Week 82: Auburndale, Florida

The school named after my grandfather

For the first and only time, I took a little detour this week on my walk to Miami and visited Auburndale, Florida, my father's home town. I was going to walk within five miles of Auburndale anyway, just by chance, and Google Maps says I only added one mile to my walk by making the detour.

When I was young, a trip to Florida from Ohio, or later from California, was a big undertaking, but we made our way to Auburndale every few years during the summer. It was always warm there, even at night, even while it was raining. Gram and Grampy lived on a lake, and we swam and walked on the dirt roads and played with my cousins who lived a couple of houses away.

My grandfather, Jere L. Stambaugh, Sr., was an important man in Auburndale. Although I cannot tell you the precise reasons why, I suspect that if you look into some of the improvements made to the city over the decades he lived there - things like building roads and schools, for example - he probably had a hand in getting them started.

I do remember a story of a prominent politician talking about how, in the small towns across Florida, there was always one person in each town -probably one man in those days - who you wanted to talk to if you wanted to reach out to the people of that town, and in Auburndale, that man was my grandfather.

Another story I remember was a time that Grampy had a question about some local issue, and he decided that he would just call his senator and talk to him about it.

So they decided to name the local middle school after my grandfather, but they wanted to wait until after he died. But Grampy lived to age 95, so before he died, the local politicians decided to stop waiting, and they dedicated the school while he was still alive.

Grampy was born in 1892 and died in 1987, well before the Internet and Wikipedia, so if you search for him now you might think that all his life amounted to was having a school named after him. There were reasons, though, that they gave the school his name.

I am over halfway across Florida now, with only 39 days left to Miami. Somewhere during the week I gained a day, so now I am on pace to get there by June 8.