Back in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, when I was a boy of elementary school age, my father Marlin would often take me with him after school as he visited customers. Our machine shop/pump factory was located on Dixie Highway in Deerfield, where the tennis courts are today. In previous Essay No. 13, I wrote about our good customer, the Butts family in Boca Raton, for whom the Butts road in Boca is named. In Essay No. 14 I also wrote about our Japanese customers in Boca and the Japanese farmers there for whom the Yamato Road and Park is named.

However, our largest customer back in those old days was a rancher and farmer west of Deerfield named Cossie Lyons. I believe he was originally from Tennessee. I do know that he owned an enormous amount of land in the northwest part of Broward County and southwest part of Palm Beach County, which is now part of Parkland, Coral Springs, and western Boca Raton. I remember my father telling me once that Cossie’s property, just on the west side of Highway US441/State road 7, was approximately six miles long and two miles deep. He raised cattle mostly, but also had large plots of vegetables on parts of it.

My dad and Cossie Lyons were good friends. Cossie, in his sixties, treated my father, in his thirties, like a son. In fact, I was there when Cossie offered to give my father 10 acres on the west side of Highway 441 for Dad to build us a new machine shop/factory. Dad, accustomed to walking out the back door of our house on Dixie Highway to go to work in our “shop” next door, turned him down. I remember Dad telling Mr. Lyons: “I don’t want to have to drive that far (seven miles) to go to work every day”.

Cossie was a single man with no children, and depended a lot upon his nephew, James, to actually run the farm. James, about my dad’s age, always wore a crumpled old brown hat, and had two or three horses which he took turns riding. Dad and Cossie would talk about what needed to be done on the farm, and James would make it happen.

Cossie also had a beautiful young secretary/bookkeeper named Alma. In her late twenties, she was taller than Cossie or my father by about six inches. She had long black hair and always dressed up, even in their office. She wore high heels and a fancy hat when she sometimes came to Deerfield’s First Baptist church, where she always sat alone midway down the left aisle. The hat and the heels made her look even taller.

One day Cossie confided to Dad that he and Alma were going to get married. When Dad told Mother over our supper table that night, Mother got very upset. I remember her saying that Cossie was way too old to marry that young woman. Dad just smiled.

Shortly thereafter Cossie Lyons and Alma were married in a private ceremony and went off on their honeymoon. The next day Dad got a call from Cossie’s nephew, James. He told Dad that Cossie had died from a heart attack on the first night of his honeymoon. Alma, therefore, became a rich young widow within hours of her marriage to Cossie.

Alma continued to come to our church occasionally, and was always friendly to my father. The women of the church, however, seemed to keep her at a distance. Within a few years she had sold off Cossie’s land and moved to Gatlinburg, Tennessee. She got married again to another short man and became Mrs. Alma Regan. Together they invested in real estate and helped build Gatlinburg into the huge resort that it is now. She died about 20 years ago, probably with a smile on her face.

David Eller,

Publisher

Published 1-31-08