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 The other night I was treated to a look through a box of rare finds when my neighbor, Betty Johnson, brought out some of the things she’d found while going through her mother’s possessions. Her mother had lived with her until her death earlier this year, and Betty didn’t know exactly what was stored in the boxes she’d brought to her garage and store room, just that they were filled with things her mother, Patricia Johnson, had saved. As it turned out, some of the things she found had also belonged to her grandmother Nettie Fern Hannes, who moved to Ruskin from Buffalo, N.Y. around 1962 to be near Betty’s family, after her parents had already settled there.
While preparing for the latest community-wide garage sale held in the Summerfield area of Riverview twice a year, Betty decided she would open the boxes and see if there was anything worth putting into the sale. Besides, she said, she needed to get rid of some things to make more room.
I knew that a couple of months back, she had discovered a football, encased in a plastic box, signed by Tony Dungy, former coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and spokesman for the national fatherhood organization, All Pro Dads.
But now, boxes of old magazines and newspapers began to show up. We looked through the November 1963 edition of The Post with a young Bob Hope on the cover; a Lady’s Circle magazine featuring Jacqueline Kennedy’s “New Life,” dated December 1964, 13 months after the assassination of her husband, and a 1964-1965 Smoke Signals (the newspaper for East Bay High School) with a photograph of Hillsborough County’s former school superintendent, and current Supervisor of Elections, Earl J. Lennard, when as a (very young) teacher at East Bay he had won the county’s Teacher of the Year award.
Very interesting material turned up in several saved editions of the Ruskin Shopper and Observer, which later became The Observer News, including announcements of “the new Thriftway grocery store” which would be opening in March 1976 and that same year, a story about the 10 tons of steel used to build what was referred to as the Mixon Building; which would become the future home of this newspaper.
The prices in the full page ads for Thriftway were interesting too, with milk at 98¢ a gallon and bananas 17¢ a pound.
I know a lot of people wonder why the shopping center by the Ruskin Post Office is called Thriftway Plaza. Thriftway was still there for several years after I moved to Ruskin from Bradenton in January 1980, until it was destroyed by fire and never rebuilt.
Meanwhile, Betty continued to pull papers out of the big brown box and we found several copies of what might have been the first existing newspaper in South County, The Ruskin-Sun City News. The content showed it was not talking about Sun City Center, but South County’s original Sun City south of Ruskin that was obviously then a bustling place. It also had people reporting events in Balm, Del Webb’s Sun City, Gibsonton, and Apollo Beach. Announcements of parties, birthdays, weddings and anniversaries were common then and sometimes ads were mixed in with news so you really had to look to be sure which was which.
The earliest date we could find was July 1960 and we could not find any start-up date but saw that the weekly publication sold for five cents and had a circulation just over 4,500. The Ruskin-Sun City News wasn’t operating when I moved here from Bradenton, so I know it had gone out of business before 1980. I’m sure if I asked Jonie Maschek, who writes the Fish Tales column for this newspaper she’d know, because a few years back she sold her series, A Piece of History, to Hillsborough County for its Historical Library.
PENNY FLETCHER PHOTO
Betty Johnson of the Summerfield area of Riverview has made some amazing finds in her garage and storage room since her mother’s death earlier this year. A third-generation resident of the area, it seems her mother and grandmother kept a lot of things she never knew they had including old newspapers, photographs and a record of title to land she still owns in Ruskin that includes every sale beginning in 1883.
There were some old family photographs too, and a brochure about the Hoover Dam which probably belonged to her grandmother because as it turns out, one of Betty’s uncles helped build it.
The most interesting thing I saw was a bound book with a soft, moccasin-type leather page for the front, titled Abstract of Title.
Now Betty had explained that her mother was from Buffalo, N.Y., and had met her dad while he was in the Coast Guard up North. He was from Arcadia, so they moved to Florida after being married; had their first child here; moved back up North and had two children while up there, and then bought property and settled in Ruskin, where two more children, including Betty — who was the youngest and the only girl of the five siblings — were born.
The Abstract of Title began with the sale of property (bought by Betty’s family in 1954, and which she still owns today) in Ruskin’s old Colony Farms area— which is 14th Avenue near First Street S.W.; the area that houses the Joyce Ely Health Center and Ruskin Neighborhood Service Center building.
The earliest recorded deed to it was signed in 1883 in London, England, for a price of $1 to Sir Edward James and Lady Rosetta Reed. The property changed hands several times in the early days, once being taken over in foreclosure by the Florida Land Bank. The earliest tax recorded on the property is $31 in the mid 1880s.
Every change of hands from the Reeds to the present day is recorded in the book, which appears quite thick for a land transaction account.
Betty says she knew her mother was a “saver” but she didn’t realize some of the papers and magazines had also belonged to her grandmother. Each newspaper evidently had some mention of a family member, although she couldn’t find them all.
You never know what you’re going to find when going through relatives’ things after someone has died. I still haven’t figured out what to do with the record albums that belonged to an uncle who worked on the Radio City Music Hall sound stage center as an engineer for nearly 40 years. Some are pre-date vinyls and cut on only one side because the performers made mistakes and the albums were never released.
So go through your attics and garages. Having grown up in New Jersey I almost said basement and then remembered we don’t have basements in Florida.
You never know what you might find!
*Perhaps you have something you’d like to share. Or maybe you’d rather tell the community about your favorite charity or cause: or sound off about something you think needs change. That’s what “Over Coffee” is about. It really doesn’t matter whether we actually drink any coffee or not (although I probably will). It’s what you have to say that’s important. E-mail me any time at
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and suggest a meeting place. No matter what’s going on, I’m usually available to share just one more cup.
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