Beneath a Ruthless Sun Read online

  Blanche’s English pilot did not make it through the war, as she learned in December. Enemy fire had taken down his plane over Calais. The news of Ted’s death left Blanche despondent. Still, she carried on at school in Tallahassee. When she came back home for Christmas, she savored the spirit of the holiday and took comfort in its familiar routines. Once again she’d waited in the kitchen while Lilla packed a sack of roast pork and black-eyed peas and biscuits. Then she’d drive into Leesburg, park by Earle Fain’s theater, and climb the fire escape of the bank to deliver her father his dinner. Lying on the blanket, she’d scan the sky for a passing shadow or a flicker of light—for any sign of a plane in lonely, ghostly flight up among the stars.

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  IT WAS RUTH who took notice of a picture of another pilot, Joe Knowles, in the Daily Commercial. The accompanying story reminded readers that Joe had been a football star at Leesburg High School before attending Rollins College on an athletic scholarship, where he’d also been a member of the basketball, wrestling, boxing, and rowing teams. He’d spent four years of the war at bases throughout the South, serving as a flight instructor in the Army Air Corps. Now he was back in Lake County, where he would be going to work in the family business.

  What a catch this handsome, square-jawed bachelor looked to be—and from one of Leesburg’s most successful families. Ruth figured she knew just the girl for him. Susanna Ward, Ruth’s twenty-six-year-old niece from Webster Groves, Missouri, was spending the summer of 1947 at Fair Oaks, after a stint in the U.S. Naval Reserve. When Joe stopped by the flower shop one afternoon to pick up a corsage for his mother, Ruth seized the opportunity and invited him to dinner at Fair Oaks.

  Joe had been born in 1916 in North Dakota. His father, William G. Knowles, was a potato farmer. But when times got tough during the Great Depression, William announced that the family would be moving south. “We may starve to death in Florida,” he told them, “but we are not going to freeze to death in North Dakota.” After careful consideration, he had decided to take his chances in the citrus business. He sold the potato farm, and he and his wife and three young sons packed everything they owned and moved to Leesburg.

  Besides being an exceptional athlete in high school and college, Joe was a hard worker, and he’d considered following in the career footsteps of his brother Harold, a physician in Orlando. But when the war broke out, Joe had enlisted in the Army Air Corps, and after his discharge he’d followed his other brother, Tim, into the family business.

  At thirty, Joe still carried the swagger of a star football player, and at Fair Oaks he gave Bud and Gogo, Blanche’s brothers, some pointers. He impressed Susie Ward, too, with his self-possession and what seemed a promising future in his family’s commercial ventures; at the time he was working in his father’s watermelon business. By the end of the evening, Susie was smitten.

  A few nights later, Joe called the Bosanquet house. Ruth answered, and Susie, hovering expectantly, waited for her chatty aunt to pass her the phone. She waited in vain. It was Blanche, home from college for the summer, with whom Joe wanted to speak. She had not been vying with Susie for Joe’s attention—“She was just being Bampy,” Bud recalled—but Susie, indignant and aggrieved, accused Blanche of stealing her boyfriend and returned to Missouri.

  Bampy and Joe became a couple, and Joe became a fixture at the Bosanquet house for the rest of the summer. He frequently played big brother to Bud and Gogo, not always to happy effect. He took issue with the boys’ juvenile, freewheeling approach to Monopoly. “He wanted to play by the exact rules,” Bud said. “He took the fun out of the game.” They never played it with him again. When he gave twelve-year-old Gogo coaching in how to block, he’d get a little rough. “He had this big ring,” Bud said, “and Gogo would end up with all these bruises. Joe thought Gogo was a big baby. He said my mother babied him, and Gogo soured on Joe after that.”

  Still, when Blanche returned to college for what would be her final semester, Bud recalled her as being the happiest she’d been in some time, and soon thereafter she and Joe were engaged. They set a wedding date for three weeks after Blanche’s graduation in 1948, and Ruth set herself to planning the ceremony—at Holy Trinity Church, of course—and reception. “It was a big, big deal in town,” Priscilla remembered, uniting not just the photogenic couple but also two prominent Lake County families. As befit such a union, the couple planned to honeymoon in style. They took a driving tour to Niagara Falls and back, with stops in Charleston, Richmond, Philadelphia, New York, Buffalo, Toronto, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Birmingham, in a brand-new car, Joe’s surprise wedding gift to Blanche.

  After the marriage, Joe quickly began to establish himself as one of the princes of Lake County. He and his friend Syd Herlong—Albert S. Herlong Jr., of A. S. Herlong Packing Company—became founding members of Leesburg’s Quarterback Club. Quarterback Clubs were popular throughout the South, each chapter serving as a social network that knit together the city’s most powerful men in banking, politics, and business. Every spring, the Leesburg members, many of them alumni of the University of Florida and its College of Law, would hold a banquet at the local Elks Lodge. A Florida Gators or other conference coach would address them, and the membership would pick a Gators road game from the next season’s schedule to attend. Come that autumn night, all the prominent men of Leesburg would pack their bags and gather at the city’s downtown train depot. On board, they’d drink scotch, smoke cigars, and play high-stakes poker as the train rolled through the night. The following morning, the sleeper cars would be detached from the train and parked in the depot. The club members would sleep all day Friday, rise in time for dinner and drinks, and carouse all night, retreating to the sleeper cars for naps. On Saturday, donning their orange Quarterback Club fedoras, they’d head out to the stadium to cheer on their beloved Gators. “What a trip,” was about the most they’d say upon being met back in Leesburg by their wives and children. But as their sons grew older, they’d later get a private rendition of the lively particulars of the weekend, effectively guaranteeing the Quarterback Club another generation of exclusive membership.

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  A LITTLE MORE THAN A YEAR after the wedding, at a Sunday dinner with the Bosanquets and the Newells, Blanche announced that she was pregnant. The words were barely out of her mouth when her mother blurted out, “Well, I knew that!”—a pronouncement that scuttled any celebratory toast and prompted an aggravated response from her son-in-law.

  “How did you know it?” Joe demanded. “Did Blanche tell you?”

  Proudly, Ruth announced that she’d figured it out herself when a friend stopped by the flower shop and divulged that she’d recently run into Blanche at Dr. Holland’s office. Since Blanche had chosen not to mention the doctor visit to her mother, Ruth had surmised that her eldest daughter must be pregnant.

  “She didn’t like anybody to put anything over on her,” Bud said of Ruth. “She ought to have kept quiet and said, ‘Oh, good.’ Instead, it got to be a little heated there with Joe. The two of them were very strong-willed.”

  Ruth had not had to surmise about her handsome son-in-law’s willful behavior or the reputation it had earned him. As far back as his high school days, Joe Knowles’s popularity with the ladies was no secret around Leesburg. Nor was the fact that now and again, as it pleased him, he enjoyed extramarital companionship.

  “Everybody knew Joe had affairs,” said Priscilla Newell. “Women kind of flocked to Joe.” Certainly Ruth knew, and although she as certainly disapproved, she had not been about to risk jeopardizing her daughter’s prospects over Joe’s philandering. “Ruth practically pushed them together,” Priscilla said. “Ruth’s ambition was to make sure that all three of her daughters got married. Joe was the catch and Aunt Ruth was bound—just determined—to get him.”

  Neither before nor after the marriage did Ruth ever broach the subject of Joe’s infideli
ty with either her son-in-law or her daughter, at least not to anyone’s knowledge, but she frequently locked horns with Joe for control over what each purported to be Blanche’s best interests. Ruth envisioned her daughter, elevated in wealth and status by her marriage, at the center of the Leesburg social scene Ruth herself so admired. Once the children came, however, Joe decided that he and Blanche should move into the big house by Bugg Spring in Okahumpka (which he pronounced “Okeehumpkee,” the Seminole word for “deep waters”), next to his father’s orange groves. He had fond memories of his rugged outdoor upbringing in rural North Dakota, he said, and he wanted to raise his children in a similar environment, away from the social milieu of the Leesburg citrus elite. He wanted acreage, horses, and cattle rather than suburban living among the tony houses of Palmora Park.

  Bud Bosanquet, for one, wasn’t so convinced by Joe’s ruralist nostalgia. The house cost Joe nothing, Bud knew, having been included in the purchase price of the property when Joe’s father bought it, and since then it had stood empty. Whatever Joe’s reasoning, his decision vexed Ruth. In Okahumpka, Blanche would be removed not only from the social scene in Leesburg but from most other company as well. With Joe constantly traveling to bolster his watermelon and citrus business, she would often be alone with small children. Blanche assured her mother there was nothing to worry about.

  And for a number of years, there didn’t seem to be, at least judging by the family’s fortunes. Joe continued to work hard and play hard with the Leesburg elite, forging social bonds that paid them back in countless ways. Syd Herlong had become a U.S. congressman, and to further advance his political career, he hosted an annual golf tournament—the Herlong Hassle, as it came to be known—at Silver Lake Country Club, where the city’s well-to-do played alongside celebrities and politicians from Washington, D.C. Guests enjoyed the Florida sunshine by day almost as much as they did the legendary gin games at night. They might also be inclined to take in an amateur theatrical performance by the local Melon Patch Players, especially if handsome Joe Knowles was performing.

  The owners of the largest groves, Joe and Syd Herlong among them, maintained their own packinghouses in downtown Leesburg, thus allowing them to realize even more substantial returns on their citrus operations. Joe also took on the responsibility of procuring thousands of watermelons each year for the city’s Watermelon Festival, where he bestowed the coveted Knowles Trophy to the grower of the season’s largest melon. Jesse Daniels was one of nearly sixty thousand people who attended the 1957 festival, pedaling his Schwinn five miles north from Okahumpka to eat hot dogs and watch the fireworks over Lake Harris.

  That year the Quarterback Club had traveled to Auburn, where the Gators were taking on the undefeated Auburn Tigers at their homecoming game. The train left on Halloween, long after trick-or-treating children and their mothers had turned in for the night. But the real highlight of the year was the ten-day celebration of Leesburg’s centennial. During it, Joe starred as the detective in the Melon Patch Players’ production of the murder mystery Laura, earning praise from the Leesburg Daily Commercial for his tasteful but “believable” handling of the romantic scenes with the young actress in the title role. “Joe taught me how to kiss for the stage,” the actress recalled, impressed by his confidence both onstage and off.

  The centennial also included the antics of the “Keystone Kops,” who’d haul perpetrators of such offenses as wearing makeup (women) or shaving (men) without a permit before a “Kangaroo Kourt,” an “unjust body” that meted out “such punishments as pies in the face and dunkings in a pool” with uncharacteristic evenhandedness. Willis McCall, whose father was a Lake County dirt farmer but who had garnered the support of the big citrus men while working as a fruit inspector for the Florida Agriculture Commission, and had gotten them to back him for sheriff in 1944—and every election since—was a member. So were such power brokers as circuit judge Truman G. Futch and state attorney Gordon Oldham. State senator J. A. “Tar” Boyd, a Quarterback Club stalwart, was found guilty of gross malfeasance “for his failure to display facial foliage,” and was given a choice between “walking up and down Main Street in his underwear” and paying a five-dollar fine. A political career to consider, Boyd chose the latter, but the Kourt deemed the senator’s lawyer—no other than Red Robinson—incompetent and made a cartoonish show of branding him with a supposedly red-hot iron. Kourt proceedings culminated in a vigilante committee that “swarmed over the judge’s stand and made off with the Keystone Kops in revenge for past humiliation of citizens,” carting Judge Futch off to jail for contempt and throwing state attorney Oldham and Sheriff McCall “body, boots and britches” into the waters of Lake Harris. A tongue-in-cheek letter to the editor of the Commercial commended the vigilantes: “I say keep up the good work boys and we will run the whole lawless gang out of gas.”

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  IT HAD BEEN a banner year for Joe Knowles in another way as well. Through Syd Herlong’s secretary, Carole Weatherly, he’d met a congressional aide named Mary Ellen Hawkins. Alabama-born-and-bred, Hawkins had moved to Washington in 1950 to work as an aide, “but the congressman was a drunk and wasn’t re-elected.” She’d then switched to New York representative Kenneth Keating’s office, and at a meeting of the House Labor Committee, a young congressman from Massachusetts had caught her eye. “Oh my goodness,” she’d thought at the time. “Who is that?” She had apparently also caught the young congressman’s eye, which was how Mary Ellen Hawkins had begun having movie and dinner dates with her Georgetown neighbor John F. Kennedy.

  Through Weatherly, Hawkins was introduced to Joe when he came to town to discuss business with Herlong, his old friend and congressman. She found Joe to be agreeable and well educated, “a good old boy and a gentleman,” and the two discovered shared interests in politics and art. He sent her fruit from Florida, and they dined together when he visited D.C. Joe was no JFK, but before long Hawkins grew infatuated. They began an affair. At the end of 1957, Hawkins resigned her position in Washington. She’d decided to relocate to Naples, Florida, and she let Joe know that in mid-December she’d be making the move south.

  So it wasn’t an urgent business matter that had called Joe out of town on December 17, as he’d told Blanche on the phone in the hours before her rape. Instead, he had driven to a Leesburg service station in the afternoon, then waited patiently for Mary Ellen to arrive in a car packed with her belongings. After greeting her, Joe got back in his car, and Mary Ellen followed him for eighty miles south to Tampa under the darkening sky. The couple went to dinner, then spent the night together in a hotel room—the same pitch-black night that a prowling man broke through a screen door at the Knowles home in Okahumpka and crept up the stairs to the bedroom where Blanche was sleeping.

  Early the next morning, Joe and Mary Ellen left the hotel parking lot in their separate cars, with Joe leading the way to show her the route to Naples. In trying to keep up with him, Mary Ellen ran through a caution light. A policeman stopped both cars and escorted Joe and Mary Ellen to a Tampa police station. There the police delivered the message Sam Powell had left for Joe. Without saying why, they made it clear that he was to return to Lake County immediately. The couple said hasty good-byes. Then Mary Ellen continued south to Naples while Joe sped north, back to Leesburg, where Sam and a close circle of fellow Quarterback Clubbers awaited him, ready to convene, if not a Kangaroo Kourt, at least a loyal council to weigh in on how to deal with the terrible blow that had befallen one of their own.

  And in nearby Mount Dora, a reporter with a fondness for bebop glasses and a history as a troublemaker for the powers-that-be was about to begin a long and ruinous crusade to run the whole lawless gang out of gas.

  The Platt family at their Pistolville home in Lake County

  CHAPTER THREE

  Smoked Irishman

  AS THE MORNING GREW BRIGHT, new rumors swirling around Lake County were threatening to further upend Mab
el’s Wednesday routine. But while the reports of the previous night had emanated from the black community, immediate and shot through with fear, this second wave of rumor was coming from the white sections of Okahumpka and Leesburg, and it was steeped in innuendo. It centered on the conjecture that the victim’s husband, Joe Knowles, had been out of town on business at the time of the incident. And hadn’t Mrs. Knowles been seen earlier that evening at the Rotary Club in Leesburg, out drinking with some men? And was it true that after the alleged attack, instead of calling the police immediately, she’d first called the Knowles family lawyer? People speculated. Maybe the “rape” was no rape at all.

  After ten years, Mabel was no stranger to the stark contrasts entrenched in Lake County, and her own appreciation of the reasons for them had been hard-earned. Mount Dora had charmed her at first sight, even though Patricia—“Punky,” in those days—had come down with measles on the drive south from Akron. “I thought it was a bit of heaven when I first came here,” Mabel recalled. Towering oak trees draped in Spanish moss shaded the downtown streets, which were lined with Victorian-era Queen Anne homes, Craftsman bungalows, and conch houses. Its gardens lush with azaleas and hibiscus, and its lawns like carpets of deep green St. Augustine grass, the quaint lakeside town hardly bore comparison to the planate pastures, clay roads, and dilapidated shacks that dotted the landscape of Okahumpka, twenty miles to the west.