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Once the center of the world

Residents recall a time when every place worth going to was right smack downtown.

By MICHAEL KRUSE
Published October 14, 2006

	[Times photo: Edmund D. Fountain]
	Joe Weeks' hardware store, Weeks Hardware, is the longest running business in Brooksville's small downtown business district. Two female members of the Weeks family opened a hardware store in 1913 called Miro Harware. That one closed, but in 1916, Weeks Hardware at 115 Main St. opened and has survived at that location, where Joe worked as a boy.

BROOKSVILLE - Joe Weeks of Weeks Hardware wears a well-tucked shirt and tidy combed hair and sturdy plain brown shoes. He moves slower than he used to and sometimes has to stop to catch his breath. But he says he won't stop coming to work until he wakes up one morning and can't put on his shoes.

His place has stayed open for decades as the rest of the original local businesses clustered around the courthouse have closed because of all the name-brand big-box stores that keep coming in on the wider and wider roads outside of downtown.

Weeks is still here. The store and the man.

"To me, it's kind of worked out like therapy - a goal in mind as you grow older," he said one day late this summer. "Some older people lose what their destiny was meant to be. Being a man of your own destiny - a man of independence - is something we're losing to mass merchandisers in this country."

Weeks Hardware, at 115 N Main St., is this town's last link to a different era, a different way of life and a kind of downtown business district that's long since gone. Recently, though, it also has become a sort of connector between the old-style vibrancy and the beginning of a slow-simmering hope of long-awaited revitalization.

"I'm coming in on an upswing," new city redevelopment coordinator Brian Brijbag said earlier this month. "Things are happening here."

Things have been happening at Weeks for almost a century.

His granddad built the building. His kin opened a hardware store in 1913. Weeks, 79, worked here as a boy, graduated from Hernando High School in '45, joined the Navy, finished at the University of Florida in '51, then came home and hasn't left since.

The store has creaky floors and peeling paint and tin-mold ceilings.

There's a dark chest with drawers of screws and nails that was built in 1901. The string holder on the counter is nine decades old.

Weeks keeps stools by the counter so folks can stop and sit and visit.

Around downtown, even up through the '70s, Weeks said, "anything you might want to put your finger on was right around the courthouse."

This wasn't just Hernando's political seat. It was the social and commercial center. Folks from all over the county worked Monday through Friday, and Saturday morning, too, and then came to town to do their business and see their friends.

"Town was the only place there was," said local historian Virginia Jackson, the executive director of the Hernando Heritage Museum Association.

"There'll never be anything like Brooksville on a Saturday night back in the '30s and '40s," said Eddie McIntyre, Hernando Class of '40. "Everybody was in town."

"Wall to wall people, believe it or not," said Bobby Snow, Class of '49.

"Couldn't stir the people with a stick," said John Mason, Class of '46.

"It was a social thing," said Murray Grubbs, also Class of '46. "They'd literally visit and stay in town till midnight. Everything stayed open till 11 or 12 o'clock."

There was a midnight show Saturday nights at the Dixie Theatre.

There was Rogers' department store, and Lingle's department store, and Bacon's and Hope's and Murphy's drugstores, and the Florida Caf and the Tamiami Caf and Coogler's Chevrolet. Publix was once downtown. So was the A&P and Carleton's and Maillis's grocery store.

"In junior high, everybody went to Murphy's to drink milk shakes and read comic books," said Steve Manuel, Class of '65, the longtime Hernando High band director who is now general manager of local radio station WWJB-AM 1450.

Bruce Snow, one of Manuel's classmates, an attorney who comes from one of the oldest families in the area, said as a boy he used to stop in front of the Weeks window display to watch World Series games on the black-and-white TVs.

"Brooksville back then," said Buddy Selph, Class of '74, the owner of Tommy Dawson Realty, "was the center of the world."

Or at least it felt like it.

Then that started to go away.

Brook Plaza opened in 1964 south of downtown on U.S. 41.

The first McDonald's opened in 1976 a bit further south. There was a parade. Big stuff.

Folks started to shop out that way, or over on U.S. 19 in Spring Hill after that community opened in 1967 and started to grow - and grow and grow - or in Tampa on a more regular basis than a special trip every now and again, down past Masaryktown and through all that Pasco County ranch land.

"Bigness begets bigness," Weeks said, "and small becomes smaller."

Frances Lingle Seibert, a former speech teacher at Hernando High who is 91 and still lives downtown in a fine house with high white columns, wrote a memoir last year called The Era of Main Street. It's about the way it was then and the way it is now. "The most worthless piece of real estate in the county," Bobby Meadows of Brooksville Printing wrote in the back of the book, "because it couldn't even grow grass, much less black-eyed peas, has become the most valued commercial property in the entire county."

The intersection of Mariner Boulevard and State Road 50 in Spring Hill has a Sears and a Wal-Mart and a Circuit City and a Ruby Tuesday and a Chick-fil-A. Wal-Marts and Ruby Tuesdays don't need grass.

Back downtown, though, after a lull that has lasted maybe a generation and a half, the antique stores and the brick sidewalks and the new signs for visiting walkers say something might be starting to shift.

"It lost some of its cuteness, if you will," said Don Hensley, Class of '68, a chiropractor with an office downtown who's also the president of the Hernando High alumni association. "But now it's starting to creep back a little bit."

Brijbag and Brooksville earlier this year won a Florida Redevelopment Association cultural enhancement award for the monthly Bandshell Bash concert series. The city is also one of five finalists for the Florida League of Cities city spirit award. The winner is to be announced next month.

Beth Crenshaw's high-end Home at Sea store on Main Street hints at a changing demographic.

So does Monique Swann's Creative Porch and Garden.

And the Rising Sun Caf, which Lisa Williams and Sallie Rice opened almost a year and a half ago, is different from the usual greasy spoon, sandwich-shop luncheonette. Exposed-brick interior walls. Wireless Internet. Comfy couches to sit and sip a cup of coffee in a spot that Starbucks hasn't found.

"There clearly is this national trend," said Kerri Post, the vice president of new product development for VISIT FLORIDA, who helped design the statewide tourism agency's Downtown & Small Towns program. "In the '60s and '70s, we got 'sprawly,' and now everyone's focused back on the downtowns.

"The downtowns are the heart and soul of a community. They really are. The community's real story to tell is there."

For Weeks, any day could be his last, he said not long ago.

But he's not ready to quit.

Not quite yet.

He hit "a bit of a rough patch" earlier this year, he said, when he didn't even tie his shoes. Just slipped them on and came to the store.

"Some days, I say, 'Hell, I got to do it soon,'" he said. "And the next day, I feel better, and I say, 'Well, I got more time left.'"

A woman walked in.

Morning, he said.

Morning, she said.

She asked if she could have a key copied.

He said he could do that and did it for a dollar. Seven cents tax.

Joe Weeks got up from his stool behind the counter and walked over to the key-making machine. His shoes were tied tight.

Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or (352) 848-1434.

[Last modified October 14, 2006, 07:24:25]