Grady is a great man and is real good friends with my father. In any society to work you have to have law and order. When I get back home I usually see Grady at my father's house in Cypress Gardens. Grady would go spend a couple of weeks at my dad's place during the summer in western Wyoming in the Wind River Range and Grady even bought some property to build a cabin out there.
I know Polk County real well. I was born and grew up in Cypress Gardens and went to high school in Winter Haven. It was a great place to grow up with all the lakes and water skiing. Great memories. Sports where huge with all the world champion water skiers and Cypress Gardens swim team back in the day. They used to shoot a lot of movies revolving around water sports when Cypress Gardens was a around with **** Pope Sr. running everything.
The new growing neighborhood where I grew up, hardly anybody was from Florida. Different countries like Russia, Poland, Cuba, Japan that had to flee communism and the ruins of Japan. Those were my next door and close neighbors and where extremely hard workers. Those Cuban girls were so beautiful. If you ever complained about this country they would be on you like a full court press reaming you out with all their different accents and better have that American flag out of holidays. The rest where from many northern states so I did not grow up in the "south"
You are right about Polk County. Winter Haven I think was about 29% black so we all went to school together starting from first grade and did not know anything about racism. Were all really good friends until we all left. We had a black mayor who was a really well respected great man with a wonderful family we went to school with. A lot of black teachers, coaches and so on and will always hold these people deep in my heart like all great child hood memories. Great sports teams keep us all real close.
I knew some of those white trash types you are talking about and many came from poor communities like Wahneta and Elosie out side of Cypress Gardens and Winter Haven. They were the ones you had to look out for breaking in to your homes and always causing problems or fights at school or outside of the ball parks. That is a place you did not want to go to growing up.