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The years and people my Woodlawn house has seen
© St. Petersburg Times, It was a project that gave me a chance to meet my neighbors beyond the friendly sidewalk wave. One weekend, an intrepid group of us from the Greater Woodlawn Neighborhood Association spent hours in the local history room of our main library researching our homes. We scoured city directories, precursors to the modern telephone book, to learn who had occupied our residences since their construction. Then we cross referenced the list of names with the microfilm records of old newspapers. Anyone notable enough to have had their name in the paper -- and in a place as small as St. Petersburg that's almost everyone -- added another piece to the puzzle of our structure's life. Not its architectural life, of course, its organic life. In my case, the modest, two-story federal-style house my husband and I purchased in 1998 was built in 1926, only two years after the neighborhood was platted. While the homes don't sit on significant property, they are a far cry from today's typical Florida development, where the houses are so tightly packed that your neighbor can reach out a side window and wipe his hands on your siding. The neighborhood first attracted us with its New England flavor, but won us over with its majestic live oaks that shade the street into a dappled darkness, even on days when the sun is angry. Many of those trees are so big around that a full hug only approaches half-way. Who knows? Maybe our home's first owner, William Goodchild, had a hand in planting some. He is described in the city directories as a "confectioner and householder." His wife, Eva May, is listed after him with her name in parenthesis, the way all wives in these volumes appeared, right through the 1970s. I wonder if our kitchen was the site of candy experiments -- attempts to keep chocolate from melting away in the sweltering summer and monstrous taffy pulls. Following Goodchild, the home had seven owners before us and a handful of renters. Among the most noteworthy is Joseph "Eddie" Bryan, who bought the house in 1944 and is distinguished in the directory for having a telephone, although there were no phone numbers as yet. Bryan appears so often in the newspaper that you would think no civic or charitable works took place in St. Petersburg without him. He was president of a local bank. And in 1966, he was named the venerable "Mr. Sun" -- a civic, rather than a muscle beach, appellation I presumed, after looking at his picture. During the nine years he and his wife lived in the house, I expect that every muckety-muck in town made a pilgrimage there seeking Bryan's endorsement or support. I bet the direction of the city was partly mapped in our dining room. When Wallace and Beverly Abell bought the house in 1963 it was apparently in tough shape after a series of renters. At least, that's how Beverly tells it. The sprightly, engaging woman came by the house the other day to reminisce. She said, at $16,500, the house was a bargain but needed quite a bit of work. Her efforts apparently paid off as her interiors were featured in a 1971 St. Petersburg Times article titled "Cheaper Living II," "for decorate-it-yourselfers." "Cable reels become coffee tables, chimney tile makes a handsome table base, egg cartons become sculptures and drapery material can be framed and hung to brighten that problem wall with modern art," read the glowing review of Beverly's efforts. But Beverly was more than St. Petersburg's own Martha Stewart. While her husband pursued a career as an engineer, Beverly used the Woodlawn house to launch a Bible studies group for housewives, mostly. She soon attracted hundreds of disciples from across Florida. Here's where our lives collide. Beverly pinpoints her religious awakening to an evening visit by Dr. D. James Kennedy of the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, who came to her door in Fort Lauderdale when she was 26 years old (about 40 years ago.) "The lord sent us to Fort Lauderdale simply to find out about (Kennedy)," said Beverly. She and her husband became members 101 and 102 of his church, she said. Kennedy is now a national figure and his televangelist ministry appears regularly on religious cable channels. Kennedy also touched my life, by making it his personal mission to demonize the American Civil Liberties Union when I was its executive director in Florida. He bought television time to broadcast a program in which he depicted the ACLU as an evil force in society. I thought he was a backward hatemonger. Beverly thought he was a savior. The house is the site of sports lore as well. Hal Lanier, a former Major League Baseball player with the San Francisco Giants, owned the house from 1979 to 1986. He coached the minor-league St. Petersburg Cardinals and later managed the Houston Astros. I can imagine the tobacco chawin' and the testosterone-laden conversations that went on in my living room at that time. The sticky, brown tobacco stains probably took layers of paint to hide. We bought the house from a couple who were divorcing. They had two young children and great plans for the house before the breakup. Our house, like all houses, is a tableau of an age. As communities change, as society changes, so do the lives of a house.
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Times columns today Mary Jo Melone Jan Glidewell Ernest Hooper Hubert Mizell Darrell Fry Darrell Fry John Romano John Romano Helen Huntley Phil Gailey Bill Maxwell Martin Dyckman Robyn Blumner From the Times Opinion page |
