Bab and Cousin Herbert

I knew her as Aunt Barbara Dupree -- an elegant octogenarian and sister to my husband's grandfather.

Before she was Aunt Barbara though, before she was Mrs. William Dupree,  she was a sausage-curled  Southern belle known to her friends as Bab Knight.


Is that an armful of hydrangeas she's holding?

Bab married William Dupree, a prominent Tampa attorney who, while recuperating from a serious automobile accident that kept him from his practice, began to develop a 25 acre tract outside Tampa into Dupree Gardens -- a horticultural wonderland, meant to draw the tourist trade.

There were extensive plantings, a lodge, and electric boats, gliding over a decorative lake. Long years later, one of Bab's contemporaries giggled like a girl as she told me how she and Bab liked to gather waterlilies and put them under the bedcovers in the lodge for unsuspecting persons to discover when they turned in for a good night's sleep.

 

Dupree Gardens opened in 1941 -- just on the eve of America's entrance into WWII -- and after a brief success, closed in 1943, a victim of gas rationing.

Possibly because of the auto accident, the Duprees had a chauffeur.  Herbert Carrington, known in my husband's family as 'Cousin Herbert,' is something of a legend. It is whispered that, as well as driving, he had on more than one occasion helped Aunt Barbara to climb out the window when William (who in later years she always referred to as 'the old gentleman) had drunk too much.


In 1942 Herbert became a waiter at the Tampa Yacht Club, rising to the post of Maitre d' -- a position he held till retiring at the age of 105.


He died at 107 after a battle with prostate cancer. At the time of his death, he was dating a younger woman -- she was 85.

Cousin Herbert and Aunt Barbara -- I'm proud to be connected with both of these folks.

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