LIVING HISTORY
three children: Stephen, Mary Jean and
Florence. Marion died in 1933.
In 1926, Margaret married my grandfather,
30
E.R. “Putz’’ Enns, who arrived in
Fort Pierce in 1923 from Kansas to manage
his family’s citrus grove. They had
three children, my dad, Bob Enns, who
became the editor of the local News-Tribune,
my uncle, Edward Gladwin Enns,
who served as a mayor and St. Lucie
County commissioner, and my aunt,
Susan Gladwin Enns, an anthropologist
and the last surviving sibling who
now lives in Atlanta. Margaret Gladwin
Enns died in 1984.
Bob Gladwin, who married Christine
Coolidge, had three children: Buck,
Christine and Tommy. Though not a
politician like his father, Bob Gladwin
was no less civic minded. He founded
the local Sea Scout Ship, Fort Pierce
Little League and created the league’s
complex, co-founded the Pelican Yacht
Club and the local Coast Guard Auxiliary,
was instrumental in creating the
city’s paid fire department and helped
establish the baseball fields on Virginia
Avenue that are named after him. He
was a longtime volunteer with the
St. Lucie Historical Society, helping
establish its current location and saving
and preserving the early photographic
collection of Harry Hill, which documented
the early history of the Treasure
Coast. So tireless were his efforts to improve
the city that the late Miami Herald
columnist Anne Wilder called him “Mr.
Fort Pierce.’’
In the course of reporting this story,
I had the pleasure of reconnecting with
relatives — my second cousin Stephen
Horton and another second cousin,
Tommy Gladwin, whom I hadn’t seen
in several years. Because Stephen lives
in Texas, I communicated with him by
phone and email. For my reconnection
with Tommy, 66, who is the last of
our male relatives with the last name
Gladwin still living in Fort Pierce, I
drove out to his home west of town.
Arriving at his place in the country
and seeing the endless barns he had
built over the years packed with jeeps,
trucks, cars and tractors he was tinkering
with, I was reminded of his father’s
own industriousness and how that was
a Gladwin family trait.
Though we don’t share the same last
name, my side of the family keeps the
Gladwin connection going in its own
way by giving various members of our
family Gladwin for their middle name,
including two of my own children. We
Tommy Gladwin’s blacksmith shop, created from tools from Mim’s Blacksmith Shop, where his uncle,
Stephen Gladwin, had worked as a youth.
Tommy Gladwin stands by a 1952 Ford tractor he keeps in running condition at one of his barns west
of Fort Pierce.
also have a relative, my first cousin,
Gladwin Enns, 54, who has Gladwin as
his first name. His 23-year-old son also
goes by the name Gladwin Enns.
During my visit to Tommy’s home,
he showed me a blacksmith shop he
had built and outfitted with equipment
the late Charlie Crooks had given him
from Mim’s Blacksmith Shop, where his
Uncle Stephen had worked.
Tommy’s wife, Kathy, versed in our
family’s history as well as any blood
relative, easily retrieves family documents
on virtually any topic we discuss.
She shares the story of how their
11-year-old grandson, Cooper Thompson,
recently gathered people around
the World War I monument across from
the Sunrise Theatre to boast of his relationship
to Stephen N. Gladwin.
Maybe “our soldier boy’’ won’t ever
be forgotten after all.