Walls are gone, stories live on

By CHUIN-WEI YAP, Times Staff Writer
Published October 21, 2007

An excavator make quick work Tuesday of a home that had stood almost three decades at 17918 State Road 54 in Odessa. A small office park will go up in its place.
	[Mike Pease | Times]

The footprint belongs to 3-year-old Daniel Shannon and was left there 28 years ago when the cement was still wet and the big old house was still new.

The house is gone now, torn down Tuesday to make way for an office park.

"I hated to see it go down," said Daniel's mom, Brenda Shannon.

Under the debris, it's hard to tell if anything remains of the little memento. What's left for sure are a wealth of memories, a real estate windfall, and a ghost that never really went away.

* * *

J. Frank Shannon was fresh out of college, a bright-eyed engineer, when he moved from Tampa to the flat expanse of Odessa.

He leased 200 acres from the Smith family. Lived in a three-bedroom trailer with his wife, Brenda. Seven children came along.

They were happy, but the happiness produced a problem.

"We were a little crowded in the mobile home," Brenda said.

So one day, she told Frank: We need a real house.

"I built that to satisfy my wife," Frank would later say.

They bought 14 acres from the Smiths for $42,000 in 1979. Frank didn't set out to build anything fancy. Clean lines, red brick, and four white columns two stories tall.

The house had six bedrooms, but the kitchen was its center.

"The kids would always bring friends to our house," Brenda said. "We had a big, long table in the kitchen. I remember most people stayed at the table."

* * *

Other things the Shannons remember:

Running cows at the ranch. Bleeding the cows when they got Bangs disease, a bacterial infection that causes involuntary abortions. Growing blueberries. Then, not growing blueberries, when the beetles got to them and they ripened two weeks after everybody else's blueberries were at the market.

One of their grandsons scaring the other kids by making up stories about a ghost in the house called Jonathan.

"The little boys were just scared to death," Brenda said, amused by the memory.

The kids grew up. The Suncoast Parkway grew up. S.R. 54 was widened. Development booms came and went and came again.

And all of a sudden, Frank and Brenda found their property was worth $2-million, which was what the developer Kevin Howell paid for it in June last year.

"Best thing I've ever done was real estate," Frank mused.

* * *

Now, they live in an old, rambling neighborhood in Land O'Lakes, in a tall, narrow house overlooking a lake. They've got another house in the Bahamas. The price keeps going up there, too.

Is there any wisdom behind this wealth?

More like pure luck, Frank quipped. "I was at the right place at the right time," he said. "That's 90 percent of it."

Frank's 68 now. Brenda's 66. Daniel, their youngest son, the one with the footprint in the driveway, is 29.

Around the old place, the neighbors' names have changed: Used to be the Geracis, the Apriles, the Doyles. Now, it's Lennar Homes, Ballantrae, and a sign that says Fifth Third Bank is on the way.

But there are keepsakes.

Brenda picked up a couple dozen red bricks from the demolished house. Says she'll edge a flower bed with them.

Frank's got aerial photographs of the old house in 1979, before it was finished.

And something else - or someone else.

When they moved to their new three-story home in Land O'Lakes for good, Brenda said, one of her daughters turned to the children and informed them:

"We got Jonathan in the car, and we brought him here to our house."

Chuin-Wei Yap can be reached at 813 909-4613 or cyap@sptimes.com.

[Last modified October 20, 2007, 20:43:51]