Diane Benedetto (left) poses with her mother and
her brother Buddy in a photograph dating from the 1920s.
Photo by Lauren Loricchio. Historical photos courtesy of the Boca Raton Historical Society
By Mary Jane Fine
She looks so grandmotherly, rocking gently there in a corner of the Boca Raton Children’s Museum, where her book of childhood memories will reside once it finds a publisher. Sweet and genteel. Self-effacing and shy. But that would be just a first impression, and wrong-headed. Because, right now, her granddaughter Tracy Eldridge is calling up a memory that is NOT in the book and will NOT be told to children.
“Can I show this?” she asks, holding out her cell phone.
Diane Benedetto — née Imogene Alice Gates — glances at the phone’s little screen.
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” she says, a bit indignant. “That’s my favorite picture.”
Diane Benedetto (left) poses with her mother and her
brother Buddy in a photograph dating from the 1920s.
Photos courtesy of the Boca Raton Historical Society
No wonder. The photo is of her, maybe 70 years ago: She is a beauty, kneeling, nude, in profile, one hand covering a breast, her long wavy blond hair cascading past her shoulders.
“When guys ask me to send them a picture of me, that’s what I send,” her granddaughter says, and grins.
The memories attached to that photo, and the dancing career that fostered it, may fill another book one day. “I’ve got enough material to start a book company,” boasts Diane.
At 95, she is a connoisseur of memory. At any given moment, a date or place or happenstance may prove slippery, but the essence is there, strong and vital enough to call up a bygone era and those who lived it.
The book is called Imogene Alice Gates: Frontier Child, and it tells the story of growing up in Boca Raton before Boca became Boca, before the Army Corps of Engineers turned a lagoon into the Intracoastal Waterway, before the jungle of palmetto palms and scrub brush was hacked away and groomed into the neat, orderly civilization that makes her long for yesteryear’s Florida.
Poppi Mercier, the museum’s executive director, calls it “a primary resource book,” a first-person account of history.
She worked with Diane for a year or so, shaping the older woman’s voluminous written and recalled stories into book form. Photos from the Boca Raton Historical Society illustrate it, alongside Diane’s own black-and-white sketches.
A photograph of Diane Benedetto holding two baby raccoons
was used for the cover of her book about growing up in early Boca Raton, Frontier Child (below).
Paper dolls, pet raccoon
Childhood, then, was a time when little girls played with paper dolls snipped from catalogues; when the remedy for a sore throat was tying a poultice of mashed onions and kerosene around one’s neck; when rum runners and bootleggers “ran rampant,” as she writes, and townspeople gathered to watch after they were caught, their bottles smashed.
Diane writes about Pete, the half-tame raccoon that was her near-constant companion, and about riding on dirt roads in her father’s Model-T Ford, bought for the then-grand sum of $300.
She recalls the day Pete snatched a neighbor’s lunch pail (chicken, which they both enjoyed) and tells of the neighbor who sent for a mail-order bride (a 300-pound mother of five, he soon learned).
From the rocking chair in the Children’s Museum, she tells other stories, stories that didn’t make it into the book. About filching nickels and dimes from milk bottles on front porches, after she and her parents, Harley and Harriet Gates, moved to Miami following a freeze that killed the banana and lemon trees and ornamental plants on the family’s 38-acre Palmetto Park Plantation.
“I would go to the store and buy candy,” she says, with a wicked little smile. And she tells about her dancing days.
Diane Benedetto holding two baby raccoons on the cover
of her book about growing up in early Boca Raton, Frontier Child.
Showgirl days
“I did a little ballet, a little interpretive,” she says of the career that led her to choose the name Diane. “I did Hawaiian. You name it. And I never had a lesson. I just went out and was a dancer.”
She ticks off the venues: the Biltmore Hotel, Miami’s Esquire Club, Lou Walter’s Latin Quarter on Palm Island.
Her eyes twinkle as she describes the nicely naughty showgirl costumes she fashioned, down to their elaborate headdresses. One of her favorites was The Devil and the Virgin: half red horns and cape, half white dress and long white glove.
“She used to hang it on the closet and scare me to death,” says Tracy, and they both laugh.
Remnants of the past linger. The family’s plantation gave its name to Palmetto Park Road. A family home is now a realty office; another became the former Wildflower Restaurant. The city of Boca Raton bought that now-vacant property, on the north side of Palmetto Park Road, in 2009, and seeks to develop it, according to a memo from the city manager’s office, as “a significant attraction with an important connection to the city’s downtown.”
Memories of the past linger. “I was a child of the wilderness,” Diane Benedetto says. “I remember my swing between two palm trees. Bamboo was growing all over the place, 50 feet into the sky, almost. And all the birds would come there. It’s horrible now. It is. I don’t think it’s beautiful anymore. They’ve destroyed all the rocks on the beach and the cliffs where I used to do all my meditating as a teenager.”
When it is time to leave the museum on this day, Tracy retrieves her grandmother’s walker. Then she and Poppi Mercier, one on either side, assist the onetime dancer, the onetime wild child, in navigating the few front steps. And, just that quickly, the past recedes once more.
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