONT/JACKSON HEIGHTS - Until Roldan Roche came along, kids who grew up in Tampa's housing projects never had a chance to experience life outside the city.

Mr. Roche led an Ybor City Boy Scout troop for 23 years. He died of cancer March 28 at age 77.

Like all other troops in the area during the 1960s, his had been racially segregated.

Mr. Roche saw the need to reach out to young people in the inner city and introduce them to Scouting in camps around Florida and beyond.

"He got involved in the 1960s, when my older brother was in Scouting," his son Rick Roche said.

"His troop was the first integrated troop in the council. He took a lot of kids on their first camping trips. For a lot of them, it was their first time in their lives they had ever been out of the city. A lot of them didn't have a father figure besides him."

The Boy Scouts' Gulf Ridge Council, which covers several counties, including Hillsborough, had no policy against integration but had never encouraged African-American youngsters to join until Mr. Roche took over the troop based at St. Paul Methodist Church in Ybor.

Mr. Roche was born in Key West but came to Tampa with his parents when he was 7 and settled in Ybor.

When Mr. Roche was a teenager, he spent a lot of time at an Ybor drugstore. One of the employees was a girl named Lutgarda, who later became his wife.

"His sister worked there, so he used to frequent it," Rick Roche said. "After he met my mother, I'm sure he stopped by even more often."

Not long after they met, Mr. Roche joined the Army and went off to fight in World War II and began a long-distance relationship with his wife-to-be.

"They actually became sweethearts while he was in the Army," their son said. "He courted her with love letters."

He served mostly in southern Europe and later in the Korean War. He came back to Tampa and married Lutgarda in 1954. Soon after, they built a house in Belmont/Jackson Heights, where Mrs. Roche still lives.

He spent a lot of his time in the Army in food service, and when he returned to Tampa, he took a job with Wonder Bread. He worked for the company for 42 years until his retirement in the late 1990s.

Mr. Roche was active in the Bakery and Confectionery Union and had served a term as the union local's vice president.

"He really started working at Wonder Bread just as a job, but it turned into a career," his son said.

"At that time a lot of the African-Americans who worked there were in sanitation, but he worked through the union to make sure they were able to get legitimate jobs."

Rick Roche described his father as "very much a God-and-country kind of guy" who strived to teach those values to his sons and Scouts.

"He always had certain rules, and you didn't mess around," Rick Roche said. "But I never felt uncomfortable talking to him about anything. My friends felt the same way. A lot of them like him better than they liked me."

In addition to his wife and son Rick, Mr. Roche is survived by another son, Roldan Jr., two brothers and a sister.

[Last modified April 20, 2006, 12:17:33]