BRYANT: Mary Nell

The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project MARY NELL BRYANT Interviewed by: Charles Stewart Kennedy Initial interview date: August 6, 2009 Copyright 2015 ADST Q: Today is August 6, 2009. This is an interview with Mary Nell Bryant. I am doing this on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST), and I am Charles Stewart Kennedy. Do you call yourself Mary Nell, or…? BRYANT: Mary Nell. Q: Okay. Mary Nell, let's talk about when and where you were born. BRYANT: Miami, Florida in 1952. I was born and raised there. Q: Let's talk a bit on your father's side; then we will come to your mother's side. Where did Mr. Bryant come from, and what do you know about that side of the family? BRYANT: My father, Calvin Schofield Bryant, was born on a United Fruit plantation in Tela, Honduras, on the Caribbean coast. His father was Calvin Oak Bryant of Lakeland, Florida; his mother Nellie Schofield of Corozal, Belize, which is a seaside town now considered a great expat relocation destination. The Nell in my name comes from my paternal grandmother. My father’s first years were spent growing up on the United Fruit compound in Tela. Q: What do you know, say, at the grandfather level and the grandmother level? What do you know about that? What they were up to and…? BRYANT: My grandmother was born and raised in Corozal, one of 16 children of Ernest Augustus Henry Schofield and Petronita Novella. (Ten of the children lived to adulthood: Rosita, Dora, Ines, Mito, Tavo, Tom, Ernesto, Ida, Nellie Armitage and Judy.) Ernest Augustus Schofield came from London in 1879 at age 19 to work in his father’s lumber and shipping business. My great-grandmother, Petronita Novella, was the daughter of a sugar factory owner in Corozal. As the family story goes, Petronita was the granddaughter of a Spanish aristocrat who moved to Bacalar, Mexico, from Spain via the Canary Islands. Fleeing a Mayan Indian uprising in Bacalar, which is in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, the family moved to Corozal. The Schofields were a prominent family in Belize, with a large 26-room house that was destroyed by a hurricane in the 1950s. To school his children, Ernesto brought in a tutor from England. When his own children were through with school, Mr. Schofield had him 1 stay on to open a local school in Corozal, one of the earliest educational institutions in Belize. My aunt tells me that many of the people of Corozal, either having worked for or been schooled by the Schofields, then took the last name of Schofield. A quick Internet search does show Schofields in Bacalar and Corozal, so that may have to be a retirement project for me, not to mention a winter escape. The Bryant family also came from London, probably about the time of the American Revolution, first settling in Boston. My great grandfather, George Lawton Bryant II, settled in Florida, where he ran a store in Lakeland, and homesteaded 160 acres outside of Avon Park in 1909, later called Palmetto Creek Farm. He and his family cleared the land, first living in a tent, then a log cabin, and finally a big house. After getting title to the land in 1915, they cut a right of way from the farm to Avon Park. This track became Highway 64 E, or Avon Pines Road. The Bryants started to grow celery as their primary crop, and the farm became such a showcase that people from the area came out on Sundays for tours. It was the showplace of Highlands County. (This according to the Avon Park Sun newspaper, June 18, 1986.) So from this agricultural background, my grandfather, Calvin Oak Bryant, who was born in 1897, followed his older brother to Tela, Honduras, to work for what became, for many, particularly in politics, the controversial United Fruit Company. He married my grandmother, Nellie Armitage Schofield in Belize in 1921. Hence the ties between Florida farming, United Fruit, and Corozal, Belize. When my father and his siblings were about four or five, my grandmother told my grandfather that she wanted her kids schooled in the United States, and they moved the family, to Avon Park, Florida, and the family farm. She herself only attended school through the first year of high school, and wanted more for her kids. Calvin Oak, my grandfather, returned after some time to Honduras, where he remained the rest of his life, remarrying a Honduran woman and having a second family. Ironically, it was through my first assignment as a Foreign Service Officer for a regional position based in Costa Rica that I got to know Calvin Oak Bryant’s second family, daughter Melba Bryant de Kattan and her family, in San Pedro Sula, Honduras—now one of the most violent cities on Earth—and the family of my grandmother’s brother, Ernesto Schofield, residing in Cartago, Costa Rica. When I traveled to Honduras on assignment, my relatives in San Pedro Sula took me to where my father was born—Tela—which at the beginning of World War I became an important sea port as the headquarters of the Tela Road Company, a United Fruit subsidiary, and the headquarters of United Fruit in Honduras. One of my relatives went there frequently as a boy, as his father was a supplier to United Fruit, stocking much of what was in what might be called their central department store. He told me many stories about the United Fruit presence in the 1920s. United Fruit built its own section of town, Tela Nueva, also known as the “American Zone,” where the white managers lived quite apart from the workers, many of whom were African-descended people whose roots 2 where in the English-speaking Caribbean, particularly Belize and Jamaica. You can still see the remains of many of its lovely single-family homes and yards. It reminded me of the American Panama Canal Zone, but of course on a smaller scale. On payday, the workers would hit all the bars in the old town, spend all their money, and head back to work. (This according to my cousin’s recollections.) Tela had a large wooden hospital that could be accessed via railroad. When my grandmother was about to give birth to my father, she went to the hospital on a handcar on that United Fruit railroad. I got to walk the halls of the then-empty hospital and picture the arrival of my grandmother. The Bryant-Kattans also took my mother and me to Tela on a later visit, but sadly the hospital had been torn down, though you could still see the railroad tracks going up to the foundation. According to my Honduran relatives, my grandfather Bryant once killed a man in Tela, and United Fruit spirited him out of Honduras to its holdings in Costa Rica, where he could not be touched. Q: So your father was basically raised in Florida? BRYANT: Yes, he moved there, to Avon Park, when he was about four or five. Q: Is there still the family farm? BRYANT: Yes it is as far as I know. The original Bryant homesteader’s daughter, Verella Bryant Kopta, inherited the farm, and sold it in 1964. However her son bought it right back. I understand that one of family is working on family history there in Avon Park, so I should look him up. That is one of those retirement projects. We know much more on my mother's side, but not so much from my father's side. Q: What did your father do? BRYANT: My father was an electronics engineer with the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration). In 1940, after graduating from Avon Park High School at age 18, he went to Port Arthur College in Texas to study radio broadcasting along with a good friend. From there, he decided to go to Galveston to get his Seaman’s papers and his FCC (Federal Communications Commission) 3rd class radio license. In early 1941, he began working for what became a leading aviation company that was the unofficial flag carrier for the United States, Pan American Airways, as a radio operator, I believe. From there he was transferred to Atkinson Air Force Base in British Guiana as a radio operator at their air base stations. Pan Am was under contract to the U.S. military at the time. I still have a few faded pictures of him and his radios in the rather bleak-looking base. He stayed there throughout the war. In May 1946, he enlisted in the Army as a private at Ft. McPherson, Georgia, and was assigned to the Panama Canal Department. At some point he was sent to Occupied Japan. He used to love to show off his war wound: a twisted knuckle from playing baseball in Japan. 3 After the war, he moved to Miami where he at first opened a TV repair shop. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to support a family, so he began working as an electronics engineer with the CAA (Civil Aeronautics Authority), then the FAA, and lastly became the airport supervisor at the Kendall-Tamiami Airport, now known as the Miami Executive Airport,. Q: On your mother's side, what do you know about her family, going back to wherever you can? BRYANT: I can take them back to the Mayflower … or so the legend goes. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, writes in her family history that she found Revolutionary War soldiers on both sides of her family, the Spilmans and the Fetzers.

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