CENTRALFLORIDAEPISCOPALIAN NEWS FOR THE EPISCOPAL DIOCESE OF CENTRAL FLORIDA
WWW.CFDIOCESE.ORG
holy cross celebrated history and community
SEE P. 10
MORE NEWS INSIDE:
from bishop brewer, p.3
summer camp wingmann, p. 17
The Presentation: Officers of TT Board, representatives from the Canterbury Retreat Center and an Episcopal Retreat Center in Oveido Florida.
A Celebration of Community in Cooperation & Outreach Melbourne
VOLUME 117, No. 4
MAY 2015
The Story of Trinity Towers: Honoring the
Community Leaders Who Made It Possible!
I
From Holy Trinity
t was 49 years ago that William C. Kelley, Frank A. Burkard and H. William Thornburg sat together one day in a café, and the idea for Trinity Towers was sketched out on a napkin. The idea would require the support of the Melbourne City Council; that happened with the support of Melbourne Mayor Grady W. White and city councilman, George I. Kaufman. Melbourne City attorney, W. Jackson Vaughn also worked on the project. Support was needed in the County Commission; that was provided by Joe Wickham. New ideas require seed money, and Radiation founder, Homer R. Denius supplied the money to send Frank A. Burkard and attorney Ralph Geilich to Washington D.C. to get funding from the federal government. (Radiation was the predecessor corporation to Harris Corp.) It turned out that the federal government would not approve the project initially, because the U.S. department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) considered Melbourne too small a city to sponsor such a project. That is when Fr. Alex Boyer of Holy Trinity Episcopal Church got involved. STORY ON P. 10
Trinity Towers: A Wonderful Story of Community Cooperation
B
From Holy Trinity
etween 1966 and 1982, Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, Melbourne, and many leaders from the wider community worked to build Trinity Towers, three apartment buildings with a total of 510 apartments for the elderly of limited means. These apartments were operated by the Board of Trinity Towers Inc. and Trinity
Towers South Inc. until the buildings were sold to a national nonprofit, Preservation of Affordable Housing Inc. (POAH) in June of 2013. The sale resulted in an endowment for Holy Trinity Episcopal Church of about $7 million. The income on that endowment is being used, in part, to hire an additional priest to provide pastoral care STORY ON P. 4
STORY ON P. 16