Pictures from Rick and Sharon

Here is Rick's email, and two of the pictures he and Sharon took. I'm taking the liberty of posting these. Rick has supplied names for the captions. -- Leslie

1- Frosted Mug outdoor dining area at the 50th Anniversary. Bill Case is directly behind the bicycle talking to his daughter Allison. Just behind the “Hog” is Elise and husband Don Sheppard. David Ross is on the far right.

2- Indoors at 50th Anniversary, The Frosted Mug, Feb. 9, 2007. Yes, that’s Claire Suter peeking in at the right. The people with backs to camera are friends (Noel & Carol) of Georgia Austin Ross’s whom we adopted for the day.

Authors' powers - apparently extend just to your posts

Welcome Ralph! Your post was so immediate I barely had time to fiddle with the template before you had it up. Thanks! -- Leslie

Now that I have logged in as an "author," I don't see where we authors can add photographs to the entire blog, fiddle with the template, etc. That's a little annoying, but I will see if there are ways around this. However, "Leslie the administrator" welcomes requests for changes and will happily, I repeat: HAPPILY, post pictures you may have on our page, wherever it's possible to post them. Apparently they can indeed be added at will. Ideas for color schemes are also eagerly solicited. You can insert pictures in your post from the menu.

The menu lets you change font, font size, and color for your entire post. Once you have done this, then if you want to put multicolors into your posts, you can use the "Edit HTML" feature, and just change the colors -- the scheme is a 6 digit hexadecimal number for RRGGBB with 000000 being black and FFFFFF being white. (Let me know if you want that repeated in English.)

You can change font size from the menu by highlighting some text and choosing a new font size. Look in "Edit Html" and you'll see the code. Font-size:100% doesn't change anything but any other percentage does. However, the command font:bold 120% courier;" works better than the pure font-size command which may, in this composer, throw out the "%" and give you a very strange size font indeed!

If you have pictures posted at other web addresses you can embed them in your posts from the menu. Let me know if you need code to adorn your posts with pictures. Pictures are wonderful.

Andersons Come to Venice

I can only go back in Venice until about 1950 when we first came to Venice for a Summer vacation. My Mother, Father, Sister, Brother, and I all climbed into a Buick and drove straight through to Venice from Indianapolis. It took 25 hours in those days to drive that distance. Talk about stiff.

Anyway, we seemed to like the beaches, quiet life, friendly atmosphere, and good weather. So, my Dad decided to move.

We moved into Venice in September 1954. My Dad, also named Ralph Anderson, and my Brother, Bob Anderson, were one of the first people to drive over the Sunshine Skyway the day it opened. My Mother and I came a few days earlier and stayed with my Grandparents who had moved to Venice a few months earlier. We moved into a rental on Park Avenue. Oh, those were the days. We had teh mandatory stucco/block house pained white with light blue trim.

I normally rode my bike to school and it took about 10 minutes to get to school or home from school. I remember we started going to Myacca Lanes after school when it opened in about 1956 since it was right across the street. from the elementary school.

It was a quiet town in the mid fifties with a population of about 1500 people year round which grew to about 4000 when those hated KMIs came to town.

My Dad bought out Ken Higle's electrical business and started Anderson Electric in September '54. His office was across from the KMI gym. I was young enough then that I did not mind. later, when we were in Venice High, and those guys tried to move in on us locals, it became an untenable business location. Consequently, he moved to a location near the airport. At least I think he moved because I did not like teh location.

Anyway, that is how the Andersons came into town. My Father was once on the Venice City Council and my Brother became a Sarasota County Commissioner for some time. The South County Courthouse bears his name, but that is another story.

Anyway, that is all I can remember till someone sparks my memory some more.

Horse and Chaise -- Let's Go Way Back

With the imminent (February 9, 2007) 50th Anniversary celebration at The Frosted Mug on US 41 south of Venice near Seminole Rd., which, I understand, will be attended by W. W. "Bill" Case, son of the founder, a group of classmates from the Venice High School Class of 1962 have come together with stories of the old days.

Okay, some of us don't go all the way back to the days when our town was called "Horse and Chaise" due to a remarkable looking tree (see History page at Venice Main Street) ... we do go way back. I was born in 1944 in the Army hospital at Venice which has now been paved over to become the USPS Post Office parking lot !!

All who have reminiscences to contribute are welcome, our classmates and all the people who love Venice, Nokomis, Englewood ... I'm leaving out a lot of fine neighborhoods by name, but you know who you are.

Leslie Grey Harper
VHS Class of 1962

See also the article in Sarasota Herald Tribune which says thsi:

Frosted Mug remains a link to Venice's past
By PATRICK WHITTLE

SOUTH VENICE -- The local folklore about the earliest days of South Venice's oldest business lies somewhere between an Old Florida stereotype and a bad movie: A guy from Indiana, fed up with bosses and hurting for cash, sold his house to live in a trailer and serve root beer along the Tamiami Trail.

Willard Case was determined to make the Frosted Mug a success, but when it opened on Feb. 9, 1957, surrounded by Florida jungle and fronted by empty miles of Tamiami, the little shack must have looked out of place.

Today, the Mug is an outpost of traditional Florida in a sea of anonymous strip malls. The Mug's brown-and-orange outdoor bar screams 1950s while South Venice's boxy stores and assault of plastic signage look a lot like the rest of Florida suburbia.

The root beer stand is Randy Haskett's kind of Florida. Haskett, a regular since around 1971 and who the waitresses call "Daytona," remembers how South Venice used to look every time he drives by the Mug, and he calls it "a shame."

Not everyone thinks the suburbanization of South Venice is a shame -- certainly not thousands of new residents who have moved to the area through the years and brought demand for new, modern stores and services.

But while the Frosted Mug was here first, the utilitarian structures that rose around the Mug defined South Venice. Patrons such as Haskett look at the Frosted Mug as a piece of Florida history obscured by today's strip malls and box stores.

The Mug's owner, Tony Fricano, bought the restaurant 21/2 years ago and said he intends to keep it Old Florida.

He hopes the Mug can continue to bring in customers with cold drinks, a place to sit in the sun and, perhaps most of all, nostalgia.

"We are ever changing our ways here in Florida with the demise of anything like a bar on the water, an archaic location," Fricano said. "It seems there's always someone out there who wants to destroy it or sell it to a developer."

Nostalgia is currency at the Frosted Mug, and it has been for years.

A 1985 story that ran in the Herald-Tribune called the stand "an architectural -- and cultural -- oddity that somehow escaped the homogenization of the Tamiami Trail."

The Mug's history is as unique as its building. Case, known as "Casey" to most people, lived in a trailer with his family behind the stand. His son, Bill, was quoted in his father's 1997 obituary as saying the stand "was like making money 15 cents at a time.

As South Venice grew, the Mug went through a succession of owners. Fricano and Ed Wudyka, a past owner, speak of Case as if he were an almost mythical figure.

"When he felt like working, he'd open the restaurant, make a little money and then he'd close up and go fishing," Wudyka said.


Fricano said legend has it the Frosted Mug became the first licensed business in South Venice out of necessity. Case started brewing and selling root beer on the grounds and government agents informed him he needed to close up or get a permit

Business got better when South Venice's growing population brought the Mug more customers

A pair of New Jersey investors platted the land in the early 1950s, and around 1954 about 200 homes started going up per year, said Dorothy Korwek, director of historical resources for the city of Venice.

Nearby Venice Gardens also started developing around the same time. In an area where there had once been "probably just a lot of trees," there were now more and more people, said Korwek

The population of the South Venice area has been fairly static at about 20,000 people since the 1980s, Korwek said. But the rapid growth of nearby North Port and Englewood has spurred more commercial development. A big-box Lowe's opened about a mile from the Frosted Mug in 2005 and an 11-screen movie theater opened nearby last year.

Ellen Hillstrom, development director of the South Venice Civic Association, drank her first glass of Frosted Mug root beer not long after buying a home here in 1969. She believes all the new homes and businesses are good for South Venice residents who want modern amenities.

But Hillstrom also doesn't ever want to see the Frosted Mug change.

"The Frosted Mug has been there and been there and been there," she said. "When I first moved here in the 1970s, the Frosted Mug was the place to go. And ... there wasn't too much down here."

There's plenty down there now -- the Frosted Mug is flanked by a boating goods store and a gas station and across the street from a carwash. But Tamiami's mass of plastic, concrete and asphalt isn't the kind of infrastructure that encourages neighborhood businesses such as the Frosted Mug, said Bob Johnson, a professor of history at New College of Florida.

"We've managed to zone those things out of sight," Johnson said. "We end up needing something that's going to fill the void that is going to provide all those services that we need. Unfortunately, we got the strip mall."

Various owners have made a few subtle changes to help the Frosted Mug adapt over the years. It now has a happy hour with 99-cent drafts and a large plastic sign that faces the highway. But old photographs attest that it is very similar to the stand Willard Case worked out of in the 1950s.

Much of the Mug's history is archived in the minds of its past owners. Wudyka ran the Mug with his wife, Katherine, who kept a trove of old photos of the restaurant, but she died in December.

Wudyka said the loss of his wife is too painful for him to think about those old snapshots right now.

The oldest employee, manager Charleen Knight, has worked at the restaurant for four years. She hears the stories all the time.

"'I used to come here all the time with my father. Now I come here with my grandkids.' Everybody has a story," Knight said.

Fricano likes to think of the Mug as "a little working man's pit stop after a hard day's work, maybe on a roof."

Haskett, after more than 35 years of patronizing South Venice's oldest business, hopes it stays that way.

"I could drive my truck down the road and in here with my tailgate down, two guys sitting in the back ... no one said a thing," he said, motioning to the Mug's dusty, unpaved driveway. "Every time I drive down this road, I remember small things like that."

Last modified: February 04. 2007 5:12AM