Louis Roney: Brick streets

•We moved to Winter Park from Atlanta when I was 10 years old, and at that time the United States was at the onset of the Great Depression. I’ve now been in the presence of Winter Park’s brick streets off-and-on for some 83 years. I remember bicycling on them and walking on them to get most of the places I went when I was young. I remember well the very early prod that thrust me into the competitive world where I was supposed to “get somewhere,” to make something of myself, and to “champion” my family in the economic storm. I doggedly saw myself as a “winner,” not a loser. I’ve always been impatient to read my own autobiographical dénouement and see what became of myself. Now I ride on those same bricks and look back at what I have accomplished during my long ride on the streets of this wide world.

Education was to be my liberation I was taught, at home and in school. The public schools did all right by me and allowed me to go through Harvard on full scholarship at the university that was my long-held choice. In World War II, I served my country in war as my father did. My singing career held years of splendor and was something very special. And here I am back on the Winter Park brick streets where I got my start. The bricks remain pretty much the same, but the streets now lead me to nowhere I have not already been many times. If my eyes were not infirm, I’d be in New York hands down. New York exerts on people the pressure to find that extra space empty up front and to move forward into it. Winter Park does not pressure me but gives me a happy life with easy expansion.

Albert Einstein stated that the human mind is capable of knowing only that which is finite; the infinite will therefore remain forever beyond human understanding. Clocks, clocks, metal clocks — busy devices on all sides separating arbitrarily humanly measured quantities of time: millennia, centuries, decades, years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds, punctuated by two equinoxes when days and nights are of equal length. (Human minds invented all these handy divisions of time, which are not necessarily the only divisions of time we could have used.)

• The city of Winter Park, incorporated in 1887, was always more a “Town” than a “City” to those of us who lived here. Orlando was incorporated as a city in 1875 and remains an entity with which Winter Park has taken pains not to be closely associated. I remember, as a youngster, that we only went to Orlando when we needed to go to Sears Roebuck! The presence of Rollins College in the center of Winter Park brings a certain educational grace and charm to our environment not directly concerned with commerce.

In terms of population, the world’s largest city is Shanghai, while the fastest growing is Dubai, and the largest city in the U.S. is hands down, still New York.

Winter Park’s perennial determined wish is to remain small, high class, quiet and aesthetically beautiful. If Winter Park people appear to be snobbish, let’s thank them for giving Florida yet another town that can justifiably call itself “classy” — even “ritzy.”

Connecticut has its Greenwich, New York has its Rye, Phoenix has its Scottsdale, Atlanta has its Buckhead, Chicago has its Lake Forest, and we have our Winter Park! (As to my “selections,” let’s not fight over them. I know they are arbitrary!) Exclusivity is a quality that people treasure in friends, neighbors, country clubs and associates. Who wants to spend his life in the midst of people he’d rather not know, talk to, or be with?

As Greta Garbo famously put it, “I want to be alone!”

“Alone” we in Winter Park wish to be left!

You resent me? So sue me!