Clyde Moore: One great tribute deserves another

Lots of people love Winter Park, no question. But it’s the rare individual who does something to pay tribute to her, as Elaine Sullivan has.

I met with Elaine this past week for coffee on Park Avenue to discuss not just her book, “Winter Park Chain of Lakes: Boathouses Past & Present,” but to learn what motivated her to write and produce photographs and sketches for it. The book is dedicated to her two grandsons, David and Matthew, both of whom were born at Winter Park Memorial Hospital.

Elaine is the epitome of a southern lady. She wears a crisp white blouse, her blond hair back with simple but classic gold honeybee earrings. She speaks calmly and lovingly as she refers to her book, thumbs through pages to show photos or sketches, and talks of researching it in local libraries. She talks of hours sitting with white gloves on, sorting through materials and learning about the history of Winter Park.

“Two winters ago it was just cold and dreary almost every day,” she says, “We couldn’t get out on the boat very often — maybe once a week. Before that though, every time we’d go out on the boat, I’d take my camera and just take pictures because I love the lakes. Then, the days that it rained and I couldn’t walk [Park] Avenue, couldn’t go out on the lake and I couldn’t go play golf, I was just sitting in the condo and I started sketching, a wannabe artist. So, I just started sketching. And I started sketching the boathouses.”

Elaine now resides part of the year in Nashville, but 12 years ago she bought a condominium in Whispering Waters on Morse Boulevard after husband Bruce retired. She spent early years in Winter Park, she says, motioning behind her to an apartment over what is now Thread where her aunt Myrtle lived in the 1950s. “My daddy’s sister lived in the apartment right there on the corner,” she says. “There were three or four drug stores right here in this one block. I think where Kennedy’s is, or maybe where SEE (Eyewear) is, there was a drug store. And my cousin and I would — 6 or 7 years old — we were allowed to come down here to the drug store and sit at the soda counter and get a coke. And all we had to do was sign Aunt Myrtle’s name and walk out. We did that all the time.” She went to elementary school just next door, where The Gap is now. She motions to the former Colony Theater, speaks of seeing “Doctor Zhivago” there just before she got married.

“I grew up on the lakes here. I’d be out skiing, three or four times a week here,” she says. Her family would later move to Delaney Park, but she says they’d be back in Winter Park each weekend. Most lakes in Orlando had docks, but homes on lakes in Winter Park, she said, had boathouses.

“I thought, you know, as far as I can remember, I can’t remember a book on the Chain of Lakes. The Chain of Lakes is why Winter Park is here. So, that’s a vital and important part of Winter Park’s history and nothing that I have seen has ever been written on them. So that’s where I started and it just kept evolving, you know because I’ve always loved the lakes and the boathouses and I’ve always taken pictures of everything on the lakes. So I just started pulling it all together and there it is.”

Elaine often refers to something in her book, providing me a wonderful history lesson of boathouses and the homes and hotels they belonged to. I’m not sure I realized just how many hotels there used to be here, where they were located. She speaks of her research, talks of boathouses as friends now lost, relatives she’s heard stories of and wishes she had met.

“This was a wonderful old boathouse. It’s got character,” she says referring to a photograph of a boathouse designed by James Gamble Rogers, now gone. “There was a fireplace right up there. And they sat up there and cooked and ate and looked out over the lake. It’s sad.”

When the book was released last year she was invited to do a book signing at Casa Feliz. She says one woman at the signing opened the book and immediately announced, “Oh my gosh! I grew up in that house and I remember that boathouse when I was a young girl.”

“And this is the one which got me started on it, because it’s the only old one left. The only old boathouse on the lake today is the Charles Morse one,” she says, referring to the picture on the book’s cover. “It’s Victorian-style, built in 1902. This is a treasure and it’s still there.” She says during her research she found many who went to Rollins College or Winter Park High School knew it as a location where younger residents liked to go to party.

In the spring, the book in print for about six months, she got an e-mail saying the publisher had submitted it in a contest in which it was awarded both regional and national awards for a soft cover publication.

“I was so thrilled I couldn’t hardly handle it,” she said. Then they said they were going to do a press release, “and I said that’s even more exciting!”

One great tribute deserves another.

Local Luv'n Local

“Winter Park Chain of Lakes: Boathouses Past & Present” by Winter Park resident Elaine Sullivan can be purchased at a number of local businesses, including Interiors on Morse Boulevard, the Scenic Boat Tour’s ticket office, Casa Feliz and Miller’s Hardware.

Clyde Moore operates local sites ILUVWinterPark.com, ILUVParkAve.com and LUVMyRate.com, and aims to help local businesses promote themselves for free and help save them money, having some fun along the way. Email him at [email protected] or write to ILuv Winter Park on Facebook or Twitter.