One of his most staunch beliefs was that government wasted half of the money it got. The first residents agreed. So when they incorporated Casselberry in 1940, they fortified themselves against runaway spending by outlawing real estate taxes. Politicians could spend no more than the citizens could pay for, and everyone would share the work proportionately. As the largest landowner and employer, Hibbard became the mayor and happily shouldered most of the responsibility.

For thirty-six years, any rumor about excess spending guaranteed a standing-room-only audience at the next meeting. Today, few people show up or comment on the city budget. This is mostly because it's practically a nonstop process. Administrators, staff, and commissioners look for the hook beneath the monetary bait offered by government grants and measure what the taxpayers can afford to pay. My father did his best to keep the needs of citizens, businesses, and government in balance with each other, and now I see why. The three parts fit together like mirrors in a kaleidoscope. He made me believe that ordinary cities can transform into dazzling, prosperous communities, regardless of their size or population, without looking going overboard in debt.

Even though creative problem solving was part of Hibbard's genius, neither his bank account nor the tax-free town's coffers were ever as big as his vision. He used to wake up in the middle of the night, jot down ideas on the yellow legal pad next to his bed, and then go right back to sleep. I felt safe knowing he loved what he did and was always taking care of us. If only I could go back to those days, then maybe I could hit the snooze button and trust that the America I grew up in would return.

One of my father's greatest dreams was that his children and grandchildren would live, work, and raise their families in Casselberry. Although his oldest daughter from his first marriage moved away, many of us call it home no matter which side of the city limit sign we live on. My brother John bought Brightwater, the stately Southern Colonial home we grew up in, after our mother died. I purchased a simple concrete block home within the city limits our aunt and uncle built in 1953. It's sentimental and convenient. From the tranquil setting of my front yard, I can see dozens of old oak trees. Silver moss drips from them in the daytime, until the sun sets behind the trees, and turns everything to gold. Fat little ducks waddle up from the pond, begging for handouts. When owls show up in the daytime, it's hard to believe I'm two blocks from a major highway, or that a half dozen major retailers are within walking distance.

While Casselberry is beautiful, residents don't always lead a charmed lifestyle. For years, we cringed every time political bickering and adult entertainment issues made juicy headlines in the newspaper. Then some people realized that, if they got involved in politics, they could remove not only the slander to the city caused it. Three area establishments became topless nightclubs shortly after Hibbard died. That kind of civic blight can take decades to heal. In his day, the town made headlines for booze, gambling, and its outspoken founder. Gossips chattered about how he acted cavalier and brandished his power, but they never understood that he was only making his vision bigger and bolder.

Hibbard saw possibilities where no one else did. He certainly took risks, more than I ever would. And he lived to serve the community. Most political aspirants don't realize how they must sacrifice to see a city become a better place. A few years ago, our commissioners were part of a group called Better Casselberry Now. The name exuded their demand and impatience. Once elected, their commitment became visible by the changes they made. They blushed with pride, like others who see their dreams come to life. Each movement forward reinforced that the voice inside that said, "We can do it." A step backward only said, "Try a different way."

Years ago, my friends and I pumped up the enthusiasm in our city. We set up a communication network for citizens, schools, businesses and civic groups, and we hosted special events. While our activities succeeded, our long-term goal failed because, past a certain point, complacency had settled in harder than rigor mortis. Call me stubborn or persistent, but I still want to shake some of my friends, business colleagues, and politicians and say, "Let's do something different." After sharing some brilliant idea, I'd get people's agreement and motivate them into action. Problem solved. Unfortunately, when I do most of them look at me and shrug. They believe I should leave the running of the city to the politicians and professionals.

Recently, I attended a national convention for municipal leaders, thinking they might have some secret leadership formula. The number of seminars about on how to create citizens involvement told me the pros at the local level weren't finding the task any easier than my friends and I did. I felt righteously vindicated, but no happier. If they took our ideas and used their budgets and staff time, I think cities would be better off for it. I'm not sure how though.

What I do know is that ours are not unprecedented times, so I find myself looking to the past for answers and inspiration. When Hibbard came to Florida in 1926, he was thirty-three years old, and had a wife and two toddlers. Then four months after he started his real estate business, over a hundred banks in Florida and Georgia collapsed - in less than two weeks. That's Armageddon compared to 2008, when the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or FDIC, took over or closed only 25 banks in the entire country.

The reason then was lot like today. Banks made fraudulent loans; the government bailed them out. The developers made unimaginable money, as did politicians and anyone who peddled influence. For newspaper owners, selling advertising for real estate developments was like printing money. They covered up the truth until it was too obvious to deny. Then people lost their life savings.

Despite the hype, Florida is not all sunshine. In 2004, we experienced four hurricanes: Charlie, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne. Hibbard had to deal with back-to-back hurricanes after the banks collapsed in 1926, and again in 1928. Just as he was getting on his feet, the stock market crashed. Consumer confidence disappeared faster than the money had. Even Bernie Madoff's stock swindle of investors in 2008 was a reiteration of a scheme perpetrated by Charles Ponzi in 1920. Hibbard went through all those and the Great Depression.

Hardly a year had passed since the town's incorporation when reality threatened to shred his dream again. When America was drawn into World War II, Hibbard and the other citizens held together solidly, adapting and reinventing to meet every challenge. Some small communities withered up and died, but Hibbard found a way to get into war production. When word got around - "Casselberry's hiring!" - the town prospered.

Could Casselberry or any city be self-sufficient again, except for things like hospitals, highways, and airports, which a larger government or businesses provide? I don't know. I wonder what Dad would do if he were alive today. I draw a blank at first, but then synapses jump like hot popcorn. I scrounge down into the depths of my convention book bag and come up with a newsletter I had seen earlier. Leaders needed to have purpose, be fearless, be creative, and build their community, it said. Check. They have to ‘cross diverse boundaries between individuals, groups, and organizations.' Double-check. Why isn't it working?

Commissioners and mangers surely see the city as a business in certain ways. They have websites for their products - the city and its services - drive people to it. Maybe its like Ken Blanchard wrote in his book, Raving Fans. I suspect that most cities don't promote their citizens and businesses, or inspiring them to promote their city. Likewise, I bet citizens and businesses don't see how doing that genuinely benefits them. I don't think anything short of this will work.

From the very beginning, Hibbard encouraged people to sell their community to their friends. He said, if you're not proud of you're neighborhood, you'd be much happier elsewhere. If you are proud of it, no one will know unless you talk about it. When you talk, it encourages your neighbors to talk. Favorable conversation increases business. Increased business increases employment. A healthy economy makes a healthy city. Residents and business owners have an obligation to join with their government to create a prosperous city. But no matter who or what starts the cycle, each part has to keep moving for it to work.

Hibbard had no secret formula for success; in fact, to his family and friends, his actions bordered on obsession or compulsion. There were times in those twenty-five years that the reality of building a real estate tax-free town nearly buried him in personal debt, and fundraising for its treasury became a survival skill. But his failures taught him to be the master of the forward fumble recovery - football jargon for having perseverance. When he fumbled, he got the ball back and kept driving toward his goal.

That's a thumbnail sketch of my father, but sometimes people at a luncheon meeting want to know more. I can't give a dissertation on his life, or even half of it, between bites of mashed potatoes and meatloaf. To me, he was Daddy, the paunchy, older man, physically warm and cuddly, much like a grandfather. He indulged my horse-crazy years, but was always around to make sure I did my homework, including the math and algebra problems I dreaded.

Daddy was not the handsome young man who moved in the world of the socially elite, or the one who started a company whenever he saw a need. I never saw him as a leader, because that trait was ingrained in every action he took. I do miss him, especially in the rough times. Maybe I wouldn't if the old-fashioned leadership of my father's day still existed.

Since we sold the old office fifteen years ago, my house and a garage have practically morphed into a museum of filing cabinets, old pictures, contracts, brochures, and stock certificate books from his various companies. Everything from small family heirlooms to tattered blueprints found a way into my closets and dresser drawers. Underneath a black knit table cover is a two-drawer filing cabinet filled with folders and envelopes squeezed in tighter than a snapped accordion. Each one represents a year or business between 1926 and 1969, when he died.

The envelope marked 1933 is particularly fat because his archrival, Gordon Barnett, led a corporate takeover against him. That alone is good for an hour of conversation about doing business during the Depression. Not far behind that, a 1940 folder holds the document that created the Map of Casselberry, complete with original signatures penned in blue and black ink. The map led to another lawsuit with Barnett. Only after Hibbard won could the town incorporate.
It was the first of several attempts to invalidate Casselberry's incorporation.

Dad was also a businessman. My cousin used to say that other men had business ventures, but Hibbard had "adventures." Files on them are all here: the fernery, real estate development, utilities, horse track, azalea garden, parachute and bandolier manufacturing, a textile company, post office, railway express agency, golf course, and cemetery. I probably know more about each business now than he did when he got into it.

Beneath my television, I store more books, files, and bulging notebooks sorted by decade. I'm not sure if this is a hobby or an obsession. Maybe I keep all this because it reminds me of those special Sunday afternoons my brother and I used to spend with Dad at the office. Regardless of how hot it was, we'd asked him if we could go up into the attic. He'd smile and take padlock off the door. Upstairs was a wondrous place. No office machine ever died, but went into permanent retirement along side its predecessors, for our enjoyment I was sure. Old wooden desks and cardboard boxes were like a time capsule, filled with thirty years of promotional gizmos, gadgets, and stationery from bygone eras.

Unlike the old office, my garage maintains a near perfect temperature for storing documents, even in the summer heat, thanks to an abundance of shade trees. Inside, books, roofing shingles, and furniture I should have thrown out years ago share space with historical oddities. Twelve more filing cabinets stand five drawers high against the wall. Five of them, probably older than their olive-drab color might suggest, are jammed with small manila envelopes so worn that they feel like chamois cloth. Each one contains Dad's letters and documents about a particular lot. A newer cabinet holds over a hundred report books filled with newspaper clippings spanning the last fifty years. On top of that is an oversized archival box with early plats and maps.

On the opposite side of the room, two jumbo-size pictures, one at least five feet tall, are covered and turned toward the wall for protection from the light. And what garage would complete without a six-foot high walk-in safe door, memorabilia from Dad's World War II bomb parachute business? When the bulldozers demolished that building to make way for a new Target Store, my brother, John, insisted that we save this semi-scared white elephant. Anyone who thinks my assortment of artifacts is bizarre should go into his garage. It looks like the old office attic.

Growing up, there was no way to escape Hibbard's shadow. When I was in sixth grade, a boy wanted to go steady with me because he thought Dad owned the town, and thus would buy him ice cream cones. Dad would have done that anyway, but I had no interest in my freckle-faced suitor. When I was old enough to drive, I went to other towns. People gave me quizzical looks when they found out Hibbard Casselberry was my father, as if they never thought of him as a family man.

As he grew older, the growth Dad wanted produced an odd byproduct. Casselberry, as a family name, slipped out of people's daily conversations. Of the thousands who moved into the city, few asked about its history. When I married, my name changed, and I moved to Tampa. My brother John came home from military school only weekends. Of my father's three children from his first marriage, only my half-brother Len and his wife Jane lived nearby, and their children had gone off to college.

My mother, Martha, ran the family business, but she was as much a recluse as Dad had been a promoter. When I moved back, my old friends knew who I was; the others just thought of me as Lilian. Once in awhile, a bank clerk would ask for my maiden name. "Casselberry," I'd say. "You mean like the town?" When I said, "Yes, my father founded the town," I saw that quizzical look again. This time their response was, "You mean there was a Mr. Casselberry?"

It wasn't until 1992, two years after my mother's death, I realized that if I wanted to do anything to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Hibbard's birth the next year, I had to generate the interest. Because no one ever talked about the past, the commissioners and civic groups saw history as something "new." My secretary, Anne, had worked for Dad, so she helped me sort through enough old documents and files to write a short video script of his life. Once I finished, I though I knew everything anyone would care to know about Dad and the town.

Instead, people asked questions I couldn't answer, like why don't we have historical buildings? The answer was simple; We did, but Hibbard built the best ones along the highway. After sixty years or so, bulldozers ground them to a pulp to make room for an office building, Taco Bell, or Target Store. There is still the Methodist Church Chapel, and handful of cottages that renowned architect, James Gamble Rogers, II designed early in his career for Hibbard. Brightwater, John's house, is probably the only architecturally significant one.

Part of the reason is financial. Orlando and Winter Park bankers used to be reluctant to make residential mortgage loans "that far out," as if the five miles distance made it Siberia. Sometimes lot owners had to do part of the construction work themselves, like laying the foundation or putting on a roof. When Hibbard got construction money to build over forty of the first VA houses after World War II, he jumped on it like a thirsty man on the last canteen of water. Of course, those are still standing.

Hibbard would be pleased at how annexation has allowed the city to grow far beyond the nucleus of what he owned. However, his most prized land, fourteen acres that he bought in 1928, remains undeveloped. It's situated on a six-lane highway, between the Methodist Church and City Hall, next to the golf course, and within walking distance of parks and lakes. Even a novice planner knows that kind of property doesn't come along every day. But if the right developer does show up, a recession can still send all his plans and dreams into storage for years.

While the history of that property remains unwritten, my search for other answers turned into a treasure hunt, pulling me deeper into the past with tantalizing promises of more to come. My head spun and my brain ached as I twisted and turned Dad's Rubik's Cube early years, trying to understand them. When a man in Iowa sent an article to me about my father, I nearly went crazy. It ran contrary to everything my half-brothers had held as "truth" for over eighty years.

This unexpected and undeniable fact went back to the Roaring Twenties. Rather than being a pioneer, it seems Hibbard would have thought the idea of founding a town was as absurd as being able to buy a legal bottle of booze. Even more so because he and his family lived outside of Chicago, in the pastoral, planned Village of Winnetka. The lakefront community held tightly to moral high ground to the point of outlawing alcohol a full seven years before Prohibition in 1920.

During the week, Hibbard took the train into the city, where he worked for Welsbach, manufacturer of gas mantles used in lamps, flints for lighters, and electric metal filaments for light bulbs. His socially elite neighbors might describe his job as satisfactory, though somewhat ordinary. It would be hard for him to imagine a time when his routine would be different, but he would have said the same thing in 1915. Fate pays little heed to the plans and expectations of mortals.