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WINTER PARK / MAITLAND OBSERVER
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OrangeObserver.com
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2017
Buoyed by community TIM FREED ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Everyone has holiday traditions. Whether it’s where you place a Christmas tree or how you string the lights, small habits and rituals are part of what makes the holidays special. But one Winter Park neighborhood surrounding Lake Knowles has shared a tradition with the community for over 50 years. It’s a tradition that sits on the body of water and glows at night with a display of multicolored lights for everyone to see — and it all started with a local garden club. The 10-foot Christmas tree that sits at the center of Lake Knowles dates as far back as 1965, when the Red Pepper Garden Club first started placing it there each year. Back then, the tree was decorated with the circular lids of tin cans and strung with garland and large, old-fashioned Christmas lights. Winter Park resident David Cavalere remembers it well — he grew up right beside the lake and always watched the club set up the tree. “I was just a little kid, and I’d be climbing in the tree watching them,” Cavalere said. “It was amazing to watch them do it.” Around 1975, the tree tradition was passed on from the garden club to the neighborhood that
The Christmas tree tradition at the center of Lake Knowles in Winter Park dates back to 1965.
surrounded the lake. Cavalere and his brother, Michael, became the unofficial keepers of the tree, leading the neighborhood effort each year to set it up ever since. Michael eventually moved away, but Cavalere always has relied on a neighborhood effort to keep the tradition going. “We got more of the neighbors involved, and now it’s kind of a neighborhood group thing,” Cavalere said. “We’ll either do it the first week of December or Thanksgiving weekend.” The process of placing the tree is certainly a team effort. The tree is decorated and placed on a wooden raft/platform, which weighs between 400 and 500 pounds altogether. The raft is attached to empty plastic barrels and floated out to the center of the lake, where it is
attached to a 300- to 400-pound concrete anchor at the bottom. The tree is powered using an underground power line at the bottom of the lake — the city of Winter Park has powered the tree since the tradition first began in the 1960s. Local residents can’t help but slow down while driving past to observe the floating Christmas tree, taking photos and admiring it from the shoreline. The Lake Knowles neighbors usually gather for a holiday party once the tree is up as well. The whole experience is something that brings the neighbors together, next-door neighbor Leslie Flaherty said. “Everybody enjoys it so much, I think even people that don’t live right here — there’s so many people that pass by Lakemont,” she
said. “I think it just creates a magical feeling when you drive past in the evening. It helps neighbors to get to know each other. … It gives a reason to come together.” The tradition has changed and evolved over the years. The husbands of the wives that made up the Red Pepper garden club originally used a live tree — and that continued the following 37 years. Issues continued to arise though with how top-heavy the tree was and the cost of purchasing the tree each year, so about 15 years ago, the community opted for an artificial tree, which is much easier to place on the raft and is less likely to tip over. “We had some adventures — when you had a live tree, it was very heavy,” Cavalere said. “One year the storms were real bad, and the thing flipped over. We’ve had other disasters along the way just trying to keep it straight. That’s the thing with the lighter artificial tree — it’s so much easier. “It actually looks more perfect,” he said. “Each year (with a live tree), you never knew how the tree was going to look and you had to buy a new tree.” Cavalere hopes to one day pass on the responsibility of keeping the tradition alive to another neighbor. Giving Winter Park something to enjoy every Christmas has been a special tradition — one that he hopes will continue for years to come, he said. “Some years, the weather is not good or something and you think, ‘It’s going to be kind of a pain to do it this year,’” Cavalere said. “But then when you start doing it, and you see people’s reactions, it always brings joy to you. It really does.”
who had gunned down two white men in Kissimmee. Despite the hangings of African-Americans being commonplace during that time in the South, news spread throughout the country via a short bulletin by the Associated Press. But there was only one significant plot hole — the report was only half-correct. There had been a killing of two white men, but as it turns out, no one was hanged — though an innocent man almost found himself with a tightened noose around his neck before being saved by the local sheriff. So what then happened to the man known as Oscar Mack? Enter one Rollins College professor and students from his African-American History Since 1877 class. THE PROJECT
“For this class, I was really interested in exploring questions of memory and community from an African-American perspective,” said Dr. Julian Chambliss, a professor of history at Rollins College who focuses on urban history, race and ethnicity in the U.S., and popular culture. “I was looking for community partners, and one of the partners was Democracy Forum, which is a group that had worked back in the ’90s on the Ocoee Massacre — that group had a huge archive of material.” The massacre in Ocoee occurred a year before the reported lynching of Mack, which saw an influential African-American man named July Perry hanged by a mob of
angry whites, before they proceeded to burn down the homes and businesses of those in the African-American community. During their research, a member of the Democracy Forum stumbled upon the little-known lynching and approached Chambliss to see if he would be interested in having his class work on the mystery. So in the spring of 2013, Chambliss and his students got to work. The first step came in the form of a book on anti-African-American violence in the 20th century, which mentioned Mack briefly in a single paragraph. After starting their research, some light began to shine on Mack’s story. “The students found out that he was a World War I vet — he had fought in France and was honorably discharged,” Chambliss said. “Then found out he moved to Kissimmee, and then from the Kissimmee Gazette, pieced together a fuller picture of the story. “In many ways, many of the details in the story just weren’t clear,” he said. A PUZZLE WITH NO CORNERS
The story itself is like a puzzle that is missing corners from its frame. Chambliss and his students learned Mack’s trouble started in Kissimmee when he competed with a white man for a job moving mail from the Kissimmee rail road depot to the post office. It was a federal contract, and Mack came in under the white man, which won him the contract, Chambliss said. After winning the bid, he was verbally threatened. The threat concerned him so much that after talking with his
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Uncovering the truth CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
WINTER PARK/MAITLAND
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WINTER PARK/ MAITLAND OBSERVER Photo courtesy of Scott Cook
Rollins College professor Julian Chambliss and his students piloted the projet on Oscar Mack.
boss, the assistant postmaster, he was handed a gun and was told to use it if anyone bothered him while working. Little did Mack know that he would use that gun at the end of the first day of work, when three to four white men — who were more than likely Klansmen — came to his house. “There was some altercation and he opened fire — shot and killed one man, wounded one man who died later from his wounds, and a third man escaped,” Chambliss said. From there large, angry mobs tried hunting down Mack and at one point they thought they had him. The mob intercepted a man who they believed to be Mack, but luckily for the man, the sheriff stepped in and persuaded the crowd to let the innocent man go. Chambliss believes that the sheriff stepped in as a means to avoid another race riot like the Ocoee Massacre.
QUESTIONS ANSWERED
Following the shooting, Mack fled Florida and made his way to Ohio, where he took the alias of Lanier Johnson. He had a family, and many of his descendants still live there today. In fact, in 2015, Chambliss was contacted by members of Mack’s family, who had stumbled across the project’s website. Since then, Chambliss has been in contact with the family and even was invited up to Akron this past June to be a part of one of the true highlights of the process — a family ceremony involving the changing out of Mack’s headstone. “It was a really emotional story for them (the family) … it just answered a lot of questions and they were just thankful toward us,” Chambliss said. “They were very kind to invite us to the memorial service in part, because they wanted us to be there, because it sort of helped them answer this question about their family.”
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