“I believe in helping people. What’s life worth if you can’t help your fellow man?” -Clyde Hollingsworth
By Anne Reynolds
CATTLE & CADILLACS The Story of Clyde Hollingsworth
Clyde began his family history saying, “We wouldn’t be here today where we are, or have what we have, if it weren’t for
my dad and my mother.” It became apparent, as his story unfolded, that his father was crucial to building the family legacy. Clyde’s father was Vernon Clyde “Mose” Hollingsworth. He had a bird dog named Mose that he held by the tail, letting it drag him around and the name developed from that. His father died of a heart attack when Mose was 11 years old. His mother moved to Jacksonville and took the youngest brother, leaving Mose and his other two brothers to fend for themselves on forty acres. Fortunately, Mose’s father had five brothers who made sure the boys had groceries and took them to school. Mose started getting in trouble, so he was sent to the Georgia Military Academy for two years, where he said they beat sense into him. He came back in 1917 and tried to go into WWI, but he was too young, so he moved to Jacksonville and got a job helping build ships for the war. When the ship building stopped, he worked in a lumber yard. He came back to Arcadia and said he was starving to death, so he moved to Sarasota and got into the real estate business. He learned how to trade and how to buy and sell, saying it was the best education he’d ever gotten. When the Depression came his real estate mentors bought out his lots. He used the money to buy a new Cadillac. He dressed a grove worker in his Georgia Military Academy uniform and they drove through Arcadia blowing the horn while he was smoking a cigar and waving to everybody. He said, “It was like the prodigal son coming home.” Mose began selling Model T’s and working on the 40 acres. The property had 10 or 15 acres of grove and the rest was pasture. In the afternoon, when the cows came out of the creek, they’d shut them up in the grove where they could bed down and in the morning they’d drive them out. “The Model T’s did real well. He (Mose) got this idea or gimmick to help