A couple of weeks ago I wrote about driving cars in the old days. The Blonde in the House has suggested that I muse on what life was like in The Villages when we moved here way back in 2000. It was different then. After a quick visit in 1999. We came back to look at lots and homes. We were put up in a villa for the night and given Village dollars that we could use to buy stuff at the stores in Spanish Springs. Spanish Springs was not finished. (No, they were not legal anywhere else.) In fact, the big building at the top of the Square was not there. What was there was a tent, and there was another tent where a number of restaurants have been. They sold farmer’s goods out of the latter tent.
A huge difference now is that The Sharon is an expansion of what was The Church on the Square. On many evenings, we used to line up at the Church to get into musicals and other shows for free. The good old days for sure! The big shows were at the Savannah Center where we had to pay three or four dollars (imagine) to see the programs. They had series tickets that you could purchase to see various shows during the year. I recall one group from lower Broadway or somewhere that gave us the worst presentation of “South Pacific” that you can imagine. Most of them were decent though.
In those days, at least where we bought, you could buy a lot and then had two years to build. We did not take that long, but moved quickly. The Blonde in the House claims that it was because I wanted to play softball. Well, there are worse reasons. The Villages had a Street of Dreams where you could pick out what you wanted in your house from siding to door knobs. They even changed the wall between the kitchen and living room in our house at no additional cost. They guaranteed that it would be done in three months. It was, although on the day of closing they were putting the railings on the porch. They were late as someone had swiped the original railings. Some things never change!
The Villages back then had very few restaurants and stores. We had to go to Leesburg or Ocala if we wanted a Lowe’s, Home Depot, Target, etc. Actually, it wasn’t all that bad as you could move easily on 441/27. 301 was mostly two lanes, but you could move along with easy grace. We also had to search around, if we wanted a varied lot of restaurants. The country clubs that were available then were good. In fact, the late lamented Hacienda Country Club had two restaurants. If you went to the smaller of the two, men had to wear a jacket. That did not last a real long time. “No jackets in Florida,” was the cry!
Another change from 2000 is If you wanted to drive your golf cart, someplace at night you had a problem. That was because the law did not permit you to drive a cart after dark. Then when you did drive, the golf paths along El Camino Real and Buena Vista were essentially sidewalks. That is, they were narrow and the Blonde in the House used to grab me as we were passing a cart coming the other way as she was certain we would hit the oncoming cart. In addition, being concrete sidewalks, they were not always level as like most sidewalks they would stick up in places and your ride was bumpy. That made trying to drive a cart at night even more hazardous as you had to watch for police while bouncing up and down on the narrow sidewalks. However, all is good now as we can drive at night, and we have asphalt paths with very few bumps. (We also have faster traffic!)
Yep, we pioneers had it hard!
Barry Evans is a columnist for Villages-News.com