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The Death of Patriarch Herbert "Capt. Hub"
Storter, 96, leaves a void as wide as the indelible mark his family has left on the Southwest Florida landscape. Herbert Storter said he wanted his wife of 77 years to outlive him because he couldn't bear to be without her. Failing in that, he sought to die one minute after her so the two of them could "cross the Jordan" together, holding hands. Storter, a career fisherman, was running a fish house on Marco Island in 1927 when he met and fell in love with a girl named Dolly Addison. Against her father's will, the couple eloped the following year to the newly renamed town of Everglades City. Storter's uncle,
George Jr., Collier County's first judge, officiated the brief ceremony.
The couple died 13
days apart from each other last month at a Fort Myers nursing home.The groom was 19 years old; the bride 14. Herbert Storter broke his promise to die first. His anguish, family members say, killed him. Storter's
death July 25 at the age of 96 signaled the end of an era.
In the days before
"Starting in the Low $300s" became Collier County's unofficial motto,there was the Storter family. Herbert, or "Capt. Hub" as he was widely known, was the last survivor of a pioneer class of Stortersthat left an indelible mark on Southwest Florida's landscape and its history books. His grandfather, George. Sr., was one of the region's earliest settlers, arriving in what is now Everglades City in 1881. Eight years later, George Jr. paid $800 for the future town site, and Robert Bembery Storter, Herbert's father and George Jr.'s brother, christened it as "Everglade." George Jr. and
Robert had 18 children between the two of them, giving the growing
fishing community an instant population.
Born in 1909, Herbert Morrison Storter was the eighth of nine siblings. Over the next
several decades, members of his generation would assume top positions
of power in various local governments, invigorate a
burgeoning fishing industry, write the area's first historical tomes and inspire the naming of a Florida university's mascot. Herbert himself
kick-started the practice of shrimping off Fort Myers
Beach, which now holds a shrimp festival every March.
He and Dolly also helped found the Naples Church of God and were the last of its surviving charter members. "The man never
seemed to age," the Rev. Elwood Kern, the Church of God's current
pastor, said as he stood beside Herbert's open casket at his funeral.
with his parents
and brothers.Herbert cut a lean,
energetic figure and retained his coal-black hair until the last
few,feeble years when all but a spot below his crown turned gray.
"He seemed to be
eternal, so it's going to be rough not to have him around anymore,"Kern
added. "He's with his mother. He's with his daddy. He's with his
beloved Dolly. He's with those who have gone before."Pioneering
spirit Vera Bennett, daughter of Herbert's brother
Flipping through one of the books last Tuesday afternoon, Bennett
paused at a yellowed picture of her grandmother, Nancy Stephens
Storter. Wilbur, is the family's historian. She has filled six scrapbooks with photographs, newspaper clippings and brief reminisces. She considers her work unfinished. The mid-1950s newspaper article proclaimed that the pioneer woman was celebrating her 80th birthday."I look at that and think she only had two or three years
left to live and here I'm 80," said Bennett,
who has soft, hazel eyes and a thick thatch of gray hair. "But one of my mother's sisters lived to be 100. I think people live longer these days." As captured in
Bennett's pages, time moved at remarkable speed.
The Storter story begins with George Washington Storter, In the span of a few pages, a blurry toddler in Victorian dress would morph into a rope-armed young man, a beaming father and finally an old man with leathery skin. A newspaper obituary noted all there was left to say. who emigrated from Alsace, France, in 1835 with his parents and brothers.who emigrated from Alsace, France, in 1835 His parents died and, at 7 years old, George was adopted by the clerk of the circuit court in New Orleans. During the
Civil War, George served as a sergeant for the Second Alabama Cavalry
and was an escort to Confederate President Jefferson Davis. After the
war, George's wife and first-born son died.
Around 1875, he and his two surviving sons, George Jr. and Robert, left Eutaw, Ala., for Florida. Traveling by ox
cart, the three men settled near Fort Ogden and later continued south
to Everglade.They began farming the fertile soil and turned out a sugar
cane crop year after year without replanting.
George Sr., a tin
smith, fashioned the cans that held the syrup.
The family's reign
over Everglade ended in 1922, when George Jr.Every year, they could can between 200,000 and 300,000 gallons of syrup.The house that George Jr. built for his growing family is now the Rod and Gun Club. It still rests near Storter Avenue. sold all the property in town to Barron Collier. The next year, the advertising tycoon persuaded the state Legislature to give him his own county in exchange for the businessman's help in extending Tamiami Trail to Miami. The Storters moved
to Naples and were instrumental in the town's early growth.
"He could have resigned from City Council long ago and probably
lengthened his life, but his devotion to duty was such that he insisted
on finishing out his work despite poor health."One of Herbert's brothers, Claude, was a Naples city councilman for 18 years before dying in office.A newspaper clipping from the late 1950s in one of Bennett's scrapbooks gives this account of Claude's death: George Jr. was the first chairman of the Collier
County Commission and later resigned to become the county's first judge.
Another one of Herbert's brothers, Rob Storter,
collected the family's stories in a series of booklets,
culminating in a collection called "Crackers in the Glade,"
published in 2000, 13 years after his death.
The family's influence extended beyond Southwest
Florida.
Lacking a complete education, Neal enrolled at UF's then-new
Gainesville campus in 1907 as a sub-freshman. His swampy origins earned
him the nickname "Brother Gator," which became shortened to "Bo
Gator."Neal, a center, was an important part of the university's
successful football team in 1911,the same year newspapers began calling
the team "the Alligators."In 1928, Neal said the nickname was coined by
a Macon, Ga., reporter. But more than 30 years later, he
claimed the "Bo Gator" theory "bordered on the truth."One of Herbert's cousins, Neal, is believed to have been the source of the University of Florida's nickname,the Gators — a notion he would later dispute and, even later, ambiguously embrace. 'She was his baby' While other Storters made their names on the football
field or in public office, most, including Herbert, adopted the family
business: fishing.
Herbert Storter was born on July 27, 1909, in Fort
Myers, where his family lived briefly.His brothers Rob and
George taught him how to fish when he was 16 years old. Herbert split
his time between guiding and fishing. When he began dating Dolly, her
father, Albert Addison, immediately objected to the pairing.
One day, Herbert intercepted Dolly on her way to Sunday school on Marco
Island. She promptly hid her books under a friend's house and hopped
into his car."We went across the ferry boat — the only way
other than boat off the island," Herbert said in the 12-page memoir he
wrote at a doctor's urging in the last years of his life.
The girl was too young and Herbert wasn't good enough for her. "She was his baby," Herbert and Dolly's elder
daughter, Marian McRae, said.
"The man that was running the ferry knew we were
running away.
Her parents found out she was gone and they started to look for her. "The man on the ferry stayed on the other
side. They were blowing their horns for him to come back over
and put them on our side," Herbert wrote.Herbert and Dolly raised two
daughters, Marian and Voncile.
Over the years, though, Dolly's father never
forgave his son-in-law for his brash act and never allowed Herbert to
set foot on his property.
But as he approached death, Addison's rancor mellowed
somewhat.
"I never liked him," he once told Voncile. "He's been
a good husband and a good father,and I'll give him that. But he took my
daughter when she was too young."
After a stint in the Coast Guard during
World War II, Herbert returned to fishing but was soon drawn to
shrimping.He would go on to own 22 shrimp boats at one time or another
and trawl his way around the Gulf of Mexico from the Dry Tortugas to
Campeche, Mexico.
Conventional wisdom held that it wasn't worth the effort to shrimp off
Fort Myers Beach.Nets would snare and snap on the stump coral that
dotted the sea floor.Herbert and his son-in-law, George McRae, solved
this problem by outfitting the nets with a steel cable.The "tickler chain" would scour the bottom in front of
the net, sweeping away any obstacle in its path.In a span of 10 to 12
days off Fort Myers Beach, Herbert could catch 5,000 to 6,000 pounds of
shrimp,
an amount that would take about a month to amass at the more popular Campeche grounds, George McRae said.Dolly would track her husband's movements and communicate with him daily over a radio in the couple's living room. When he was away, the radio was never turned off. At 86 years old, Herbert finally retired from fishing,
but he continued to work for several more years in packing houses and
as a security guard.
During the last three years of his life, poor circulation and
arthritis left him bedridden. A paralyzed esophagus prevented Dolly
from eating solid foods toward the end.She entered a nursing home on
Feb. 15 this year. Herbert joined her on March 1, and they soon shared
the same room.
About three weeks before Dolly's death, Marian approached her father with a question.
"Do you realize mother is dying?" she asked.
"Yes, I do," was his reply.
She asked if he wanted to say goodbye, and he said he
did. Marian took her father to her mother's side. Herbert rubbed his
wife's hands for a moment and petted her cheeks.
"Thank you for 77 years," he told her.
For the first time in five days, Dolly opened her
eyes.She tried to speak. The words came slowly and with difficult
pauses between them.
"I ... love ... you ... too."But her message was clear. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Information from "Crackers in the Glade" by Rob Storter and "A Brief History of the Everglades City Area" by Marya Repko was used in this story. Link to the original article
Article is donated to this site with permission
by: Mary
2010
©
Peggy
McSwain
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