Biltmore Shores: The Mayberry That Was

Less than a decade after the end of the Second World War, the men and women who had trained at Bartow Air Base and encountered Florida for the first time in uniform were coming back — this time with families, furniture, and the intention to stay. Housing couldn’t keep up. Developers who could read a map and a moment were platting groves as fast as the surveyors could work.

One of those groves was on the north side of Havendale Boulevard, in the city’s northwest quadrant adjacent to Inwood. Bounded by Lake Jessie to the north, Havendale to the south, 29th Street to the east, and Jersey Road to the west, it became Biltmore Shores — and the families arrived quickly enough that it felt, to those who were there, less like a subdivision being built than a neighborhood being born.

Bryan Owen was among the first ten to purchase a lot, paying $3,400 in 1954 for a parcel fronting Lake Jessie. Ray Leis sold him the land; he and George Leis appear to have been the developers. Chester and Wallace Tucker built the Owen home, as they did several others in the neighborhood, and the family moved in in 1955. Patti Rulli White’s family paid $5,300 for their home the same year. The names filling in around them — Terry, Bray, Varner, Steinmetz, Stotz, Boucher, Pierce, Schoonover, Duncanson, Wing, Wulff, Nelson, McDowell, Williams, Wright, Ortagus, Irby — were almost all young parents with children of similar ages, which gave the neighborhood, from its earliest days, the character of a place where everyone was in the same moment of life at the same time.

A new Garner Elementary School had just been constructed nearby, which was a significant selling point. So was the fact that each new home came with grapefruit trees in the yard.

The children of Biltmore Shores grew up in the particular freedom that the 1950s and early 1960s allowed. Bikes left in the morning and returned at dinner. Doors went unlocked. Sandra Wing Hudson remembers riding her bicycle downtown to the Ritz Theatre, “something I wouldn’t think of letting my grandchildren do today.” Heavy summer rains would flood the intersection of Hickory Street and 29th Street with three or four inches of water, and a number of children would arrive with skimboards to hydroplane across the asphalt underneath. The main problem, as Wynn Ostrander recalls, was falling. Raw knees were a summer constant.

Popular destinations included the Dog and Suds Drive-In — now Dino’s — for hot dogs and root beer, where some residents recall buying their first experimental pack of cigarettes. A trampoline center called Jumpin’ Gymany operated at the corner of 29th Street NW and Havendale during the early 1960s craze for such things. The Jiffy Food Store, now Trader’s Pawn, served the neighborhood’s immediate needs. Patti White and friend Melissa McDowell played Yankees and Rebels in the carport. Melissa also remembers a family somewhere on the street that was said to keep a puma in their backyard. When asked for the family’s name, she was direct: “I didn’t know the adult. I was a young girl walking down the far side of the street.”

Popular 1960s Dog n’ Suds Drive In on Havendale adjacent to Biltmore Shores. Now Dino’s Drive In and a favorite still.

One neighbor watered his lawn before each outing, then drove his airboat from Lake Jessie directly to the house to save steps — a detail that requires no embellishment.

Ronnie Owen’s family was among the first to build. Their house overlooked Lake Jessie, and before long aunts, uncles, and grandparents had also moved into the neighborhood, which was either the definition of community or the end of privacy, depending on your perspective. Owen learned to water ski by age eight. He had a private fort in the bay tree in the vacant lot next door. He remembers being awakened, before the house had air conditioning, by the sound of loud piston-driven Air Force planes flying from Bartow to Winter Haven’s Gilbert Field.

By twelve he was using the family boat to travel the Chain of Lakes visiting friends — Mary Helyn Begley, Richard Parks, Steve Vines, Bo James — to ski. A five-gallon tank of fuel cost $1.50. He earned spending money mowing lawns, selling greeting cards to neighbors who, he suspects, bought them out of pity, and selling Grit newspapers at the Winn Dixie near Auburndale.

Lake Jessie was the neighborhood’s front yard. About a third of the shoreline was airport property and left undeveloped. Owen’s father bought a sailboat from the Jaycees and Ronnie spent hours on the water with his transistor radio, a jug of iced tea, and his dog Nicky — returning home when his mother rang a farm bell that had come down from his father’s family in Kentucky.

After Christmas each year, he and his brother Steve would rope discarded Christmas trees to their bikes and drag them to the vacant side lot, where they would eventually ignite the accumulated pile into a bonfire that, by Owen’s account, lit up the night sky. Steve’s son is Jake Owen, the country music singer. The bonfires may have been formative.

The neighborhood had its business people too. The Wright family opened Wright’s Cleaners, first on Havendale and later on Avenue G NW. The Varner family operated the first KFC franchise on Sixth Street NW downtown. Shannon Steinmetz ran Standard TV electronic repair on Central Park, and Jane Pierce was a popular local radio host. Mrs. Schoonover, a seamstress, opened Schoonover’s Costume Shop, which outlasted the neighborhood’s earliest era and moved to Havendale.

Helen Patton used to make the neighborhood children biscuits with chocolate gravy. Red Sox star Rico Petrocelli rented the house next to the Barnes family during spring training and would bring his children over to swim in their pool after games.

The Brian Owen home on Lake Jessie was one of the first homes built in the emerging Biltmore Shores subdivision.

Mayberry, as Owen put it. That is exactly what it was.

Biltmore Shores also knew grief. Officer Gordon Stotz of the Winter Haven Police Department was killed in the line of duty in March 1956 — the first WHPD officer to die in service. He left behind his wife, Hazel, and two young children, Gary and Cheryl. A neighborhood that close-knit does not absorb a loss like that without carrying it.

Father Ron Owen — the boy who sailed Lake Jessie with his dog and his transistor radio, who dragged Christmas trees home with a rope and a bicycle — is now an Episcopal priest living in Orlando. He offered the summary that no amount of descriptive writing could improve upon: “Growing up then was an idyllic experience that cannot today be replicated. All in all, the folks in the neighborhood were Mayberry folks. They cared about each other and were genuinely nice.”

Sources: Biltmore Shores Facebook group recollections of Biltmore Shores alumni including Patti Rulli White, Bob Bray, Tom Patton, Wynn Ostrander, and Ron Owen.