Growing Up in Inwood...
- Bob Gernert
- Feb 27
- 5 min read
Inwood is a diverse neighborhood located on Winter Haven’s western side on the shore of Lake Cannon. During the real estate boom of the 1920s, Inwood was among several newly created neighborhoods marketed by the Haven Villa Corporation. Though never formally incorporated into Winter Haven’s city limits, it is part and parcel of the city’s rich history.
My family moved to Winter Haven in September of 1960. My maternal grandparents had moved here a year earlier and had purchased a small home on Avenue Q, NW. My father had been hired to operate the warehouse for the Continental Can Company that was in the old Racebilt complex on U. S. 17. Our family bought a practically new home on 26th St. NW one block from Lake Cannon. It was a three-bedroom home with terrazzo floors and ceiling heat. While that type of heat was radiant and toasty in the winter, the lack of air conditioning made July and August memorable for all the wrong reasons.
It was an amazing change for a sixth-grade boy who was accustomed to life in Ohio farm country. Hurricane Donna had just torn through the area and left quite a mess. I remember my father driving us down Cypress Gardens Boulevard (then CG Road) and seeing just the button top of the landmark Garden Court toadstool above the waves on Lake Ina. And to think we had our very own tourist destination — Beautiful Cypress Gardens!
My sister and I were enrolled at Garner Elementary where I would finish sixth grade. I remember we changed classes each day spending half with Mr. Stalvey and half with Mrs. Tyler — she was a force to be reckoned with. I also remember the Blue Horse school supply store in Mr. Stalvey’s room, where our purchases earned premiums the school could use for special purchases. Garner was a relatively new school at the time, and Boy’s Club Road did not exist. The back of the property was a landscape of Florida scrub, and great for exploring and adventure.
Twenty-sixth Street was amazing to me. It was anchored on the north end by a new Burger King restaurant on Havendale Boulevard (then a two-lane road) and Kitts Drug Store on the south end at Avenue G. The Havendale end also had Combee’s Market with a great selection of comic books. The street teemed with young people my age. On the street or within a block were future friends with names like Walker, McIntee, Jensen, Doty, Bryan, Smith, Hardy, Stone, O’Gwynn, Peavy, Saye, Brown, Berry, Carr, Sealy, Allor, Reed, and Carson. There were almost as many kids my age on 26th Street as there were in my entire class in Bloomville, Ohio. Great families. I always envied the O’Gwynns, as their dad drove a Sunbeam Bread truck and they had a refrigerator in the garage that was filled with ice-cold Cokes. Must have been paradise. They had a cool juke box in their garage as well. When my wife and I were newly married (and had better things to spend our money on) we too owned a juke box (which later became a part of Sheriff Lawrence Crow’s collection). Ultimately, a refrigerator in our garage was home to ice-cold Cokes … I just never found a fully stocked bread truck!
It was a whole new adventure for an eleven-year-old baseball fanatic moving into a world dominated by football … a game I knew little about. But it’s an adventure now in its 67th year.
EARLY 60S INWOOD ESCAPADES…
The northwestern Ohio farm town I came from boasted less than 800 residents. Inwood, as a neighborhood, and Winter Haven as a community were “the big city” by comparison.
As I finished the sixth grade, the neighborhood adventures were many. Within bike riding distance was the brand-new Westwood Junior High School, where early physical education classes amounted to walking shoulder to shoulder, clearing the athletic area of palmetto stumps and other debris. It only took an hour to get completely filthy. To the current enrollment — you’re welcome! And while I have fond memories of many of the Westwood teachers, a favorite was English teacher Hazel Miller. She admitted to loving “Mad Magazine,” earning her cult status immediately!
Down the street the Allor boys raised pigeons as did neighbor friends Frankie and Johnny Carson. We sometimes camped out near a friend’s home and when the “mosquito truck” would come by spewing a cloud of white spray … we ran behind it for fun! Since that cloud contained something like kerosene … this may not have been our best decision.
Just down 28th Street to Havendale, you’d find the “Jump n’ Jiminy” trampoline center (short-lived due to lawsuits, I’m sure) and the nearby “Dog and Suds” drivein (now thriving as Dino’s). Many Biltmore Shores kids remember stopping for 5-cent root beer on the way home from school. Several streets to the west was the Havendale Lanes bowling alley and later LaCarousel Roller Rink.
A block from my home lived a teenager several years older than me. Richard Carr became an amazing friend. A tall, lanky boy, he taught me to swim and to water ski in Lake Cannon. Though Richard was known to approach my mother outside and ask her to guess what was under his shirt … and then produce a snake (much to her dismay), my parents trusted him to look after me. He introduced me to Boy Scout Troop 559. I loved scouting, and I had three amazing Scout Masters in George Hardy, Gene Murrell, and Don Primm. Richard and I would also canoe on the lakes. I remember on one excursion we paddled to the canal between Lake Mirror and Lake Spring. At the time, none of the homes had been built behind Northgate. The Perrin Thompson citrus groves were still in place, and an old map of their property marked the south side of that canal as “The Jungle.” Amazingly we camped there by the shore of the canal (there was no seawall at the time), and you had no idea that a thriving shopping center was a stone’s throw away. Across Lake Spring from our campsite was a large neon sign with a blinking arrow pointing to the Landmark Motor Lodge, then located where Spring Lake Shopping Center is today. The sign rested atop an old boathouse, and the last time I looked, the cement pilings were still there along the shore.
When Richard went off to high school I didn’t see as much of him. His stepfather, Henry Zibelin opened Winter Haven’s first Honda dealership on the southwest corner of Avenue G and 26th Street, NW. Henry sold a gazillion Honda 50s and larger. Before I left Westwood, I owned Richard’s red hand-me-down Honda 50.
These are just a few of the escapades I can record here without fear of legal action. We made our own “excitement” in what I remember as a simpler time with very special friends.
