On our final stop, I took Philippa to meet my brother John. Like Len, Jane, and Hibbard Jr., he keeps everything that pertains to the family or the city. If it wasn’t for them, King of Casselberry would never be the grand story it is, because I would have thrown all that “old stuff” out in the name of good housekeeping.
If Casselberry ever builds a museum, we can fill it. Stored one place or another amid books, boxes, roofing shingles, and old furniture are boxes of “junk” from the attic of the old office. John insisted on rescuing them when the building was torn down in 1993 to make way for a Target Store. We have filing cabinets from the Thirties and Forties, jammed with manila envelopes containing original deeds and letters about each individual lot Dad sold. We have over a hundred report books Anne Blood, Dad’s secretary, filled with newspaper clippings spanning fifty years, and an oversized archival box for early plats and maps.
Without Hibbard, The Town of Casselberry would probably not have survived its first ten years, the Forties. But he morphed his businesses to fit whatever came along. Right before America got into World War II, it was a neutral country. To keep that status, our government declared an embargo on shipments of goods to warring countries, which meant he could not ship his simple, delicate ferns to his floral customers in Canada. Once the America joined the war, men went into military service, leaving Hibbard with a town full of women needing jobs.
He and the town’s citizens decided that the best work for women was sewing for the war effort. Getting sewing machines without a government contract – or a government contract without sewing machines – seemed impossible. But that never stopped Hibbard.
A year later, the government gave him funds to build a bomb parachute factory – a building large enough to contain over twenty small homes. Tradesmen swarmed the site with patriotic purpose, and it rose as swiftly and proudly as an American flag. Twenty-one days after construction began, people looked at the CasselberryIndustriesBuilding in amazement, and dubbed it the MiracleBuilding. The smooth, glowing maple floors in the simple, open-block sewing room would make any bowling alley owner envious. Inside the main entrance, one-inch black and white tiles spelled out “Town of Casselberry,” least anyone forget where they were. All that was nice – but two words made the town thrive in the midst of war – “Casselbberry’s hiring!”
When the building was demolished, our family gave the flooring to the Institute on World War II and the Human Experience, endowed by Tom Brokaw at FloridaStateUniversity. The university gave him an ink pen made out of the MiracleBuilding’s flooring.
For John, however, keeping the tile floor sign was not enough… he wanted to keep a semi-sacred white elephant, the building’s six-foot high walk-in safe door. Sometimes I wish he collected stamps or coins like other people, but life wouldn’t be quite so interesting – nor would King of Casselberry be as good without such history keepers.
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