Avon Park recalls "checkered" history
Story & Photos by: Larry Levey - News-Sun June 6, 2001 - Explorer Page Coordinator

Avon Park - Call it the perfect subject for a Normal Rockwell painting: Two men, seated at a table, playing checkers, surrounded by four or five other men, all making comments and joshing the players with such colorful expressions as, "Rise and fly" (meaning it's your turn); or "Whoa back," (you're playing too fast); or "Late with the San Francisco Mail," (you missed a move).

Along with some serious checker playing, you'd never hear many-a tale, recalls longtime Avon Park barber Larry Albritton, "and some of them could have been true."

In the 1940s and on up to the early 1980s, checkers was a major league sport in Avon Park, as it once was in small-town America. Over the years checkers had two major arenas in Avon Park. The first was the still-standing "checker shelter," located near the flagpole and veteran memorials on the Mall on Main Street, across from the old Wells Motor Co. It's not clear when the shelter was built. Some say in the 1940s; others, the 1950s.

Another local barber, now retired, P.T. "Red" Carlisle, has some memories of that shelter. Born in 1905 (he'll be 96 later this year) and a resident of the city since 1919, he became a barber in 1925, later buying the shop and moving it to a site on Main Street right across from where the checker shelter was to be built.

He admits his memory is a bit hazy, but he thinks the structure was built by the city in the early 1940s - "but not for playing checkers - I don't know what it was built for." Then, "L.H. Ford, who owned the Chevrolet dealership and the man who owned Western Auto liked to play checkers and they brought some benches and a table and began playing there."

Eventually, two tables were set up and men gathered around just about every day, except in bad weather. "Sometimes there'd be six or eight men standing around, watching the checker players."

And, he adds, in those early days, they used Coca-Cola bottle caps as checkers. "Some would be turned down, some turned up."

Did he ever play? "Yes, but I wasn't much of a checker player."

Former Avon Park Mayor Gordon Marshall also recalls playing there as a young man. "I thought I was pretty good, but those fellows showed me how quickly they could beat me."

Playing action moves

In the late 1960s, according to Larry Albritton, the checker-playing moved from the shelter to his barber shop at 17 S. Lake Avenue, where it was cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter.

Albritton recalls men coming in every day just to play checkers, taking time out for lunch and then returning. Even some businessmen came in to play when things were slow. And they would "play by the numbers," meaning they'd pick a card that would spell out the first three moves, so the games would vary and the players "wouldn't get stuck in a rut."

An article in the Avon Park Sun, dated Sept. 12, 1974, and headlined "471 Years of Checker Playing Experience," spotlights six of the regular checker players at Albritton's barber shop. Their average age at the time was 78 1/2.

According to the article, "Their slightly askewed table is a piece of plywood (barely larger than the one-piece checkerboard) nailed to a rough-sawed four-by-four which in turn is nailed to a one-inch board. And a game is in hot progress almost any time one drops in at the shop."

Albritton says the last game of checkers played in his shop took place "probably in the mid-1980s." He thinks the checker board they used is now on the table sitting in the remodeled checker shack. And a sign in front of a wooden box of checkers on display in the depot museum of the Historical Society of Avon Park reads, "These checkers were used on the checker board in Memorial Square on the Avon Park Mall."

Military tribute

The checker shelter on the mall has become part of the military tributes in the section known as Veterans Square. The shelter and table were renovated by the American Legion Highlands Post 69 in the 1980s and again in 1998 by the Avon Park Veterans Honor Guard. A plaque in the structure read, "Veterans Honor Roll, followed by the names of nine Avon Park veterans representing World Wars I and II and Vietnam.

The checker shelter: a piece of Avon Park history in more ways than one.