Tami Pleasanton (left) and Kim Jones remember growing up in the county pocket. Photo by Jerry Lower
By Ron Hayes
In the summer of 1969, a registered nurse with two young daughters to raise started looking for someplace to live closer to her job at Bethesda Memorial Hospital.
“I didn’t want to stray too far from work,” Jeanne Punté remembers, “so I would leave for the 3-to-11 shift a half-hour early and roam the streets looking for places near the beach.”
Eventually, she found Belair Drive, 10 small homes on an unincorporated cul-de-sac just south of Briny Breezes.
To the post office, it was in Boynton Beach.
To the phone company, it was in Delray Beach.
To the sisters, it was heaven.
When Kim Jones, 13, and her sister Tami, 11, moved in that August, Gulfstream Park was 15 years in the future. The parking lot was a scrub thick with Florida holly, the tiny street was lined with lush coconut palms — and the rent at No. 8 was $150 a month.
“If your objective was to bring two girls up in a natural, safe haven, our mother struck gold,” Kim Jones says today.
“What we are was formed by our mother’s desire to put us in a place that would nurture our talents,” her sister adds.
Today, Tami (née Jones) Pleasanton is the headmistress at St. Joseph’s Episcopal School in Boynton Beach, guiding the education of 260 boys and girls no older than she was then.
Kim Jones retired nearly 20 years ago after a lucrative career as a professional engineer. Nowadays she devotes much of her time to the nesting sea turtles she first befriended as a girl on Belair Drive.
“We’d spend summer nights on the beach with a bonfire,” Kim remembers, “and one evening a massive green sea turtle crawled right by us to nest, and I was hooked.”
As they reminisce together in Pleasanton’s office, 40-year-old memories emerge, of a tiny street that prepared them for a great big world.
“We were latchkey kids, but we didn’t know it,” Tami says. “We didn’t wear bathing suits until mother decided we’d better, and then we didn’t wear tops for a while because nobody ever came there.”
“We were just sea waifs,” says Kim.
Their neighbors were all retirees, they recall, older couples who taught them respect for the elderly.
“Our role models were 80-year-old retired engineers from Pratt & Whitney or housewives who made dinner for everyone and passed around pasta,” Tami says.
Tony and Marie Brunaldi, in the corner house, would tie a 250-yard line to a tree and lay it out over the sand with three or four lifebuoys attached.
“We’d make sure they got in and out of the water safely,” Tami adds. “We became sensitized to older people’s needs.”
They learned to drive on Belair Drive, and Kim, who learned to surf in the ocean just east of their home, has gone on to ride the waves off Easter Island, Tahiti, Bali.
“I think we cooked out every night,” their mother says, “and we always had a lot of fish because we caught it right down there at the beach.”
They kept an aquarium, home at one point to an octopus they found on the beach. The octopus escaped, to be discovered at last clinging to the bottom of their dining room table.
Later, they bought the house next door at No. 10 for about $30,000. Last year, its assessed value was $242,000.
“I got the bedroom to the east,” Tami says, “so I went to bed every night listening to the waves and woke up to the same thing.”
And then one evening, theft came to peaceful Belair Drive.
“A huge St. Bernard showed up hungry,” Jeanne Punté recalls. “We had a steak on the grill, and she just took it and disappeared into the woods.”
Not long after, the girls heard puppies yelping in the scrub. They gave the puppies away and named the St. Bernard “Passport.”
When Kim left home for her first engineering job in Schenectady, N.Y., Passport went with her.
Tami departed Belair Drive for college in 1976, and their mother, the last to leave, moved to Palm Beach Gardens in 1984.
“It was heaven,” Tami says. “Everything you wanted and needed was there.”
Not long ago, she adopted a rescue dog from Tampa. The dog, about 3 years old, was named Buffett when she got him — whether for Jimmy or Warren, she’s not sure.
But he’s a St. Bernard.
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