William Gee Roe
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The History of
WILLIAM GEE ROE
Born May 26, 1886
(Narrative by his son, Willard E. Roe, in 1998-99)
W.G. was born on May 26, 1886 at the Roe farm house located about ¼ mile east of Earlton, New York. Earlton, sometimes pronounced URLTAN, was located in Greene County, on NY state route 81. This area was about 5 miles west of Coxsackie town on the Hudson River. This is approximately 20 miles south of Albany, New York, the state’s capital.
W.G. had two sisters and one brother. Lottie, the oldest sister, died young. Dad spoke of her often with sadness at her early death. I believe she was in her early twenties when she died. I do not know how she died. The other sister was Hazel. She married Will Deere. They had 10 children and were always broke and in money distress as a family. He was a painter and had a drinking problem. All the children were beautiful and in time did well, mostly in Albany. We saw a lot of them at school age and high school age. At various times W.G. would get phone calls or letters describing terrible needs for funds. He would end up sending dollars with great anguish. One time they descended on Winter Haven in the mid-winter and threw themselves on him as rich Uncle Bill -- Bad time.
The Roe farm house was a one story affair with several bedrooms, a parlor –- always closed unless there were guests –- a kitchen with big cast iron cook stove, pantry and basement for food storage.
Grandma was small and old when I knew her. She had been Cora Brownell as a girl and very popular and beautiful. The Brownell clan was big and powerful in New York then and later. She married Harvey Roe who was a gay blade –- handsome and a real ladies man. He called square dances at Earlton’s Dance Hall. I do not remember much more about him except his death from consumption when I was about six or seven years old, (1926 or so). Dad would not let me near him for fear I would get consumption too.
In the years that I knew Grandma Roe, she was married to Harry Consack, which was a convenience marriage for her as he was really just a hired hand. This period of time, like 1930 to 1940 when Grandma Roe died, was taken up with boarders, and doing what it took to get along. The area was full of big old houses and people came up from the city for their vacations. They would stay for two weeks at a time. They expected to be cared for and meals -– hiking and sightseeing busses to the Catskill Mountains.
Grandma never went out into the sun without a full down-to-the-ground dress and full head bonnet. She worked her garden that way and went shopping in Earlton that way. Harry would harness her horse, “Dobbin”, for her and she would drive ¼ mile to “town” and shop in one of two stores: Haines or Hataways. These two stores, plus the dance hall, were all there were to Earlton, except the peoples houses scattered along the highway. The stores were general stores and sold everything from gasoline to ice cream to cloths and groceries. The store’s owners lived in big quarters on the store’s second floor. The Haines were good friends of Dad’s younger brother, Jesse L. Roe, a plumber in Coxsackie. (More thoughts about him later.)
W.G. ROE: I never understood why W.G. had to quit school after the fourth grade and go to work. That would have made him ten or eleven and the time 1896 or 1897. there was nothing extra ordinary going on then that I remember. McKinley’s assassination took place in 1898. The Spanish-American war was in progress. I assume that his father was not making a living or anyway not supporting his family.
W.G. talked a lot about his horse and his job as a road superintendent, but that would be difficult at his age in 1897 or 1898. He was definite about being a foreman in an ice cutting crew on the Hudson River at 14 years of age. Malbon King was in the crew. More later about Malbon King.
Ice cutting on the Hudson, (how did he get there if he lived at home 6 or 7 miles away?) was the principle source of ice in that part of the world at that time. There were miles of tall ice houses on the river banks where ice was stored with sawdust. W.G. tells the story of his falling into the Hudson River through an ice cutting. He was swept under the ice, knowing he was a goner for sure, but he popped up in another ice hole and grabbed the edge and pulled himself out of the water.
At some time during this youthful life, say 1905-1910, when he was 20-25 years old, he became interested in fruit. His interest was apples, pears peaches and cherries, which grew well in the area. His mother’s family, the Brownells, all were well to do farmers with big houses, barns and families.
I do not know how he got started, but he started shipping fruit into New York City and going down to the city with his fruit. This allowed him to get to know the brokers and dealers on the New York City market where he established lifelong friendships. You have to know that W.G. was a great listener and was capable of making people feel good while talking to him because he obviously enjoyed it and learned from them. The friendships he made then stayed with him all his life. These events had to have occurred in about 1902-1906. He apparently needed more fruit than there was around Greene County. He went into Western New York and bought and shipped fruit to N.Y.C. from there. I do not know how close he followed his fruit shipments as they went to the MYC market, but I think he was pretty careful and chaperoned his fruit pretty careful.
At this time on the Hudson River two transportation facilities were available. NY Central had very good service between NYC and Albany, the state capital. There was also a lot of motorized river boat traffic like the Hudson River Dayline and the Hudson River Nightline. These were big passenger excursion boats, 200 to 300 feet long, some with side paddles, others with propellers. (The Hudson River is deep and the current is fast.) W.G. seemed to know a lot about the boats when Fred Roe and I went on one probably about 1930-32,or 33. He rented staterooms and brought food and drinks to eat in our rooms, like cheese, crackers and milk. I do not know if the boats have food service, but if they did W.G. was too poor or too cheap to use it. As I grew older during the depression, these boats began to disappear from service and they could be seen beached and rotting away along the side of the river as you drove along the river’s edge.
I’ll try to remember some more about that period of time later.
I do not know about how W.G. came to go to Florida. He seems to have had a bronchial problem and was told a milder climate would be better for him. At any rate, about 1910 he did come to Florida.
His first stay was in North Florida near Green Cove Springs. He joined citrus picking crews and learned how the citrus business worked. He apparently moved further south and was in Winter Haven by 1912-13. he began buying packed up fruit from local packing plants and shipping it in rail cars to New York City –- and doing well because of his previous fruit experiences there.
He had no facilities for packing at this time, but he was able to buy packed fruit and/or buy growers fruit and have someone pack it for him. I heard that packing house owners and managers followed him regularly to keep track of who was selling their fruit to him because it was fruit that was already signed up with them fro picking and packing. This went on for several years in Winter Haven and thereabouts.
He married my mother, who was Rosa Etheredge, in 1916 at Winter Haven Methodist Church. She was here as a housekeeper and worker for her brother, Clarence Etheredge, who had a furniture store in Winter Haven on 5th street near the old Grand Theatre. I think that they all lived at Mrs. Howard’s boarding house on Central Avenue.
Rosa was pretty and very much caught up in Winter Haven’s social group of Marguerite Viertel, Glen Gerke, Anderson Caffe and many others. They moved into a house, 137 Ave. A, SW, belonging to a lady named Mrs. Cassells, from New York State. Dad would not buy the place for he thought she wanted too much money. After Roosevelt defeated Hoover in the 1931-1932 election, Mrs. Cassells caved in because she was convinced that the country was going to hell under Franklin D. Roosevelt. He bought the house for $3,000.00.
Meanwhile, Rosa Etheredge Roe had Willard on May 15, 1919, and Fredrick Wm. on January 20, 1922. The boys had no big problems but she did. She developed multiple sclerosis in 1925 and went downward in health. W.G. was forced to put her in an Ashville sanitarium in 1927-1928. Fred Roe and I grew up basically without her leadership.
W.G. always believed she got MS when she was operated on for goiter by Dr. Helms at Tampa Bay Hospital in 1925. This was inconclusive. He had her at Philadelphia’s Jefferson Hospital sometime after her infliction where they gave her pretty strong electric shock treatments. W. G. thought they helped by stopping the progress of the disease because she stayed relatively stable from 1930 through 1943. She remained as active as she could during Fred’s high school years. In 1943 she fell and broke her hip. During these years she stayed at Florida Sanitarium an Hospital under the care of Dr. Jewett and his wife who were bone people. W.G. visited her on Sunday nights. This continued after WWII until we brought her home to an enlarged house. She remained wheel chair bound the rest of her life until she died in 1975.
W.G. did not get into WWI. At the time he was 31 years old and somehow avoided the draft. He was active in selling war bonds, but was not a volunteer or an active service person. This is a little blurry, but he did not serve his country.
His activities from 1915 business-wise are fuzzy to me, but I believe they were centered on fruit. In any case, he prevailed on Sea Board Coast Line Rail Road people to build his packing plant on their land in 1925. This plant became operational in 1926 and was expanded in 1926. He immediately became a major shipper of Florida Citrus Fruit and became involved with the politics of the industry. He became involved with the “Clearing House” which was the forerunner of the “Citrus Commission” and later on he worked for the establishment of Florida Citrus Mutual. His 1,000,000 box packing house was an important part of Florida’s citrus industry.
W.G. formed Wm.G. Roe and Company in 1923. He also had labels designed in California and bought grove property. Florence Villa grove (20 acres) was his- grapefruit and Valencia oranges. I don’t know if he operated Roe and Company as his principle business or not, but I now he had it and Rosa was one of his principles. Also at the same time in the 30’s, he opened an office in NYC at 412 Fruit Trade building. His man there was named McAulliffe. His principle job was receiving Roe fruit and looking after its display for sale at auction. I believe this office ran from the mid-thirties into WWII. I don’t believe that it still existed after WWII was over.
I remember coming back from WWII and being in NYC with W.G. We ate at Jack Dempsey’s and W.G. knew half the people there. We were with his receiver at the time whose name was Thomas Gangemi, but everyone called him Riley, for some strange reason. I think he could whip the Irish guys in his gang and they adopted him and they gave him an Irish name. As Riley picked us up at our hotel, he said his new caddy was the first one in New York, and we were riding in it! Riley was a big shot in Jersey City and was a powerful man in political circles. W.G. knew them all. We were drinking Manhattans in Jack Dempsey’s.
During our high school years, W.G. was running several packing houses: (1) big one in W.H.; (2) small one over toward the gas plant; (3) Tampa Union Terminal in Tampa on the docks with Bob Foster and L.K. Edwards, and in Winter Garden. Don’t know why he had to be so spread out -- somehow it seemed natural for him to be big.
One of his purposes for being in T.U.T. on the docks was that he was hiring steam ships to transport his fruit to Eastern markets in an effort to break up the railroad monopoly and their high freight rates.
Fred Roe and I, in those years, rode those steamships as owners sons and had good times. Clyde Lines and the Merchants & Miners were the names of those steamship lines.
Another play W.G. used to get fruit to the market cheaper was to haul it to Sanford, Fla. on his truck pulling four wheeled trailers. At the time he had a fleet of 1933 Chevrolet 1½ ton trucks that carried 88 field boxes and the trailer did the same. At Sanford they unloaded and transferred to the St. Johns River Line steamers. These river steamers took the fruit up to Jacksonville, where it was transferred onto Merchant & Miners steamships. A gent named Fred Treshur owned the St. Johns SS lines and also a beach house in Daytona where W.G. and us boys were often guests. I remember Mrs. Treshur’s shrimp and her sauce. Their beach house was made of big palm logs cross stacked and was a landmark in Daytona for years.
“W.G. and Roosevelt’s Bank Holiday”
In the depths of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt assumed the office of president in 1932. He immediately did many things to start financial activity. He also called for a “bank holiday” to allow the nation’s banks to get their affairs in order in order to prevent their closing for lack of funds, thus their failure. It did not seem to work that way as many of the banks that closed for the “holiday” were never able to open again. This occurred mostly because of bad loans already made to people who could not pay the loans back. Buying stocks on margin was the big culprit.
W.G. was a director of American National Bank in Winter Haven, and he felt it failed because its directors wanted it to; though he thought it need not have failed. I do not know enough details, but always after that he called his cohort bank directors crooks.
The “bank holiday” was a disaster for business because money transfers were impossible. Some how W.G. found enough cash to run his business and that’s what he did in the fall of 1932 and 1933. he had large sums of cash to pay off growers and his pickers and packers. Every day as the Orange Blossom Special came through Winter Haven, it would drop off a large express box full of money from NYC along with two guards who would deliver it to W.G.'s packing house for distribution. This was dangerous business and W.G. was very concerned about his boys. Our place swarmed with off duty cops and detectives at all hours of the day and night.
The Lindbergh baby had been kidnapped and killed in 1932 and that event shaped a lot of thinking across the country. His murderer, Bruno Hamilton, was killed for his crime, but the threat remained for W.G. He kept Fred and me under close watch, often sending off duty police officers to parties we attended to tell us to come home.
W.G. stayed busy with his packing house and we all made summer trips to NY State. Rosa and boys sometimes (quite often) stayed at Potic Mountain House at Earlton. They kept a coaster wagon at Potic MH and every summer I couldn’t wait to unpack it. They had sidewalks and hills in the yard. PMH was large and always had a big group of boarders up from the big city. PMH was run by the King family whom W.G. had known since birth. The Roe farmhouse was across the valley from the Kings. The Kings had only girls so they were very friendly. I can’t remember the girls’ names now except for Edna, who was married to Earl Fiero. He had been crippled by a stroke at the time I remember him when I was 7–10 years old. I think there were other girls and maybe two sons named Stanley, and Muriel. Stanley was a Doctor, and I remember Muriel showing up with a man in a beautiful 1932 twin six convertible automobile.
Aunt Beulah, the wife of Brother Jesse Roe, in later years hinted to me that W.G. was romantically involved with someone, but she never told me who it was.
High school years were uneventful for Fred and I. We made good grades, studied and played music and dramatics. Rosa helped where she could; no driving or parties or entertainment. But she ran her house and saw that food was present and things got done.
One day she sent me to the A&P for a pound of “tub butter.” A&P was a 40’ store on Central Avenue about where Rays Coin Shop is now (2000). Mr. Priest, (very young,) was the manager. He took a knife, reached in and cut off a hunk of butter inside the wooden 5 gallon bucket and said it was a pound.
First Baptist Church was diagonally across the alley from W.G.’s house, and Preacher Griffin was the minister. W.G. always kidded him when he asked for a donation. He said Griffin would have to have a drink with him if he wanted a donation. Preacher did.
W.G., in spite of repeated insistences of only a 4th grade education, was quite a reader. He got up every morning at first light and went down with the cocker spaniel “Corky” to get his tribune paper. He would lay in bed for an hour and read it completely. He was equally at home with fruit shipment statistics and other government reports.
He was an avid lover of Will Rodgers, and an equally avid hater of Franklin Roosevelt.
The 1925-26 Florida real estate boom did not leave him alone either. With his good friend, Arthur Klein, he joined up partnership in a big real estate development called Twin Lakes subdivision. This was on the south side of Lake Idyllwild and Lake Jesse, where Field’s Equipment is today, just north of Havendale Blvd. Of course they went broke and also broke up their friendship because Arthur Klein would not join him in clearing their names.
W.G. also set on the Board of Directors of American National Bank. He was close friends of all the other directors. He got chairs and desks when the bank folded, and his friend W.D. Gray presided over it. W.G. did not approve at all!
One Summer, while I was in high school, we were on a NYC trip. This was a sales trip for W.G. and we were visiting Dave Bilgore who was a big receiver on the NY market for W.G. In the course of the conference W.G. said, “Dave, since you built your own packing house in Clearwater I don’t seem to be getting your best orders anymore.” Dave answered, “Bill, you are my ‘vera besta fren, after me, you come firsta.’” I don’t think W.G. ever forgot that comment. Then we went to lunch in Dave Bilgore’s 16 cylinder Cadillac with chauffer and footman.
W.G. took his boys on many such trade calls in many cities, like Philadelphia, Frank Summichian; Joe Duyer, Philadelphia, also attended my Princeton graduation. Other trips included Detroit, Chicago, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Washington DC, and Baltimore. Fred and I learned the value of personally meeting customers and dealers.
W.G.’s business expertise continued to grow through the '30s and his sales of fruit through the Northern auctions caused him to know many leaders of political and economic importance. He was acquainted with people through the Brown and Second Auction in New York City that helped WER and FWR into Princeton.
He was active in Fla. politics at a local and national level. He was close friends with Albert Martin; we stopped by to see John Martin in 1039–1940 at Tallahassee and were welcomed by the Governor. W.G. had a way with people.
WER went away to school in Princeton NJ in 1937. You have to know that at that time there were NO interstate trucks or roads. Everything went by rail or boat. Railroads went to great lengths to develop cargo. As above, SAL RR built WGR’s packing house for the cargo tonnage. RR people kept up a constant tattoo of visits to places like ours to make sure we sent our rail traffic over their lines. People like me, after the War, knew countless RR people and RRs by their initials like; SAL, ACL, PRR, NYC&S, C of Ga, NP, ATSF, MD&S, etc. On many occasions as I left WH for New Jersey, before we got to Auburndale the conductor would seek me out and say my money was no good courtesy of John Derham, operating mgr of SAL.
On Thanksgiving Day in 1939, WER went up the Hudson River to visit Uncle Jess and Aunt Beulah in Coxsackie NY. They lived in W.G.’s house at 88 Mansion St. I went out to work with plumber Jesse L. Roe on zero degree days as he made house calls. Jess was 49 at the time and was a massive man of 210 pounds. He plumbed whatever and was a cheerful delightful person. World War II started while I was up there that weekend. Germany invaded Poland.
The World’s Fair in NYC started and everyone went -– “Grover Whalen unveiling the Trilon.” Fred Roe and Helen Dahlgren went to the fair and performed on 1 violin with 2 bows for the Governor in NYC. WER had a girlfriend from Conn., can’t remember her name.
Also NYC’s Mayor, Theo La Guardia read the funnies over the radio and they named the airport after him.
Back to W.G. The family decided to see the West. We took our 1937 Buick to NY and gathered at 88 Mansion St. in June 1940 after my ROTC camp at Watertown, NY. We left NY State in June and headed West. NO air conditioning in this car!!! Rosa Roe was present with her cane and pesky urinary problem. We had a great trip winding up at San Francisco where W.G. met people of Schmidt Lithograph Co. who produced his labels. Great pictures of all of us eating crabs on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. We were in most Western States: staying in motels of all descriptions before Holiday Inn and Hilton Inn. Our big Buick performed well and we tried several types of cooling; ice in buckets, windows open on ice trays; nothing worked but we had a great time.
My graduation from Princeton was a great time for my Father and Mother. Both came up, and with Joe Duyer, and Pitts Mother and Father, we all enjoyed it. Can’t remember anything special but Mrs. Pitts and Rosa Roe looking out the dorm windows is memorable. Got my commission as a 2nd Lt in field artillery at that time.
I can’t let this degenerate into a WER tale. With my departure for Ft. Bragg and active duty my story of WG Roe almost ends. WG Roe at July 1941 was 55 years old and holding down a big business of harvesting fruit and selling same everywhere.
Help became scarcer and scarcer; the government was fixing prices and he didn’t know what to do. He collected a group of 70 year old men to run the packing house and did the best they could. One old man who worked four years of war time was old Mr. Costello; Father of George and Jane –- both friends of mine.
World War II over – WER came home in November 1945, hitchhiking from New Jersey.
I came to work for WG Roe in February, 1946. My first job was making a grove out of the Williams 160 acre pine forest. Roe & Sons was active with Malcolm Pope as buyer.
Biography of William G. Roe (Willard's father), from "Florida - Indian Trail to Space Age"
Provided by Martha Conn (nee McCutcheon) in 2011.
Biography of Willard Etheridge Roe, from "Florida - Indian Trail to Space Age"
Provided by Martha Conn (nee McCutcheon) in 2011.
