Telegraph Staff Writer
Della Rosenberg left quite a gift for the Woman’s Club of Starke, so the club did something to honor her memory, officially dedicating the Della Rosenberg Memorial Garden on Jan. 12.
“This was a long time in the making,” Charnelle Whittemore, club president, said. “We’re very excited to see it come to life. We have a few more things to do, but we are almost finished.”
Rosenberg, who passed away March 14, 2017, at the age of 100, bestowed annual monetary gifts to the Woman’s Club, Bradford County Public Library, Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, Flagler College and the University of Florida as part of the Rosenberg Family Foundation. The stipulation regarding the money the Woman’s Club receives is that it goes toward the preservation of the club building, which sits on the corner of Jefferson and Walnut streets in Starke.
Jeff Tidwell, executive vice president of Graves Tidwell Wealth Advisory Group of Janney Montgomery Scott LLC, expressed his thanks for those attending the dedication and to the Woman’s Club for its work on the project. Tidwell handles the money for the Rosenberg Family Foundation, which is headed up by Clay Meux, managing director at Rogers Towers PA.
Meux was unable to be present, but Rogers Towers and the Rosenberg Family Foundation were represented by Rachel Duffy and Tara Forrest.
“I know this would mean so much to Della seeing this— being able to utilize the space and have this space upgraded on her behalf,” Tidwell said.
Perhaps Rosenberg gave a sign of her approval. Whittemore shared how the water in the fountain blew a certain way and that club member Cleo Elder had talked to Tidwell about getting it fixed.
On the day of the dedication, the fountain was working properly.
“Maybe somebody did get by here and get it fixed, but I don’t know of them fixing it,” Whittemore said. “We’d like to think Ms. Della straightened it up for her dedication today, so we’re just going to go with that.”
Whittemore and Tidwell planted a temporary marker designating the garden in Rosenberg’s memory. A permanent marker will be placed in the future.
Besides the fountain and improved landscaping, the memorial garden will consist of pavers bearing the names of individuals, families, businesses, high school graduating classes, etc.
The paver project is helping to raise the funds to finish the memorial garden. Pavers are $100 each.
“We have 3,500-plus pavers to sell,” Whittemore said. “It will continually be a piece of history to which you can add your name, your children’s names, your grandchildren’s names, your business’ name.”
Pavers are being placed in batches of 25. Whittemore told the assembled crowd that if anyone had purchased a paver and didn’t see, not to worry. Another batch was planned to be placed the following week.
A pleasant surprise
Linda Lee was the Woman’s Club president when she opened a certified letter that notified the club of the Rosenberg Family Foundation and the monetary support it would provide.
“I actually had to sit down,” Lee said. “I had to read it again. Then I started calling everybody on the board immediately and letting them know.”
Whittemore said the club doesn’t know how much total money it’ll end up receiving.
“What we know is that we have enough money for years to come to preserve the club,” Whittemore said.
So far, the money has allowed the club to do such things as replace all 59 windows, improve the flooring and purchase stage curtains, two stoves, a refrigerator, an ice machine and a washer and dryer.
“When people come in here, they are so impressed by how beautiful it is,” Lee said, adding that Rosenberg’s posthumous gift “was just a blessing because eventually this building would’ve failed if it hadn’t been for her money.”
Whittemore said a second garden will be added to the grounds in the future.
When thinking about what Rosenberg’s generosity really means, Whittemore said she can’t help but feel humbled. In essence, Rosenberg is enabling the club to have its own physical presence that many clubs in Florida don’t have.
“What I didn’t know until this last year of my presidency is that across the state of Florida, there are so many woman’s clubs that are no longer standing,” Whittemore said. “The members are actually having to meet in church parsonages or buildings that they are renting every month for their luncheons and their meetings.”
Meanwhile, “little, old Starke” not only has a standing club building, “but one that is beautiful and perfect condition,” Whittemore said.
The Starke club (especially the Della Rosenberg Memorial Garden) has certainly proven to be a popular place to take photos. Lee said somebody observed how many people gathered at the memorial garden to take prom photos. The number, including students and their families, most likely exceeded 300.
Lee encouraged everyone who poses for photos to share them on the Woman’s Club of Starke Facebook page.
Whittemore said Rosenberg would’ve liked the idea of high school students using the garden as a scenic background for photos.
“I know that she is very, very happy about that,” Whittemore said. “Her biggest focus was education.”
Della Rosenberg: preparing young people for real life
Rosenberg taught business for 24 years and then served as guidance counselor at Bradford High School. She was known for speaking her mind, sticking up for her students and doing what she thought would best prepare those students for success after school. Rosenberg was strict and expected a lot from her students. In an interview for a Telegraph-Times-Monitor story that was published July 13, 2000, Rosenberg talked of an incident involving a female student who was wearing a low-cut blouse.
“I gave her two safety pins and told her to go the restroom and take care of it, or she could call her mother and have her bring her another blouse,” Rosenberg said.
Rosenberg said students weren’t on the fence when it came to their feelings toward her.
“My students either worshipped the ground I walked on — and thought I hung the moon and the stars — or they hated my guts because I was so rough on them,” she said. “But they also knew I was fair.”
Prior to working at BHS, Rosenberg taught military correspondence, typing, accounting, shorthand and office practice at Camp Blanding. She and two other teachers worked eight hours a day and also wrote their own textbook on military correspondence.
Rosenberg later worked at the Blanding post office, followed by a stint at the USO in Starke. She began teaching at BHS in the late 1940s.
If she felt something would benefit her students, she taught it, even giving her female students pointers on makeup and how they should dress for a job.
“I threw everything at them, but I felt like I had to,” Rosenberg said. “A lot of these youngsters were the first child (in their family) to graduate from high school.”
Many of her students had never traveled as far away as Jacksonville, let alone outside of Florida. Rosenberg would take groups of students on Saturday bus trips to Georgia.
The destination may not have been anything overly special, but the point was the experience.
“Most of the time it was just a little filling station,” Rosenberg said. “We’d have Cokes and crackers. Then we’d stop somewhere else and get a sandwich or have something to eat. They got out of the bus, and they’d walk around a little. They’d (now) been out of the state of Florida.”
She made students promise her that when they began working after graduation, they would save some of their earnings and not “blow everything they made on food, movies and clothes.” As Rosenberg put it, they’d “save a little for a ‘special fun’ fund for a fun trip that would take them farther than the border of Georgia.”
Basically, Rosenberg was a guidance counselor before officially becoming one.
“When I became guidance counselor, the kids told me they were glad they made me legal because I had been doing it all these year,” she said.
Rosenberg knew the personnel supervisors at Prudential in Jacksonville and Southern Bell in Jacksonville and Gainesville. She said those people would hire any student she sent their way.
Nationwide Insurance in Gainesville was another business that saw value in her students.
“They took every student I would send them,” Rosenberg said. “Many of them became supervisors.”
Lee said she was told those businesses wouldn’t even require Rosenberg’s students to take a test when they applied for a job.
“If they knew that they had been through her class, they knew they were good,” Lee said.
Rosenberg didn’t stop caring about her students’ best interests after they graduated from BHS. One of her former students told her how a University of Florida professor made a disparaging remark about the number of BHS graduates in a particular class, referring to them as the “Starke wonders.” Rosenberg knew several professors and administrators at UF, so she began making phone calls. The professor later made an apology to the students during class.
“You may step on my toes, but you don’t step on my children’s toes,” Rosenberg said.
