The table sits in my home today, quietly doing what it has been doing for more than fifty years. Most people would see an old dining room table; I see a table I played underneath during summer days and weekend sleepovers. My cousin, Sherri, the neighborhood girls, and I draped sheets and blankets across it and crawled underneath, turning the space beneath it into a fort or a private clubhouse. That table became whatever we needed it to be. There was even a servant’s bell under the carpet that I remember my legs and feet were not long enough to reach. I do not remember anyone ever using it for its intended purpose. We certainly used it for ourselves as we thought we were clever hiding beneath the table, ringing it, then listening as the adults stopped what they were doing, as if it was the front doorbell. Eventually, one of them would realize. The children were under the table again.
One thing my father always did and demonstrated was to make room at the table. All through the years, well into his last days, on holidays and birthdays and ordinary get-togethers, there were people we did not actually know, sitting right there with the rest of us. Dad had decided somewhere along the way that a stranger without anywhere else to go was still someone worth feeding. That table hosted elegant dinner parties and important guests, but that was never all it was. To me, it was not a $10,000 table from Paris to be admired from a careful distance. It was my fort, my clubhouse, restaurant, and classroom. If this table could speak, it could tell an incredible story. It cannot. Here is the story I remember, one you will never hear anyone else tell.
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When I share who my father was, the conversation usually goes one of two ways. They look up to the left to draw from their memory; these days you must go way back. “Glenn Turner?” “Oh, the castle in Winter Park?” “I remember him, haunted castle, right?” Or their face freezes and they try a slight smile like they are trying to swallow food they don’t like. “I’ve heard of him. Wow, I didn’t know that.” Depending on whom you ask, my father is remembered as a Con Man or Saint—his own words, not mine.
The Glenn W. Turner the public knew was a performer and loved the spotlight, the spectacle, the showmanship. He had private jets, bodyguards, and a billboard downtown welcoming people to Orlando. He would run down an aisle of a thousand people and “con” them into believing in themselves. He built businesses that grew faster than any law could keep up with. There were television cameras, magazine covers, and a fifty-thousand-square-foot castle made of Georgia marble on a lake, with seventy-two acres, rising from the orange groves of Central Florida. Some people remember only the rise. Most like to remember only the fall; it’s human nature.
I remember Dad. I remember him sitting on the floor and playing with me. He was my bucking bronco, and he would try to throw me off his back while I held on for eight seconds. I remember him telling stories with intensity, others as silly jokes a young child could understand. He taught in parables. His life verse, Mark 9:23: all things are possible to him that believeth. I remember hearing him say, “This too shall pass,” so many times that I still hear those words whenever life becomes difficult. I remember him ordering banana pudding at every little country kitchen we ever stopped at together, and afterward, closing one eye in the car and announcing he had “banana pudding eye” and could no longer see to drive, which was how, years before I ever took a real lesson, I learned to steer a car from the passenger seat with one hand, my father still technically behind the wheel the whole time. I also remember watching him lose almost everything but not really knowing at the time that he was losing it.
I am putting all of it on the table; I am quite literally an open book. The table came to be in my home after his death. It has outlasted companies, castles, arguments, victories, and losses. My family now gathers around it, newer hands resting where older ones once did, adding their own marks to the ones already there. These are the stories this old table has held for more than half a century. Now it is my turn to tell them.
Dad and me.