Why Clearwater? - Freedom Magazine Presents The History of Clearwater, Florida Part XI

Babe Ruth and Mayor Joe Houze
When baseball immortal Babe Ruth visited Clearwater in the late 1940s, Arlos Ogg recorded the event. Ruth is shown here with then Mayor Joe Houze.

Home Sweet Home

A picture of a small house surrounded by empty fields made him chuckle. “This is my house, the one we are sitting in right now.”

Outside, the traffic roared past the tightly packed houses, one block north of Crest Lake Park. “We were going to build a house closer to town when World War II started. The lumber man called and said that all lumber had been frozen and no one could build. So we bought this house instead.”

To the east of the house, he explained, lay the largest grapefruit grove in Florida. But there were no trees around the lake itself, so Ruth helped plant the first tree there.

A series of photographs of flower arrangements, colored by Ruth, prompted Ogg to talk of his wife’s floral arranging skills. She won many blue ribbons in contests sponsored by the Garden Club, which she helped found.

All of the flowers that she used were grown by the Oggs in their back yard, including magnolias, roses, kumquats, orchids (they had 300 at one time) and kapok blossoms. They also enjoyed the fruits of the banana, papaya and pineapple trees they husbanded.

His art shows history. Here’s a picture of mustachioed men—his father and uncles. Here is Ruth’s grandmother, a 98-year-old at the time of the photograph, a Swedish princess who had lost her title for marrying the “commoner” she loved. Her uncle perfected the dial telephone. Faces of honest and upright folk pass through Arlos Ogg’s hands, people from another age, even though it was less than a century ago.

A wonderfully delicate picture of Ruth and her sister are printed on porcelain, a technique not available for half a century now, but done because the pictures would last more than a lifetime. They look like new.