By Steve Plunkett
ATLANTIS — Rita L. Taylor, a fixture in the town halls of Gulf Stream, Ocean Ridge and Briny Breezes for more than five decades, died in her home on Oct. 28. She was 95.
Ms. Taylor served as the town clerk of Gulf Stream for 32 years and nine months before retiring in 2022. At the time she was the town’s highest-paid employee at $143,956 a year.
She had moved to the Gulf Stream post in 1990 after spending 20 years as the town clerk of Ocean Ridge. During that period, she also handled clerk duties for Briny Breezes on her own time.
Bill Thrasher, now town manager in Briny Breezes, worked with Ms. Taylor in Gulf Stream from the 1990s until his own retirement there in 2017. He remembered her as a woman who “knew government and she knew people” and easily worked with both.
He also recalled his hesitation about moving into his predecessor’s office and taking his desk when he was named Gulf Stream’s interim town manager in 1999.
“My very first day as interim town manager — I didn’t know what it meant,” Thrasher said, so he sat at his comfortable old finance director’s desk.
But Ms. Taylor, always a mentor, told him, “You wanted to be a manager. Now be a manager and get in this office.”
“She was very clear and got to the point,” Thrasher said.
She and Thrasher became such a team that Gulf Stream’s current town manager, Trey Nazzaro, invoked their names when he was appointed last January in telling how he planned to handle the job with current Town Clerk Renee Basel.
Basel’s “not only the town clerk but does a lot of what I would consider assistant manager or senior-level things, just like the relationship that Bill and Rita had kind of running the town before, that’s the relationship that I envision having with Renee.”
Ms. Taylor and her husband, Ed, who hailed from Indiana, first settled in Briny Breezes in the mid-1960s after touring the country for five years with a travel trailer. They had no children and her husband died early in her tenure in Ocean Ridge.
“Back then there were a lot more travel trailers in Briny than what there are today. Oh, quite a few. In fact, they had one section that was all travel trailers,” she told The Coastal Star right before she retired.
But lounging on the beach was not for her. Soon Ms. Taylor, who learned bookkeeping through jobs in Indiana banks, took a full-time job in Ocean Ridge.
Karen Hancsak became a police dispatcher not long after.
“I’ve known her since 1981 when I was hired in Ocean Ridge. She became my mentor in 1988 as her deputy clerk and a friend ever since,” said Hancsak, who rose to be town clerk after Ms. Taylor left Ocean Ridge in 1990.
“I’m crying here now. I’m in total shock,” she said when told of Ms. Taylor’s death.
The two were very close and had met for lunch a week and a half before.
“We still got together at least monthly, either having a Banana Boat lunch, or dinner at Atlantis Grill or Rosalita’s,” said Hancsak, who retired from Ocean Ridge in 2016. Ms. Taylor attended her protegee’s retirement festivities.
“She was my rock steady, especially after losing both my parents within three weeks of each other this summer,” Hancsak said. “I could always call her. I will miss her greatly.”
Ms. Taylor kept two homes: a three-bedroom, two-bath place in Atlantis and her mobile home a few houses from the Atlantic Ocean on Briny’s Ruthmary Avenue.
In 2021 her former one-room office in the Town Hall was named the “Rita L. Taylor Gulf Stream Library” in her honor.
But her invisible fingerprints are all over the barrier island. Besides being its clerk, she was instrumental in arranging for Ocean Ridge to provide police service to Briny Breezes, helping establish Ocean Ridge’s police dispatch system, training Ocean Ridge’s volunteer firefighters and getting its first ladder fire truck, which Boynton Beach also relied upon.
In her last official government meeting in 2022, Ms. Taylor said she would never turn her back on Gulf Stream.
“I’ll think of all of you even though I won’t be here,” she said, “and I’ll be watching the papers, what The Coastal Star is going to have to say, about our meetings and the meetings you’re going to have, because my interest will not die.”
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