Did you ever have someone pass away in your family and I don't know two, three months later, there was something that popped up in your life and you said, Oh my gosh, I have to tell this person about that. It just automatically came into your brain, something that you would share. And then all of a sudden the stark realization comes flying right into your face that you can't do that. You can't share that anymore.
That happened yesterday in a mega, mega, mega way for me. We're going to talk about it. Welcome. Welcome to the Daily Grateful.
I'm Michael Croce and yesterday I had kind of a fun day turned weird, but I had kind of a fun day. I went with my favorite ex wife, Diane, she wanted to go to Ocala. Ocala is about 110 miles from here and she was going to meet up with her two brothers who she hadn't seen for a while. They were on the other coast.
So we were going to meet in the middle. We're going to meet in Ocala and have a meal and visit. It was so pleasant. Number one, I hadn't been up that way in a million years.
Just you know, many, many, many, many, many years and we drove up there, you know, took the interstate up there and I said, ah, you know, that was hectic. I got to tell you, there were a lot of cars. It was very hectic, but we got up there, got to the restaurant, had the most wonderful visit. It was like, it was cool.
It was really, really cool. And then we left. Well, when we left, Diane did not want to take the interstate and I didn't want to take the interstate either. And I wanted to go explore something and that's what we did.
I guess I should tell you, I've shared some of this with you before and you're the only ones left that I can share this with. So I'm going to share it with you right now. In 1964, my family moved to Florida. After the 1962 freezing winter in Michigan, my father said, I've had all of this I'm going to take.
We're moving to Florida. So he took a kicking and screaming to Florida, best damn thing he ever did, by the way. But when we moved to Florida, instead of moving to normal Florida, we moved to this little town called Fernando, Florida, which was in Citrus County and it was in the middle of nowhere in Citrus County, the absolute middle of nowhere in Citrus County. And we went there and we rented a house across from my Aunt Vivian's house.
And it was down the street from the VFW Hall. And we came from Battle Creek, Michigan, which wasn't a big town, but you know, they had Kellogg's and Post and it was an industrial, nice little town area and actually we lived out in the country, a place called Middle Lake in Michigan, halfway between Battle Creek and Hastings. And it was a cool place to grow up. I mean, it was just a freaking awesome place to grow up.
But we moved to this little town and understand I went to a school in Michigan called Lincoln Elementary School. It was totally integrated. I mean, you know, I went to school with, you know, white kids, black kids, you know, knew them all, knew them all. And we moved down to Hernando, Florida in 1964.
And there was a shell station right down at the end of the very small little town. And this is the first time I'd ever seen anything like this. There was three bathrooms, two in the front, one male, female, men, women, and then around the back, there was another bathroom. And it wasn't labeled the way you would think.
It was labeled in a derogatory term for African Americans. That's all I'm going to say about it. And that's when I found out that this was like the normal thing. Black people were referred to by everyone.
I mean, everyone is that word, everyone. And when I say everyone, I'm talking about the principle of the school I went to over the loudspeaker system, there was a place there at Lake Salapaca where everybody would go swimming, except for the black people, you know, we swam off a really cool dock. It was really neat, but they swam down by the rocks down a ways, quite a ways down there. They were allowed to swim by the rocks.
They weren't allowed to come by our dock. And the Ku Klux Klan was really big in Citrus County back then, and I got to tell you, we hated it. Oh, I hated it. My brother hated it.
My sister didn't like it. My mother could not stand it. My father was with his sister. You know, we moved to my Aunt Vivian's, you were right across from my Aunt Vivian's house.
And Aunt Vivian was not one of my favorite people. He was not, you know, he was all right. But you know, I remember my dad telling me about Aunt Vivian the first time he went, you know, if you ask your mom, if you tell your mom that you're hungry, she wants to fix you a sandwich. I said, yes, yes.
Aunt Vivian's not that way. If her kids say, I'm hungry, she says, well, eat something, you know, just a different personality. I remember that discussion. Anyway, there was a lot to know about the little town of Fernando back then.
There were lots of characters. I've talked to you about Baker Miley, who was the town council. There was Mr. Ogle who for some reason kind of adopted me.
He moved out of this terrible little house in the middle of the woods and rented another house in a goat farm that was owned by Mr. Ogle. Liked it there. A lot better.
There was a nice breeze. Nobody had air conditioning. My family opened up the El Rancho restaurant that had been closed. We went and rented it and we opened up the El Rancho restaurant right next to the El Rancho Motel and everybody in the family worked there.
We made good money there, by the way. We made good money, but we hated the place. My dad was very involved in the VFW there and the VFW had a bar out back and, you know, a lot of drinking. A lot of, you know, we became friends with the Methodist minister there who had just moved there from up north and nobody in town liked him, but we liked him and we became friends with him and Mr.
Ogle liked me. He would take me out. I would help him in the goat farm every day. In school, we were all referred to as the damn Yankees.
Well, no, we were referred to as the goddamn Yankees, just to be totally blunt about it. Nobody liked us because we were from up north. Nobody liked us because we were not part of that group down there. I referred to somebody and this is what you called him in those days.
I referred to as a black person as a colored person and that's what everybody did back to. That was a norm in Michigan. That was a norm. And because I did that at school one time, the math teacher humiliated me in front of class and he goes, oh, Mr.
Croes doesn't like to use that word, you know, and he was just a real jerk about it. The whole classmate in front of me was not a pleasant experience, but it was parts of it were interesting. They had, Inverness was the next town up where the school that we went to was at. There was a theater there called the Valerie theater that would get the movies two years after they came out.
So that was the only entertainment. There was the VFW hall that had dances every Friday night and bingo games. There was all of this that would happen. It just, I could tell you tons of stories.
There was a guy named Dudley Dale Todd who came there and started to start a youth group in the town and it was weird. He would take us out. He would sit on the dock at the lake and he pulled out all these pictures of car wrecks with dead people and he was teaching us the, you know, supposedly teaching us the horrors of driving while drinking or, you know, being stupid. And it was like really, really weird.
It was just very, very, very, very, very weird. But interesting characters nonetheless, there was a guy named Al Broadbent who dated my sister for a while, a very short while, as it turns out he had just gotten out of prison and he had escaped from prison two times which extended his prison thing. We didn't know any of this about him. We met him at the Catholic Church in Inverness where my dad would drag us to go to Mass.
And he was a volunteer there and an altar boy there, an altar man, I guess you could call it there. And so my dad thought he was nice and, you know, he's dating my sister. Well, my sister then realized what he was like and that ended relatively quickly. And he was just beside himself.
I remember that. I have no idea what ever happened to him. I'm sitting here naming names. Most of those people are no longer with us.
But I remember after being there one year, my mom, my brother, and myself went for a two-week trip back to Michigan. And I will tell you, my mother was just hated this place as did I, as did my brother. And we went to Michigan and we had this restaurant, you know, that in Hernandez that we had to deal with. By the way, the guy that owned the El Rancho Motel, which was right next door to us, wouldn't even talk to us because we were from, we were Yankees.
He just wouldn't even talk to us. It was just really weird, but we went back to Michigan and I'm going to tell you something I know in my brain right now that we got up there. People are talking to my mom and they're saying, you know, we can move you right back into here. You guys can be good.
And I think my dad honestly thought that we weren't coming home. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure that he was pretty well positive that we were not going to come back to Hernando, Florida. And I remember talking to my, you know, he was talking to my mom on the phone and we just sold the restaurant. We're moving to Dunedin, Florida.
Now we had taken little trips around Florida to find another place to live because my mother was so unhappy. We were all so unhappy with living in Hernando and Dunedin was one of the places that we really liked. I remember that and I remember that phone call because, but anyway, my dad told us on the phone that he sold the restaurant and got us a place to live in Dunedin and we were going there and we were going to meet a realtor down there that, you know, to buy a house. And he had a house looked up for us to go by.
So we came back, drove back, drove the 19th. 1962 Ford Falcon station wagon all the way back stayed one night in a holiday and by the way, you could stay in a holiday in those days using a golf oil credit card. We didn't have a lot of money, but we had a golf oil credit card and you could eat there with the golf and we drove back and as we drove back, new people were already moving into the restaurant. We were out of there.
You know, dad got us out of there and my sister had our house almost totally packed up and a U-Haul trailer was sitting in the yard and loading stuff up at U-Haul trailer. And off we like two days later, we were in Dunedin, staying upstairs in an apartment above a house that was owned by a guy named George Cunningham, rented this apartment out there and we had met with a builder, we had met with this realtor and we went and looked at this house. It was beautiful and it was right on the water and we could get it for $18,000 and it was right on the water and we said, wow, well, this is cool. But because my dad was a disabled veteran, we were getting $10,000 from the government for the house.
That was a new benefit that they'd come out with. How's that? And $18,000. How's that?
Oh, wow. And so the next thing, you know, the realtor said, I can tell you the house, by the way, I had to be wheelchair equivalent. My dad wasn't in a wheelchair, but he gets $10,000. The house had to be prepared for wheelchairs.
All the doors had to be a certain size and all this and this house supposedly was that way. But the realtor said, hey, I can tell you, I can introduce you to the guy that built the house. His name is Elmo Jolini. And we went to Elmo Jolini.
He says, how about I build you a house here in Dunedin with a swimming pool or $20,000. They became best friends. Long story short. Anyway, getting back to what I was saying, I just seem to be dragging on today.
I did not go back to Hernando after that. That was 1964. I had absolutely no interest. We moved to Dunedin that summer.
I never went back. I had no interest in going back to Hernando. I had no interest in going back to Invernus. I had no interest whatsoever at all of going back there.
And I never did. My sister went back a couple of times. I think my brother may have gone back. My mom never went back.
I can tell you that. My dad, while he was alive, never went back. But no interest. So yesterday, Diane and I are coming home and I said, let's go down 200.
And we're just going to go home a back way and I said, we're going to go to the town I lived in. And we were going down 200 and I see the VFW hall where my dad did a lot of drinking. I saw my old amphibians old place and I said, oh, God. And then we went around the corner.
Hernando had changed a lot, saw the swimming place where we used to swim. But Baker Miley's place, they built a road where Baker Miley's place used to be. It was gone totally. But then I saw the restaurant.
I said, pull in there. And Diane pulls in there right across the street with the elementary schools, not an elementary school anymore. It's some kind of a community center. But there's a lot of people there.
The population there now, according to the Google, is 9,054 people. And that's that when we live there, there may have been a thousand people, but I doubt it. You know, it was very, very, very small for our year there. But we pulled into the restaurant, which was now like an old beat up walk up place.
The El Rancho Motel was torn down and gone. There was another hotel that was across from there that is no longer a hotel. It's a place where people rent rooms by the week, I guess, you know, that kind of place. It did not look pretty at all.
And we, I said, oh, this is essentially we drove by drove, saw the road where the goat farm was that I used to live at drove past that didn't even want to drive down to see the goat farm, worked our way to invert all the stuff that we used to see there. There was a place called stuff for sale when we live it gone. All the place was gone. All is a lot of new businesses, a lot of stuff.
And we drove into inverness, worked our way, drove by citrus high school where I went to high school. And I remember this 1964 citrus high school. I remember this, the principal coming over, the Civil Rights Act had just passed. And there would be no more, there would be no more segregation.
The black people had their own school and all the white folks went to citrus high school. And I remember the principal coming over the loudspeaker saying, well, next year that those people using that word can come here, we're giving you a piece of paper now. You have to take home your parents have to sign it where you want, they want you to go to school next year. You can come back here or you can go to the school.
By the way, the school has air conditioning and we don't, just to let you know. And just really, oh, God, could not wait to get the hell out of there. But I saw all of this. We're driving home.
We get out of there. We go down 50. We get on the veterans and we head home. And I don't know, I just had this unsettled thing and I got home and I went into my room and I sat down and this horrible, absolutely horrible thing came over me.
And that was no one in my family. No one that I know is alive that I can talk to about this, that I can say you would not believe what Hernandez looks like now. You would not believe what Invertis looks like now. You would not believe what our old restaurant looks like now.
You would not believe what the terrible old house that we first moved into that was in the woods across from the VFW looks like. You would not believe what the VFW, I could not share that with anybody because I am the last person in my five member family that's alive. Now the last time I experienced this was 22 years ago when my mom passed away and somebody that we both knew very well did something absolutely crazy, funny, crazy, but crazy. And I remember wanting to immediately pick up my cell phone and call her and tell her and I couldn't because she was gone and how helpless I felt after that.
Last night as I went into my room alone, I felt absolutely breaking helpless that I could not share my experiences of yesterday, driving through that little town. And there's nobody I can talk to about it. No one alive. My brother's gone.
My sister's gone. Both my parents have been gone. See that I know absolutely no one I know I can talk to about that. And I only remember like a few people from there, but I mean, there's no one I could talk to about it.
So guess what? On today's edition of the Daily Grateful, I got to talk to you about it. Sorry that I unloaded on you, but it's healing. So I guess this edition of the Daily Grateful is for me.
We'll get back to normal stuff tomorrow, but today it's for me. What does it say about it? Hernandez, a census designated place in Citrus County, Florida, United States population 9,284. Wow.
Up from 9,054 in the 2000 census. That's all we have to say about it. There's nothing to say about that awful little town. Oh, well, we'll see you tomorrow.