Tampa Bay Times from St. Petersburg, Florida • 112

PT TIMES MONDAY, JULY 18, 1988 3 Commissary is red white, blue and the price is right too wait before she wised up and started shopping during off hours. Some people entitled to shop there say the savings aren't worth the hassle. But everyone agrees crowds have dwindled since last summer, when the new 61,000 square-foot store replaced one a third that size. Officials say the renovation has boosted sales 18 percent. Tucker notes that spending caps also force commissaries to keep shorter hours, typically eight hours a day, which is "pretty old-fashioned" in an age when many supermarkets stay open until midnight.

Times pholo BOB MORELAND A shrimp boat rests at a dock along the Withlacoochee River. Inglis residents hold on to their history The 5 percent surcharge at a high-volume commissary such as MacDill's pays for building tiny ones in the jungles. By BONNIE TAFT Times Correspondent By LESLIE BRODY Timet StarWriter TAMPA Red, white and blue streamers fluttered overhead as a shopper pushed a convoy of seven grocery carts, piled high with everything from paper towels to pizza. Welcome to shopping American-style at the biggest U.S. Air Force commissary in the world.

The megastore at MacDill Air Force Base is as long as a football field. On payday, customers waiting at its 28 check-out counters stretch past the 30-yard line. What lures shoppers from as far as Orlando? Prices. Air Force officials say shoppers can save as much as 25 percent. Everything is sold at cost plus a 5 percent charge tacked on at the cash register.

"I love it," smiles Wanda Hughes, 35, who treks from Lakeland regularly. "We save enough in one trip to cover all our gas to get here, eat out with our three kids and buy cigarettes for a month." Luckily for local supermarkets, only military people, past and present, can get in. It's not easy to compete with 89 cents for two liters of Coke, $2.29 for a pound of coffee or $7.68 for 200 Marlboros. The huge population of military retirees who flock to Tampa Bay accounts for the size of MacDill's store. A whopping 87 percent of the 85,000 buyers in the vast brick building in an average month are now out of uniform.

MacDill rang up retail sales of last year to become top seller among 145 Air Force commissaries, according to Mike Hawkins of Air Force Commissary Services in San Antonio, Texas. Of 376 Army, Marine and Navy commissaries, MacDill ranked sixth. Customers aren't the only ones who relish MacDill's market. Randy Hardy, a sales manager at the Tampa Coca-Cola Bottling called it a "unique animal" and one of the biggest of more than a thousand accounts in Hillsborough County. A Coke employee needs two hours before lunch and another two after to stock the shelves.

"People don't run to it like a Circle he said. "They buy months of supplies while they're there." Tim Brewer, a manager at Pepsi-Cola in Tampa, says the commissary moves three times as much soda as a top civilian supermarket and is a "privileged route" for a distributor. Marketers say they savor space in commissaries especially because they can build brand loyalty early among the young consumers in the troops, although that attraction does not apply as much with the older customers at Mac-Dili. The commissary's popularity creates some problems as well, however. "It's okay if it's not busy, but on payday, it's packed," says Minnie Lee, who got stranded in lines 40-people long with a half-hour Dan Allen, past president of the Historical Society, is the man behind the video camera at the society meetings.

His father, Dewey Allen, died recently at 87. He had joined Neeld's father at the Model garage when he was only 19 years old. In the years to come, he was elected by his neighbors to represent them at every level of government from City Hall to the state Legislature. One of his claims to fame was a move to help farmers survive a controversial fencing law. During the 1950s, then-Gov.

Fuller Warren pushed through legislation requiring the fencing in of livestock. Investors, anticipating the new law, had driven the price of barbed wire sky high and Allen raised a voice of moderation, requesting a phasing-in period for the farmer faced with the expensive task. As a result of his public service, his constituents have filled Levy County with buildings named in his honor. The city of Inglis is a latecomer to the history of this lush, green riverland. Incorporated in 1956 (to allow the bars to remain open later, locals say) the population today is about 1,400 people.

Three years ago, Inglis got its own small Withlacoochee Plaza with a much-needed Food Ranch grocery, Rexall Drug Store and Family Dollar store. Food Ranch store manager Steve Mullady says things have slowly built up over the past few years with winter visitors filling up the river lodge and the seasonal rentals along the river in Inglis and Yankeetown. Fishing helps reel in the business. "When the reds are running," Mullady says, "we are More commerce is visible along State Road 40 West and includes the Levy State Bank, Inglis Realty, Eiland Realty, Buddy and Fred's General Store and Corp. But the largest crowd on a recent Monday morning still gathered at the Inglis Dewey Allen Community Center for 11 a.m.

bingo. In a drive through the small, quiet neighborhood directly off State Road 40, a little boy is happily racing back and forth through a slowly rotating sprinkler in his yard. His dog sits quietly, a safe distance away, waiting. Across the tree shaded street, an elderly woman fans herself in front-porch swing. There is much to value here, and much that will be needed in the 21st century.

Perhaps in the year 2088, the Historical Society will meet in the Hammock and have much more to record with their hi-tech equipment, as friends and neighbors set long tables with good cracker food and the band sets toes to tapping. Two decades before the girls searched the heavens for the comet, Captain John Inglis, a Scotsman, pioneered what would become the busy port on the island at the mouth of the Withlacoochee River. At that time there was a great demand for the pure dolomite, a limestone mineral used to condition soil, mined in Dunnellon. A large hotel was built to accommodate the ship captains and their crews, wealthy investors and tourists who enjoyed the excitement. Perhaps 140 ships a day went in and out of the port.

Most of the dolomite was sent to the industrial economy of Austria-Hungary. Cedar, another plentiful resource, was sent a shorter way up the west coast to another boomtown, Cedar Key. After the Civil War, an acre of land in Dunnellon was bringing $5,000, and the area was crowded with 19.9 people per square mile, compared with the sluggish southern tip of Florida where just 3.5 hardy souls shared each mile of mosquito-infested scrubland. But the boom period ended with World War I. The Port Inglis Hotel was emptied of its successful clients and remained deserted until it burned to the ground in 1972.

Bob Neeld's family arrived just as the boom was ending, in 1916. The president of the Historical Society, Neeld built a home on the family property and used the native stone he loves in the design. His surviving brothers and sisters, children and grandchildren have homes scattered throughout the property, left for the most part in its native state. They visit back and forth, relishing the slower pace of this quiet place. But the old cedars and ancient gopher tortoises have seen their share of bright lights and Cadillacs.

They were here when the Neelds' simple cracker house was pressed into service by movie moguls in the Elvis Presley film Follow That Dream. Neeld found a note tacked to the front door of the old house in 1962 offering $100 a day for its use. Neeld says $100 a day "when the dollar was a dollar" was no problem at all. He and the rest of the area residents sat back and enjoyed watching the long, shiny black Cadillacs negotiate the narrow dirt roads through the dense woods. An area was cleared to set up Presley's trailer, and an exterminator was brought in to spray the acre of ground surrounding the old house.

There was a certain amount of good-natured laughter as Hollywood tried to tame the Hammock, but the extermination was considered an outstanding success. Not only did Elvis go unbitten, but Neeld swears they didn't see a roach in the old house for five years. INGLIS A video camera whirs softly, blending into the bird and insect sounds of the Gulf Hammock as a group of old friends, sitting together on the front porch of a Florida cracker house, begin to reminisce. "I was married in this house, in the front room right behind where I'm sitting," Minnie Runnels Kirkland says to begin the session. "That was in 1917.

We didn't make too much of a fuss didn't do that much in those days, but it was nice. My friends and my family were around. I was supposed to go on back up the river that night after Mr. Kirkland went on ahead with a load of things. "Some folks were going to give me a ride.

But I decided not to make that trip that night. I sent word on I'd be coming up another day." As her friends beside her on the porch laugh, she gently points out that she was, after all, only 14 years old at the time. Those in the "group" have a common bond. They are members of the Yankeetown-In-glis Historical Society and are pioneers, or children of pioneers, who have settled in Levy County between the Withlacoochee River and the Gulf Hammock since the mid-1800s. At this gathering, there will be good food and fiddling.

Not given to performing, they have nevertheless decided to record on videotape recitations of oral history at informal, monthly meetings. Leaning forward, Mrs. Kirkland smiles at Celie Gaines on the other end of the porch as she continues: "Celie and I could stand on our porches and signal back and forth to each other. We had such good times together, and to this day I can't recall us ever exchanging a cross word." More than 80 years ago, the girls became best friends when the Runnels family arrived by train and ox cart from Texas. They did all the important things together: such as sneaking or attempting to sneak over the barbed-wire fence behind the house to steal an early watermelon.

Because their petticoats were stiff as boards from the homemade starch of corn starch and water, they figure they probably made enough noise to warn anyone really paying attention for five miles around. In 1910, the girls watched the brilliant cosmic show of Halley's comet a little apprehensively, having been warned by a neighbor that if the tail touched the Earth, the world would burn to a cinder. She noted that MacDill is famous among commissary connoisseurs, however, for being "very large and very successful," and for its innovative experiments with a cheese bar and a candy boutique that's about to open. Some critics have traditionally complained that commissaries beat regular supermarkets with unfair price advantages, but several local store officials said they didn't feel hurt by MacDill. Bill Schroter, spokesman for Publix, said shoppers can save as much off base if they watch sales, and he suspects many retirees go to the commissary out of habit or for social reasons.

One of the strongest arguments backing commissaries, contends the Air Force's Hawkins, is that it's cheaper for taxpayers to support the base stores, which rank as the troops' favorite benefit after medical care, than to pay higher salaries. Congress spends about $260-million a year for labor at all base stores, which are supposed to break even otherwise, he said. Recent studies showed military shoppers worldwide spent an annual total of on goods that would cost at regular stores, thus saving $700-million. Further, military stores the troops in remote spots where a profit-seeking firm would never venture. The 5 percent surcharge at a high-volume commissary such as MacDill's pays for building tiny ones in the jungles.

For all the fuss, some shoppers say saving money isn't the main appeal anyway. Ask Henri Williams of St. Petersburg, whose late husband was in the service. "When I come to the commissary, I tend to overspend," she said. "My husband got so much out of the military, I feel I should give my business back to it." MUAH INSURANCE INC.

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