If you were to find ten young adults who grew up in Boca Grande during the 2000s and ask them who the most influential people in their lives were, you can be guaranteed a good number of them would say the name DJ, or “Coach,” Keisling. DJ has been working at the Boca Grande Community Center’s events and summer camp for a very long time … time he has made good use of. The number of young lives he has positively impacted is countless. Not to mention, it just wouldn’t be a proper egg hunt without him there between hunts, throwing candy to the wind with joyous abandon, surrounded by hundreds of young children who look as though they might eat him for brunch if he didn’t step up the pace.
1964 – 2022 Bonnie Kay Pringle, 58, died on Sunday, July 31 at home in Rotonda. She was born in Punta a on May 8, 1964 to June (Reynolds) and Merril “Buddy” Fulton.Bonnie grew up in Placida, however, where her father was a commercial fisherman. She attended Charlotte County schools and had a natural affinity […]
It all started in the 1960s when my Granddaddy, Alfred Bavis Dixon, known by most folks as Alfred or A.B., bought a parcel of mostly submerged land from Bert Cole. Mr. Cole had purchased the deed from the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers when the Corps was building the Intracoastal Waterway, which stretches from Massachusetts to Brownsville, Texas. The Corps approached upland and adjacent landowners and sold off parcels of submerged and partially submerged land in order to help fund the massive project. Granddaddy was a dreamer and doer, a visionary, no stranger to long hours of hard work, a man far ahead of his time. He went to the proper authorities and obtained permits to dredge and fill the parcel, and then he brought a dredge that he had built with his son Ormand to his new dream. He never asked for any special favors, no government grants, no subsidies. All he wanted was to be left alone with his task. He got as much fill as he could get when the big dredge came through digging the waterway, and he dredged up more when he built the basin and channel out into the bay. The first time I remember going to “The Point,” as we all called it, I was just a kid, and Grandaddy had the dredge set up digging the channel out to the bay. I must have been about 10 years old at the time, and it was a very exciting time for me. We were living in Virginia then, and I had never seen anything like that.
John Henry Eckenroad, III, 78, of Boca Grande, Florida passed away surrounded by his family on July 24, 2022.Born on August 14, 1943, John spent the first years of his life in Clarendon Hills, Illinois with his parents, Mary and John Jr. and his younger sister, Ann. John attended St. Procopius High School before the […]
There is a special place in Susan McKenzie’s heart for second-graders. She loves teaching all elementary grades, but second-graders have a “special wonderment” about them. “There is an excitement to learn and the ability to stretch themselves. I love to watch them grow.” This is what second-graders bring to this teacher, and she is happy to be starting her connection with The Island School by teaching second grade. She will have 14 students in her class.
A wise local once told me something profound. When asked what we could do to help save a historic icon that was about to be sold he said, “What are you trying to save? It’s already been sold out. It could have been sold to someone who cared, but they didn’t buy it. And it’s not my job to subsidize their personal experience. They had their chance to make it what they wanted to, or to keep it the way it is, and they choose not to buy it. Now it’s someone else’s choice.”
All it takes is one homeowner or, in some cases, a corporation, to try to impose this regulation on beaches, and soon others follow suit. GIS maps can be misleading to potential property owners, as in many cases it shows the property line going out into the water. In Florida the law states that all beaches are public from the mean high-water line down to the water, and that used to be a cut-and-dried rule. But in 2018 former Governor Rick Scott created House Bill 631 (now Florida Statute 163.035), which is known as the “Establishment of Recreational Customary Use.” It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now it has proven to make a touchy situation even touchier in the fact it can be interpreted in many ways … including ways that benefit the property owner, not the public.
Andy said the focus has changed somewhat in the last months. Initially, the emphasis was on vehicles, gas and safety equipment to help people evacuate. Today the evacuations have slowed significantly and the new emphasis is on restoring normalcy where they can. Housing is a major item. “We are working with a church in Kyiv to clear land and set up modular houses,” Andy reported. Each house can be put up for $1,900 to $2,000, and, when necessary, can house two families. “So a $4,000 donation from a church or group can make a real difference,” he said.
Monitoring of sea turtle nesting activity is done through two separate programs: the Statewide Nesting Beach Survey and the Index Nesting Beach Survey. Managers use the results to evaluate and minimize the effects of human activities (e.g., coastal construction, seawalls, beach renourishment and recreation) on turtles and their nests and identify important areas for enhanced protection or land acquisition.
Norman Darrell George, 83, passed away on July 24, 2022. As a native of Pennsylvania, it is not surprising that Norm received his bachelor of science degree in business at Bucknell University. It is there that he would meet the love of his life, Carolann Buquet. In college, Norm loved skydiving and was the president […]
