Cleo's Corner - About Us

Hello. My name is Cleo Robertson and I grew up in Pass-a-Grille from 1941 to 1956. At that time I left home to earn my fame and fortune and didn’t return to live here until 1994. For a number of years I wrote for local papers but with the advent of the new website, St. Pete Beach Today, I am very excited to be able to share with you insights, information, news, travel tales, nature up dates and other things of interest through Cleo’s Corner.

This first issue is about the St. Pete Beach Today website. When I first envisioned the St. Pete Beach Today website over six years ago, my hope was to be able to bring a feeling of community and fun to our residents, guests and visitors. Back then my son, Randy, helped me develop the format and we included a discussion section because the city was going through some pretty big decision-making issues, in particular, should the Bayway Bridge be 60’ high or remain a drawbridge.

The bridge was put up as an Issue on the site, and about twenty people wrote in their pros and cons and one hit the mark for me. A person wrote “Vina and SPB residents, do you realize that with a drawbridge there are cars, trucks, buses and motorcycles waiting for it to open three times per hour and that all the pollution is drifting right into your homes?”

Bingo. Okay, some argued that it drifted up too, but no one could really say that a low bridge was best for any reason. I drove to visit a friend in Apalachicola and saw the high bridge they built there in an estuary and loved it--it looked like a Frank Lloyd Wright art project! I came home convinced and then the whole bridge project was put on hold by the state. I started traveling and forgot all about the website.

However, sometime around last November, I kept hearing my neighbors speak of discontent, lawsuits, lack of respect and confusion. I decided to revive the website with the goal in mind of giving us all a chance to see what is here in this very special Paradise, to communicate with each other through discussions, to post our photos and memories of growing up here and overall, to build a feeling of community.

The results tell the story for themselves. We went live in June of 2009, and now just two months later, we have had over 2,100 new people go to the site in August alone and over 13,000 total visits in 3.5 months. Our hits are well over 515,085 for that period of time, with hits representing how many pages each person went to. Our FaceBook account for the website has over 750 “friends” and is growing daily.

The St. Pete Beach Today team has taken it far beyond my expectations, so I want to introduce to you the remarkable people who are making this site happen.

First, we have Woody Pelt who has worked with me for several years on producing a video of Pass-a-Grille (see Photo Albums) and other projects. He brings humor, insight and his own visioning to the site which you can enjoy in the article on the Red Tide. It is also because of Woody that we have the video of the baby turtle waddling to the Gulf on its’ first journey away from its nest.

It was Woody, also, who had the vision of putting every business on St. Pete Beach on a map, with a link to their website and menu, and he personally went out and gathered all the data. He also felt that every business needed to be shown, whether or not the business could afford to pay. And so it is. We ask businesses to contribute $110 per year as a sponsor. But if they can’t (and we know things are tough right now), then they can still be represented…just with a smaller sign. Thanks Woody for your good insights, humor and dedication to the value of this site.

Mike Hebert is a master designer and developer who we were lucky enough to get because he was waiting on data for one of his systems integration projects. Just proves some things are meant to be. Mike brought organization, insight and management to the overall plan so we now operate in a very tight, regulated system that keeps things from falling through the cracks. He has innovated page design, gotten our site to be recognizable by search engines and other technical aspects which I didn’t even know we needed. But he did. And he has done a magnificent job of managing all of our efforts to produce a simple-to-use, yet comprehensive site. Miracles truly do happen.

Last, but certainly not least, came 23-year old Cory Chlapowski. I met her father, Van, in the alley behind the Fire station (he is a SPB firefighter). He complimented me on the site and I said, “Yeah, well find me someone to RUN it!” His face immediately changed and he said, “Well, my daughter is looking for her first job this very day--she just graduated from college,” and I said, “Well send her to me.”

By 1 p.m. Cory was hired and we haven’t looked back since. I knew I had hit on a winner one day early on when I was sitting at the computer showing her how to do something complicated and she said, “That’s alright Cleo, I’ll figure it out.” And she did and has, again and again and again. It is Cory’s voice you hear on the phone, cordial, helpful and full of spirit. Cory has learned the database and entered all the businesses into it, she posts all the articles, puts together the videos, answers all questions and keeps a smile on her face the whole time. It is because of Cory that I could leave for two weeks to go to Sanoviv Health Institute for my annual health check up.

At the current time the cost of funding the development and management of the site has been covered by private funding. It is hoped that as “supporters,” those businesses who stand to benefit the most from the site, see the benefit of their presence on the map, that they will pay the $110 per year for the link to their website, etc. It is only by the involvement of the businesses that this site will continue to grow.

In the future I will share some of my travel experiences, snorkeling trips up and down PAG beach, and other things I hope you will find of interest.

This is the first “Corner” we are making available to you. But others will follow. Sally Yoder, who also grew up in Pass-a-Grille, will write articles about our history (Sally is Director of the Gulf Beaches Historical Museum located on 10th avenue in PAG).

I sincerely hope you enjoy reading what we have to share and if you have something about our area you want to share, just click on the Discussions button to your left and find the topic you want to discuss. You may also send photos or information to us via the Contact Us button on the Home Page. Welcome to the St. Pete Beach Today website.

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