Dan Dewitt: Remembering 'The Watermelon King,' a crusty, colorful Cracker

Not even Jimmy Batten claims that his father, Olan, was Hernando County's last Cracker. "Well, I'm a Cracker," Jimmy Batten said as we talked about his dad's legacy last week. So are the handful of other ranchers he named. So is anybody who grew up in Florida and works outside or hunts and fishes, or just likes to wear camo and Wranglers. At least that's what many of them call themselves....

DeWitt: Bike trail funding is no turkey

It's a lot of money for a bike trail — $50 million.

That's true even for a trail with an impressive name, the Coast-to-Coast Connector, and an impressive goal: building 72 miles of trail that would join 200 more miles of trail that have already been built or funded.

It's especially true now that the Times' John Woodrow Cox has reported that the claim supporting this whopper of an investment — that the trail "will realize an annual economic benefit of $120 million" — appears to be a whopper itself....

Hernando politicians will be known by company they keep

They ought to be ashamed.

I'm talking about county commissioners Jim Adkins, Wayne Dukes, and Nick Nicholson.

I mean the new Republican constitutional officers, the ones I thought knew better: Tax Collector Sally Daniel, Property Appraiser John Emerson, Clerk of Circuit Court Don Barbee.

I'm referring, especially, to commission Chairman David Russell, who lent his hard-earned credibility to a candidate with a severe shortage of it, Blaise Ingoglia....

DeWitt: So, finance reform is in your court, Schenck

Which version do you believe?

Which one of Rep. Rob Schenck's different statements about his cousin's duties do you think is true?

Answer that and you answer this: Did Schenck, a Spring Hill Republican, commit a civil violation of Florida election law?

In case you've forgotten last week's column on committees of continuous existence, or CCEs, Schenck controlled one called Conservatives for a Better Tomorrow — at least he did until January, when he took his name off it....

Column: Too much house is too much of a headache

I wasn't a total sucker.

I didn't lock myself into a crazy mortgage or buy a bunch of spec homes I couldn't flip.

But it was the boom and my wife and I got caught up in it in our own way: We bought too much house.

Don't do it, I'd like to tell anyone who might be about to make the same mistake — and, amazingly, a lot of people are.

They — we, really — haven't learned that size has little to do with happiness. ...

DeWitt: The absurd idea of Schenck as campaign reformer

Rep. Rob Schenck, cleaning up the state's filthy campaign finance system.

Rob Schenck, reformer.

Stunning, absurd, a flat-out joke — but, on its face, true.

Schenck's bill on this issue, HB 569, passed the House of Representatives in March and the Senate last week.

You might have figured that this has to be sham — Tallahassee money addicts making a show of cutting off their supply — which it pretty much is....

Locking ourselves away from enrichment

I learned about a fascinating and notoriously lethal form of military service from a true authority, Roland "Bobo" Richardson, who had served as a pilot in World War I.

I heard him tell about safely landing a crippled biplane "with all the gliding capacity of a brick." He told this story modestly and only because he'd been asked. So I also got a lesson in grace.

As a bonus, he was a master handyman, the patient, generous kind who didn't mind sharing his expertise and time. I saw him fire up a chain saw when he was well into his 70s and drop a towering, dead pine tree in a neighbor's narrow back yard....

DeWitt: Hernando County Commission losing a trusted voice

You probably think it's too early to contemplate the 2014 election, and it is — except that we already know one result.

And very possibly nothing that we find out 19 months from now will be quite this dramatic:

David Russell will not be re-elected to the Hernando County Commission. We can be sure of that because he said last week that he will not run. And there is no chance that he will change his mind, he said....

Appalling cuts fall on needy children

Head Start is a lousy name, because at best the program just makes up lost ground — gives needy preschoolers some of the things other kids get by being born into middle-class families.

Things like access to books and computers, dental care, decent meals, organized play time. It gives kids a chance to learn numbers and letters, and screenings to check their sight and hearing.

They need this help everywhere, these Head Start families, which are eligible only if they fall below the federal poverty line. In Hernando County, you can be sure, they really need help. There's a waiting list of 125 children, which would be longer if not for the families that find the number so discouraging that they decide it's useless to add their child's name....

Margaret Thatcher leaves polarizing legacy

Since Margaret Thatcher's death last week, you've no doubt heard how great she was.

"Great lady," is the specific phrase favored by my English father-in-law, High Point resident Bernard Booth.

My wife, Laura, on the other hand, remembers Thatcher from even before she was prime minister, and that as a cabinet member in the early 1970s she helped cut the free milk allotment for some schoolchildren....

Nature's reminder to 'resort living bordering on the wild'

I think we can all agree that controlled burns should, in fact, be controlled — and that the blaze that threatened the Glen Lakes community last week definitely wasn't.

And the people there don't want to hear, as one wildlife official has said, that the cause of this wildfire was just a curveball from Mother Nature.

Several homeowners told me that last Friday was dry and breezy, the eve of a holiday weekend when Glen Lakes was full of guests. They can't believe the state Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission even considered a prescribed burn that day....