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One vantage point, 95 years of change
By CAROL LOVE © St. Petersburg Times, published February 21, 2001 ST. PETERSBURG -- Lenora Sims Duato remembers when it was beach, not seawall, from Pinellas Point to Coffee Pot Bayou and when streetcars were the main traffic in town. She recalls having to take a ferry to Pass-a-Grille and having to traverse the long road to Tampa via Oldsmar. She remembers having to line up quarters to feed the gas meter to keep the stove working. Mrs. Duato, who celebrated her 95th birthday Monday, has lived in St. Petersburg her entire life. When she was born in 1906, Pinellas County didn't exist -- it was still part of Hillsborough. Her reminiscences are a history lesson on this city's past. She had a birthday lunch at the Columbia restaurant at The Pier, dining on boliche and flan with her three children and other family members. Mrs. Duato received news of the most startling events of the 20th century right here in St. Petersburg. She was here when the telegraph lines flashed with the news of the Titanic. "It was just a shock to everybody," Mrs. Duato says. "Then I saw the movie and thought that it was unbelievable. You knew that's what happened, but to see it in a movie was just mind-boggling." She watched as St. Petersburg celebrated victory in Europe and then in the Pacific in World War II. "Everybody went wild down on Central Avenue. ... They went down at night and shot off fireworks and were tearing up the town!" Several modern conveniences were absent in her childhood at the turn of the 20th century. When she and her family wanted to go to Pass-a-Grille beach, they drove to Gulfport and took a long ferry ride to the barrier island. There was no bridge to the beach until 1919. "They had big white sand dunes as you were coming in," Mrs. Duato said in an interview last week. She went on to describe the trip. "You know it didn't go fast (and) it seemed like a long, long ways then. You'd stay all day. There was a bathhouse out there, and you could get yourself something to eat." Likewise, going to Tampa was no quick trip. "We went up and around Oldsmar -- it was a long, long time (getting there). ... We used to go over there just to shop at Grant's. Grant's was a big deal." Day to day was just as different. There was no monthly utility bill -- the gas meters in their homes ran on quarters. "If you didn't keep a line up of quarters, you didn't cook," she wrote in an autobiographical journal she began to keep in her early 70s. "The meter readers collected so many quarters in the leather bags they carried over their shoulders, they'd have to have someone in a car meet them and empty their bag midmorning and afternoon." At least one preacher had a rough time as well. "The railroad ran right behind our church, and the preacher would have to stop preaching when the trains came by -- the steam would be going and half the time they'd ring bells." Mrs. Duato's family has several distinctions in St. Petersburg and Pinellas County. Her grandfather, the Rev. P.H. Walters, was the first pastor of the first permanent building of the First Baptist Church of St. Petersburg. Mrs. Duato is still a member of the church. She has mixed feelings about the current discussions about tearing down the old downtown sanctuary. "It's had years of use, but yet you feel like they could use it for something because it'd be a very small parking lot. It's a lot of church, but when you take it out and look at the ground area, it's not that much. ... I'd like to see another church take it." In 1911, Mrs. Duato's father, Charles Sims, was one of the first deputies to be named under Pinellas County's first sheriff, M.L. Whitehurst. Mrs. Duato has a scrapbook with a news clipping from the Evening Independent showing her father and another officer standing in the scrub palms surrounding Lake Maggiore with a newly confiscated 60-gallon still during Prohibition. The Sims family also was acquainted with some of St. Petersburg's more famous residents. Mrs. Duato's aunt, Effie Bangs, used to work for the Snells and babysat their cat when they took a trip to Europe. A friend of her husband's family dated Doc Webb. The former Miss Sims married Charles Duato, who worked for St. Peterburg's utilities department for 41 years before he retired. They have three children, Charles, Robert and Peggy, eight grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. The two will celebrate their 73rd wedding anniversary this year. (Mr. Duato's health makes travel difficult, and although they still live together at the Masonic Home on First Street NE, he was not able to join the family for the birthday lunch.) Having spent nearly a century here is one change that stands out the most with her. "(I'm surprised by) the growth of this city and the people. It used to be you knew everybody ... someone at school from Boston used to be so strange."
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