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Tom Jackson

Escape life’s upheaval at familiar county fair

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You don’t need a consumer confidence report to know that the economy is on a rebound trajectory. Instead, just open your eyes to what’s going on in Pasco County, where change, once more, is afoot.

You can scarcely swing a surveyor’s plumb bob without whacking evidence of our resurgence. Earth movers are moving earth. Grimy guys with signs are redirecting traffic. New construction is erupting like mushrooms after a summer thunderstorm.

Entire parts of the county are hardhat zones, and it’s all pretty much good, this investment in things that bring new jobs and opportunity.

Amid the flying dust, the big machines belching smoke and the sense of anticipation that attends it all, humans are naturally grateful for what is reliable and unchanging. It’s why we celebrate efforts to preserve vast swatches of virgin land and lovely old buildings. It’s also among the reasons to cheer the return this week of the Pasco County Fair.

Mckenna, left, and Brianna Childs, of Dade City, wait in the stall area at the 2016 Pasco County Fair, until they are called for their part in the Possom Trot club 4-H events.
(File)

The county fair is our annual Brigadoon, a touchstone that remains virtually the same one year to the next, despite all the change that swirls around it. And, we not only count on its constancy, we are reassured by it.

There may be a connected city — whatever that is — surrounding jaw-dropping manmade lagoons back up the road. Traffic engineers might be spellbound by the prospect of a “divergent diamond” interchange at State Road 56 and Interstate 75. Riders can access Wi-Fi on all county buses now. In short, we’re so cutting edge you could lose a finger.

But, just beyond the ticket-takers at the county fair, it might as well be … well, frankly, you can pick your year. Because, with the exception of a detail here or there, it never changes.

Pasco’s fair week — always the third week in February, always nestled between the Florida State Fair and the Plant City Strawberry Festival — is a comforting little slice of yesteryear, where the familiar abounds: Pig race, poultry preens, cities, towns and communities boast, young pageant princesses seek their first crowns, and performers with unusual talents bring fresh meaning to the term “side show.”

Where, besides a county fair, after all, are you likely to run across the self-proclaimed “only traveling ‘Lumber Jill’ show in North America?” Or, a psychologist who promises to “explore the hilarious side of hypnosis” in a “wacky show that rivals reality television”?

This year’s opening day event is history, of course, but as a past participant, I would be remiss if I did not throw some love in the direction of the goofy opening-day “Celebrity Milk-Off.”

Nevermind that the annual descent into bovine mayhem is that variety of celebrity events in which, as humorist Dave Barry observed, all the celebrities require name tags.

In truth, almost nobody comes to see Pasco hotshots ineptly yanking on poor heifers’ delicate faucets. They come, instead, to see which cow will relieve herself smack dab in the middle of a squeeze duel.

In this way, the milk-off is a lot like the Daytona 500.

What else? With the possible exception of a rickety rollercoaster, the county fair’s midway offers all the rough-and-tumble kinetic experiences sufficient to eliminate weak-stomached NASA astronaut applicants.

Speaking of stomachs, fairs are pretty much the originators of food trucks, although you aren’t likely to be able to find a barbecue sundae, corndogs or fried, well, everything at the Taste of New Tampa or those downtown Tampa food-on-wheels roundups Mayor Bob Buckhorn fancies.

And, a bellyful of fried-everything is exactly what is needed when you board a ride in which you will spend substantial moments suspended upside down.

Then again, you don’t have to eat fair fare. Up at the Madill Building, they’re grilling juicy hamburgers that will transport you to 1957. And, at the next window, you’ll find strawberry shortcake that’ll save you the trip to Plant City.

There’s also this to like: At 30-odd windswept acres atop a hill overlooking State Road 52, the Pasco County fairgrounds is contained. Compare that to the Florida State Fair, which sprawls across a daunting 330 acres.

The county fair is relentlessly doable, then, and that, also, is to its credit.

Its midway, resembling a droopy barbell, is as organized as such things can be: big-kid rides in a big grassy plaza on the north end, little-kid rides on the south, and connecting them an avenue of games of — *cough-cough* — skill.

Just the way it’s always been. And, that’s just the way county fair-goers like it. Familiar. Comfortable. Traditional.

Something reliable to hang onto in this time of hurry-up upheaval. This is the week to lose yourself in yesteryear. Our changing world will be waiting when you get back.

Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

Published February 22, 2017

Farewell, and Godspeed, to Adam Kennedy

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The call brought Pasco Schools Superintendent Kurt Browning out of an early morning meeting. Crews Lake Middle School was on the phone. The principal hadn’t arrived. There were reports of a terrible wreck along his usual commute, and they were worried.

Saying he was on it, Browning rang up Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco and put the situation to him. “I’ll call you back,” Nocco said. Ten long minutes ticked by. Then, Nocco, on the phone.

“My condolences,” he said.

Now, Browning. “Those are the words no one wants to hear.”

(Courtesy of Pasco County Schools)

Thus began what Browning would come to know as “the worst I’ve had as the superintendent of schools.”

Adam Kennedy was, like many U.S. Marines, a Renaissance man. Smoker of savory meats; baker of perfect cheesecakes; housepainter, woodworker and cabinetmaker; golfer, triathlete, Xbox aficionado and Pokémon shark; tank driver and fan of Broadway musicals; warrior-philosopher, educator and servant leader.

And — and! — marvel his friends — he more or less mastered virtually all these skills before that maker of instant experts, YouTube, entered our lives. Adam Kennedy was old school.

Also, this: He is missed. As Nocco reported to Browning, the 46-year-old died on the way to work Jan. 20, when his 12-year-old Dodge pickup slammed into the back of a logging truck on State Road 52 that had slowed to make a turn just west of U.S. Highway 41.

A couple of weeks ago, some 800 mourners filled the school’s gymnasium to express, with tears and tender memories, why his premature passing left a sinkhole that will be slow to fill.

“He never gave you the answer,” Clarissa Stokes, his student, said into a melancholy microphone the other night. “He made you work for it.”

This was not College of Education theory at work. This was a revelation that came to Capt. Kennedy in the cockpit of an M1A1 Abrams tank on the outskirts of Baghdad. Deployed as part of Operation Desert Storm in 1991, it came to Kennedy he wasn’t sure exactly where he was, or what exactly motivated the Iraqis.

There in his war machine, Kennedy made a promise: If God saw fit to deliver him home, he would do whatever he could to make sure future generations of Americans did not suffer a similar fundamental shortcoming about the world.

It was a vow he followed as surely as if it had been an order from a commanding general.

Kennedy made it home, made his way into teaching, and began making his mark on young minds by inspiring them with the stories of those who went before.

Teaching rewarded him not only with young minds flickering to life, but also dedicated friends and a wife, Abigail, also a teacher, and their children, grade-schoolers Ethan and Hannah.

All were, and remain, staggered. Because Kennedy was young. And vibrant. But, as colleague Freda Abercrombie rightly noted, “It is not always the leaning tree that falls.”

Once a commander, in the classroom he was commanding.

“He told us, ‘Never present a problem without offering a solution,’” Stokes recited, “‘because then, you’re just complaining.’”

Witness after witness said much the same thing: Everything about him encouraged others to be better.

Mike Pellegrino admired him because Kennedy boosted his game.

Pellegrino noticed the new guy at Weightman right off, as you do men who wear suspenders and bowties.

Pellegrino and Kennedy wound up playing golf, training for triathlons and repairing houses together.

Pellegrino stood by him, when Adam took Abigail’s hand.

As Jim McKinney, a tech specialist who found a fellow traveler in Kennedy, said utterly without irony, “He liked retro things.”

As proof, he noted the singular time Kennedy shed his 1920s-teacher look to come to school, instead, dressed as Ben Franklin.

Browning imagined big things ahead.

Kennedy made assistant principal before he was 40, and rose to principal in 2015. All of which added to the devastation from the horror of that Friday morning.

The boss pauses here. There is a sniff. He remembers excitedly calling Kennedy to tell him about his new command. “He said [in Marine Corps monotone], ‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Right away, sir. Thank you, sir. Have a good day, sir.’ …  I thought I’d messed it up.”

He hadn’t, of course.

Kennedy, it turned out, absorbed the rigors of responsibility the same whether his view was through the periscope of an Abrams, or across the panorama of a middle school campus.

Only the rules of engagement changed. As did the lives of those who were blessed, in recent years, by that engagement.

Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

Published February 8, 2017

Pucker up for kumquats

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Every year when the calendar rolls up against the Dade City Kumquat Festival, I can’t help thinking about a scene from “Doc Hollywood” — the Michael J. Fox movie in which an aspiring Beverly Hills plastic surgeon gets waylaid in tiny Grady, South Carolina (played convincingly by Micanopy, just up the road).

While he’s there waiting for repairs to his wrecked Porsche and serving community service hours in the local hospital, preparations are underway for the local Squash Festival, which prompts a rumination on timing by the mayor (David Ogden Stiers).

Skip Mize, the longtime kitchen boss at Williams Lunch on Limoges, says that kumquat season at his popular Seventh Street eatery is fleeting. But, during that period, the ambitious menu features kumquats in all of the various forms.
(Tom Jackson)

It seems the zucchini and the Grady squash were locked in a battle over which would be the nation’s preeminent gourd when a shipment of the town’s signature crop was swept away by a tornado that was otherwise “bound for … agricultural stardom at the [1933] Chicago World’s Fair.”

“If it had gone the other way,” the mayor says, “there’s no telling where this town would be today.”

The parallel is not exact, but when it comes to festivals surrounding local harvests, and towns that are making the most of close calls, I can’t help thinking about kumquats and Dade City. Not that there’s anything wrong with either, except that kumquats are not, to choose one regional delicacy, strawberries. Nor are they tangerines or oranges — although all these and kumquats are related taxonomically.

Generally, however, humans do not have to work their way up to strawberries or tangerines or oranges. Each can be enhanced, of course, and often are, but each also, when ripe, is tasty right off the bush or branch. Fresh-picked kumquats, however, are an acquired taste.

Yes, you’d say, and so are Spanish olives, champagne, golf and PBS’ “Masterpiece Classics.” And, I would not disagree. Each requires a mature palate, and rewards the effort.

But, in my experience, bright little kumquats, so lovely in aspect and mesmerizing in fragrance, will flat out produce a three-day pucker when eaten fresh-picked.

Yes, even if you follow, precisely, the recommended regimen, rolling the fruit firmly between your thumb and forefinger to release the sweet oil in the skin before popping the whole thing, grape-like, in your mouth, you will wind up resembling someone eager to be kissed.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Still, the resolute tartness of kumquat pulp makes the little fruits conveyances for the delivery of sugar, the more the better.

So, part of me can never anticipate the Kumquat Festival without wondering, like the Grady mayor, how the arc of Dade City’s history would have bent if it had been Florida’s first to celebrate the subtly sweet temple orange, the easily peeled and delicate tangerine, or even the bold pink grapefruit.

But, no. Instead, The Greater Dade City Chamber of Commerce decided to organize a festival in its honor. And, they have it on the last Saturday in January — the same day as Tampa’s annual Gasparilla pirate invasion.

A challenging date for a challenging fruit. Because that’s how Dade City, the little town that can, rolls.

If you were there last weekend, you may have discovered that once they have submitted to the culinary expert’s machinations, kumquat-centered dishes can be exquisite.

And so, we turn to the Skip Mize, the longtime kitchen boss at Williams Lunch on Limoges, who advises us at the top, kumquat season at his popular Seventh Street eatery is fleeting.

This has more to do with preparation, which is labor intensive, than harvest season, which extends from November through March.

“There are some things you get to eat only at Thanksgiving, and some things you get to eat only at Christmas,” Mize says, “and some things you get to eat only around the Kumquat Festival. It’s tradition.”

For Mize’s kitchen, that tradition extends “only about two weeks, two-and-a-half weeks, tops.” But, what a season it is. His ambitious menu abounds with dishes featuring kumquats in various forms: sauced, jellied, jammed, candied and glazed; kumquats reduced, through repeated boiling, to simple syrup; and, ladled onto pork, chicken or salmon, kumquat chutney.

Similarly, on festival day itself, nearby Kafe Kokopelli always features kumquats in various forms, infused into everything from appetizers and cocktails — kumquat sangria sounds zesty — to entrees (who’s up for kumquat meatloaf?).

Without a gate admission, organizers say it’s impossible to know how many people attend the festival in any given year, but with roughly tens of thousands each year, it’s fair to say the crowd is substantially more than turned out for the Grady Squash Festival.

Then again, the movie had a happy ending: The doc got the gal; the town got the doc; the mayor, presumably, went on to many reelection landslides.

It’s a similar joy that descends, each year, on Dade City as a result of its embrace of its tart natural treasure.

Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

(Published February 1, 2017)

Casting a wider crime-fighting net

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If, like me, you grew up on “Dragnet” and graduated to “Hill Street Blues,” the new face of crime-fighting in Pasco County isn’t what you’d expect.

But, if you came of age following the exploits of the “CSI” franchises, in which sharp and attractive young people foil bad actors by tapping on keyboards, then it’s exactly what you’d expect.

Ashlyn Reese, Chase Daniels and of course, Ally Gator, are using social media to boost communications from the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office.
(Tom Jackson)

Either way, it’s high time anyone concerned about law and order in our region met Ashlyn Reese, 23, and Chase Daniels, 28, two intrepid nerds whose combined age matches, precisely and exquisitely, that of Jeff Harrington, Sheriff Chris Nocco’s second-in-command.

We mention Harrington, 51, a no-nonsense cop in the mold of TV’s legendary Sgt. Joe Friday, because of his assessment of what the fresh-faced, wide-eyed Reese and Daniels mean to the agency.

Says Harrington, “They help us cast a wider net.”

You might not get this at first glance. As the agency’s social media coordinator, Reese, brought aboard in September only months out the University of Florida — Nocco has fondness for Gators, as we shall see — spends much of her time posting cute pictures and videos to the sheriff’s Twitter feed (@PascoSheriff) and Facebook (Pasco Sheriff’s Office) page. There is a method to her charm.

And, Daniels — whose avocation is knowing UF athletics as well as any of the university’s paid media staff — shoulders, as Nocco’s assistant executive director, the task of maximizing community outreach.

Together, however, they combine, in ways both subtle and overt, to expand Pasco residents’ awareness of — and involvement in — local policing. This soft-touch pair helps put a toothy chomp on Pasco County crime.

“The easiest method of getting information out to the public is through social media,” Nocco says.

The sheriff’s social media accounts are not new. But, until last summer, all three — Facebook, Twitter and Instagram — suffered from being over-institutionalized. Nearly all of the posts, mostly grim, were official business: suspects sought, road closings, sinkhole alerts. Not that such alerts aren’t important, but they suffered from an old social media complaint: Who wants to follow streams of relentlessly bad news?

Last summer, Nocco ordered up a fresh and amped-up approach. His staff not only would post far more frequently, the subject matter would be spiced with upbeat chatter, happy pictures of dogs and horses — because who doesn’t like dogs and horses, of which the sheriff has plenty. The posts also would offer light commentary on items and entities of community interest.

Suddenly, the sheriff’s social media teemed with mentions of the Buccaneers, Rays, Lightning and the USF Bulls; celebrated the morning’s first cup of coffee; wished followers a good night’s sleep; and celebrated the region in every season — to name only a few items you’d never see on the standard police blotter.

You can’t argue with success. Twitter followers have more than doubled, to more than 25,000. The sheriff’s Facebook page is up to nearly 81,000 fans. Combined, the sites get about 100,000 views daily. “That’s what we used to get in a month,” Daniels says.

And, there’s growth: Each adds between 100 and 150 new followers daily.

It would be one thing if all this were simply about putting a happy face on the agency’s activities (and there’s no arguing about the smile potential of a German shepherd in a hat). But, as spokesman Kevin Doll notes, if you snare your audience with cute pictures and giggle-inducing gifs, they’re still around for notices about missing persons, road closures and suspects sought.

There’s seriousness, too, in the lock-your-doors hashtag campaign: Every night at 9, followers get a reminder about making sure their doors — house, garage, vehicles — are secure.

This is no small thing. A significant portion of property crime results from easy opportunity, Nocco says.

“You see surveillance video of cars driving down a street, teenagers hopping out and trying the doors of cars as they pass. If they’re locked, they keep moving. They don’t want to spend a lot of time or make a lot of noise getting in.”

Where’s this going? Just here: An informed public is a more secure public. And, the larger audience, the more likely important knowledge is going to be spread through sharing and retweeting.

“Eighty-thousand Facebook followers becomes 200,000, even 400,000 shares,” Doll says. And, that sort of citizen-dissemination has led to assorted arrests, among them a suspected bank robber and a suspected burglar, both of whom were fingered by civilians when surveillance video was posted on the sheriff’s online sites.

The only downside: users who think tweeting is a substitute for dialing 9-1-1. It’s not. Got that? In an emergency, do not tweet or post to Facebook. There are trained dispatchers waiting for your call, but they are not monitoring the sheriff’s social media. OK.

Come for the adorable dogs in hats. Stay for the bad-actor bulletins and the body-cam video. This, say Nocco and Daniels, is the future of law enforcement, and — just the facts — it’s helping the good guys sleep better.

Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

Published January 25, 2017

Campaign 2016: Something to talk about

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Everyone knows the old saying, the one designed to keep peace among restless kinfolk: Never discuss religion or politics.

Sandy Graves knows it, too, and spurns it at every turn.

“If it weren’t for religion and politics,” she says breezily, “I wouldn’t have anything to talk about.”

This, as anyone who knows the first lady of Land O’ Lakes, is not entirely true. She can do hours on the history of her community, or what goes into the construction of a small amphitheater.

Sandy Graves stands near a lake in her beloved Land O’ Lakes.
(Tom Jackson/Photo)

Even so, politics and religion, and especially how they intertwine, are her preferred milieu. Nonetheless, in anticipation of the completion of a historically wild ride, Graves is willing to take a conditional vow of silence.

It was either that, or, to affix a fitting ending to her efforts on behalf of a certain billionaire reality TV star and developer, pay close to $700 a night for a hotel room anywhere near a Washington D.C. Metro stop. “With a four-night minimum,” Graves says. Yikes.

Yes, Sandy Graves, accompanied by amiable husband Steve, is going to the (even now, mind-boggling) inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 45th president of the United States. In exchange for free lodgings with her niece, a pleasant progressive who lives in Alexandria, Virginia, and supported Hillary Clinton, she says, “I am willing to bite my tongue.”

That will be her niece’s loss, because as pleased as she is about the election’s outcome, Graves nonetheless emerged from the campaign with utterly delightful tales that have next to nothing with partisan politics.

We will get to the Blue Ridge Mountains snake woman in a moment.

First, meet Liam, a 7-year-old Wesley Chapel lad who greeted Graves, who’d arrived in response to a request for campaign signs, as if mounted on springs.

Graves rapped, the door swung open, and there was Liam, eyes wide and bright, and bouncing — boing-boing-boing — as he summoned his grandmother.

“Grammie! It’s a Trump supporter! Grammie!”

Weeks later, after Election Day, Sandy and Liam happened across each other, and the boy asked why she hadn’t responded to his email.

“You sent me an email?” she answered. “I don’t think I got it.”

Shrugging, but without missing beat, he said, “Hillary must have deleted it.”

Speaking of whom, Graves noted two errors — one of commission, the other of omission — she considers critical to Clinton’s defeat.

Evidence of the first adorns the back windshield of her Kia SUV, a sticker that proclaims the driver to be an “Adorable Deplorable,” in response to Clinton condemning Trump backers as society’s dregs.

Graves rejected Clinton’s characterization as “worse than anything Mitt Romney said about the ‘47 percent’” — the 2012 GOP nominee’s assessment of the recipient class that had no incentive to vote for him.

Also like the 47-percenters, the so-called Deplorables rallied around their new-found celebrity. “We’re deplorable?” Graves says. “Fine. We’ll take it.”

The omission: According to reports in Pasco, and pooled information from around Florida, Clinton operatives vanished between the March primary and the end of the Democratic National Convention in late July.

Meanwhile, GOP activists worked their precincts like bees, linked to their hives by sharply designed mobile apps. This, Graves noted, was in stark contrast to Clinton campaigners who, when they finally did arrive, lugged old-fashioned paper logbooks.

This, too, boosted Republican hopes. “At last,” Graves said, “our technology is ahead of theirs.” In her gratitude, she couldn’t help wondering how the Clinton campaign could have mislaid so much of what President Obama had proven correct about getting out the vote. It was almost as though Republicans and Democrats had switched playbooks.

All of that was history, however, on Election Day when, in a quirk of scheduling, the Graves found themselves in the North Carolina Smoky Mountains for Steve’s annual camp retreat with college buddies.

“If we’re here,” Sandy told him, “we’re working.”

Assigned a precinct in deep blue Cedar Mountain, between Brevard and the South Carolina state line, they met secretive ticket-splitters — shy Trump voters who planned otherwise to tick Democrat boxes — a couple their age who were first-time voters “because they said they’d never felt needed before, and the aforementioned snake woman.

She rolled up in “a nice Cadillac,” Graves recalls, and asked workers to keep an eye on it. She needed to keep the motor running and the heater on, because it was cold, and she’d brought her baby python curled up in its carrier.

“He goes everywhere with me,” she explained. “He sleeps in bed with me. Of course, my husband doesn’t like it. But, that’s the way it goes.”

“Then,” Graves says, “we asked her if she wanted a Republican sample ballot, and she gave us a look like we were nuts.”

Politics and religion. And snakes. And 7-year-old boys with zingers. That was Campaign 2016 in a nutshell.

The lesson here? Be careful what you decide people shouldn’t talk about.

 

Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

Revised January 11, 2017

Saying ‘No’ to New Year’s resolutions

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The time has come, tradition says, for all of us to take stock of our lives and, having properly weighed the whole sorry mess, resolve to make much-needed improvements.

Or not.

Mostly not.

According to a survey conducted by the Saint Leo Polling Institute, scarcely more than one in four adults planned to make New Year’s resolutions — just 27 percent.

Victor Wallington hasn’t made a New Year’s resolution since the one he made about 20 years ago, when he successfully stopped smoking.
(Tom Jackson/Photos)

Maybe it had something to do with when the calls were made, the four days beginning Nov. 27 — the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Given Americans’ short attention spans, that is weeks before most of us would even think about whether we should commit to a new lifestyle regime.

After all, a week before the election, 10 percent of American adults hadn’t settled on their preferred choice for president. So, maybe the poll suffered from bad timing.

Or, maybe it was something else altogether. Maybe three out of four of us really are content to muddle along the way we did in 2016. Or, maybe we have been discouraged by previous attempts that unraveled before Super Bowl Sunday.

If the three-out-of-four statistic is a good one, then those in the business of slinging words have lately been targeting a jarringly slender audience. Who knew?

More than weight lost, gyms joined, self-improvement books bought, time better organized or investments made, what New Year’s resolutions inspire most are ‘listicles’ — that is, articles comprised of lists. These are actual headlines.

“Four steps to get over the New Year’s resolutions you didn’t accomplish this year.” (Verily)

“Five people getting even richer off your New Year’s resolutions.” (Marketwatch)

“Six New Year’s resolutions that will give your dating life a boost.” (Verily)

“Seven secrets of people who keep their New Year’s resolutions.” (Forbes)

“Eight ways to keep New Year’s resolutions about money.” (Forbes)

“10 must-know tips for achieving New Year’s resolutions.” (Huffington Post)

“10 New Year’s resolutions for your wallet.” (Christian Science Monitor)

“11 New Year’s resolutions for grown-a** ’90s kids.” (Bustle)

I could go on, but you get the idea.

In short, if you are the sort who thinks a blank calendar presents endless opportunity for real life-improving change, there is no shortage of advice about how you might, or should, go about the task.

The long and short of it, as laid out by Saint Leo University assistant professor of psychology’s Scot Hamilton, is to be realistic. The best way to do that, he says, is avoid staking your success to the end result.

“So the adage of just a little better each day, or a little less each day,” is the correct approach, Hamilton advises. It’s like the riddle: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Wendy and David Hevia don’t make New Year’s resolutions, instead they set goals for themselves that don’t coincide with the calendar.

Another Hamilton recommendation: One way to prolong keeping to a resolution is to allow yourself the occasional old-habit indulgence. Consider the good you’ve done to that point as equity in your project. If your discipline is generally good, you can backslide now and again “knowing that you’re not back to square one.”

It’s precisely that temptation to backslide, conjuring the specter of failure— not contentment with our lives as they are — most cite for not committing to a resolution.

Accordingly, “I don’t call them New Year’s resolutions,” says Wendy Hevia. “I call it a ‘reset.’” Along those lines, 50-somethings Wendy and husband David, who own and operate three Kiefer Jewelers shops (Lutz, Brandon and the original in Dade City), have pledged to adopt a new eating regime — specifically the Whole 30 Program — in time for New Year’s Day.

But, it’s not a resolution, David says. “We have goals, not resolutions.” Among them, get into better shape, work more efficiently, and, to avoid the stress of being stretched too thin, learn — as billionaires do — to say “No.”

I know what you’re thinking. But, lest you waddle down that if-it-looks-like-a-duck-and-quacks-like-a-duck New Year’s resolution path, know this: “We are not committed to getting to all of this in 2017,” David says, “or beginning right with the start of the new year.”

Except for that new eating plan, anyway. So, yeah.

Around the corner up Collier Parkway, 61-year-old Victor Wallington is also skipping the New Year’s resolution game. Not because he isn’t a believer. One of his most cherished life changes — quitting smoking — began on a New Year’s Day about 20 years ago.

Now the retired Detroit emergency technician, who defines effervescence, lives in Wesley Chapel, works in the cart barn at the recently reopened Plantation Palms Golf Course, and counts his blessings.

Declaring he’s “had an absolutely wonderful life — thank God for that,” Wallington is committed only to “take each day as it comes.”

For the skeptics forming a super-majority, that’s not just one way to have a successful New Year’s resolution. It might be the best.

Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

Published January 4, 2017

Glimpsing the upbeat in a gloomy 2016

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You don’t have to be a disappointed supporter of Hillary Clinton to have arrived at the notion that 2016 can’t end soon enough.

Tom Jackson

I mean, lots of us got there long before Nov. 8. Simply put, 2016 was, in many respects, a rough year, and not just because of the rancor of the election.

We needn’t revisit the particulars here. That’s for the news services, networks and major dailies. Let’s just say any year that begins and ends with relentless horror that elevated an unknown Syrian city — Aleppo — to nightmarish prominence, and still found time to accommodate the Orlando nightclub massacre, two mass killings by truck, and the deaths of Prince and Zsa Zsa Gabor is a year that will live in infamy.

Not unexpectedly, then, as if to hasten its exit, we have for weeks been awash in the business of mopping up 2016. People of the year have been declared. News events have been ranked. And, we’re up to our chins in forecasts about what 2017 will bring. (Breaking: CNBC projects Americans still will buy lots of trucks and SUVs.)

Ordinarily, I am second to none when it comes to reveling in expectation, what psychologists call “the joy of anticipation.”

This is why you never will find me lining up with those who complain about Christmas merchandise filling the shelves in the middle of September, or TV commercials for April’s Masters golf championship airing in January.

Both are terrific dates on my calendar, and I extract enormous pleasure from contemplating them. In fact, I’m going to pause right now and think about the banks of azaleas surrounding the 12th green and 13th tee at Augusta National’s Amen Corner. … OK, back to our regularly scheduled column.

The thing is, although it’s true 2016 packed no shortage of misery — for me, the year will forever be framed by the death of the Tampa Tribune, where I’d toiled nearly a quarter of a century until its abrupt termination May 3 — but, what the old Scottish philosophers said about ill winds applies equally to the year behind us. Close inspection finds some slight cheer amidst the tumult, including within the region served by The Laker and Lutz News.

Mike Wells, Pasco’s longtime property appraiser, retired, as scheduled, celebrating among friends and associates at the Champion’s Club clubhouse in early December.

Land O’ Lakes-based Richard Corcoran, meanwhile, has become Florida’s Speaker of the House, giving Pasco its second House speaker in two years (Wesley Chapel’s Will Weatherford turned it over in 2014), and, Corcoran’s pronouncements on crony capitalism, lobbyist activity and government transparency — all welcome — sent tremors across the state.

In Pasco, another can-do fellow with an agenda — Seven Oaks’ Mike Moore — was elected chairman of a county commission that, with the loss of Ted Schrader, will be looking for leadership.

Moore’s job will have to be easier than that of Pasco schools Superintendent Kurt Browning, who, even as the district races to complete new schools — including the jewel, Cypress Creek High, with a state-funded performing arts center — has been accused of unfairly tampering with attendance boundaries.

So, yes, we suffered losses in our region, although few were more keenly felt than that of Joe Hancock, forever 57, descendant of pioneers, farmer, philanthropist, family man and cycling enthusiast, knocked off his German Focus and into eternity on rolling Lake Iola Road in early May.

Those hills are God’s way of reminding us space must be honored, which is among the reasons folks in Pasco’s high country remain worried about what encroachments might be signaled by the rollout of the “Connected City” plan proposed by Metro Development, a massive project of homes and job centers east of Interstate 75 and south of State Road 52.

Although ground recently was broken on a staggering 7.5-acre lagoon slated to become the centerpiece of a $100 million residential community, Metro has yet to submit its final proposal involving about 96,000 new residents to county commissioners.

So, something else to anticipate in 2017. Need more? OK. Spokesman Kim Payne says the Florida Hospital ice center is only weeks from exiting its construction stage. Soon, only hockey players will need hard hats.

And finally, this upbeat note. Upbeat? Make that soaring. The results of the raffles involving Sherry Lee Steiert’s quilts are in, and San Antonio Rotarian Betty Burke has this to report: The drawing attracted $420. Through the miracle of matching funds — from various divisions of Rotary, plus the Gates Foundation — that $420 became $3,150, enough to purchase 5,250 polio vaccinations.

Y’all did that. In a certifiably terrible year, assorted acts of kindness, love and generosity stitched together to produce a quilt of human selflessness. Something to build on as we contemplate 2017.

Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

Published December 28, 2016

Harvey’s Hardware fills a niche in Land O’ Lakes

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Christmas is upon us again, and with history as our guide, an appreciable number of your neighbors are about to be grateful for the existence of a locally owned hardware store in their midst.

Paul Harvey points to a photograph of the original Harvey’s Hardware building.
(Tom Jackson/Photos)

“The saddest time of the year,” says Emma Lou Harvey, “is when somebody is trying to put something together on Christmas Eve and they don’t have all the parts, or the parts don’t fit.

“And then, they come in the day after Christmas, looking for what they needed.”

Emma Lou, 86, is the grand dame of the venerable Harvey’s Hardware in the heart of Land O’ Lakes, and she has a secret: Desperate parents in the role of Santa’s elves not only have been known to seek out the Harveys after closing time Christmas Eve, they’ve also been rewarded for their efforts.

This is the sort of thing that happens when you run a hardware store as a public trust, the way a small-town doctor treats his practice.

“It’s nothing for people to come to the house,” Emma Lou says. “It’s what people did back then.” It’s sometimes what people do now. “If people had a problem…”

“… We helped them out,” continues Dee Dee Amodio, the store’s longtime clerk.

This is what Harvey’s, established — no foolin’ — April 1, 1961, does.

Guide a single mom through the intricacies of replacing the guts of a failed toilet tank? Check.

Dee Dee Amodio, a clerk at Harvey’s Hardware, and Oatie, the high-fiving cat.

Work with a hobbyist as he spreads out a project in the middle of the electronics aisle? Check.

Readily produce the part the big box retailers didn’t have, then smile knowingly when the relieved customer gasps at the low price? Check and double-check.

I mean, proof that Harvey’s does things differently is manifest in its shop mascot, a bob-tailed Siamese cat — Oatie — that dispenses high fives.

All anyone who works at Harvey’s asks is you think before you blurt, “I’ve been all over town looking for this!” Telling the folks who just bailed you out you tend to shop elsewhere is not a compliment.

Nonetheless, much as they want to, none of them — not Dee Dee, not Emma Lou, and not even Paul, Emma Lou’s plainspoken, 60-year-old son, will reply with what’s patently obvious: You should have come to them in the first place.

Lots of Harvey’s clients figured that out a long time ago. In fact, it’s pretty much why Ted Harvey — Emma Lou’s late, lamented husband — got the family into the business in the first place.

It’s not like the Harveys weren’t constantly occupied. She taught home economics at Gulf High School. Ted worked for Sheriff Leslie Bessenger. There was young Paul to rear, of course, and they had an egg farm with 10,000 free-range chickens. “We stayed busy,” Emma Lou says.

But, Land O’ Lakes, at the turn of the 1960s, was miles from the nearest retail center — “You had to go to Sulphur Springs if you wanted anything,” Emma Lou recalls — and, unbeknownst even to his wife, Ted Harvey had an itch to change that.

Dee Dee Amodio, Oatie the cat, Paul Harvey and his mom, Emma Lou Harvey, are familiar faces at Harvey’s Hardware, a shop that’s become a mainstay in Land O’ Lakes.

So when Charles W. Johnson, the store’s founder, asked Ted to look after the place while he was on jury duty, it was as though a bolt found its ideal nut. He spun into place, and held fast until he died in February 1994.

Once in charge, Ted quickly upped the store’s offerings, adding milk, eggs, ice, live fishing bait and fuel-oil delivery … none of which the store carries today.

Indeed, Harvey’s Hardware is, in many ways, as notable for what it no longer carries as for the odd treasures it does. Guns and ammunition, for instance, are off the menu, Emma Lou says, because, “They attract bad actors. Besides, there’s all kinds of paperwork and special insurance.”

Similar reasons related to bureaucrats account for how they chucked their fuel-oil operation. There is a limit, she says, to how many visits from EPA staffers any one small business can endure.

Instead, Harvey’s found a niche in knives, especially those designed and handcrafted by Bradford, Pennsylvania-based W.R. Case. “Biggest Case dealer in the Southeastern United States,” boasts Paul.

Now we’re 55 years on, and Harvey’s has stubbornly hung on, as history has gone on around it — like the Olympic torch passing through in 1996 en route to the Olympics in Atlanta, and ball fields and the Land O’ Lakes Community Center blooming in the former swamp, where Paul used to explore.

It’s not easy. Emma Lou reports they lose more suppliers every year, and there’s that whole internet competition thing. But — to answer the question that’s always dangling — she has no plans to quit the place.

Paul endorses her fixedness. “We need her,” he says. “She jump-starts us.” As Harvey’s does her.

“Retail is interesting to me,” she says. “You never know when you open the door that day what’s going to happen.”

Someone might come in completely unaware that what he needed most in the world was a set of Allen wrenches on a ring. Someone else — on Pearl Harbor Day — might bring his father, a World War II veteran, just to say hello, and that would trigger a memory.

Emma Lou’s family, who lived then in Seminole Heights, spent that infamous 1941 weekend at their Land O’ Lakes home. But, she dropped her little plastic box radio getting out of the car Saturday morning, and it shattered. They had no idea what had happened until neighbors rushed to greet them when they returned home Sunday night.

She was only 11 at the time, but she remembers the moment like it was yesterday: “The world had changed.”

It always does, of course. Which is why it is reassuring when some worthwhile, likable institutions resist, Harvey’s Hardware not least among them.

Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

Published December 21, 2016

Tree farm plays starring role in annual tradition

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The first thing you need to know about the Ergle Family Christmas Tree Farm is, you have to be going there to get there. Nobody leaves the house for a gallon of milk, or a package of screws, or to drop off a donation at the neighborhood church and comes home with an Ergle tree.

Visiting the Ergle Family Christmas Tree Farm provides a great photo op for the Webers, of Lutz. Shown here are Kyle, Kelly, Sophie and Aria, along with photographer Cortney Pieus.
(Tom Jackson/Photos)

No, unlike the neighborhood big-box retailer and those ubiquitous pop-up lots, experiencing Debbie and Tony Harris’ rolling 25 acres on U.S. 301 above the north bank of the Withlacoochee River — like yoga or a “Gilmore Girls” marathon — requires commitment.

Nonetheless, for 25 years — longer if you include the original Ergle farm, a converted citrus grove nearby founded by Debbie’s late father, Omar Ergle, the Pasco-Hernando Community College provost — seekers by the thousands have found their way to this out-of-the-way place in the country to retrieve their centerpiece symbol of the season.

Once there, visitors browse from a menu that includes choose-and-cut Florida-hardy species in the field, or familiar imports from Michigan and North Carolina — Scotch pines, Douglas firs, blue spruces, Fraser firs and more — turning the farm into nothing less than the region’s yuletide crossroads, where evergreens and old-fashioned seasonal merriment are dispensed in equal measure.

Breathe deeply, the sign says. They’re making oxygen.

Piper (in front), Vesper (in the wagon) and Kemper Streets have come from Lakeland to visit the Christmas tree farm.

“You have to give customers what they want,” says Tony Harris, silver hair under an ever-present ball cap, and in his experience, about 70 percent of them want trees from up north, even though they cost about 80 percent more (about $10 a foot versus $6 for farm-grown trees). “But, for an old Southern boy like me, going out in the woods to cut down a red cedar and haul it home — that’s Christmas.”

Similarly, for most of the spread’s customers, treating the experience not like just another hurried household errand, but instead like a time-honored ritual, seems to be what it’s all about.

“It’s a tradition,” says Wesley Chapel entrepreneur Ben Alexander, founder of Balloon Distractions. “Coming out here” — as he did with his wife, Rachel, and daughters Claire, 19, and Grace, 17, on a recent Thursday — “harkens back to a time when people did stuff with their families.”

For the Delaneys of Treasure Island — Pete and Paula and their 28-year-old daughter Amanda, plus leashed Pomeranians Nick and Gabby — tramping around with a bow saw in search of the perfect tree (while Pete preserves the day on a 12-year-old Sony video recorder), followed by a picnic lunch, defines the Christmas season.

For Susan Zygmont, 81, from Connecticut by way of New Port Richey, every bit of the experience, from the moment her son, Bob, picks her up until they’re back home, is an eagerly plotted adventure.

Debbie Harris holds a wreath. Among the reasons she has to celebrate is the fact that she’s a cancer survivor.

“On the drive out here, you see so many things you don’t ordinarily see,” Zygmont says, “and then on the way home, we always stop at a little diner in Brooksville. It’s tradition. It’s Christmas.”

Virginia Michael Tokyro, from just up the road in northern Ridge Manor, likes that Tony will cut the price on a potted tree — which she’ll use for Christmas, then plant outside — in exchange for fudge.

Then again, it’s not just any fudge. Family lore holds that a San Diego grandmother came into possession of one of the recipes used by Los Angeles-based See’s Candies, and they’ve been whipping it up, now, for four generations.

As it turns out, the farm isn’t just for picking out trees. Area professional photographers — among them Wesley Chapel High digital media specialist Cortney Pleus — are pitching the place as the ideal location for Christmas card portraits.

So, here came the Webers of Lutz — Kyle, a Wesley Chapel High School history teacher; Kelly, a Sand Lake Elementary assistant principal; and their daughters, Sophie, 5, and Aria, 3 — to pose in the slanting light piercing the farm’s Choctawhatchee sand pines.

“We’ve known Cortney a couple of years,” says Kyle Weber, “so when she tells us she’s found a great place for pictures, we believe her.”

Nick Speigle is handy with a saw.

Happily, for the Harrises, this time of year few things shout “Hallelujah!” more boldly than a ceiling-scraping evergreen erected in the family room.

“I knew it was going to be a good year,” Tony said on a recent hopping Friday night. It bears noting the man is the essential optimist, a Gibson Les Paul-strumming, Harley-riding, boat-driving, Jimmy Buffet-celebrating free spirit.

But, December brought upbeat news, even by Tony’s hopeful predisposition. Diagnosed with breast cancer in August 2014, Debbie’s recent follow-up biopsy revealed no traces of a recurrence. More important, she reports she feels terrific.

All that said, then, “How could it be anything but a good year?” Tony says. Still — and he rarely is one to reveal proprietary information — this one is feeling exceptional. “It could be a record,” he says.

Accordingly, he ordered a second delivery of more than 1,000 trees from his supplier in western North Carolina, whose mountaintop farm, though not threatened, is within sniffing distance of the recent, raging wildfires.

More than 1,000 newly cut trees? In the second week of December? From a guy whose crew’s work is occasionally interrupted based on the wind direction?

As Alexander, the Wesley Chapel balloon guy, says, “It’s the holiday for love, the holiday for joy.”

This year, especially, those who come to bathe in the full Ergle experience are rewarded with both.

Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

Published December 14, 2016

Stitching together a life’s big moments

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Perhaps it was how she was brought up, or maybe it’s just in her genes, but Sherry Lee Steiert never was interested in being a poster child for polio.

Never mind that she’d have made a good one. Struck when she was just 7 years old and paralyzed for a time from the waist down, Steiert survived to create a life that was exceptionally normal — a marriage, four lively children, a career or three — despite having to get along on uncooperative Mutt & Jeff legs that she herself calls “the shriveled one,” with the brace and the boot, and “the heavy one.”

And dance? Oh, yes, she danced. “I did my share,” she says, triumphantly. More on that in a moment.

Betty Burke, left, and her friend, Sherry Lee Steiert, show off the quilt that Steiert made that will help raise money to battle polio. (Tom Jackson/Photo)
Betty Burke, left, and her friend, Sherry Lee Steiert, show off the quilt that Steiert made that will help raise money to battle polio.
(Tom Jackson/Photo)

Life turns on moments. A handful of fateful seconds here. A chance encounter there. Early on, Steiert’s life pivoted on at least a couple.

There was that Saturday morning in 1949. She was 7, hurrying down one of the side streets by Rodney B. Cox Elementary on her way to a dance recital in which her friend, Suzanne Williams (of the downtown Dade City department store family), was performing, when she was sideswiped by a boy on a bicycle.

He struck her, and she went down. Within a day or so, she ached powerfully in her lower joints, and a fever came on. Then, “My leg just gave way,” she says. Soon she was at Tampa General Hospital being treated for polio.

The collision and the onset of the disease are most likely pure coincidence, she concedes; polio was not transmitted by random acts of two-wheeler mayhem. But, it stands as one of those incalculable before-and-after episodes.

Steiert also remembers a brother enduring a bout of fever and aches only a week or so earlier, then bouncing back like nothing happened. Suppose the boy on the bike missed her. Did the crash somehow weaken her at a crucial passage?

That’s how it was with polio in the fear-soaked days before Jonas Salk’s miraculous vaccine stopped it cold in 1955. Some got fevers and aches, and were back playing in a week. Others got fevers and aches, and wound up in massive iron lungs.

“That’s what I remember from being in the hospital,” Steiert says. “The boy in the iron lung. That made an impression on me. No matter how bad it was for me, I was lucky. There were others worse off.”

Doctors recommended exercise, which is how the family moved from its San Antonio acreage to Sarasota, so Sherry could attend a school with a pool.

“I became a duck,” she says. “Third and fourth grade, swimming is what I did.”

Eventually, they returned to the family’s ranch land east of town, where Lake Jovita — the golf course and gated community — sprawls now. Then, it was 1,800 acres of citrus and wildlife, and more than enough to keep the second family of a locally legendary frontiersman busy. Alas, William E. Lee died when they were young, leaving not much money and absolutely no time for feeling sorry for themselves.

Which is how 14-year-old Sherry Lee found herself zipped into a gown of her mother’s design and stitching, on the elbow of her younger brother, practically shoved through the door of the Dade City Garden Club hall for a soirée remembered as the “sub-deb ball of 1956.”

She didn’t want to be there; she especially didn’t want her brother for a date. But, never leaving the house means missing the moments on which life changes, and if she’d stayed home, she’d have missed this one:

Phil Williams, Suzanne’s brother, future proprietor of Williams Lunch on Limoges, striding across the floor and asking her to dance.

“He was so good looking!” Steiert says.

“I remember it well,” Williams says. “Suzanne was Sherry’s champion. I’m sure she encouraged me. But, I probably would have done it anyway. It was the right thing to do.”

Today, the episode decorates Steiert’s memory like a flower pressed in a book: delicate and precious, a reminder of a moment that was full of life and beauty.

On a recent morning on the porch of Betty Burke’s antiques shop, these two events stood out from a lifetime when sometimes just getting out of bed was a major accomplishment.

Add a marriage — to a lumber mill worker and house builder, long since deceased — the rearing of four children, careers with Saint Leo University and the University of Florida/Pasco County Extension Office (where, self-taught, she designed the web page), and you have plenty of life for someone with two good legs.

There’s more. Not a closing chapter, by any means, but, deep into her story, a plot twist. Sherry Lee Steiert has become a quilter. She does it to fill up her days, she says, and they go to family and friends. As gifts. You simply can’t buy one.

But, you could win one. As Steiert says, she never has been one much for the cause of eradicating polio. “I contracted it so early, it’s part of who I am,” she says. Maybe she simply doesn’t want to be reminded that her timing was bad.

Still, her friend Betty is a Rotarian, and persistent, and Rotary International is bent on stamping out polio where it still lurks in the world. Bad stuff travels in this modern world, she notes, and if an infected someone from a Third World country comes in contact with one of the thousands of American children unvaccinated on their parents’ say-so, what then?

Like Rotarians everywhere, then, the San Antonio chapter is raising money for the cause. And next week, at the club’s Dec. 13 meeting, two of Sherry Lee Steiert’s quilts will be raffled off. See them at RotarySanAntonioFL.org, ask a club member, or call (352) 588-4444 to obtain tickets.

Maybe this, too, will be a moment: a simple act of selflessness that changes everything. Buying a ticket wouldn’t just affirm this late-coming poster child’s decision to join the fray. In the words of Phil Williams, it would be the right thing to do.

 Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

Published December 7, 2016