Childhood Friends Play Golf at Buckhorn, Reflect on Town’s Growth Since ’79 Brandon High Graduation

Cliff Roberts and Mark Nash joined each other on the golf course for the Eighth Annual B. Lee Elam Golf Tournament, some 32 years after they graduated from Brandon High School, where the two friends once played in the marching band.

At Buckhorn Springs Golf & Country Club in Brandon, where Nash said he grew up with his dad and often spotted Elam there, the two friends talked about the ways Brandon has changed over the past three decades, since their high school graduation.

You can always tell a Brandonite with deep roots in the area if the first thing they answer when you ask them to reflect on the town then and now is, as Roberts put it: “We remember when State Road 60 had only two traffic lights.”

Brandon Boulevard today has many more lights, for sure, as the suburban sprawl has transformed the look and feel of a town once deeply rooted in its rural ways and small-town airs.

Back in the day, everyone was an Eagle, at the town’s only school for grades 10 to 12.

“Brandon was the only high school in town,” said Roberts, a sixth-generation Brandonite. “And the school was on double sessions.”

Today, the Greater Brandon area also has Armwood, Bloomingdale, Durant, Riverview, Newsome and Spoto high schools, opened in that order.

Roberts added that when his brother graduated from Brandon, in 1981, the graduating class numbered 1,100 to 1,200 students, making it the largest graduating class that year in Florida.

Mom-and-pop shops were prevalent back when Roberts and Nash were in high school.

“My dad [Norman Roberts] had the first carpet shop in Brandon, Colors ‘N’ Carpet,” Roberts said.

The store, he said, was where Walgreen’s now sits, next to Bill’s Prescription Center, on Brandon Boulevard (State Road 60).

‘There were no national chains, really, and it was a very local, family community, where everybody knew everybody,” Roberts said.

With the growth, Nash said, “there are way more people.”

“But I still think the people here are very special,” he added.

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