Florida Strawberry Festival Sets Scene for Father’s Remembrances of a ‘Berry Good Friend’

Sometimes a story is too sweet not to write.

And this is one of them.

Strawberries are involved, of course, because why else would there be flats of them everywhere and babies adorned with strawberry headbands and so many people wearing red if it weren’t the annual Florida Strawberry Festival in Plant City.

That’s where I was on the 2011 festival’s fifth of 13 days when I walked by an elderly man sitting in a chair wearing a cowboy hat with a stuffed figure on his lap.

It was, of course, a strawberry, with oversized arms, wearing a white glove on an arm risen up, signifying a wave.

“Ah, you look cute,” I told the man, Richard, who treated me like an old friend (which is probably why I was remiss in asking him for his last name).

The next thing you know, he was offering me a piece of strawberry shortcake (which I turned down) and a glass of strawberry lemonade (which I thankfully agreed to).

“Let me introduce you to the owner,” he said.

That’s how I met Bob Singletary, of Singletary Farms, where you will find “God’s berry best berries,” he told me.

“I’ve been a farmer all my life, I was in it for 32 years,” he told me.

He grew watermelons and cantaloupes but also strawberries, his favorite crop, he said, because they’re “profitable, more profit per acre.”

He traveled from Dade City to be at the festival because “they push more strawberries here than anywhere,” he said.

Under his initiative, the conversation turned to the stuffed strawberry sitting on Richard’s lap.

“This little fellow here is 25-years-old,” Singletary told me. “My daughter used it in a pageant back in ’92 and I’ve kept it ever since. Every strawberry stand I have it goes with me.”

His daughter, he said, is now 33 (but don’t try to do the math, it’s not important).

Suffice it to say, daddy’s little girl had a stuffed strawberry and daddy just can’t part with it, looking to the figure to remember in an instant that pageant so many years ago, as if it were yesterday.

Indeed, Singletary’s daughter-in-law Ashley Fatzinger, who prepared my lemonade, remembered the ditty that Singletary’s daughter, with her mother, penned for the pageant. Fatzinger sang it for me (but declined to let me videotape it, but that’s doesn’t matter, either).

The words are touching enough.

Read them and think about a little girl singing them at a pageant, and a daddy who more than a quarter-century later remembers it as if it were yesterday and has yet to part with his daughter’s “berry good friend."

"Well, I’ve got a friend,
Wears a little green hat,
He’s got dimples all over,
And he’s short and fat.

"He’s a great little guy.
When you spread it on bread,
But he’s kind of silly,
When he blushes bright red.

"He’s my berry good friend,
He’s my friend to the end,
And when my tummy goes, ‘ugh!’
My berry friend gives me a hug!”

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