Haines City

by Charles Harrison
(Titusville, Florida)

You don't have a Haines City page yet, so I'll write something maybe you can include later.

There used to be a man named Emery Cocke who lived in Haines City and owned a company named Sunni-Citrus or somesuch. His company took orange peels and ground them down to be used as cattle feed.

Mr. Cocke was originally from Atlanta. I first me him in the late 1960's, and he was very elderly then. He was tall with distinguished features and a mane of silver hair parted in the middle.

His office in Haines City looked like it was set in the 1930's. His desk had an antique telephone and he used a dictation machine with the old fashioned goosenecked handle for the microphone.

At the time he was driving a 1948 Cadillac sedan, and told me that he had many more antique cars at his home on Lake Hatchineha. I never got a chance to visit him out there, so don't know what he had.

I seem to remember he was from an old Atlanta family that was one of the early investors in Coca-Cola.