By Carnell Hawthorne Jr., Reporter
For more than 20 years, Butch told stories while he worked as a guide and photographer in the Everglades before moving to Suwannee County.
"I entertained people from all over the world," Butch said.
In 1976, Butch gave then Democratic Presidential candidate Edmund Muskie a glades tour during the height of the campaign. Butch also says he entertained actress Dina Merrill, actor Cliff Robertson, NFL Hall of Famer Merlin Olsen and Tom T. Hall, country music legend, among others.
"All my life, if you had a party out there, or if you were fishing and had a slow day out there, then you had to be able to entertain. Ninety-five percent of the stories I tell are my own true life experiences."
Butch tells of how he taught Kermit the Alligator to come at the sound of a call, brewed tin can coffee for weary airboat hunters, gigged frogs for early morning breakfast and wore a light on his head at night to spot night creatures.
"Frogs' eyes shine white like diamonds, gators' eyes shine red like charcoal, and deer eyes are an iridescent green," he said, pulling lines from his self-titled DVD.
"I met doctors, lawyers, judges, writers, photographers and many Seminole Indians. They were all people that had crossed my path," Butch said. "But politics put me out of business in the Everglades."
Plotting Along
Butch later decided it was best to leave the south coast and head upstate. "I moved directly to Suwannee County with family because, like I said, we wanted to become self-sufficient. We bought 142 and a half acres in Newburn, turned it into a turnout facility, a rest for polo ponies."
Following WWII, the game of polo had been reestablished at the Gulf Stream Polo Club. Polo reemerged and began to thrive, Butch explained.
"Primarily we would take polo ponies to my turnout facility and let them rest for seven or eight months. I'd been around horses all my life. As a kid, that area between the ocean and the Everglades was all cattle country."
Butch drifted back to a childhood memory.
"I got my first cracker horse when I was 10 years old. Billy," Butch said before spelling out the name letter by letter. "B-I-L-L-Y, was his name.
He was a marsh tacky, a descendant of the first Spanish horses that Ponce de Leon brought to Florida," Butch smiled, tossing in another tidbit of Florida history. "What people don't realize is that cattle and horses started right here in Florida in 1521 with Ponce de Leon."
He continued.
"And that's when I started messing with the polo horses. I got to know everyone around the game of polo -- the best of the best. Then we made arrangements to transport horses from here to Alaska and everywhere in between."
By this time Butch had reached the age of 40.
"I made my living with my vision and my left eye was my dominant eye," Butch said. "I was in a business where I couldn't be rigorously honest and I didn't know how to get out. God suddenly did for me what I couldn't do for myself. He took away the vision in my left eye."
Doctors discovered a retinal occlusion, which trapped blood from arteries in his retina, Butch said. Since then he's worn the patch.
Piecing it Together
"I went through a deep depression when I lost my eyesight," said 75-year-old Butch. That was about 10 years ago.
Butch, who had always been surrounded by nature, found himself in menial jobs that trapped his free spirit. He tried his hand at temporary work, first as a door greeter at Wal-Mart for nearly a year. Then he landed a part-time position as an information specialist at the Nature and Heritage Tourism Center in White Springs.
"I was there eight or nine months," he said, "but then the state started having cutbacks of temporary employees and they let me go."
"A good friend of mine from grade school, Lucian Williams, was living in Gainesville at the time," Butch said. "Lucian was a computer buff, and he began looking all over the computer trying to find me a job. But, there's not a lot of jobs out there for an old one-eyed man," Butch smiled.
"Wait'll you hear the next one now," Butch paused and steadied himself for the best part of the story.
"Lucian called me one day and said, 'I just looked outside my front door and there's a pickup truck sitting over there with this man's name on it, and underneath his name it says: Storyteller.' Lucian said to me, maybe this is what you need to do since you been BS'ing us all your life."
It seemed that telling stories was exactly what Butch was meant to do.
"I quickly replied to Lucian: 'Get me a phone number,' and the rest is history."
The transition was simple, Butch said.
"I been storytelling all my life, but only for the last eight years as a professional."
A Good Ending
Nowadays, Butch happily carries the name "Florida Cracker," a term he says derived from the sound of the cracking whip used by Florida's early cattlemen and Anglo settlers.
He travels and speaks to school children, at state parks and places all in between -- telling Florida's story, which he affectionately calls "my story." He carries along in his croker sack the skins of raccoons, deer, alligators, gray foxes, bobcats, skunks, otters and the horns of white-tailed deer. And he doesn't hesitate to show off his cracker whip. It's all part of the story for Butch.
"As long as God lets me, I just want to continue telling the stories of Florida and its rich past," he says. "God has allowed me to live and do a number of different things. I never planned to do any of this."
