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Derek Norwood hunts extreme terrain, in extreme ways. Derek is well-known in his home state of Florida for being extremely consistent in taking down top-tier bucks for his area. We traveled to Plant City, FL, to Derek's shop to sit down and talk about his life in the woods. Some of the topics include: - The bucks in central Florida are bigger than you think - How growing up dog hunting taught Derek how bucks escape through swamps - The story of Derek's father passing away on a hunt with Derrek - How Derek reads tracks to track down bucks - Slip hunting swamps - Spot & stalk hunting individual buck beds in swamps (this is wild!) - The extreme measures Derek is willing to take on a nice buck - Insane snake stories - Why Derek seeks out the "worst WMA's"...and why he finds the biggest bucks there and tons more! We had a great time travling through Florida to interview Derek. If you enjoy this episode, and want to hear more Flordia deer hunters on the show, let us know! Reach out on our website - https://www.thesouthernoutdoorsmen.com/contact Check out Derek's channel here - https://2ly.link/27XbS Got a question for the show? Submit a listener Q&A form - https://l.linklyhq.com/l/1uMXP Grab some Southern Outdoorsmen merch here - https://l.linklyhq.com/l/1u4aK Join Woodsman Wire - https://l.linklyhq.com/l/1u4aR Use the promo code “southern” for a discount on your OnX Hunt membership here - https://l.linklyhq.com/l/1tyfm Save 10% on your next Vortex Optics order at eurooptic.com using the Promo Code “southern10” - https://2ly.link/1wyYO Use code “SOUTHERN25” for a discount on Houndstooth Game Calls: https://2ly.link/24tFz Use code SOUTHERN20 for a discount on all vortex apparel, including eyewear Check out Moultrie's trail cams here - https://2ly.link/1zJWv Check out Latitude Outdoors for your mobile hunting gear - https://2ly.link/1zVDI Have you tagged a deer using something you heard on the show? Submit your listener success story here - Share Your Story Here Come chat with us on our Thursday Hunter Hangouts! Join our patreon - https://l.linklyhq.com/l/1uMXU NOTE: Not all advertisements run on this show are endorsed by The Southern Outdoorsmen Podcast unless an ad is read by one of the hosts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Rappin' With ReefBum is a LIVE talk show with hosts Keith Berkelhamer and Dong Zou with guests from the reef keeping community. In this episode we chat with Chris Meckley and Chris Wood. Meckley is the owner of ACI Aquaculture, a coral wholesaler in Plant City, Florida. Wood is a marine biogeochemist and the Chief Science Officer of Captiv8 Aquaculture. He is also the founder and sole owner of Captiv8. We will discuss how to use ICP testing to dial in trace elements.
En este episodio de FMOFM Español, Alyna Francine y su papá inician su primer especial de “Papi y la nena”, donde hablan sobre el festival anual de Plant City, Florida, y algunos de los titulares más destacados de Florida. On this episode of FMOFM Espanol Alyna Francine and her dad kickoff their first “papi y la nena” special discussing plant city florida's annual festival and some florida headline favorites!
Billy TeedanCoach Teeden just finished his 10th season as the Head Boys Basketball Coach at Plant City High School. He has led the Raiders to 8 regional appearances and a district championship title. Prior to coaching and teaching at Plant City, he was the Head Boys Basketball coach at East Bay High School. In six seasons, he became the all-time winningest coach in school history, while winning three district championships and had a regional final appearance.Coach Teeden has been named Hillsborough County Western Conference Coach of the Year seven times. In 2024, Coach Teeden was the FABC 7A coach of the year. In 2010, Teeden was named the William Bethel Coach of the Year, an award given to a coach who turns around a basketball program at a school that struggled in the past. Teeden has also been the head coach for the 16u Nike Team Florida AAU Team.Coach Joseph WillisCoach Willis just finished his 8th coaching season with the Plant Panthers boys' basketball program. During his time at Plant, the Panthers have had a overall record of 143-75. His Plant teams have won 3 straight district titles (2023, 2024, 2025) and he has been named American Division Coach of the Year the past two seasons. Willis' Plant teams have also won 2 Hillsborough County GPA titles in his time at the school. Although it was his 8th year at Plant, it is his 19th year as a head coach in the county. Coach Willis previously coached at Bloomingdale High School and prior to that at Lennard High. At Bloomingdale, Coach Willis guided the Bulls to their first district title since the 1996 season and first regional semi-final appearance since 1994. During that season he was named the Federal Division Coach of the Year. Prior to coaching in the high school ranks, Coach Willis spent time coaching collegiately at High Point University (2003-04), Saint Leo University (2001-03) and the University of South Florida (1996-2001). Coach Willis played one year of college basketball at Webber College (now Webber International University) and through his high school basketball experience at East Lake HS, he earned All-Pinellas County Honorable Mention his senior year. Coach Willis earned his Bachelor's degree in Physical Education from the University of South Florida in 2000 and his graduate degree in Educational Leadership at Saint Leo University. He lives with his wife Ellen, and daughters Maggie and Elise.
This week the Troika discuss Andrew Jackson, the well known......American president. We also discuss Reba, the Strawberry Festival in Plant City which consists of strawberries, deep fryers, and shaker rope philosophy marms, enjoy!
The Florida Strawberry Festival in Plant City is that last lethal blow to those New Year’s resolutions. You’ve got until Sunday to head to Plant City to try my 3 picks for the best of 2025. One is just here this year but the other 2 are Florida Strawberry Festival classics.
Episode 239: We Risked $15K to Save $50K – The High-Stakes Battle to Close Our 6-Unit Deal (Part 2) What really happens behind the scenes of a multifamily deal before the closing table? Spoiler: it's never smooth. In this episode, I'm giving you the raw, unfiltered update on our 6-unit acquisition in Plant City, Florida. We're still under contract, but it's been a rollercoaster of tight deadlines, surprise negotiations, seller drama, and serious money on the line. ✅ How we secured a $50K seller credit ✅ Why we risked $15K of earnest money ✅ The panic moments (yes, I lost sleep) ✅ Our financing strategy using hard money ✅ The creative moves that kept this deal alive We're not at the finish line yet—closing is set for March 18th—but this is the kind of real, behind-the-scenes insight that most investors won't share. If you've ever wondered what it really takes to get deals done in today's market, this episode is for you.
Kyle Robinson, President of the Plant City Strawberry Festival, sits down with host Owen LeFave to discuss his career journey and lifelong connection to an annual event that has seen its own evolution. Kyle managed security for the Strawberry Festival during many of the 27 years he spent working with the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office. He became president of the festival in 2022. Since its 1930 inception, the Plant City Strawberry Festival has had a rich history and continues to have a cultural, community, and economic impact on the region–from the creation of year-round and seasonal jobs that support local families to the dedication of its 1,400 volunteers. Not only does the festival claim to be the birthplace of the Strawberry Shortcake, but its support of local agriculture and youth through nearly $2 million in 4-H and FFA scholarships demonstrates its commitment to giving back to the community. At the same time, strong partnerships with law enforcement, an enhanced concert experience, reception to customer feedback, and plans for infrastructure improvements show how the festival is always looking forward. If you've ever wondered how an organization can strike the right balance between pride in its traditions and dedication to future growth, this is the episode for you. The Bank of Tampa | Member FDIC
Will a lucky listener beat TKras this week against the spread with the NFL games? Find out!
In New York, they drop the ball. In Atlanta, they drop the beach. In Las Cruces, New Mexico, they drop a chili pepper. Plant City is starting its own New Year's Eve tradition to welcome in 2025 and can you guess what they're using as a symbol? We speak with Dawn Hyatt, executive director of Plant City Main Street.
Rappin' With ReefBum is a LIVE talk show with host Keith Berkelhamer and guests from the reef keeping community. In this episode I chat with Chris Meckley, who is the owner of ACI Aquaculture in Plant City, Florida. ACI is a coral wholesaler and Chris runs the business with his wife Amanda and their staff.
On this week's show, we finish out the Halloween 2024 season with a local haunt out in Plant City, Sir Henry's Haunted Trail. https://www.sirhenryshauntedtrail.com Visit us at www.CFSAS.com Contact us at podcast@cfsas.com BlueSky at @CentralFLSAS.bsky.social Subscribe to us on YouTube! Please rate and review!
Hurricane Milton slammed into Florida Wednesday night, causing widespread devastation before heading into the Atlantic, making landfall as a category 3 storm. Meteorologists thought it would be a category 5. The destruction left at least four people dead and knocked out power to more than 3 million homes and businesses. While Tampa avoided a direct hit, the storm still brought intense rain, flooding, and a storm surge of up to 10 feet in some areas. Officials warn the danger isn't over, with flooding still a major concern, especially in hardened areas like Plant City. Tornadoes were also reported across the state, further adding to the chaos. Gov. Ron DeSantis urged residents to stay indoors as crews work to clear roads and restore power. Florida is still reeling from the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, and many areas are struggling to recover from the double blow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
On this special episode of BOW TIE DIALOGUE, Keith welcomes TJ Francis host of the God's Lawyer Podcast and Lead Pastor of Christ the King Baptist Church of Plant City, Florida. You can find the God's Lawyer podcast at this link: / @godslawyerpodcast DON'T FORGET! Partner with @ConversationswithaCalvinist You can get the smallest Bible available on the market, which can be used for all kinds of purposes, by visiting TinyBibles.com and when you buy, use the coupon code KEITH for a discount. Buy our shirts and hats: https://yourcalvinist.creator-spring.com Visit us at KeithFoskey.com If you need a great website, check out fellowshipstudios.com SPECIAL THANKS TO ALL OUR SHOW SUPPORTERS!!! Support the Show: buymeacoffee.com/Yourcalvinist
Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the LORD’s purpose that prevails [Proverbs 19:21]. It's a beautiful thing when God moves our plans aside, and brings His purposes to pass. Jenny is a listener from Plant City, who was feeling overwhelmed this morning. She decided to reach out for some encouragement and the Lord met her in powerful ways! As always, He comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God [ 2 Corinthians 1:3-5 ].See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Tonight we'll be talking with newer meadmaker Stewart Jacobs. Stewart is in the Seattle area. We'll talk techniques, recipes and mead making in general. Stewart is an aerospace engineer in the Seattle area who has been making mead in 5 gallon batches since 2016. He has made at least a dozen unique batches with a variety of different additives since starting. He currently has a smoked apple mead awaiting bottling and has two unique batches in storage which he made after the birth of each of his kids. Stewart wants to dig into a bunch of things, like: preparing your honey best practices for caramelizing honey Figuring out the appropriate amounts of fruits and herbs in a mead to have good balance How to make braggot Adding nutrients - best practices for timing Yeast strain recommendations We'll have a good time talking with Stewart and trading mead making info tonight! This player will show the most recent show, and when we're live, will play the live feed. If you are calling in, please turn off the player sound, so we don't get feedback.[break] Sponsor: Calling all mead lovers and adventure seekers! Look no further than Honnibrook Craft Meadery in Castle Rock, Colorado, for your go-to destination for wonderful, light, and refreshing mead! We have 20 meads on tap and four seasonal mead slushees. Go to honnibrook.com for review our tap list, upcoming events and to order online! If you want to ask your mead making questions, you can call us at 803-443-MEAD (6323) or send us a question via email, or via Twitter @realGotMead and we'll tackle it online! 9PM EDT/6PM PDT Join us on live chat during the show Upcoming Shows July 30 - Matthew Chrispin and Kevin Meinstma - live mead judging with proctors Aug 13 - Kyle Ducharme - making mead, classes and mead competitions Aug 27 - Christy Hemenway - Run Amok Meadery Sept 10 - Copa Hidromiel competition in Mexico with Vicky and Kevin Show links and notes Let There Be Melomels by Rob Ratliff The Big Book of Mead Recipes by Rob Ratliff Let There Be Session Meads by Rob Ratliff Upcoming Events May 1 - Sept 1 - Copa Hidromiel Mexico Competition Registration June 15-Aug 4 (weekends) - Honnibrook Craft Meadery, Castle Rock, CO - Colorado Renaissance Festival this summer June 15th-August 4th. At the festival you can find our Black Currant, Huckleberry, Black Cherry, Elderberry, Blackberry and Dragonfruit meads July 19 - Michigan Beer Cup, Kalamazoo, MI - MBC Mead Judging and Social Event July 19 - Three Hands Mead Company, Plant City, FL - Billy Ray Wheaton solo acoustic music July 20 - Haley's Honey Meadery, Fredricksburg, VA - Mead and Read July 20 - Hickory Tree Farm Apiaries, Kent City, MI - Mead Make and Take Class July 20 - Apis Mead and Wine, Carnegie, PA - Springs and Arrows live music July 20 - Four Brothers Mead, Festus, MO - Blight of Many live music July 24 - Oppegaard Meadery, Seattle, WA - Paint and Sip at the Meadhall! July 27 - Dawg Gone Bees Apiary & Meadery, Hanover, PA - Mead Making Class July 27 - Four Brothers Mead, Festus, MO - HK live music July 28 - Bløm Meadworks, Ann Arbor, MI - Body Boost workout July 31 - B.Nektar, Ferndale, MI - Finer Things Mead and Food Pairing Aug 1 - St. Ambrose Cellars, Beulah, MI - Lynn Callahan live music Aug 2 - Wyrd Leather and Mead, Portland, OR - A Night of the Seven Kingdoms - House of the Dragon Cosplay and Finale Pre-Party Night Aug 3 - White Bear Meadery, Maplewood, MN - Mead Day Celebration Aug 3 - Helderberg Meadworks, Esperance, NY - Mead Weekend 2024 Aug 3 - White River Mead, Cider and Spirits, Iron River, WI - Mead Day - Legacy Mead Tasting Aug 3 - Honnibrook Craft Meadery, Castle Rock, CO - World Mead Day Celebration with live music all day and Polynesian Fire-Dancer show starting in the evening. For the celebration we will be serving 8 different varieties of mead slushees and 20 d...
Rappin' With ReefBum is a LIVE talk show with host Keith Berkelhamer and guests from the reef keeping community. In this episode I chat with Chris Meckley, who is the owner of ACI Aquaculture in Plant City, Florida. ACI is a coral wholesaler and Chris runs the business with his wife Amanda and their staff.
Frank Starkey and his family are one of those rare breeds of Floridians that actually have deep roots in the Sunshine State. We talk about how they sought to owner their grand-dad's wishes as they ultimately developed the family cattle ranch in New Port Richey. A big part of their work was the Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND) called Longleaf. And later, the Starkey Ranch project.Here's a funny real estate video about Longleaf: (funny to me, anyway)If you listen to Frank, you'll learn how an architect has a whole different perspective on the present and the future, and why he thinks he has a luxurious lifestyle now in downtown New Port Richey. You can see some of his current efforts at this link to his website.This is episode number 50 of The Messy City podcast - thanks so much for listening. If you're new to this, welcome! I look forward to the next 50, as we explore the issues and people who love traditional human settlements, and are trying to create them. I love talking to the do-ers, to the creators, and everyone who has skin in the game that's trying to build a more humane world.Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin's Substack page.Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you'd like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.Intro: “Why Be Friends”Outro: “Fairweather Friend”Transcript: Kevin K (00:01.18) Welcome back to the Messy City podcast. This is Kevin Klinkenberg. I'm happy today to be joined by my friend and fellow new urbanist, long time participant, Frank Starkey, joining us from Florida. Frank, how you doing today? Frank Starkey (00:20.337) Howdy, Kevin. Doing great. Happy to be with you. I've been... Kevin K (00:22.908) I didn't even check. I assume you're in Florida at home, but you could really be anywhere. Okay. Frank Starkey (00:25.617) Yeah, I am. Yeah. Yep, I'm in our we recently moved into a townhouse that Andy McCloskey, who used to work for me, built in town here and we just bought one and we're very happy here. It's really nice. Kevin K (00:40.348) Cool, cool. And you're in New Port Richey? Frank Starkey (00:45.169) Yes, Newport Richey is on the northwest side of the Tampa Bay region. It's part of the region. We're in that suburban sprawl miasma that characterizes all Florida cities. And we're about 25 miles as the crow flies from Tampa, basically from downtown Tampa, and probably 15 to 20 miles from Clearwater and 30 miles from St. Pete. So we're And we're right on the Gulf. We have a river that runs right through town that river miles from where we are out to the Gulf is maybe five river miles. So you could easily kayak and paddle board right out there or upstream pretty quickly you're into the Cypress freshwater wetlands. So we've got a lot of good nature around. Kevin K (01:39.516) Do you ever do that? Do you ever get out on a kayak or whatever and get out there on the river? Frank Starkey (01:43.089) Yeah, it's been a while. But if you go up to there's a preserve that the city owns that's up in the freshwater area. And if you're in there, you think you're in the Tarzan. A lot of the Tarzan movies and shows were filmed in Florida swamps and you feel like you're in a Tarzan movie. You can't see that you're in the middle of town. And if you go out to the coast, the barrier island and right where we are. They really start and go south from here. So from here on up through the big bend of the Panhandle in Florida, the coastline is all marshes and salt flats and grass wetlands. It's a much prettier coastline in my opinion than the more built -up barrier islands. But you can go out and kayak for days and days out in the coastal areas and see all kinds of wildlife and water life. So it's pretty cool. Kevin K (02:40.124) That's cool. That's really cool. Well, Frank and I have been talking about trying to do this for a while. We'd hoped to hook up in Cincinnati, but schedules just got in the way, as is typical for that event. But I really wanted to talk with you today, Frank, because you hit on a couple of my hot points, which is that you're an architect and a developer. Frank Starkey (02:51.313) you Kevin K (03:06.332) And I know as a designer that you also care a lot about the kind of issues that we talk about routinely within the world of new urbanism and urban design, which is, you know, creating beautiful walkable places. So I just think it'd be interesting. You know, I talked to a lot of people who come into the world of trying to be developers. You and I probably both talked to a lot of fellow architects who we try to encourage to be developers. Frank Starkey (03:06.481) Mm -hmm. Kevin K (03:33.948) And so it's fascinating to me how people come to that. So I wonder if we could start just a little bit by talking about like your path and where, you know, how you got to this point. You, did you grow up in Florida or were you in Texas? Is that right? Frank Starkey (03:51.761) Now I grew up in Florida. I went to college in Texas, but I grew up on a cattle ranch just east of here, in an area that's now called Odessa. It was a 16 ,000 acre, beef cattle ranch that our grandfather had bought in the 1930s. And we were about 20, 20 miles from downtown Tampa and Newport, Richie was our hometown because of the county we're in Pasco County. And so we came to, you know, church school. shopping was in Newport, Ritchie. But I also kind of had an orientation towards Tampa because we were sort of closer that direction. And then my extended family all lived in St. Petersburg. My parents had grown up there and then my dad grew up in Largo on a branch down there that his dad had before the one in Odessa. I... Kevin K (04:41.564) So it's like the rare species of old Florida people, right? So. Frank Starkey (04:45.361) Yeah. Yeah, but man, I have a weird, I've always come from a very mixed, I mean, just a very much kind of background, culturally, geographically, economically. My great grandparents were from, mostly from the upper Midwest. And so we kind of, and my great grandfather on my dad's side. was William Straub, who was the publisher of the St. Petersburg Times. But I later found out that he was instrumental in getting the city to hire John Nolan to do a plan for the remainder of St. Petersburg. He was instrumental in getting the city to buy up a mile of its waterfront to create a continuous waterfront park along the bay in downtown St. Petersburg, which is the crown jewel of the city in terms of civic space. So I kind of grew up and then that that kind of orientation towards parks. He also helped the County, Pinellas County establish a park system, which was one of the earliest ones in the country. And so I kind of this park orientation and public space and civic life and civic engagement was a strain through my whole childhood. You know, my whole is kind of a generational thing in our family. And so that's one thread and. Living in the country, we didn't have much in the way of neighbors. The area of Odessa in those days was pretty poor. So I rode the school bus with kids that had virtually nothing and went to school in the suburbs of Western Pasco, which was where the kids were mostly from the Midwest. Their grandparents had worked for Ford or GM or Chrysler and then they... moved to Florida and the grandkids, you know, the kids moved with them. And so those were the kids I grew up with. And so I, you know, I didn't feel like I grew up in the deep south. People, but I, but I was close enough to it that I understand it, but I don't consider myself a, you know, capital S southerner, my accent notwithstanding to the degree that a good friend of mine, Frank Starkey (07:07.793) I grew up in Plant City on the east side of Tampa, which is much more in the farming world part of Hillsborough County. And he was much more deep south than I was, even though we grew up, you know, 40 miles apart. So it's just a very different cultural setting. So I grew up with, you know, upper Midwest heritage who had been in St. Petersburg since 1899. And then, you know, poor kids, middle -class kids, and then eventually wealthier folks. So I just kind of had this really all over the place cultural background that's not nearly as simple as, I mean, all of Florida has a tapestry of, a patchwork of different kinds of cultural influences. South of I -10, north of I -10, you're in South Georgia or Alabama, but. the peninsula of Florida is very culturally mixed up. Kevin K (08:11.228) So the old canard, I guess, was that the west coast of Florida was populated by people who came from the Midwest and the east coast was from the Northeast. Does that hold true in your experience? Frank Starkey (08:22.129) Yeah, that does hold true, although there were a lot of New Yorkers in Boston, not so much New England, but still a lot of New Yorkers found their way across. So I grew up around a lot of New York Italian descent folks, as well as Midwesterners. So I, you know, it's a wonder I don't have a New York accent or a Michigan accent or a Southern accent, because those were the kind of the three, more about more, you know, Northern accents than. than Southern accents from immediately where I grew up. But yeah, I -75 goes to Detroit and that I -95 on the East Coast goes to New York. And so that means that has an impact. Kevin K (09:06.844) Did you ever know about the Kansas City connection to St. Pete then with J .C. Nichols down there in downtown St. Pete? Frank Starkey (09:17.329) And tell me about it. I mean, I, because Bruce Stevenson's book, I think touched on that because they, they had an APA convention down here back in the 1920s. Kevin K (09:20.54) Well, that's it. Kevin K (09:28.54) Yeah, J .C. Nichols who developed the Country Club Plaza here, starting really in the 19 -teens, later in his life, he was asked to, or he bought property in St. Petersburg, in or near the downtown area. And the whole concept was they were going to essentially build like another version of Country Club Plaza there in downtown St. Pete. Yeah. And so I think like a small portion of it got built down there. Frank Starkey (09:32.785) All right. Frank Starkey (09:51.665) Really? Kevin K (09:57.564) And then maybe the real estate deal fell apart or something like that. But there was, yeah, that was a big push at some point. Yeah. Yeah. Frank Starkey (10:03.633) or the Depression hit. Interesting. Now, I wasn't aware of that. I didn't know that he had bought and had plans to develop here. That's interesting. The other, St. Petersburg's, well, the Florida Land Bus was in 1926. So Florida real estate speculation really ended then, and then it didn't pick up again until after World War II. So that might have been the death of it. Kevin K (10:13.084) Yeah. Yeah. Kevin K (10:27.164) Yeah. Yeah. So you find yourself growing up on a ranch then, pretty much in Florida. What takes you to architecture? What takes you to architecture and then to Texas to go to architecture school? Frank Starkey (10:35.505) I'd have been becoming an architect. Frank Starkey (10:42.289) For whatever combination of reasons, one evening when I was in about fourth grade, I, dad recollected this years later. I asked dad at the dinner table, what do you call a person, what do you call a person who designs buildings? Not as a riddle, just, and he said, it's called an architect. And I said, well, that's what I want to be when I grow up. And I never had the sense to question that decision again. So. Kevin K (11:00.54) Yeah. Kevin K (11:09.276) That's how it sounds vaguely familiar. Frank Starkey (11:11.853) you So, you know, whether it was Legos and Lincoln Logs and the Brady Bunch. And when I was a kid, we had a cabin in North Carolina that dad had the shell built by this guy who had a lumber mill up there and he would build a shell for you for $5 ,000 or something. He built that out of green poplar wood. The whole thing was immediately warped and racked and sagged and did everything that. green wood will do, and we immediately put it in a building. But dad spent all of our vacation times up there finishing out the interior of that. So I was just around that construction. And dad was also being a counter rancher, and he knew welding. And he was always tinkering. And in addition to fixing things, he was also inventing implements to use on the ranch and things like that. So he just had a hand building. ethic that, you know, he just kind of had. So whatever made me decide I wanted to design buildings, as I grew up from that point on, I just was all about it. And so by the time I got to high school, I couldn't wait to get into working for an architect. And I was an intern for an architect in Newport, Ritchie, when I was in high school. And then I went to Rice University in Houston to go to architecture school. So after I, and I did my internship here, which is part of the program at Rice for the professional degree. I did that in New York City for Pay Cop, Read and Partners. And another ironic thing was I learned, I had a really great classical architecture history professor in college at Rice who in his summers led, he and his partner who was a art history professor also, a fine arts. Frank Starkey (13:10.289) They led an archaeological excavation outside Rome of a villa from the dated that basically dated a time period of about 600 years straddling the time of Christ. And I've spent the summer after my freshman year on that dig. So I had a had a really strong exposure to classical architecture and urbanism throughout my school. And when I worked for PAY, I worked on James Freed's projects. At that time, we were working on what became the Ronald Reagan building in Washington, D .C. It's the last big building in the federal triangle. And so it's a neoclassical exterior with a very modern interior. It's kind of like a spaceship wrapped inside a federal building. And the other project I worked on a little bit that year was the San Francisco Main Library, which is in the Civic Center right down in the Civic Center of Francisco with the City Hall and the old library. The new library is a mirror of it that's a neoclassical facade on, well, two wings of a neoclassical facade that face the Civic Center side. And then on the backside, which faces Market Street, there's a much more modern interpretation of that commercial core district facing along Market Street. So I worked on these buildings with Sirius that took, you know, this was at the end of the Pomo era of the 80s when everybody was making fun of classical architecture in, the architects were having fun with it or making fun of it, however you look at it. And Fried was taking it more seriously. It was still a updated take on neoclassical architecture. in some of the details, but it was really a fascinating exposure to the actual practice of designing classical buildings, working for one of the most famously modernist firms in the world. So. Kevin K (15:21.628) Yeah, no doubt. No doubt. Yeah. That's pretty wild. Was rice, I mean, we're about the same age, was rice kind of like most architecture schools, generally speaking, in their emphasis on looking at modernist design as the holy grail that you must pursue? Frank Starkey (15:28.433) Mm -hmm. Frank Starkey (15:38.769) Yeah, interestingly, like my childhood and the cultural mix that I described earlier, Rice was sort of in this period at that time where it was between deans. There was a series of, it's too long a story to explain here, but the previous dean who had been there for 15 years or something, O. Jack Mitchell, announced his retirement the day I started classes. And... So he was a lame duck. And then it was, you know, we basically went through a series of searches, deans, dean passed away, interim dean search, a new dean, and then he resigned. So the whole time I was in college, we really didn't have a dean. And the faculty that Mitchell had built was very, I'd say ecumenical. They kind of, we had some diehard theoretical postmodernists and we had. At the other end of the spectrum, we had a guy who did a lot of real estate development who was super practical and we always made fun of him for caring about mundane things like budgets. And I know he was, I made him a laughing stock, which I wish I'd taken more of his classes. But anyway, and then a really good core faculty who had a real sense of, and real care about urban design and. Kevin K (16:46.428) Well, yeah, exactly. Frank Starkey (17:04.401) My sophomore class field trip was to Paris and we did studies of, you know, in groups, each of us studied at Urban Plus. So I really had a strong urban design and contextual sensibility through my architecture class, all my architecture classes. In the background, there was this whole drum beat of postmodernist, post structuralism and deconstructivism. that was going on. I never caught into that. It always just seemed like anything that requires that much intellectual gymnastics is probably just kind of b******t. And it also, I was involved with campus ministries and fellowship of Christian athletes and church. And so I had a sense of mission and doing good in the world. And it also just, it just didn't work with that either. So I didn't really go in for that stuff, but the urban design stuff really did stick with me. And then the classical architecture and Vignoli, which I mentioned to you the other day, that really did kind of stick to me as a methodology. Kevin K (18:29.436) Man, I went for it hook line and sinker, man. It was, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I thought deconstructivism was like the coolest thing at that time period. And I bought the whole program for some period of time. And frankly, until I ran across some of Andreas's writings and then started learning about seaside. And that's really what kind of broke it open for me that I started to. Frank Starkey (18:32.433) Really? Frank Starkey (18:40.465) -huh. Frank Starkey (18:52.273) Mm -hmm. Kevin K (18:58.556) see things a little bit differently and all, but I, yeah, I was, I was in deconstructivism was funny because you could just kind of do anything and you know, you could call anything a building basically. Yeah. Frank Starkey (19:07.537) Yeah. Yeah, yeah, the author is dead long live the text was the, and so you could just, yeah. And to me, it was just pulling, it was just pulling stuff out of your butt and I just. Kevin K (19:22.636) totally. Yeah. Yeah. It was all b******t, but it was, I guess, fun for a 19 or 20 year old for a little while. So, all right. So fast forward then, did you come back to Florida then pretty much right after school or? Yeah. Frank Starkey (19:25.809) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Frank Starkey (19:38.929) Yeah, I did a gap year after college and then ended up in Austin for another year and then came back to work with my brother. So by that time, we had seen, because of where the ranch is situated, it's sort of in the crosshairs of growth patterns coming from Tampa to the south and Clearwater to the southwest. and Newport -Ritchie from the west. So it was, the growth was coming from, at us from two directions. Granddad and you know, this 16 ,000 acres that's 20 miles from downtown Tampa, as you can imagine in the 20th century is going up in value pretty dramatically from 1937 to 19, you know, to the late century. And in the early seventies, he started selling and donating land to the state for preservation. Kevin K (20:24.22) Mm -hmm. Frank Starkey (20:36.177) and so we had, you know, again, that whole park ethic, and the, so we were selling, kind of selling the Northern parts that were away from the development pattern, off. And it was partly for the state tax planning purposes and also just, but primarily to put the land into conservation. So there would be something left of native Florida for people to see in future generations. That was his. His goal. My brother had my brother six years older than me and had gone to University of Florida and gotten a finance degree. And he came back after college, which was when I was like my senior year in high school and started working for the granddad was still alive and he was working for the estate, helping with that planning. And granddad passed away while I was in college and we had the estate tax to deal with. And we ended up selling some more land to the state for conservation. And he also started learning the development. process. We knew that as much land as we could sell to the state as possible, we were not going to be able to sell at all and we were going to have to develop. Somebody was going to develop land on the ranch. And our family wanted to see that it was done in a way that was, you know, that we would be proud of that, that put together our, you know, our family goals for civic engagement, environmental preservation, and, you know, and also. It was the whole family's sole asset. So it's everybody's retirement fund and principally our parents and our cousins. So we have cousins who are half generation older than us. So we were accepting that development was inevitable and wanted to be more in control of it. So Trae had been talking to me for a while about coming back and working with him on the development stuff in the ranch. So that's what I decided to do in 1995. And the decision point for me, Kevin K (22:09.468) Yeah. Frank Starkey (22:34.449) was, you know, I had set up my career trajectory to become a consulting architect and design buildings for other people. And I realized that I had this opportunity to, you know, have a bigger imprint on developing a neighborhood that could perhaps set a pattern. By that time, I had become knowledgeable about new urbanism and what was going on at Seaside. And And at that point, I think some of the other projects were starting to come out of the ground. So this was 1995. So I was like, well, I, you know, I've got too much opportunity here. And, and with what, what I know and what I have to bring to the table, it just seems like the thing I'd need to do. So I came back and we started working on development on the southwestern corner of the ranch, which was sort of the direction that was the frontline for development. So in 1997, we held our charrette for what became Longleaf, which is a 568 acre traditional neighborhood development that we broke ground on in 1999. Our first residents moved in in 2000. And that was the first TND in Pasco County. And in my opinion, it was the last TND in Pasco County. Because the county loved it so much that they... Kevin K (24:00.38) You Frank Starkey (24:04.721) passed the TND standards ordinance, which it would never comply with and that no other developers ever wanted to do. And so nobody really has. They've kind of just, it's been compromised with, right? That's a whole other story. Kevin K (24:20.14) Yeah. Well, that sounds, I mean, we may need to get into that at some point, but, so you started this in 2000 and really in earnest 2001 or so. And obviously there was a little, little bump in the economy right then, but I guess kind of more of a bump compared to what came later. So talk about like those first, maybe that first decade then, like what all did you build and how much of this were you actively involved in the design of? Frank Starkey (24:24.529) Okay. Frank Starkey (24:39.377) Yeah. Frank Starkey (24:49.425) It's fascinating looking back on it how compressed that time frame was because we sold we we developed the first of four neighborhoods In the first neighborhood we did in As I said 99 2000 and then we built the second neighborhood in 2002 2003 we sold the third and fourth neighborhoods in 2004 which You know, six years later, we look like geniuses. If we would have been, if we'd been real geniuses, we would have waited until 2006 to sell them. But we got out before the crash, obviously. So we did well there. We were, I was, you know, Trey and I, because we had a view of building a career in real estate development, we thought we should do everything. We should touch every aspect of the process ourselves at least once. So we knew how everything worked. But then we never scaled up our operation big enough to hire people to fill in those specialties for us. So we really both kind of ended up doing a whole lot of the work ourselves. So our master, our designer was Jeffrey Farrell, who did the the overall plan for Longleaf. And he wrote the design code, but we collaborated on all that very closely, because I knew enough about what urbanism was and architecture. And so I administered that design code with our builders. He detailed out the first neighborhood. He and I detailed out the second neighborhood. collaboratively or sort of a 50 -50. And you know what I mean by detailed out, just, you know, you take a schematic plan and then you have to put it into CAD and get it, get to real dimensions and deal with wetland lines and drainage and all that stuff. You get, s**t gets real about, you know, curbs and things like that. So that kind of, those details. And the third neighborhood I detailed out, but we sold it, but the developer who bought it built it out according to what I had done. So I was... Frank Starkey (27:15.281) very involved with the planning side of it. And of course I had been involved with the entitlements and then I administered the design code with all of our builders. So I was dealing with there and we had, we didn't have sophisticated builders. We didn't have custom, we weren't a custom home builder project. We were small local production builders. So these were builders who built 300 houses a year. We weren't dealing with. David weekly, you know, a national home builder who was doing nice stuff. Nor were we dealing with the 12, you know, you know, a year custom builders. So we didn't have much sophistication on the design side coming from our builders. So I did a lot of hand holding on the design of that. I always tell if you're a architect who's going to be your. Kevin K (27:46.716) Mm -hmm. Frank Starkey (28:13.169) is going to develop a T and D. I will tell you under no circumstances do what I did. Always hire somebody else to be the bad guy because as the developer you just can't look the home builder in the eye and say let this customer go. And so even though they're asking you to do something you shouldn't. So you need somebody who can be your heavy for that and it's not going to be you as the developer. But anyway, so I did that and And then I designed some of the common buildings and then had them. I wasn't licensed yet. And so I had those CDs done by somebody with a stamp. So I always said that I, you know, between the larger planning of the ranch and the strategy there, and I also got involved in community, you know, regional and county wide planning efforts and committees and things like that and planning council. So I kind of worked at the scale from the region to the doorknob. Which, you know, is fabulous as an architect because I've found all of those levels, I still do, I find all of those levels of design and planning fascinating. Kevin K (29:17.084) hehe Kevin K (29:30.78) So let's talk about the mechanics of being a land developer for a minute and how you did it. So you obviously own the land, and then you came up with the master plan. So then how many steps did you take? You took on the burden of entitling probably the whole project in phase by phase. And then were you also financing and building infrastructure as well, and then basically selling off finished land? Frank Starkey (29:36.433) Mm -hmm. Kevin K (29:59.26) finished parcels or finished lots to other developers or builders. Frank Starkey (30:04.177) Yeah, what we, so dad on the land free and clear, he contracted the land to us under a purchase and sale agreement whereby we would pay a release price when we sold a lot. So, you know, it's favorable inside family deal. We paid him a fair price, but it was a very favorable structure that allowed it, and he subordinated it to. to lending for, we had to borrow, we don't have cash as a family, we didn't, none of us have cashflow from, you know, we don't have some other operating company that spits off cashflow. So we had asset value, but no cashflow. So we had to borrow money to pay for infrastructure, I mean, for planning and entitlement costs and engineering. And so that was our first loan. And then we had, We set up a community development district, which is a special purpose taxing district that a lot of states have different versions of them in Florida. It's called a CDD. It's basically like a quasi -municipality that a developer can establish with permission from the county and state government to establish a district, which is then able to sell tax -free government -style bonds to finance infrastructure. So it's an expensive entity to create and then to maintain. But if you're financing a big enough chunk, which in those days was like $10 million, it became efficient to have the care and feeding of the district in order to get the cheaper money. So you could get cheaper bond money for financing infrastructure. You could not finance marketing or... specific lot specific things you could for example, you could finance drainage, but you couldn't finance still so some of the Terminology was a little bit You kind of had to do some creative workarounds, but basically our so but we it also meant you had to still have a source of capital for those things that the district would not finance so we had an outside Frank Starkey (32:28.497) Loan structure in addition to the CDD financing and that was how we financed the construction of the development and then sold the lots to individual home builders We had three builders under contract in our first phase and each of them was committed to a certain number of lots and they had enough capital access on their own to finance their the construction of their houses a lot of them would use their buyers financing and use do construction permanent loans to finance the vertical construction of the houses. But the builders had the ability to take down the lots. So that was the deal. I don't know if that structure is still done very much or if there were many builders in that scale that still do that in Florida or in this area. It seems like most of those builders got just crushed. in a great recession and never came back. I'm not really aware of any builders that are in that scale, in that size range anymore. I mean, if there are, there's maybe a dozen where there used to be 100. Kevin K (33:40.86) Yeah, so they either got smaller or a lot bigger basically. Frank Starkey (33:45.681) No, they mostly just flat got killed and just went out of business. And they may have resurrected themselves. Yeah, they may have resurrected a smaller or gone to work for somebody else or retired because a lot of them were older. Of the builders that we had, yeah, I think they probably did get smaller in fairness, but they were gone. And we were out of, as I said earlier, we were long out of long leaps. And the... Kevin K (33:47.836) Yeah. Frank Starkey (34:13.969) Crosland was the developer that bought the third and fourth neighborhoods and they didn't they brought in all new builders. So they brought in David weekly and inland, which was a larger regional builder. And then Morrison, I think one of the other large, larger builders who did rear loaded T and D project product. Kevin K (34:38.108) So how much heartburn was that for you and your family to go from this position where you're like asset rich but cash poor to and then all of a sudden you're taking on pretty large debt to do this development piece? I mean, what was that like? Frank Starkey (34:54.801) Well, you know, you just you don't know what you don't know when you're young and ambitious. So it was it was there. I did. There were some real Rolade's cheering moments. I think, as I recall, the most stressful times for us were before we started construction. And it was it was frankly, it was harder on Trey because he was he was starting a family at that time. So he had. He had literally more mouths to feed than I did. I was still single and so, and I didn't have the stresses on me that he did. And once we got under development, we weren't so much, you know, the stress level shifted to different, you know, kind of a different complexion. And, you know, fortunately when the recession hit, We were done with long, we didn't have, you know, we weren't sitting with longleaf hanging on us. So that was good. but we were in the midst of entitlements for the Starkey Ranch project, which was the remainder of the land that the family still had that had not been sold to the state. And we were taking that, there was about 2 ,500 acres. We were taking that through entitlements starting in 90, in 2005. And I would say that we got our, our entitlements. not our zoning, but we got our entitlements package approved, in essence, the day before the recession hit. So, so we had borrowed again, borrowed a lot of money to relatively a lot more money to pay for that. And that also involved the whole family, because that was the rest of the ranch that that the part that long leaf is on dad had owned individually, free and clear. The remainder of it. had been in granddad's estate and that went down to children and grandchildren. And so there were seven different owners of that. And we had spent some time in the early 2000s putting that together into a partnership, into one joint venture where everybody owned a pro rata share of the whole, but we had other shareholders to answer to. And so that was a whole other level of stress. Frank Starkey (37:16.913) due to the recession because our bank went, you know, did what all banks do and they called the loan even though we hadn't gone, we hadn't defaulted. We would have defaulted if they'd waited six months, but they blanked first and they sued us and we spanked them in essence, but we, at the end of the day, but it was two years of grinding through a lawsuit that was hideous and that was really the most unpleasant. Kevin K (37:29.82) Hahaha! Frank Starkey (37:46.257) level of stress, not because we were going to lose our houses, but because we were, it was just was acrimonious and not what we wanted to be doing. Plus you had the background of the whole world having ground to a halt. So fighting that out through the dark days of the recession was, that was pretty lousy way to spend a couple of years. Kevin K (38:12.284) Yeah, so then how did you all come out of that situation then? Frank Starkey (38:17.009) We ended in a settlement. The settlement, the worst part of the settlement to me was that we had to, long story, but some of the, we had retained ownership of downtown Longleaf with the commercial core, mixed use core of Longleaf. And that wasn't completed development yet. And because we had that collateralized on another loan with the same bank, we ended up having to cut that off as part of the settlement. So. we, you know, we had to, we amputated a finger, not a hand, but still it was, it was, you know, it was our pointer finger. So that was, that was hard, but, but we lived to fight another day, which again, you know, fortunately it's better to be lucky than good, right? We were, that makes us look like, you know, we did pretty well coming out of the recession. So after the recession and after getting that settled out, and there was a couple of other small pieces of land that we had, Kevin K (38:52.124) hehe Frank Starkey (39:15.121) collateralized to the bank that we handed over, but basically got them to walk away from pursuing us further. We got that worked out and then we had to then figure out how to sell the land. Our joint venture partner, which was to have been Crosland on developing the ranch, they had gone to pieces during the recession, so they weren't there anymore. And the only buyers at those coming out of that were big hedge funds and equity funds. And they were only, their only buyers were national home builders and the national home builders, even the ones like Pulte who had tiptoed into traditional neighborhood development product before the recession. They were like, nope, nope, nope, backing up, never doing that again. They're. Kevin K (40:10.46) Yeah. Yeah. Frank Starkey (40:12.593) So everything that we had about TND and our entitlements, they're like, get that s**t out of there. TND is a four letter word. We will not do that. So we kind of de -entitled a lot of our entitlements and cut it back to just a rudimentary neighborhood structure and interconnected streets and some mix of uses and negotiated to sell it to one of these hedge funds or investment funds. who developed it with a merchant developer and sold it to national home builders. And they pretty quickly undid what was left of our neighborhood structure and developed it in a pretty conventional fashion. They did a really nice job on it and it soldered a premium to everything around it. They did a really great job with their common area landscaping, but they gutted the town center. They didn't even do a good strip center in lieu of it. They just did a freestanding public and a bunch of out parcel pieces. They squandered any opportunity to create a real there out of the commercial areas. They did beautiful parks and trails and amenities centers, but they just didn't get doing a commercial town center. Kevin K (41:36.444) What years was that when they developed that piece? Frank Starkey (41:40.337) We sold it to them in 2012 and I guess they started construction in 13 or so and it was really selling out through 2020. They still got some commercial that they're building on. I don't know if they've got any residential that they're still, I mean, it's kind of, its peak was in the 17, 18, 19 range and it was one of the top projects in the country and certainly in the Bay Area. and got a lot of awards. And yeah, so I don't, I can't complain too much about it because it sounds like sour grapes, but basically they didn't, I always just tell people I'll take neither blame nor credit for what they did because it's just not at all what we, there's very little of it that is what we laid out. So because that, so we, having sold that in 2012, that left me and Trey to go do what we wanted to do. All of the, you know, the rest of the family for that matter. And, Trey was ready to hang it up on development for a while. So he kept a piece out of the blue out of the ranch and settlements and started the blueberry farm. And I went and decided to do in town, small scale development. Ultimately ended up in Newport, Ritchie back in my own hometown. And then and that's that's what I've been doing since basically since 2015. Kevin K (43:06.844) Yeah. So I'm curious about a couple of things. So with the completion of the sale of all that and the development of both Longleaf and Starkey Ranch, I guess I'm curious how your family felt about the results of all those. Were people happy, not happy with the results? Was there... I'm just kind of curious about that dynamic because it's an interesting thing with a family property. And then... I guess secondly, with you being somebody who carried more a certain set of ideals for development, what did you take away from that whole process, especially with Starkey Ranch and anything, any useful lessons for the future for others relative to an experience like that? Frank Starkey (43:38.321) Mm -hmm. Frank Starkey (43:56.209) Couple of thoughts. As far as the whole family goes, we were, well, our cousins don't live here and they were less engaged in it intellectually and just personally. The four of us kids had grown up here and this was our backyard. They had grown up in St. Pete and one of them lived in North Georgia. And so it was, they just weren't as... emotionally invested in it. Not to say they didn't care, but it just didn't, it wasn't their backyard that had been developed. And you know, and we all are proud that three quarters of the ranch of the 16 ,000 acres, over 13, almost 13 ,000 of it is in conservation land that will always be the way it was when we were kids. Except there are no fences, which is very disorienting, but anyway. It's still, you know, that's the way granddad saw it when he was young and it will always be that way. So that's, we're all excited about that. And we pay attention to that more than we do to what happened on development. I think even long leave the, what, you know, the, the people in the surrounding area think we're sellouts and, people who have lived here. for five years or 10 years or 15 years are still just shocked and dismayed by the rapid pace of development. Well, it was a rapid pace of development, but we've been seeing it coming for 130 years now as a family. And I mean, it's why we put land into conservation going back to the early 70s when granddad started selling that. What people can see is the part along State Road 54, which is the visible stuff. which 10 years ago was a lot of pastors with long views and pleasant looking cattle who were money losing proposition as a agricultural business. But people don't see that. They just thought, it's a pretty pasture land. And how can you turn that into houses? It's so, you greedy b******s. So yeah, we get a lot of flak still to this day. I mean, and I've got a. Kevin K (46:12.092) Yeah. Frank Starkey (46:17.425) Trey's wife is a county commissioner and she gets all kinds of grief for being corrupt because people see our names on everything and they're like, well, they must be corrupt. No, you've never met any less corrupt people. And so there's kind of public blowback to it. I've said what I've said, what I just told you about how the development of the ranch did not comport with what we envisioned for it. And I don't, I don't shy away from saying that. I don't go around banging a drum about it. cause what's, what's the point of that? And a lot of people might think I just sound like sour grapes, but it, you know, it's, we, I think we all had our ugly cry about the ranch at some point. I mean, I remember when we were, we, the first closings of the ranch were in 2012 and it was a phased state down, but you know, they, they take a chunk at a time. So we stayed in our office, which was the house that we had grown up in at the ranch headquarters, right where the cattle pens and the horse barn, the truck barn and the shop and all of the ranch operations were. And the day that, eventually we had to move everything out and all that, almost all of that got torn, all of it got torn down. I remember having, I went out and stood by a tree and cried my face off for a while. Kevin K (47:46.044) Yeah. Frank Starkey (47:46.673) You know, it still chokes me up to think about it. And we all did that. I mean, but it wasn't an overnight thing to us. Whereas if you lived in a subdivision in the area that, by the way, had been a cattle ranch 20 years ago, you didn't, you know, you're not building, you're not living in a land that was settled by the other colonists. It seemed shockingly fast, just like overnight. my God, all of a sudden they're, they're. They're scraping the dirt the grass off of that and you know three weeks later. There's houses going up It's just shocking and and really disorienting we'd said we had seen it coming literally our whole lives We always knew that was going to be the case. So it was there was going to be something there our Feelings about the what what what it was compared to what we would like it to have been or another You know, that's what we have to wrestle with but the fact that it's developed We always saw that coming and people don't really understand that until because you just, you know, because it just it's perceived so differently. If you just drive by and see it developed one day when it wasn't, then if you grow up with an aerial photograph on the wall of dad's office and you know, we just know that that's not always going to be that way. Kevin K (49:05.82) Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's talk for a minute about what you're doing now then with the stuff in Newport Ritchie and the smaller scale infill stuff. What was like the first one, after shifting gears and doing that, what was like the first project you took on on your own? Frank Starkey (49:25.561) Much more much more fun topic. Thank you for shifting gears. I should have let you do that sooner Kevin K (49:30.204) Yeah. Frank Starkey (49:33.617) The, so Newport Richey is a pre -war town that was laid out in 1911 by Wayne Stiles, who I'm starting to learn more about was a pretty cool town, kind of B -list town planner who worked with people like John Nolan and the Olmsted brothers and was contemporary to them. Got a very competent little city plan for a small town and it has building stock in the downtown. the main street and Grand Boulevard downtown that dates to the 1920s and to the 1950s and 60s, kind of about half and half. And so it always had these good urban bones, some decent building stock, nothing great. It was never a wealthy town, so it doesn't have big grand Victorian houses down at Boulevard or anything, but it's got some good characteristics. But it had economically just cratered, just for years and really decades of disinvestment. moving out to the suburbs. It wasn't white flight in the traditional sense, but it was economically, it was the same just reallocation of wealth from the historic city into the suburbs and leaving the city behind. So in 2015, there was a, so downtown Newport, which he has a little lake, a about a five acre really lovely little. city park, a riverfront, and the central business district is right next to it. And then there's a pink Mediterranean revival hotel building from 1926 in that park. It kind of ties it all together. It's all the same ingredients that downtown St. Petersburg has, just in miniature and in bad shape. And St. Petersburg, believe it or not, which is now the best city in Florida, was really down in heels for most of my childhood. The Vanoi Hotel, which is their big pink hotel, was a hulking, you know, it looked like something out of Detroit when I was a kid, broken out windows and chain link fence around it and weeds and looked like a haunted hotel. So the Hacienda was kind of in that shape almost. And Downtown was doing, was, you know, just kind of sitting there with some honky tonk bars and a lot of, you know, just kind of moribund. Frank Starkey (51:54.705) commercial space. The city had bought out the First Baptist Church, which overlooked that lake right downtown when the church decamped out to the suburbs like all the other capitals in town. Even God's capital moved out to the suburbs. And the city bought it and tore down the church buildings and put a for sale sign on it, put it out for RFP a couple times, got crickets in response. Because no self -respecting developer would look at downtown New Port Richey as a place to develop. And I looked at it and as Robert Davis and Andres 20 will point out, we developers and architects and urbanists, we live in the future. You know, our brains are in what can be, not what is here now. And you've heard Andres say that the present is a distortion field. So I wasn't bothered by the fact that the neighborhoods around it weren't the greatest neighborhoods. They weren't terrible. Kevin K (52:39.8) Yeah. Yeah. Frank Starkey (52:48.177) And I looked at it and said, well, this is a pretty good gas piece of property. You got through overlooking this nice lake. There's a park. There's a downtown right there. We can work with this. So I asked the city to put it out for an RFQ, which they did. And Eric Brown, your buddy and mine, and one of your former guests on the podcast recently, was the architect for the buildings. And Mike Watkins, whom you also know, was the planner. I had them come in and do a Charette to develop a design for an apartment project on that former church property. And we negotiated a deal with the city to buy that property and we were off and running. So that was the first project. Just announcing that and showing, you know, as people were, some people were rightly skeptical that it would just end up being another low income housing thing because. This is Newport Richey. It's an economic shithole. Why would anybody put anything nice here? And surely, surely, even if you think it's going to be luxury, or if you're just saying it, it's obviously just going to, there's no way it can end up being anything but low income housing. And, but a lot of other people were excited to see that somebody was putting some investment in town. And it just kind of started to change people's thinking. Then we took on a commercial building downtown that when I was a kid had been a, IGA grocery store where we did our grocery shopping and it had, fallen into, you know, another moribund state as an antique mall that just needed to be fixed up and, and refreshing them live and up or something new. So we bought that and, did a severe gut job on it. divided it up into five tenant spaces, brought in a natural grocery store that was in town, but in a much terrible location. And a new microbrewery, the first microbrewery in town, and a taco place, and a kayak paddleboard outfitter, and a CrossFit gym. Kind of a dream lineup of revitalizing. Yeah. The kayak place didn't last very long. Kevin K (55:04.636) It's like the perfect mix. Frank Starkey (55:11.665) They were pretty much pretty ahead of the market and also just work. It wasn't their core business. They just didn't really know how to do it right. And then the taco place ended up getting replaced. The CrossFit gym outgrew the box and went to a much bigger location. And then we replaced them with an axe throwing business, which is killing it. So no joke, no pun intended. And then the microbrewery is still there. natural food store is still there. And then in the paddle boarding space, we now have a makers, a craft market that is multiple vendors that are, you know, like cottage industry makers selling under one roof. And we have a new bar and hamburger place and the former chocolate place. And they're also doing really well. And so between those two projects, it really, and then, you know, it's other, businesses started opening, new businesses opened downtown that just kind of had a new approach. They weren't honky tonks, they weren't just kind of appealing to a kind of a has -been demographic. And I just started changing the attitude. And the most remarkable occurrence was at one point, and this was around 2018, I just noticed that the online chatter in the general discussion among locals about Newport Richey kind of flipped from overwhelmingly negative people just running down the town, just saying this place is terrible. You know, get out while you can. There's nothing but crack heads and, and prostitutes and you know, it's just terrible. And to, Hey, this place is pretty cool. It's getting better. There's, it's got a lot of potential. And the naysayers started getting shattered down by the people who were more optimistic and positive about the town. And it just kind of hit that Malcolm Gladwell tipping point pretty quickly. And the attitude of the town and the self -image of people in town just has been significantly different ever since then. And then that's, of course, paid dividends and more investment coming to downtown. Now you can't find a place to rent for retail downtown. Frank Starkey (57:38.641) We actually have the problem now that there's too much food and beverage and the market isn't growing enough because we've got to bring in customers from outside of the immediate area because it's just not densely populated enough town yet. But that's so that's kind of where things started in New Port Richey. Kevin K (57:56.604) That's really, that's a great story. It's kind of, it's so indicative of also like what Marty Anderson has talked about. Let's sort of like finding your farm and a place that you care about and working there and making it better. And that's really cool. When it came to all this, were you self -financing? Were you working with investors? How was that process? Frank Starkey (58:13.169) Yeah. Frank Starkey (58:22.321) On the central, which is our apartment and on the 5800 main, which is the project that had been the IGA store, I have a financial partner on that. Who's another local who had made done well for himself in banking and lived away and moved back and was wanting to invest, but also to do some invest locally in a way that helps, you know, give something back to his own town. And that was my attitude as well. So our, our. Capital has been him and me on those two projects. And then I've got two other buildings that, one other building that I have a co -owner on and then another building I own solely by myself. So I've got a total of four projects. And all of the projects that I have are within one, two, three blocks, four blocks of each other. I was, you know, you mentioned the farm. I was very intentional about farm. I said, okay, my farm is New Port Richey. My farm yard is downtown and my barn is our office, which was right in the middle of all that. And the so that's, you know, and then now Mike and I live three blocks from all of that stuff. So we have we our new townhouse is three blocks east of downtown. Since 2018, we lived in a house that was four blocks south of downtown. So all of it was walkable. And even when downtown had just a couple of restaurants that were mostly just diners, one place that was pretty decent for lunch and salads and things, and a couple of pretty mediocre to crappy bars. I have a lot of friends here now and my office is here. And I immediately realized this is the most luxurious lifestyle I have had since college because the ability to walk everywhere and just live your life on foot is luxurious. It's just delightful. And my best friend now lives well in our old house, lives a block away. And we got to be friends living in town here and living a block from each other. And we would just ride bikes. And there was a whole other crew of Kevin K (01:00:24.284) You Frank Starkey (01:00:49.041) the people we'd ride bikes up the river in the evenings and maybe stop for a beer or maybe not and just enjoy the town. He really showed me just kind of, I smacked myself in the forehead one day when he talked about how nice it is to ride up the river during the sunset. I was like, wow, you mean you can just enjoy living in these walkable places? Because I'd always spent so much time trying to build them that I didn't spend much time just... f*****g enjoyment. Kevin K (01:01:19.676) I know, I know. It's a crazy thing. It's like it shouldn't be like a rarity or anything like that. We wish it was available to everybody, but it's wild. That was the thing about living in Savannah and that was like the hard part about leaving Savannah was, I think for a lot of us who have our ideals about walkability and everything, you kind of go back and forth about, do I want to spend my time? Frank Starkey (01:01:30.257) Yeah. Frank Starkey (01:01:37.489) Yeah, I bet. Kevin K (01:01:48.38) you know, working real hard and trying to create this as much as, as I can and, and live in a certain place where I, I guess have the economic opportunity to do that. Or do you also maybe just say, yeah, at a certain point, screw it. I just want to live somewhere where I can be, you know, do the things that I talk about all the time. So. Frank Starkey (01:02:06.513) Yeah, exactly. And it is hard to live in a place that's already kicking butt and do the things to make a place kick butt. So. Kevin K (01:02:20.124) Yeah, and in so many of these places, the places that we admire, and if you didn't get in early, you can't afford it at a certain point anymore anyway. So it's kind of a crazy deal. So as an architect, then would the infill projects, I mean, I know you worked with Eric and Mike and some others, but do you do any sketching or work on any of these sort of, is it a collaborative deal or do you at this point just be like, well, Frank Starkey (01:02:28.369) Right. Kevin K (01:02:46.268) I'm going to be a good client and be kind of hands off and just help direct my architects. Frank Starkey (01:02:50.865) I try to, I'm trying very hard to just be a good client and direct my architects. I'll let you ask Eric on whether I'm a good client or not, but that's probably been the project where I have been the most, I've left the most to the architects to on the design side. On the, the one of the commercial building that I owned by myself was a, building that didn't have any windows, two stories right on one of our main streets on a corner. So two full facades with essentially no windows. And it needed new windows storefront and upstairs. So it basically just needed a whole facade because there was just a big windowless bunker. But it had existing structural columns or structural considerations for where I could put windows. And it ended up being a interesting, challenging facade composition project. Anyway, I designed that building. And also it was a double high space where the second floor was just a mezzanine. And we closed in the second floor to make it into a mixed use building. So that because it had always been a nightclub or restaurant and it was too big as being a story and a half to for that, for this market to support because the upstairs are just kind of. You know, just sucked. So I was like, this needs to just be a regular size restaurant on the ground floor and then offices above. So I did the architecture on that, including the build out for the restaurant. I had some help on that on the layout, but I did the design, interior design stuff on that. I wish I had, I love the facade design process. And that was a really fun project. And the result was, you know, it's, it's unusual because of the constraints that it had. So, but it's, I think it's a fun, it's a good result. but if I were doing more projects, I mean, I really feel like I don't do architecture every day. So I'm not, yeah, certainly I'm not going to do construction drawings because I don't have that, capability just cause I don't, I mean, I have the technical ability to do it. Frank Starkey (01:05:15.249) and I am now licensed, I could sign and seal it, but I don't want to. And I haven't signed and sealed anything yet. So my goal is to be more of a client than I am an architect. Kevin K (01:05:27.868) So in all this stuff and going back to even your initial work with Longleaf and others, you've obviously tried to create well -designed places and beautiful places. I know you said you had some thoughts kind of based on one of the other podcasts I had where we were going back and forth and talking about beauty in buildings and the value of that versus sort of utilitarian values as well. How have you tried to balance all that and really create? beauty and do you find it at conflict with also making real estate work? Frank Starkey (01:06:04.753) I don't find beauty in conflict with making real estate work at all. I think it's critical. I don't think that things have to be built expensively in order to be beautiful. And my comment to you in my email was about y 'all had had a discussion on this, your podcast before last. about and you had said you can't legislate beauty no code in the no amount of code in the world is going to result in beauty and I've always thought about that because I agree with you that codes by their nature don't result in beauty that that human love results in beauty I mean that's you know because that's a it's a it's a spiritual outcome not a I mean, it's an outcome of the spirit. I don't mean that metaphysical terms, just, but it's something that comes from a level of care that's not, that doesn't happen from just conformance. Kevin K (01:07:10.94) Yeah, it's a value you bring to a project basically. It's something you really care to do. Yeah. Frank Starkey (01:07:16.529) Yes, that said, the American Vignoli and other handbooks that were used by builders, not by architects, but by people who were just building buildings and designing them, designing and building buildings by hand in the 1800s and early 1900s. resulted in scads of what we consider beautiful buildings with a capital B because it codified, maybe not in a sense of regulation, but in a sense of aspiration and guidance. It codified a way to arrive at competence with beautiful principles underlying it. And I wonder, it's... It's a hypothesis. I've not proved it or even set out to prove it. But if you could require that people follow the American Vignole as an example, or something else like that, where the principles of proportion are codified and they're followable, then I think you probably would still have to have some coaching. But I think you would get a whole lot closer than you can in the, because it's more like a playbook than it is a rule book for producing a competent design. Competent in the classical sense. Kevin K (01:08:54.556) Yeah. Yeah. Kevin K (01:09:02.236) Yeah, I think that's fair. It's more like coaching people about people who care. If you want to do good things, here are simple rules and patterns to follow that are not going to get you the Parthenon necessarily, but they're going to get you certainly at a minimum like a B building, like a B or a B minus building if you follow these rules. And if you do them really well and execute the details well, you could end up with an A plus building. Yeah. Frank Starkey (01:09:34.641) Yeah. Yeah, and it's something that McKim, Mead, and White can follow that and come up with something spectacular. But the same underlying principles are in every garden variety inline building on a street. Because individual urban buildings and places that we love are individually not spectacular. It's the accumulation of be buildings that are singing in the same key that makes a good chorus. Not everything can be a soloist anyway. Kevin K (01:10:11.996) And certainly, a lot of the people who produced the buildings in that era that you described, late 19th, early 20th century, I mean, there were a whole lot of just illiterate immigrants to the United States, ones who were building all that. And they didn't need 200 pages of construction drawings to follow it, but they did have patterns and illustrations and guides that they could follow. Frank Starkey (01:10:25.041) Yeah. Kevin K (01:10:42.46) and just some kind of basic standards. Yeah. Frank Starkey (01:10:43.217) And also a general cultural agreement on what looks good and what doesn't. And that's what I think you can't recreate from start, I mean, from scratch, because it's got to, that culture builds up and accumulates over decades and generations of practice. Kevin K (01:11:09.148) No doubt. Have you seen with the buildings that you have done in Newport, Richey, has there been other people who've looked at what you've done and tried to essentially say, kind of continue to raise the bar with good looking buildings? Frank Starkey (01:11:24.209) Unfortunately, I can't say that has happened yet. There hasn't been that much new construction in New Port Richey. And I don't, I can't think of any off the top of my head that have been done since we built the central, for example, which is really the only new ground up build. There's another apartment project and apartments and mixed use downtown, but it was designed in 2006 and then it was stalled and it finished about the same time we did, but it has nothing. you know, didn't follow others at all. We did have a lot of people. And this is something I would recommend, which I did accidentally. I didn't put really good drawings of the buildings into the public before they were built. I made a real now here's a blunder. There's a my blunder was I allowed the elevations of the buildings. to be the first thing that got into the public view because they were required as part of the permitting process. And an elevation drawing of a building is the architectural equivalent of a mugshot. It's representative and it's accurate, but it's accurate, but it's not representative. So it doesn't show you what a person looks like. It shows you just facts about their face. And so it shows you facts about a building, but not what it's gonna look like. So people saw the elevations. of what Eric could design, which were intentionally very simple rectangular boxes with regular, very competent, beautiful classical facades, but they looked really flat, they looked really boxy, and they looked terrible. They couldn't be at elevation, there's no depth on it. So people were like, holy s**t, of course he's building, I mean, they look like barracks. And so people lost their minds. I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So we quickly put together some 3D renderings. based on a quick sketchup model, we illustrated the hell out of them with landscaping and showed what a view down the street would look like. And it was a much better view. And that's really how you perceive the buildings. And so people were like, OK, well, if it looks like that, I guess I won't oppose it so much. But they were still rightfully skeptical. And so I s
In this episode of The Concordia Publishing House Podcast, Rev. Mark Kiessling and Julianna Shults from the LCMS Youth Ministry office join host Elizabeth Pittman to discuss facilitating healthy youth ministry practices, as well as their new book, Seven Practices of Healthy Youth Ministry, which outlines their insights into this topicGet a copy of their book at cph.org/seven-practices-of-healthy-youth-ministry. Show Notes:Wondering how to care for the youth in your congregation? Experiencing dwindling attendance or enthusiasm? Not sure how to measure the efficacy of your ministry? LCMS Youth Ministry staff members, Rev. Dr. Mark Kiessling and DCE Julianna Shults, are here to help, offering seven markers of healthy youth ministry. With these research-based, practical insights, you'll be empowered to take on the essential task of caring for teens in Jesus' name. Listen now as Mark and Julianna discuss the seven practices (not programs), their journey to writing a book, what's ahead for the Youth Ministry office, the Youth Gathering in 2025, and more. Get a copy of Seven Practices of Healthy Youth Ministry on…cph.org AmazonQuestions:· Tell us all about your new book.· Were there any surprises during your research?· Who did you write the book for?· What are the seven practices not?· What do the seven practices mean?· If you had to spend some time digging into one of the seven, where would you start?· What are some ways warmth, challenge, and grace look like in practice?· Talk about the idea of resilience, identity, and Christ as one of the practices.· What do you say to youth leaders who have read your book and ask “So, what now?”· Tell us about what's coming for the Youth Ministry office. About the Guests:The Rev. Mark R. Kiessling serves as the director of LCMS Youth Ministry. In that role, he supports the leadership, service, resourcing, and networking functions of LCMS Youth Ministry. Kiessling graduated from Concordia Seminary, St. Louis in 2006 and was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters from there in 2020. Kiessling is married to Beth (Timm), who teaches Preschool at Christ Community Lutheran School in Kirkwood, Mo.Julianna Shults serves as Program Manager for Resources and Leadership for LCMS Youth Ministry. Her work includes managing YouthESource.com and LCMS YouthLead along with other research and resourcing. She graduated from Concordia University Seward in 2005 with a BA in Psychology and Director of Christian Education Certification. As a DCE, she has served both Hope Lutheran in Plant City, FL and St. Paul Lutheran in Chicago, IL. With a lo
Update: That giant screen erected in Japan to block tourists from taking photos of Mount Fuji now has several holes in it, We've got a guy on fire inside of Publix in Plant City and a lot of questions that need to be answered, Man with suspended license videos into court appearance...while driving
Tampa Bay Business Journal Real Estate Editor Ashley Kritzer - HCPS buys land in Plant City, the Tampa trolley car is set to expand service, and Tampa airport adds more flights to Germany. NewsRadio WFLA National Correspondent Erin Real - Walgreens joins the list of retailers cutting prices.
Are you an introvert or an extrovert? What do you do to unwind? What's your favorite smell or sound? These are just a few of the questions we were asked as we sat around the bistro table in Plant City, Florida at a Fresh Grounded Faith event. Author and podcaster Annie F. Downs and singer-songwriter Laura Story were with me, and these women gave so much insight and inspiration when we spilled the beans. We talked about the importance of hanging out with a small group, how I preserve memories when I can't see pictures, and if you have to be an extrovert to go into ministry. Plus, we were asked about how to deal with disappointment when a deep longing remains unfulfilled, as well as how to show yourself grace when you feel like a failure. This conversation was deep and wise, encouraging and fun, and it would be even better if you joined us. So pull up your chair at the bistro, and let's spill some beans. SHOW NOTES: 413Podcast.com/298
Esta semana, en Islas de Robinson, suenan: CARDELINA - "LA IMAGINACIÓN AL PODER" ("FLOR DE BEREZO", 2023) / ADRIANNE LENKER - "CANDLEFLAME" ("BRIGHT FUTURE", 2024) / NAIMA BOCK - "TOLL" ("GIANT PALM", 2022) / SAM GRASSIE - "PUT THE BLOOD" ("SANDWOOD", 2024) / DAISY RICKMAN - "FALLING THROUGH THE RISING SUN" ("HOWL", 2024) / MARLENE RIBEIRO - "FOREVER" ("TOQUI NO SOL", 2023) / JANE WEAVER - "HAPPINESS IN PROXIMITY" ("LOVE IN CONSTANT SPECTACLE", 2024) / JULIA HOLTER - "SPINNING" ("SOMETHING IN THE ROOM SHE MOVES", 2024) / DANA GAVANSKI - "LATE SLAP" ("LATE SLAP", 2024) / SHIRLEY HURT - "CHARIOTTER" ("SHIRLEY HURT", 2022) / TOMATO FLOWER - "HARLEQUIN" - ("NO", 2024) / FRANCES CHANG - "DARKSIDE" ("PSYCHEDELIC ANXIETY", 2024) / RYAN BOURNE - "HOPELESS" ("PLANT CITY", 2023).Escuchar audio
In this episode, host Ginain is thrilled to have Dalia Colón, an acclaimed food journalist and host of The Zest Podcast, as her guest. Join us as we dig into Dalia's journey into gardening, the intersection of food and community in Florida, and the launch of her exciting new cookbook. Highlights: Dalia shares what she's growing in her garden: Dalia shares her foray into gardening with raised beds on wheels, growing herbs and vegetables like cilantro, basil, green onions, romaine, and purple cauliflower, and her aspirations with a baby mango tree and a banana plant. A Feast of Flavors: The conversation blooms into a discussion about Dalia's involvement with The Zest Podcast, celebrating Florida's rich food culture through stories of citrus, seafood, Spanish flavors, and Southern charm. Cookbook Chronicles: Dalia unveils her new vegetarian cookbook, packed with over 120 plant-based recipes, reflecting her decade-long journey as a vegetarian. She emphasizes the cookbook's approachability for everyone, regardless of their dietary preferences. Food for Thought: Engaging tales from Florida's food history, including the challenges facing the citrus industry and the success of the strawberry industry in Plant City, spice up the conversation. Recipe SHARE: Ruby Red Roasted Beet Hummus: A vibrant recipe from Dalia's cookbook is shared, showcasing the versatility and beauty of vegetables. This easy-to-make, visually stunning dish is perfect for any gathering. Ruby Red Beet Hummus Makes about 2 cups 1 large beet, peeled and cut into ½-inch cubes ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil plus 2 tablespoons, divided 1 (15-ounce) can chickpeas, rinsed and drained 4 cloves garlic, minced Juice of 1 large lemon 2 tablespoons tahini ½ teaspoon salt Preheat the oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Spread the beets on the prepared baking sheet. Toss with 2 tablespoons olive oil to coat. Roast in the oven for 30 minutes or until tender. Let cool. In a food processor or strong blender, combine the chickpeas, garlic, remaining ¼ cup olive oil, lemon juice, tahini, and salt and pulse. Adjust lemon juice, olive oil, and salt and continue to blend until hummus reaches your desired flavor and thickness. — Recipe from The Florida Vegetarian Cookbook by Dalia Colón (University Press of Florida, 2024) Resources and Links: The Zest Podcast Purchase Dalia Colón's Vegetarian Cookbook: The Florida Vegetarian Cookbook: Colón, Dalia: 9780813069906: Amazon.com: Books Connect with Dalia on Social Media: Dalia Colon (@daliacolon) • Instagram photos and videos Cook The Gardent Links & Contact Info: Join our NEW Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/COOKTHEGARDEN Connect on Instagram: www.instagram.com/cookthegarden Visit the Food Blog: www.cookprayslay.com Email with Feedback and Topic Requests: info@cookprayslay.com
Get in, we're going to the Florida State Fair and the Strawberry Festival. March in Florida definitely means fair season and as always these fairs tend to draw some great acts for live entertainment. Listen as we recap our nights in both Tampa and Plant City and share what each fair had to offer along with their top notch musical acts!
Embarking on a venture steeped in ambition, Matt Perkins from Ledgeway Farm and I set our sights on the vibrant Strawberry Festival in Plant City, Florida. This episode is a tale of seizing chances and embracing the grind that shapes our aspirations. As we gear up to engage with the festival's swath of nearly 600,000 attendees, we unpack the essence of growing beyond transactions to cultivating lasting relationships with potential patrons, all while sprinkling our narrative with a dash of humor through impressions ranging from the tranquil Bob Ross to the unmistakable Donald Trump.Strap in for a strategic foray into the heart of festival culture, where the stakes are high and the rewards even higher. I unveil our approach to expanding Loud Proud American and how these events serve as fertile ground for brand loyalty and lifestyle promotion. You'll find out how we're balancing our in-person connections with a need to boost our online presence, a move crucial for the sustenance of our family business. We're betting big on ourselves, ditching the comfort of a safety net, and inviting you to witness the unfolding of an American dream, rich in hard work and hearty laughter.As we round off our southern journey, the conversation shifts to the poignant act of discarding the past, a symbolic burning of old documents and Plan Bs that once tethered us to uncertainty. I share the intense experience of relinquishing my ties to former safety nets and how this leap of faith into the future has challenged us to trust in the path we've paved with Loud Proud American. Join us as we live out loud, proud, and unapologetically American, all while inviting you to be part of the journey.If you found value in today's show please return the favor and leave a positive review and share it with someone important to you! https://www.sharethestrugglepodcast.com/reviews/new/Find all you need to know about the show https://www.sharethestrugglepodcast.com/Official Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100077724159859Join the 2% of Americans that Buy American and support American Together we can bring back American Manufacturing https://www.loudproudamerican.shop/Loud Proud American Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LoudproudamericanLoud Proud American Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/loud_proud_american/Loud Proud American TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@loud_proud_americanLoud Proud American YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmYQtOt6KVURuySWYQ2GWtwThank you for Supporting My American Dream!
The 89th Florida Strawberry Festival opens Thursday in Plant City. More than 600,000 showed up during the 2023 run and those numbers are expected to be met or exceeded this year. We speak with one of the festival's associate directors, James Scott.
I got the chance to speak with Shannon Crosby the owner of The Citrine Ghost. a spooky dark and moody plants, goods, and home decor brand from Plant City, Florida. She is also co-creator of the Mossy Hollow Market - a whimsical market featuring artists and vendors as you meander through the interactive woodland experience, complete with a potions bar, magical decor, photo ops, wishing cauldron, wandering characters, and festive music. I chatted with Shannon about how she went from a music podcast to getting into plants and starting The Citrine Ghost. She also spoke on how she came to co-create the Mossy Hollow Market. Shannon also discussed with us how she started filming TikToks and amassing over 108k followers talking about poisonous plants. She provided some great information Lunch with Biggie is a podcast about small business and creatives sharing their stories and inspiring you to pursue your passion, with some sandwich talk on the side. Created, edited, and produced in Orlando, FL by Biggie- the owner of the sandwich-themed clothing brand- Deli Fresh Threads. The Citrine Ghost Social: The Citrine Ghost IG: https://www.instagram.com/thecitrineghost/ The Citrine Ghost Website: https://www.thecitrineghost.com/ Mossy Hollow Market IG https://www.instagram.com/mossyhollowmarket/ The Citrine Ghost Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thecitrineghost Biggie's Social: Deli Fresh Thread's Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/delifreshthreads/ Podcast's Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/lunchwithbiggie/ Podcast's Facebook Group- https://www.facebook.com/groups/lunchwithbiggie Podcast's Twitter- https://twitter.com/LunchwithBiggie Deli Fresh Threads- https://DeliFreshThreads.com --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lunchwithbiggie/message
Plant City… home of the Florida Festival
Rappin' With ReefBum is a LIVE talk show with host Keith Berkelhamer and guests from the reef keeping community. In this episode I chat with Chris Meckley, who is the owner of ACI Aquaculture in Plant City, Florida. ACI is a coral wholesaler and Chris runs the business with his wife Amanda and their staff.
“Mama Jane” Harris is a favorite on TV shows like Carnival Eats. There's always a line for her fair food creations for the Florida State Fair and Florida Strawberry Festival. Today she let me in on her two new creations for Tampa and Plant City next year. The Florida State Fair Head to the Florida State Fairgrounds between February 8 and February 19 to try Mama's newest savory funnel cake: The Temperamental Hog Funnel Cake. Mama wanted to get crazy and do a savory creation that would be all-new. It's a funnel cake with cornmeal that gives it a bit of a crunch, barbecue spices and there's pulled pork on time. Then you pick your temperament: happy, angry, or FURIOUS! There's a thinned down cream cheese glaze to cool the cake down. It's not sweet – it's a straight cream cheese flavor. The Florida Strawberry Festival Love Almond Joy candy bars? Mama has nailed the flavor with her new Almond Joy Funnel Cake. It's got the chocolate, almonds and coconut flavor you love in the candy bar. Mama said she's a big fan of the candy bar – it's one of her favorites, so this one was all her idea. It's a traditional flavor with the coconut and almond topping and drizzled chocolate. If neither of those spark your curiosity, Mama Jane will also have her usual elephant ears and other funnel cakes too, like strawberry cheesecake, red velvet or the turtle with the chocolate and caramel. You can find Mama's truck near the main stage.
We were invited down to Sir Henry's Haunted Christmas media night! This local haunt is located in Plant City, FL and runs for select dates in December. December 8th-9th and 15th-17th Be sure to get your tickets online in advance! This year's event features two haunted trails; Slay Bells: Chapter 2 and Creatures of Christmas. On top of the two amazing trails you can also enjoy some laser tag, an escape game and plenty of great treats and snacks! Make sure when visiting you wear close toed shoes as the paths are outdoors and have some uneven pathways!
Join Katy Rey and Charity Golden in a vibrant tale of empowerment and unity, from the strawberry fields of Plant City to the global stage of The Lipstick Network.
In this edition of R2D, the crew is joined by Trent Tetreault. A kitchen manager at Plant City, Trent reveals a long line of working in the service industry with an interesting job history that takes the podcast down a route that it hasn't been before. Working 3rd shift in a casino running Buffett is an angle that hasn't been touched on the podcast and from the nap rooms to being tipped with mystery pills, Trent paints a great picture. The Cheesecake Factory, coffee shops, and a more clear definition of what Emo Skramz music is the episode speaks for itself
Sir Henry's Haunted Trail expanded in 2023 with a new haunted hayride. Owner Zach Glaros explains how he continues to grow the event into a full scream Park. Support for this episode comes from Gantom Lighting and Controls. See what you're missing with a free demo. Subscribe to everything from the Haunted Attraction Network here.
In this spooktacular VacationScares episode Tom and Ian discuss attending both Busch Gardens Williamsburg and Busch Gardens Tampa Howl-O-Screams, Kings Dominion's Halloween Haunt, Sir Henry's Haunted Trail in Plant City, Florida and Field of Screams in Mountville, PA.Tom and Ian also catch up on SeaWorld Entertainment 2024 coaster announcements and more. Sir Henry's Haunted Trail: https://www.sirhenryshauntedtrail.com/Field of Screams: https://fieldofscreams.com/Website: https://vacationeerspodcast.com/New Vacationeers Tee: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08G18TV2JTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@vacationeers_podcastFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/VacationeerTomTwitter: https://twitter.com/vacationeertomYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/c/VacationeersPodcastContact the show at vacationeerspodcast@gmail.com.
Cari and Jake come on the podcast to have some drinks (thanks to Fade Away Barbershop) and chat. Cari tells her story of how she ended up in a wheel chair and how it has impacted her life. Jake, who has been on the podcast before, tells us about how he doesn't know who his parents are from when he went to the social security office. All in all, we had a great time, very many laughs and I learned a lot. If you have been getting any okay looking haircuts and are ready for the best haircut, make sure you check out the podcast sponsor, Fade Away Barbershop. That is where I get my haircut, and I can't recommend them enough. We had our drinks provided to us for this episode of the podcast by Fade Away Barber shop in Plant City. They just recently started providing the drinks for the podcast and we are super great full for that. If you are tired of how your haircuts have been and are looking for a new barbershop, look no further. https://instagram.com/fade.awaybarbershop?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== to check out the barbershops instagram. Walk ins welcome.
NewsRadio WFLA Anchor Chris Trenkmann runs through today's top stories, including Trump endorsing Jim Jordan for House speaker, the Biden administration waiving federal laws to allow border wall construction in Texas, and Plant City Police urge the public to be alert as they investigate a case of 'jugging."
Hosts Erika Lance and Mark Muncy investigate the mysterious tales that make Sir Henry's Haunted Trail in Plant City, Florida such a unique haunted experience! Special thanks to Amanda Rosenblatt and Brad Acevedo, the dynamic author duo of Sir Henry's Haunted Tales and our guests this episode. #EerieTravels #MarkMuncy #ErikaLance #CallieMuncy #SpookySeason #SirHenrysHauntedTrail #HauntedAttraction #Halloween #ScaryBooks #HorrorAuthor To send us your own listener tales and questions, email us at mark@eerietravels.com or visit eerietravels.com. Episode Credits: Hosts - Erika Lance @authorerikalance - Mark Muncy @eerietravels Guests - Amanda Rosenblatt @missfanculture - Brad Acevedo @infiniteoddball Producer - Calista Muncy Intro/Outro Music - Destini Beard @destinibeardmusic Full Song available for purchase now at https://destinibeard.bandcamp.com/track/eerie-travels?fbclid=IwAR2sO2nrfyLQj5BdTGhlJtilLF0QvCoDuNI_H3KC1H4DNAoaQ8UoQCX0b5M Links: Sir Henry's Haunted Tales books - https://www.sirhenryshauntedtrail.com/sir-henry-s-haunted-tales-novel#:~:text=Amanda%20Rosenblatt%20is%20the%20creator,many%20great%20causes%20or%20organizations. Sir Henry's Haunted Trail - https://www.sirhenryshauntedtrail.com/ Amanda Rosenblatt Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/missfanculture/ Website - https://linktr.ee/missfanculture?fbclid=IwAR1NKC4F94wMlrP2jNrDk2Ho9XAfBgyR7pcwtrpudgRva2Bmy4f4tUiC398 Brad Acevedo Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/infiniteoddball/ Website - https://authorbradacevedo.com/ Sponsors: Paranormality Magazine - https://paranormalitymag.com/?ref1257 Use Code: Travels for 10% Off The Voice From Hell - Dick Terhune - https://dickterhune.com/
Last week we were asked to attend the media night for Sir Henry's Haunted Trail down in Plant City, FL! Celebrating 10 Years as a haunt they have now introduced a new attraction! A HAUNTED HAYRIDE! This year will include said Hayride, 3 Haunted Trails, 2 Escape Games, Ax Throwing and Midway! This event is a Local FL Haunt NECESSITY for all!
Wyatt and Kodey come on for drinks and to hangout. We aren't able to hangout like we used to due to work schedules and life commitments but when we get together it's always a good time. The older that we have gotten the more we value moments like this to come together and just be silly.We had our drinks provided to us for this episode of the podcast by Fade Away Barber shop in Plant City. They just recently started providing the drinks for the podcast and we are super great full for that. If you are tired of how your haircuts have been and are looking for a new barbershop, look no further. https://instagram.com/fade.awaybarbershop?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== To check out the barbershops instagram. Walk ins welcome. Subscribe to our Patreon for the link to full length podcast. Thank you for your support. patreon.com/somehowwereadults
In 2021, Dr. Sandra Musial gave up a private practice and teaching career to go ALL-IN with what she loves most - helping people transition to a whole food, plant-based lifestyle.She and other plant-based physicians started Plant Docs Providence to provide classes, education, and consultations to the public and medical professionals about how whole food, plant-based nutrition can prevent, improve, and reverse chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and certain cancers.Today, she and Rip discuss:Her Ukrainian roots and why she wanted to pursue medicineWhy she become a pediatrician to work with childrenWhat or who inspired Sandy to pursue plant-based nutritionThe rewards and challenges of working with children and their fammiliesThe dedication and outcomes of starting an obesity clinic and a food garden at Hasbro Children's HospitalWhen she knew it was time to go all-in on plant-based nutrition educationHow Plant Docs found a home at Plant City in Providence, Rhode IslandUpcoming programs at Plant CityThis career transition hasn't come without risk, but when you pursue what you believe, the risk also comes with high-reward when you KNOW you're making a difference in the lives of motivated people. Sandra Musial, MD is a physician specializing in food as medicine who is dedicated to preserving health and reversing lifestyle-related chronic disease through whole, plant-based nutrition. Sandy earned a BS degree in Nutritional Sciences from the University of New Hampshire, and an MD degree from the University of Massachusetts Medical School. She has worked in a private pediatric practice and at Hasbro Children's Hospital teaching the pediatric residents and medical students from the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. She is a Culinary Coach from Harvard's CHEF Coaching program, has a certificate in Plant Based Nutrition from eCornell, and a Health Coaching certificate from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition®. Sandy is board certified in Pediatrics and Obesity Medicine and started an obesity clinic and the first vegetable garden at Hasbro. Though she has witnessed the healing power of conventional medicine, she has also seen its limitations, especially with regard to disease prevention through healthy nutrition. Sandy started the nonprofit Plant Docs as an avenue for people to learn about the power of plant-based nutrition to improve health.https://plantstrongfoods.com/ https://plantstrongfoods.com/pages/2023-sedona-retreat https://plantstrongfoods.com/pages/plant-stock-landing-page-2023 https://www.facebook.com/GoPlantstrong https://www.instagram.com/goplantstrong/https://home.mealplanner.plantstrong.com/ https://app.soundstripe.com/songs/10845 Episode Webpage www.plantstrongpodcast.com/blog/sandra-musial-md Plant City WebsitePlant Docs PVD | Best Nutritionists in Rhode Island - Learn more about their upcoming "Jumpstart Your Health" programs
After this interview, I promise you'll want to load up the family and head east to Providence, Rhode Island! Over eight years ago now, Kim Anderson and her family watched “Forks Over Knives” and “Cowspiracy” and felt an IMMEDIATE responsibility to educate others and inspire change. They hosted movie nights and dinners where hundreds would come to enjoy a delicious plant-based meal, but the refrain they kept hearing was, “It's a shame I can't eat my values and my health when I go out to eat.” There just weren't many plant-based options.That changed when Kim and her family opened Plant City, the world's first plant-based food hall and marketplace in the heart of Providence, Rhode Island. Packed with multiple restaurants (including Mexican, sushi, Italian, and burgers), Plant City also features a bakery, coffee shop, and a vast community space packed with monthly educational programs and cooking classes.Today, she and Rip discuss:The genesis and inspiration behind Plant CityHer personal journey to plants, inspired by her son How this experienced entrepreneur with no restaurant experience brought her vision to life with internationally acclaimed chef, Matthew KenneyThe unique environment and worldly flavors they bring in each of the restaurantsTransformations of guests who visit since most are not plant-basedHow Plant-City, which opened in the fall of 2019, adapted the business to survive the pandemicHow Kim continues to educate students at area universities about the impact of climate change, animal agriculture, and sustainabilityKim and her family's mission is to invest in companies for a more sustainable and humane future and you'll hear that unrelenting passion in today's conversation. She was inspired by "The Game Changers," but she, too, is a true game changer. https://plantstrongfoods.com/ https://plantstrongfoods.com/pages/2023-sedona-retreat https://plantstrongfoods.com/pages/plant-stock-landing-page-2023 https://www.facebook.com/GoPlantstrong https://www.instagram.com/goplantstrong/https://home.mealplanner.plantstrong.com/ https://app.soundstripe.com/songs/10845
Rappin' With ReefBum is a LIVE talk show with host Keith Berkelhamer and guests from the reef keeping community. In this episode I chat with Chris Meckley, who is the owner of ACI Aquaculture in Plant City, Florida. ACI is a coral wholesaler and Chris runs the business with his wife Amanda and their staff.
Aquariumania - Tropical Fish as Pets - Pets & Animals on Pet Life Radio (PetLifeRadio.com)
Coral reef tanks continue to gain in popularity, and advances in technology and coral reef biology and ecology have made reef keeping much more accessible. My guest today is Chris Meckley of ACI Aquaculture, a well-known coral aquaculture and wholesale facility in Plant City, Florida. In Part 1 of our Reef and Coral Keeping 101 series we discussed tanks, equipment, and accessories. Join us, as Chris continues with Part 2: an Overview of Aquascaping and Water Chemistry. EPISODE NOTES: Chris Meckley of ACI Aquaculture - Reef and Coral Keeping 101: Part 2, Aquascaping and Water Chemistry Overview
On today's MJ Morning Show: Fester's upset about big lottery winners Roxanne was shaved by Meredith Morons in the news! MJ's Chicago get-out-of-jail-free card Substitute teacher was overpaid... wouldn't give the money back Pizza delivery customer left driver waiting 15 minutes... who was right? We took calls. Eagles concert with MJ's Michelle and Alan Arrows on the road... are they new? The party is over... is it for you? We took calls. A heavy pot smoker quit smoking and told her story. We took calls. Cheating fishermen who were caught in a tournament have gone to court. Whiskey packed in luggage wasn't full when it reached its destination More scooters found in Hillsborough River. Should they stop the program? Plant City wedding vows... poor taste? funny? too dirty? There are yet more new Oreo cookies. A 9 foot long gator was caught by Tampa police officers Kim and Chloe Kardashian's pictures... Robert Downy, Jr.'s chewed gum on eBay CHP Car stolen... guy leapt from car
In this episode Crawlspace Media's Tim Pilleri, Lance Reenstierna and Jennifer Amell speak with Katrina Overstreet and Brian Hunt about the disappearances of their siblings (Cieha Taylor and Calvin Johnny Hunt) and Katrina's cousin Ta'Niyah Leonard. Cieha Taylor went missing on February 6th, 2020 from Plant City, Florida under suspicious circumstances. Cieha's sister Katrina is searching for answers in her sister's case. Katrina and Cieha's cousin Ta'Niyah Leonard went missing on October 19th, 2002 from Bartow, Florida. Ta'Niyah was 11 months old at the time. Calvin Johnny Hunt went missing on May 29th, 2018 from Ten Mile, Tennessee. Brian is searching for answers for his brother Johnny's case. GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/to-get-a-new-sign Follow their FB page: https://www.facebook.com/findingcieha/ Please donate to the family GoFundMe if you can: https://www.gofundme.com/f/ma2tz3-justice-for-johnny The family Fb page: https://www.facebook.com/calvinjohnhunt Check out our Missing subscription service where we have a bonus show and ad-free episodes! https://missing.supportingcast.fm/ For more information on Morgan & Morgan go to https://www.ForThePeople.com/MISSING. Sources: https://charleyproject.org/case/taniyah-monique-leonard https://www.wtsp.com/article/news/special-reports/the-missing/taniyah-leonard-the-missing/67-2e6741d9-33e5-4a54-a680-fecbb16d39db https://www.oxygen.com/crime-news/cieha-taylor-missing-family-searches-after-car-found-on-florida-tracks https://charleyproject.org/case/calvin-johnny-hunt Follow Missing: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@missingcsm YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/missingcsm IG: https://www.instagram.com/MissingCSM/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/MissingCSM FB: https://www.facebook.com/MissingCSM Check out our entire network at http://crawlspace-media.com/ Follow Private Investigations For the Missing and please donate if you can: https://investigationsforthemissing.org/ http://piftm.org/donate https://twitter.com/PIFortheMissing https://www.facebook.com/PIFortheMissing/ https://www.instagram.com/investigationsforthemissing/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It's my annual winter ride in Florida, but things turned out a little differently this year. Day 1 featured a massive headwind that whittled down my energy and made for, um, challenging audio conditions. It was only 40 miles, but would the wind prevail? Florida 2023 - Day 1 Folks, I ended up having to toss about 30 minutes of witty banter and ride info because the headwinds from Tampa to Lakeland were simply brutal. I used a dedicated recorder with a "dead cat" lavalier microphone and the winds still managed to cut through. Some of what you hear won't sound great, but the vast majority is understandable. I solved the problem for next week's episode so you only have to put up with it for a week. But this was a really fun ride and I can't wait for you to listen... so... off we go! STATISTICS Average wind sustained headwind speed 20 mph Average speed 8.3 mph Cortados in Ybor City 1 Number of times I committed Carny ride slander that was lost to the headwinds in Plant City minimum of 9 times Coke floats that rescued my energy 0 Separately purchased Coke and ice cream that rescued my energy 1 each Miles biked 41 Flats 0
In this episode Crawlspace Media's Tim Pilleri, Lance Reenstierna and Jennifer Amell speak with Katrina about her sister Cieha Taylor's disappearance from Plant City, Florida on February 6th, 2020. We also speak with Brian about the disappearance of his brother Calvin Johnny Hunt from Ten Mile, Tennessee on May 29th, 2018. Please donate to the family GoFundMe if you can: https://www.gofundme.com/f/ma2tz3-justice-for-johnny. The family Fb page: https://www.facebook.com/calvinjohnhunt Cieha Taylor's family GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/to-get-a-new-sign Follow their FB page: https://www.facebook.com/findingcieha/ We also speak about their cousin Ta'Niyah Leonard's disappearance: https://www.wtsp.com/article/news/special-reports/the-missing/taniyah-leonard-the-missing/67-2e6741d9-33e5-4a54-a680-fecbb16d39db Follow Private Investigations For the Missing and please donate if you can: https://investigationsforthemissing.org/ http://piftm.org/donate https://twitter.com/PIFortheMissing https://www.facebook.com/PIFortheMissing/ https://www.instagram.com/investigationsforthemissing/ Follow Missing: Twitter: https://twitter.com/MissingCSM FB: https://www.facebook.com/MissingCSM IG: https://www.instagram.com/MissingCSM/ Check out our entire network at http://crawlspace-media.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this episode Crawlspace Media's Tim Pilleri, Lance Reenstierna and Jennifer Amell speak about the disappearance of Cieha Taylor from Plant City, Florida in February of 2020. This episode was originally published by Missing Maura Murray on December 3rd, 2020. Check out our Missing subscription service where we have a bonus show and ad-free episodes! https://missing.supportingcast.fm/ Sources: https://www.oxygen.com/crime-news/cieha-taylor-missing-family-searches-after-car-found-on-florida-tracks https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/region-hillsborough/cieha-taylor-missing-womans-case-covered-in-debut-episode-of-sheriffs-office-cold-case-podcast GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/to-get-a-new-sign Follow their FB page: https://www.facebook.com/findingcieha/ Main Theme by Kevin Macleod. Check out his work at https://incompetech.com/. Additional music by David Williams. See his work at http://williamsflutes.com. Follow Private Investigations For the Missing https://investigationsforthemissing.org/ http://piftm.org/donate https://twitter.com/PIFortheMissing https://www.facebook.com/PIFortheMissing/ https://www.instagram.com/investigationsforthemissing/ Follow Missing: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@missingcsm Twitter: https://twitter.com/MissingCSM FB: https://www.facebook.com/MissingCSM IG: https://www.instagram.com/MissingCSM/ Check out the new Crawlspace Discussion Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/talkcrawlspace/ Check out our entire network at http://crawlspace-media.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices