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Obituary

Country living cast lasting spell

By MARTY CLEAR
Published February 9, 2007

One night in 1963, young Raymond Sibley was on his first date with a Plant City waitress named Shirley. Toward the end of the evening, he made a pronouncement.

"He told her if she had any other boyfriends, she had to get rid of them because he was going to marry her," said Michelle Davenport. "Three months later, they got married."

Raymond and Shirley Sibley spent more than 40 years together, until his death from a massive heart attack on Jan. 28, exactly a month short of his 67th birthday. Davenport is one of the couple's two daughters.

Mr. Sibley worked most of his life as a boilermaker, which kept him away from home and his family for months at a time.

But he found time to help his wife start Sibley's Liner Farm, which eventually shipped ornamental plants to retail outlets all over Florida. Once the farm was established, Mr. Sibley gave up boilermaking and worked full time on the farm.

"My mother had a green thumb," Davenport said. "She could grow anything. My father mostly did sales. He had a gift of gab, and he was great at sales."

Mr. Sibley was born and raised in South Tampa, but he spent summers with relatives in rural Alabama. It may have been there, Davenport said, that he discovered he was more suited to country living.

After a four-year stint as an Army paratrooper, Mr. Sibley returned to the Tampa Bay area, settled in eastern Hillsborough County and began his career as a boilermaker.

His work took him all over the country, and when his two daughters were young, the family would simply travel together. They would spend several months to a year in a location before moving on.

"Once my sisters and I started school, we came back to live in this area because we had family here," Davenport said.

He spent a lot of time away, but when he was home, he doted on the children. He bought ponies for his daughters, and boarded them in a pasture 3 miles from the trailer park in which the family lived. Every Saturday that he was home, he'd drive to the pasture and walk the ponies back to the trailer park. He'd make the long return walk on Sunday.

"He thought the world of his family, he really did," nephew James Whitmore said.

The Sibleys bought some acreage near Dover in 1975 so his daughters could keep horses at home. His wife started growing plants in a greenhouse on the property, and later that hobby grew into Sibley's Liner Farm. At its peak, the farm was shipping about 1-million plants a year.

"He worked as a boilermaker until they got the farm growing," Whitmore said. "Once they got that going, he could work there, and he didn't have to be away from his family so much."

In the early 1990s, all the farm's plants were wiped out by a batch of contaminated fungicide. Rather than start over, the Sibleys decided to retire. Mr. Sibley was about 50 at the time.

He spent his retirement years traveling with his wife and doting on his grandchildren, as he had doted on his own kids.

He had a history of heart trouble and had suffered a stroke last year, but seemed to be in good health until a Jan. 20 heart attack. He never regained consciousness and died the next week.

Besides Davenport and his wife, Mr. Sibley is survived by his daughter Shirley Rae Roberts and two granddaughters.

[Last modified February 8, 2007, 08:36:38]