The life of Mr. Sun is a bowl of cherries (and then some)

By LENNIE BENNETT

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 23, 2000

Let us consider cherries.

If you, like Toby and Carole Krayer, never thought much about this fruit, then you should consider doing what they recently did: Spend a week in Traverse City, Mich., at the annual National Cherry Festival. As the reigning Mr. Sun, Krayer and Mrs. Krayer were honored guests of the festival, which has reciprocal visitation with our Festival of States. They now have a deeper understanding of these succulent little orbs, which apparently consume much of Michigan during the summer months.

"I wasn't a big cherry-eater before," he said. "Now I feel like an expert."

I guess so. They ate cherries for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and they found that a person can dress cherries in more guises than a costume shop at Halloween. Besides the obvious pies and cobblers (one lunch featured 25 different cherry desserts), the Krayers sampled cherry-laced sausages and hamburgers, cherry-stuffed peppers, cherry salads and a sour-cherry steak sauce.

"The variety was amazing," Krayer said. "Everything was delicious."

The festival is a bit like our Festival of States, though bigger, attracting about 500,000 people over eight days, with about 150 different events (including a cherry-pit-spitting contest, of course) and a $2.2-million budget.

The Suncoasters, a civic volunteer group that produces the Festival of States, has sent a representative to the Cherry Festival for about 25 years, Krayer said. The Sungoddess traditionally attends, too, but this year was unable to. Cherry Festival organizers, in turn, send the Cherry Queen and their equivalent of Mr. Sun to our spring event.

In between the festivities, the Krayers were shown the area, which sits on the bank of Traverse Bay off Lake Michigan. They lunched with the governor and attended the Coronation Ball, and watched three parades and two fireworks displays. A drive through nearby Charlevoix was memorable for the 50,000 petunias planted along the five-mile main thoroughfare, Carole Krayer said.

Toby Krayer said that over the years Cherry Festival organizers have taken several ideas from our festival back to Michigan, including the formation of their version of the Second Time Arounders, the popular band of several hundred former marching band members.

The Krayers are not the first in their family to attend the Cherry Festival. Their daughter, Kolleen Krayer Kellin, visited Traverse City in 1979 when she was the Sungoddess. She became acquainted with the 1979 Cherry Queen, Marlene Polus, who happened to attend this year's ball and caught up on news with Mr. and Mrs. Krayer.

Being selected Mr. Sun was not the first time Toby Krayer has been honored by the Suncoasters. In 1941 when he was 11 and his sister, Miriam Krayer Hill, was the Sungoddess, he won the best-decorated bike category at the Festival of States Parade.

"It was the worst-looking bike," he said. "But one of the judges said, "Which one is Queen Miriam's brother?' That's the reason I won."

Perhaps, but there is no question that he was named Mr. Sun on true merit, having served in volunteer leadership roles with the Chamber of Commerce, United Way and on boards of numerous cultural and social service agencies. And now that he has become a fan of cherries, that service likely will continue for many more years. "If you eat 20 cherries each day," he said he learned, "you significantly cut the risk of heart disease."

I asked him if my favorite version, chocolate-covered cherries, counted in that formula.

"Unfortunately," he said, "I think not."

Judy Genshaft, University of South Florida's new president, was introduced to supporters of the St. Petersburg campus at a reception Monday at the Salvador Dali Museum, which shares waterfront space with the campus.

St. Petersburg dean Bill Heller greeted her as she rushed in with arriving guests.

"I got lost," she said, adding that she is still trying to learn her way around Tampa and St. Petersburg. "I was late for a lunch today, too."

The group was a mix of faculty, staff, students and community members of campus boards and committees.

Carol Russell introduced folks to another new face at USF, Alexandra Jupin, who has been appointed USF-St. Petersburg's interim director of advancement, replacing Mrs. Russell, who is going to work with her husband, J.C. Russell, in his mortgage brokerage business.

Jupin, who lives in Sarasota, is a freelance consultant who most recently was interim director of the Mahaffey Theater Foundation.

Peter Betzer also has a new title, Dean of the College of Marine Science, which was elevated from a department recently and which will give the programs more local autonomy.

Gary Litman visited with Andy and Ann Hines, urging them to visit the new Children's Research Institute nearby. Dr. Litman, who holds the chair in molecular genetics that the Hineses endowed, said of the lab facilities, which he helped design, "I wouldn't change a thing about it. It's wonderful."

Ray Arsenault, who presented a copy of his book St. Petersburg and the Florida Dream to Dr. Genshaft, told Bethia Caffrey he expects a very high phone bill over the next few months, with his wife Kathy Arsenault nodding in agreement. Their daughter Amelia is in Zimbabwe organizing a film festival which will benefit AIDS relief efforts in Africa, and the Arsenaults say they talk on the telephone a lot. "E-mail is good," he said. "but I like hearing her voice."

Also in the crowd were Jim Wheatley of First Union, which underwrote the party, Mary Wyatt Allen, Hazel Hough, Evelyn Craft, Fran Risser, Sarah Lonquist, Jim Gillespie, James Martin, Anne Gooden, Fay Baynard, Betsy Owens, Marianne Rucker, Louie Adcock and Steve Easton.

Genshaft, in her remarks to us, did not beat around the bush about her feelings about the idea that the St. Petersburg campus should break away from the university and become a separate school. "My intention, my hope," she said, "is to keep the USF family together," which was followed by a round of applause and then several rounds of punch.

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