HISTORY OF PASCO COUNTY

Trilby

A Return to Trilby (2011)

By NELL MOODY WOODCOCK

This article was copied with permission from the EPHS web site.

Buddy Nott, 92, returned to the place of his birth on March 18, 2011, to attend the fifth Annual Trilby Homecoming hosted by Scott Black. The Charlotte Tomkow-Glen Whittington family provide their oak-studded hill side residential property for these events in east Pasco County, Florida.

Buddy and I remembered each other from our youth during the time Trilby, a major railroad junction, and Lacoochee, a sawmill town, were in their prime (1920-1958). Since that March 2011 event, Buddy, who lives in Live Oak, Florida, shared his memories of that era. Some of them will be featured in future website updates.

Before we get to those stories, which Buddy relates in a homespun manner, you should know something about this man and his family.

He was born at home in Trilby on December 2, 1918. His mother was attended by a doctor from Dade City. The Nott residence then was a small, two storied, frame building located in the middle of a block on Oak Street. Buddy recalls that Oak Street, which was a thoroughfare, was the only paved street in the residential section of town not far from the Atlantic Coastline railroad station which contained a restaurant.

Soon after his birth, Buddy’s father, Leslie Nott moved the family to a farm located about a mile outside of town. According to Buddy, his father had been a railroad man and a baggage master at ACL’s station. A disagreement had ensued between his father and the company so the elder Nott left railroading to become a fulltime farmer and cattleman. The details of that incident and Buddy’s memory of early life on that farm will be told in Buddy’s on words in a future episode.

As an adult, Buddy launched into a banking career that began on July 31, 1937, at the old Union Trust Company in St. Petersburg, Florida. He retired at the end of 1985 as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Commerce Bank in Live Oak, after serving as bank president.

At age 67, and with nothing else to occupy his time, he made a political bid for election as mayor of Live Oak and served four terms in that capacity, a total of 16 years, retiring again at age 83.

After 33 years of marriage to his first wife Buddy met and married Linda Brown in 1981. She was in the banking business in Tampa. Buddy had three children; Linda had two. Linda attended the Trilby Homecoming this year along with her very active and alert husband and several children, grandchildren and perhaps great-great grandchildren.

Buddy is also the author of a series of stores published in a local newspaper years ago under the pseudonym Justine Tyme. And as he states at the end of a 28-page transcript of stories recorded in 1994 by one of his daughters named Marianne, “time marches on.”