Port St. Lucie 50th Anniversary
LIVING HISTORY
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Leonard S. ViLLafranco, P.a.
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For its first few months, the school had no cafeteria,
Gessner says. “They brought the food from other schools in
a truck and it seemed like every day something would happen
and we’d get this announcement over the intercom that
lunch was delayed by 12 minutes, lunch was delayed by 20
minutes, and then the kids were all ready for lunch but you’d
have to teach while you waited.”
The students would pick up their food and bring it back to
class. “I don’t think there ever was a trip back to the classroom
that someone didn’t spill their food, and the janitors
hated that,” she says.
Port St. Lucie Elementary was torn down last year — an
aging school, 35 years old, that was simply too expensive to
repair. Residents who went to school there, who sent kids to
school there or who worked there were upset, but someday
another school may be built on the campus.
Gessner recalled that the school was “always different. The
Florida Power & Light nuclear plant (on South Hutchinson
Island) was being built then, and you had people from all
over the world working there. They had all these young children
who came in to our school, and they had gone to school
all over the world. They came from France, from Argentina,
from many places, and they were very exotic compared to
the rest of us and it created a mindset that was different from
everywhere else.”
When Gessner wanted her students to publish a book,
12 mothers from nuclear plant families came in to help the
youngsters write them. They did this for three years in a row,
she says.
“The school always had very involved parents, and I really
thought it was from the nuclear plant days. They were
all new, and they all came in together.”
PARKS ARRIVE
While parents were coming together at the city’s first
school, families were coming together at the Port St. Lucie
Marina, and later, at Sportsman Park, which GDC gave to the
city, Gessner says. Her husband, Dave, was put in charge of
programs there as well as at the St. Lucie Marina.
“Sportsman Park really was a nice park,” she says. “It had
baseball fields and a playground, but it was hot as the blazes.
There were a few pine trees and that’s all, so they had a
carport-size shade erected. Kids had to go home to go to the
bathroom.”
The route for all Port St. Lucie parades was on Prima Vista
Boulevard in the city’s early days.
BECKY POST OBRIEN
Sportsman Park was the center of youthful sporting activities in the 1960s.
Here, opening ceremonies are about to commence prior to a baseball game.