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Letter to the editor

1976: Strangers in Ozona aren't readily welcomed

By THERESA BLACKWELL, Times Staff Writer
Published November 11, 2007

OZONA - Jim Craver was studying for his doctorate at the University of Illinois in 1877 when the doctors told him he had tuberculosis. Craver, 27, wasn't expected to live long enough to reach the warm state of Florida.

But survive Craver did - for nearly another 50 years - in Ozona.

Ozona. The name is the butt of jokes to some strangers zooming by the signs on U.S. 19, just north of Dunedin. "How's the ozone in Ozona?" chortled one. Ozone is that stuff in the Earth's atmosphere that protects us from ultraviolet rays, and possibly from some skin cancers.

The good people of Ozona, numbering perhaps 1,200, don't mind the laughter - as long as the strangers keep driving and bypass their beloved community. They want to keep Ozona just the way it is.

No high-rise buildings touch the coast here. Oaks spread their limbs, and pines and palms rustle in a nearly-constant breeze. The view of Honeymoon Island should take away your breath. Property here is guarded zealously, with no trespassing signs and at least two barricaded roads.

The community may be the last of its kind on Pinellas' Gulf shore.

No one is quite sure how much was known about ozone in the late 1880s, but that's when two physicians - one from Elgin, Ill., and one from St. Louis, Mo., - settled here, and changed the name of the community from Yellow Bluff to Ozona (anything yellow suggested the dreaded yellow fever back then, a historian wrote in the 1920s).

Yellow fever was just one of the diseases men and women tried to escape on the bluffs overlooking St. Joseph's Sound. They came from interior Florida's for the sea breezes, to escape malaria outbreaks as well.

But Ozona did not become a sanitarium for those seeking clean air. It was, first and foremost, a place for the homesteaders who carved out orange groves and later tried commercial fishing.

Many of the winter people from the North and Midwest invested in orange groves tended by year-round residents. Most of the people interviewed say they worked in the groves, in the packing houses, or for the Orange Belt Railroad Co., acquired later by the Atlantic Coast Line.

The children of the pioneers say their numbers are dwindling, but the surviving kinships are impressive. More than one generation often shares the same mailbox at the Ozona post office, established in 1888.

Postmaster Jeannette Lindsey is a great-great-granddaughter of the pioneering family of Whitehursts, who settled here in 1868, when Yellow Bluff was nothing but a watering hole for fishermen, including Cubans and Key West sponge fishermen. Not until 1885 was the town mapped.

Nov. 18, 1950

Drew and Brown enter Clearwater mayor race

CLEARWATER - There are four hats in Clearwater's city political ring today, two bearing the "mayor" tag and the others "city commissioner."

Within the space of two hours yesterday, three candidates made their announcements for the Dec. 19 election. They were:

For mayor: Holdover City Commissioner Leland Drew, native of Central Pinellas, a gas appliance dealer and former superintendent of the sewage disposal plant; City Commissioner Herbert Brown, finishing his first term on the board, an attorney, artillery battery commander in the European theater in World War II.

For commissioner: Herbert Blanton Sr., prominent Clearwater Realtor and a past president of the local realty board.

The terms of Mayor Harry D. Sargeant and Commissioners E.B. Casler Jr. and Brown expire Dec. 31.

Looking back

Headlines through the years

A look back at the events, people and places that made North Pinellas the unique place that it is. The information is compiled from past editions of the St. Petersburg Times

[Last modified November 10, 2007, 22:22:43]