SAVING THE DERRY DOWN In 1964 Gram Parsons would open a teen club in a little building on Winter Haven’s Fifth Street. By 2012, the defunct Derry Down had become a warehouse lost to time. The relic of Polk County’s musical paramount was in disrepair and being used for storage. Not everyone had forgotten it, though. The convergence of an author, a persistent Gram fan, a nonprofit, a private developer, and the Winter Haven community would save this cultural landmark in the eleventh hour.
investigating novelist Jack Kerouac. He learned about a thendilapidated Orlando cottage Kerouac shared with his mother in 1957 and 1958. In 1997, Kealing penned a four-thousand-word article about the cottage for The Orlando Sentinel, sparking what would become the Kerouac Project. An all but forgotten abode twenty-something years ago, the Kerouac house is now a fully restored home on the National Register of Historic Places. An ongoing writers-in-residence program is hosted there. In 2004, Kealing published the book Kerouac in Florida: Where the Road Ends.
Ten years ago, Bob Kealing released his book, Calling Me Home: Gram Parsons and the Roots of Country Rock. The author, an Edward R. Murrow and four-time Emmy award-winning broadcast journalist, is no stranger to writing about Florida figures and history – it’s kind of his thing. “My raison d’être is preDisney history. When I got here 30 years ago, I really started to bristle at this notion that Central Florida has no history or culture that predates Walt Disney,” he said.
Throughout the four-and-half-year process of researching and writing Calling Me Home, Kealing traveled from Waycross to Winter Haven, visiting sites relevant to Gram’s story. He interviewed Gram’s best friend, Jim Carlton, for an early background on the country rock pioneer. “I’ll never forget Jim standing in Gram’s old room and just going, ‘Oh my God, the memories are just coming flooding back,’” Kealing said. It was the first time in 40 years Carlton had been back there.
In the mid-nineties working as a freelance writer and reporter with the Orlando NBC television affiliate, Kealing began
The Derry Down before renovation Photo courtesy of Main Street Winter Haven havenmagazines.com
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