In the face of a new development, a determined man stands his groundStanley Dale's two 1950s-era homes, with garden tractors, boats and old rusted cars strewn in the yards, could wind up nearly encircled by the manicured lawns and condominium towers of a new 25-acre development at U.S. 41 and Stickney Point Road.
It's not that developers haven't tried to purchase the last 3/4-acre chunk along the perimeter of the proposed Siesta Pointe.
But Dale turned down their $1 million offer for his homestead and the rental he owns next door. It wasn't enough to coerce him to pack up his backyard workshop, the homemade solar energy system that powers his house, and the 1958 Edsel that he and his wife, Betty, drive to bluegrass festivals.
"If I can get my price I'll go. If I don't, I won't," Dale said.
In an area that's being redefined by big-money developments, Sarasota residents are constantly asked to make way for newer, fancier things. Most, like Dale's neighbors, get out and start over. Others stay, even though they may no longer fit in with the neighborhood.
Dale is waiting.
The $1 million offer was from Cogan Development Co., which bought the Pine Shores Trailer Park along with some commercial properties and surrounding homes. Since Benderson Development Co. took control of the Siesta Pointe project last year, Dale hasn't had another offer.
"When we purchased the property, his piece did not come with it," said Shaun Benderson, an executive at the development company. "After we started working on our layouts, we didn't see that we should include it."
The homeowner himself is taking it all pretty lightly. He's still renting the house next door to a tenant of more than 25 years. And for attention, he recently propped up a sheet of plywood in front of his home with "Would you buy this house for $1 million?" written on it.
For 30 years, 6331 Glencoe Avenue has been the playground that Dale worries he won't be able to replace if he moves. Especially the area in the back, where he has a Cadillac, hubcaps, tires and half a dozen lawn mowers. An "I support Sarasota Opera" bumper sticker is slapped on the side of a rusty desk with nuts, bolts and tools spilling out of open drawers and piled atop.
"Betty calls it my junk. I call it my lab," Dale said of his wife.
The white, 36-by-80-foot open-air workshop even has a "Stan's Lab" marquee above the entranceway, and parked alongside it is his 32-foot solar-powered mobile home.
Inside the house, past the old . . . the old oxen yoke and buck saw perched above the doorway, more than a dozen quilts hang on the walls and are thrown over mid-1800s Victorian furniture.
Betty Dale pieces together the tops of the quilts, then her husband stitches them together by hand, using his mother's old quilting table.
"It's comfortable," Betty Dale said of their home.
The couple has spent countless hours making it that way.
Their entire house runs on solar energy. Unable to afford a $150 monthly electric bill after retiring as maintenance manager for Pine Shores Trailer Park in 1990, Stanley Dale looked into solar. With a little common sense and some self-education on the Internet and from books, he outfitted his property with 155 solar panels linked to 200 batteries.
"It was all built from the college of hard knocks," said Dale, who also rides to the grocery store on a three-wheeled bicycle that's powered by a solar panel he affixed onto the back.
Any fixing up of his house has been done with Dale's own hands: the rooms with 9-foot ceilings that he built onto the back; the refurbished sheets of stained glass from a demolished church in Alabama that he installed into floor-to-ceiling archways throughout the house.
"His blood, sweat and tears are in this home," Stanley Dale's daughter, Roxane Goodman, who lives up the street, said earlier this week in her dad's living room.
As one of 14 children growing up on a farm in Pyrmont, Ohio, Dale couldn't imagine having so much. His family didn't get electricity until he was 16 years old.
"When I think about what I come from and what I have accomplished in life, it's meant an awful lot to us," he said.
If he sells his home, Dale said, he'll still stay in Sarasota -- as long as he can find a community without deed restrictions.
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