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Letter to the editor

Mixing memories with a new vigilance

By Marlene Sokol Editor
Published October 26, 2007

CARROLLWOOD - June Beem Reynolds remembers the night police visited her house. They had come to drop off her little brother, she said, and "that's how we knew my grandfather had been arrested."

It was the prohibition era and Richard Beem operated a two-story dance hall on the shores of Lake Ellen. A speakeasy, you could call it. "I was never allowed upstairs," Reynolds said.

She remembers, "it was a very stormy night." And that very same night, the dance hall burned to the ground.

Reynolds, 85, tells these stories like they happened yesterday.

She remembers walking to a place called Lake Magdalene School each day. It had three teachers, one who doubled as the principal. Together they taught grades one through eight, with the fifth grade rotating from teacher to teacher depending on what was being taught.

"We were country, real country," she said, and no one ever locked their door.

Reynolds was a special guest at the first meeting of the Lake Ridge crime watch last week.

Lake Ridge, as it is called in property records, is a tiny neighborhood along Lake Ellen, just east of Original Carrollwood.

This is the real original Carrollwood, says longtime homeowner and crime watch organizer Lindy Sanchez.

But unlike Carrollwood, this neighborhood is short on historians.

The stories Reynolds tells are as colorful as the eclectic housing along Gomez Avenue and Graham Lane.

Reynolds describes how her grandfather planted orange trees on his 5 acres, cut trees in the swamp and built picnic sheds by the lake.

He rented boats out for a dime. Again, he never locked his front door. "Sometimes early in the morning people tossed in a dime," Reynolds said. "He called it 'breakfast in bed."'

Few landmarks existed other than the original Lake Magdalene Church and a Salvation Army home for unwed mothers.

"There was a mausoleum in the cemetery, and I was scared to death," Reynolds said.

She says her father, Melville Beem, developed Lake Ellen's beach in the spot where the dance hall had burned down. He bulldozed the wreckage and the cypress knees, dug out the muck and filled it in with sand he imported from a lot he had purchased near the cemetery.

"These lakes just have a wonderful history about them," said Sanchez, who worries that if no one steps forward to record these memories, they will be lost.

Few can remember the echo of children's laughter at Lake Ellen, before homes and condos lined the road.

Fewer can remember Carrollwood's original peacocks, imported by a circa-1940 farmer to sound an alarm when intruders came. These days it takes more than peacocks.

Two months ago someone tried to empty out Sanchez's garage, which she had left open just long enough to answer the phone.

A neighbor intervened, and another witness got a description of the car, and thus began the crime watch.

As the organization evolves, Sanchez hopes it will have spin-off benefits: friendships, stable property values, maybe even that historian she's looking for.

"Ever since we started the crime watch, it has been a really wonderful experience," she said. "I have met the most wonderful neighbors."

Fast Facts:

Find out more

You can learn more about Lake Ridge and its crime watch by e-mailing lindysanchez1@verizon.net.

[Last modified October 25, 2007, 07:21:21]