Frank Thomas. Melbourne Beach Historian. Click view more comments to see more photos and history. Sometime in the mid-‘70s the owners of Poor Richard’s Inn had a falling-out, and eventually the restaurant closed. When the painting of The Barefoot Mailman surfaced sometime later, it was in the hands of Frank Thomas, a retired educator with a passionate interest in the history of the Melbourne area. Thomas had become involved in an effort to preserve and restore the old, original 1891 Melbourne Beach Post Office The story of the replica Post Office is told, with photographs, in Thomas’ book, “Images of America: Melbourne Beach and Indialantic.” By the spring of 1962, my wife, Annie Hellen, and I had decided Melbourne Beach was to be our permanent home. We had come to south Brevard County as teachers the previous fall and immediately fell under the spell of this sleepy square-mile section of sandbar between the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian River. Melbourne Beachs population, slightly more than 1,000, was steadily growing in the early 1960s. New houses were the usual concrete-block, jalousie-window, terrazzo-floor, gravel-roof construction found elsewhere in Florida. Did these newlyweds want this or one of the older frame houses available in the community? Our adopted municipality, Melbourne Beach, had a unique air of permanence; it had existed well before most of the surrounding Space Age towns. So it was a desire to share a sense of this permanence that helped us decide to buy a 1920s two-bedroom frame cottage on Avenue A - that, and the less-than-$10,000 price tag. From our quiet street one could see the ocean to the east, and to the west, the Indian River. For a couple of North Carolina inlanders who had seldom visited the beach, this was paradise. Our new home was surrounded by overgrown vacant lots, or jungle, as we thought of it. We reveled in the feeling of isolation and in the summer heat. Air conditioning did not enter our minds. In those days, a history of the property came with the house. One of the many stories gleaned from ours concerned Ed Shannon, a developer who built our house in 1924 for $1,800. Ed fell on hard times and, according to his will, left his wife $15 a month to live on when he died in 1933. But Ed lives on, though his wife probably died of starvation. He managed to name one of our principal streets after himself. We stayed in our little dream cottage by the sea for six and a half years. A growing family required a larger house, so we moved, not far, to the typical ranch-style, air-conditioned Florida domicile. As weve grown older, we have come to appreciate its roominess, its coolness, its convenience. But it can never replace the happiness first felt in the summer heat of a long ago August afternoon when we first settled into the cluttered ambience of our little house by the sea. We remember the creaking of the hardwood floors and the strong smell of the pine walls, and the salt smell and the sound of the waves as the natural world blended with us through our open windows and doors. And we know that that innocence is forever lost.
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 05:30:18 +0000
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