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By Penny Fletcher
penny@observernews.net
RUSKIN- When most people think of Julius “Dooley” Houghtaling they usually think of the 200-acre Dooley Groves farm on Stephens Road in Ruskin or of one of the six retail stores the family operated, one of which was for many years in Sun City Center Plaza. Fresh citrus, honey and juice has been grown, bought, sold, packed and shipped by the Houghtaling family for more than 35 years.
Others knew Dooley – a fourth-generation Floridian– as a community leader; a co-founder of the original South County Roundtable in 1997; a member of the National Estuaries Program Advisory Committee; a member of the Hillsborough City-County Planning Commission; and founder of the Southside Rural Community Group in 2003 that insisted that Hillsborough County make a separate plan for its area south of the Little Manatee River.
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| Julius is surrounded by his wife Lillie and immediate family. In the front is his daughter, Sharon Plummer, his son Robert (Bob) standing and his oldest son, David Michael (known locally as Mike.) |
In other words, I – as did many – knew him as a champion of the area called South County and beyond: a man of vision.
But following his death Oct. 6 an interview with his family opened up a side to him few people ever saw. Thanks especially to his daughter, Sharon Plummer, who provided most of the information, and her husband Glenn who patiently dug out old photographs the day before the funeral, I learned amazing things about the man I thought I’d known for years yet had never suspected.
I spent nearly two hours in the home built by Dooley’s father, where shining knotty pine walls, floors and ceilings and country furnishings helped tell the family’s story. The home sits on the original property of the groves’ store with other houses occupied by family members.
The nuclear family, Dooley’s wife Lillie, Sharon and Glenn, and her brother Mike and his wife Diane, all live on the property. Dooley’s oldest son, Bob, a musician, and his wife Debra, live on Marco Island. But Bob (whose full name is Julius Robert) was on hand preparing to play the violin at his father’s funeral.
The stories I was told brought together the “Dooley” who rode around his fields on his tractor, even at 82, including the day before he died, and the brilliant planner who often gave politicians a piece of his mind.
Although the stories I was told were many, basically I wanted to convey how this well-known man, born in Orlando in 1927 (who as a child had helped clear the South County ground of rattlesnakes and palmetto bushes) not only learned about, but taught and consulted on atomic energy; nuclear psychics; accident test analyses; nuclear reactor pressure and calculations and measurements of temperature distribution in fuel rods during large power explosions.
I didn’t even know what half of the things on his formal resume were and have only named a few of them here.
But as Sharon began to tell about the father she knew; the man who lied about his age to join the Merchant Marines and fight in World War II and then came back, obtained his GED and went to college while working in a gas station, a real profile of courage, determination and love of study began to emerge.
“When dad was little Grandma said he never played with toys,” Sharon said. “Instead he would take things apart to see how they worked. At 6 or 7 he was building things out of everyday materials, boards, tomato stakes, bricks and wire. Once he made a glider out of tomato stakes and some baling wire and planned to see if he could fly off the roof of the barn but fortunately his dad stopped him in time.”
Dooley didn’t quit that project until his father decided to help him start building a canoe with the materials at hand.
During this period, his mother, who was a school teacher, home-schooled him.
“I thought she was a sadistic slave-driver at the time,” Dooley said in a short autobiography he wrote a few years ago for his children. “But since then I have thanked her many times over.”
Other stories from his autobiography practically begged to be told.
Once, Sharon said as she skimmed them, he went to visit a friend of his grandmother’s and took a sudden interest in a doll he saw there. “You can imagine how embarrassed she (the grandmother) was,” she read. “Here I never even played with toys and now all I wanted was that doll.”
Well, as it turned out, it had to have been meant to happen just that way.
“They were riding home in the jeep- of course they (jeeps) had no doors then- and hit a big bump and he fell out. If he hadn’t landed right on that doll the fall would have killed him. He didn’t have any interest in it after that,” Sharon said. “The doll saved his life.”
Dooley progressed from the inquisitive boy who invented things out of everyday materials into a 15-or-16 year old boy who lied about his age to get in the Merchant Marines.
“They were fighting and he wanted to defend his country. But you had to be 120 pounds to get in and he was only 116. So he bought a bunch of bananas and ate until he hit 120 and got re-weighed,” I was told.
Meanwhile, the good job his father landed in the middle of the Great Depression that brought them from Orlando to this area- managing McLean Citrus Farms in Ellenton- had taught him enough that later Dooley’s dad bought land and began growing citrus himself. “He was just giving it away at first, until Grandma decided to start a U-pick she ran from the house on her carport,” Sharon said.
So the family began growing citrus- but Dooley wasn’t entirely a part of it. Sharon remembers that when she was about 3, her father got the measles and almost died. He had to rest for a long time and she was later told that was when he did a great deal of soul-searching about his future.
Shortly afterward, he attended the University of Tampa while working for Phillips Petroleum Company at a nearby station pumping gas. He attended the University of Tulsa after that.
“He fell in love with study. Especially physics. And the people he was working for took notice. Officials at Phillips said they couldn’t pay for him to go on for his Masters at the University of Idaho but they assured him he’d have a job with them when he got there,” Sharon said.
So Sharon and her brothers spent most of their young life in Idaho and Pennsylvania, while Dooley studied, and later worked in the nuclear energy division of Westinghouse Corp., and for the Atomic Energy Commission.
He worked as a nuclear physicist from 1959 to 1980.
“He was a true genius,” Sharon said.
Meanwhile, Grandpa’s farm had taken off so much his grandson Mike came back to help him. Then the family began to drift back to Florida one at a time until they were all here. At the time of his death, Julius “Dooley” Houghtaling had 9 grandchildren and 5 great grandchildren. He had come back to his roots and enjoyed working the land, although he was still called to China and many other places around the world to consult for the government on nuclear matters.
The man driving the tractor was equally at home in the halls of Washington DC.
He founded many groups; chaired many chamber committees and ran many organizations in South County.
But I wanted to know something more. I wanted to know how “Dooley” got that name.
“He had a little sister who couldn’t pronounce his name (Julius). She kept calling him Julie,” Sharon said. “Well, Grandpa knew that would never do so they started calling him Dooley and it stuck. In fact, in the family, he was called Dooley-Boy.”
South County will miss the man people knew as Dooley.
“I grieve for my lost friend ‘Dooley,’ wrote Sun City Center resident Jim Harkins in Dooley’s online “Guestbook” the day before his funeral, which was held Oct. 9. “We co-founded the South County Roundtable (now called the SouthShore Roundtable) together many years ago. He was always devoted to improving the lives of the citizenry of his beloved Hillsborough County. I will miss him.”
“As we say in Ireland,” the transplanted Irishman continued, “Ar dheis De go raibh a anam dilis,’ which means, ‘May his faithful soul be on the right hand of God.’”
Having lived in South County since 1979, I know that Jim speaks for many of us.
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