A sharecropper's Father's Day legacy

Dorothy Simmons had Georgia on her mind.

Ocilla, Ga., that is.

She moved here in 1954 from the small farming community, but neither the feel of the soil on her fingers nor the life lessons she learned as a girl working on a farm ever left her.

They were her father’s gifts.

Claude Miller was a south Georgia sharecropper and worked until 1994 when he passed at 79.

“My daddy loved farming. He loooved it,” said Dorothy, now a 74-year-old great-grandmother in Palmetto.

She was 18 when she and first husband Alfonso Anderson arrived in Bradenton and settled in the Rogers Garden Apartments. Though times have changed, she felt an immediate kinship with rural Manatee County.

“When I came here there was more farming and families going out on those farms,” Dorothy said. “The daddies, the mamas, the children, all of them teaching them about work ethic.

“I know that’s how we were on the farm. Daddy telling us about life. I know farming isn’t easy, but it had good in it. It taught you something.”


Read more in Sunday's Mannix About Manatee