Mike learned to engrave as a junior in high school, and this skill became his specialty in the jewelry business. Ray ran the DuBose Jewelry Vero Mall store and Mike ran the downtown location. John became a schoolteacher in Stuart after his years of service but later joined the business. Mike, as the third son, did not have to serve. Ray and John went on to serve in Korea, one as a tank commander and the other as an office worker, but both of them bunked together, strictly by chance. At the height of the Vietnam War when a lottery determined when and if a person would serve, all three sons were picked in the same lottery. Robert DuBose and his wife, Patsy, had three sons, John, Ray and Mike. DuBose sold his optometry practice to his grandson, B.Q. He also served on the Vero Beach City Council. He ran the business and saw it begin to expand beyond Vero Beach. He took over management after Oscar’s untimely death in 1956. Oscar DuBose’s son, Robert (1927-2018), joined the family jewelry business in 1949 after serving in the Navy during World War II. It was known then as DuBose and Son Jewelers. In 1933, DuBose decided to concentrate on his optometry practice and in 1934 his son, Oscar (1900-1956), took over the jewelry store, moving it to 14th Avenue where it would remain well into the 1990s. Their son would later take over one of the DuBose businesses. He eventually became the station agent for the Florida East Coast Railway in Wabasso, a position he held for the next 43 years. Waddell had moved from Washington, Georgia, to Sebastian at age 10 to earn a living as a fisherman, but in 1921 he was hired at the Vero train station. In 1925, he and 129 other civic leaders went by train to Tallahassee and convinced the legislature to create Indian River County from the northern section of St. DuBose helped start the Vero Beach Chamber of Commerce in 1923 and served as its second president for 10 years. By then he had moved his family to Vero and opened his first business on Old Dixie Highway. He began practicing optometry in 1919, the same year Vero became incorporated. Waddell, Jr., is part of a family that has practiced optometry in Vero Beach since 1919. Later, DuBose founded the First Baptist Church of Wabasso.ĭr. DuBose opened a store, the Jewelry Gift Center and by 1915, the First Baptist Church of Vero was established to serve the spiritual needs of 15 of those souls. He preached, performed marriages and officiated at funerals as early as 1913 in Narrows, Sebastian, Wabasso, Winter Beach, Vero, Okeechobee, Fort Drum and Fort Pierce. He saw the potential even though Vero was only a handful of souls. The lineage began in 1912, when an itinerant ordained minister, optometrist and jeweler, James Calvin (J.C.) DuBose (1878-1953), came by bicycle from his home in White City. As Vero Beach celebrates its centennial year, we recognize some of those businesses and the families who started them.ĭuBose is a name synonymous with Vero Beach. But some weathered all those changes and still exist today, operated by descendants of those early settlers. Businesses created by earlier settlers either changed hands, moved on or failed. Over time, settlements became communities, then cities. Then a second wave of settlers came with skills and enterprises further fueling the growing community. They may have settled because nature provided a means of survival (farming, hunting, fishing), but as their communities grew and economies developed, those families diversified by providing services that catered to their neighbors. Just about every community, town or city had its origins with pioneer families who, sometime in the past, decided to put down roots in a particular location. Some of Vero Beach’s oldest businesses remain in family hands today
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