Pioneers of PSL sharing history

PORT ST. LUCIE — They were just a couple of friends, sitting on a sunny patio, chatting about old times.

With a camera. And an audience.

Fay James, 79, and Mickey Ford, 66, are some of the first people to share their memories of the earliest days of Port St. Lucie for the city's Historical Society oral history project.

With help from the city's Communications Department, the society has recorded the recollections of more than a dozen Port St. Lucie pioneers — people who came to the city in the 1960s and 1970s. Contributors include Bob Minsky, the former mayor who spent more than an hour during his last week in office sharing memories with the camera.

"If we don't preserve our history as we go, we're going to look up one day and it's going to be gone," Minsky said.

James, who moved to Port St. Lucie permanently in 1978 after years of coming down from Virginia for vacations, recalled winter cocktail parties at golf course homes in Sandpiper Bay.
"People dressed up for the parties," James said. "I mean dressed — furs, you know this was in winter, and full-length gowns."

In those years, Port St. Lucie was a retirement village near enough to Martin County, the playground of Frances Langford Stuart, to attract a few famous faces. It wasn't unusual, James and other pioneers said, to see Perry Como out on the Port St. Lucie golf courses.
But the General Development Corp. town wasn't exactly the high life. There was one restaurant and one gas station.

When 83-year-old Roman Mager moved here in 1959, before Port St. Lucie was even incorporated as a city, friends laughed at him. They called the city an "out of civilization" place.
"That's where I wanted to be," Mager said. "Now, I'm missing the out-of-civilization place, to be perfectly frank."

Thanks to the population boom of recent years, most of the city's 150,000 residents are newcomers. Which is precisely why pioneers like Mager think Port St. Lucie Historical Society has the right idea trying to preserve history.

"There are very few people who know of it," Mager said. "Things were constantly changing. We need people to keep ... the past."

PORT ST. LUCIE REMEMBERED

General Development Corp. incorporated the original 80-square miles of Port St. Lucie in April 1961. The population in 1970 was 330. Early residents were mostly retirees from the Northeast.

Pioneers remember a variety of experiences including:

• Cocktail parties on patios overlooking golf courses.
• Roughing it in homes wired for just 60 amps. The electrical appliances were a refrigerator, a coffeepot and "maybe" a toaster.
• Telling friends to send letters to "Sandpiper Bay Country Club" instead of a city address.
(By HILLARY COPSEY hillary.copsey@scripps.com )