From his days as a Sarasota County Historical Society assistant to his years in charge of the county Parks and Recreation department, John McCarthy has devoted himself to saving pieces of Southwest Florida for future generations. As the newly named executive director of SCOPE (Sarasota County Openly Plans for Excellence), he now oversees the collection of data on the region. We spoke to him about the most important data points of his being.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY EVAN SIGMUND
Florida Highwaymen I’m a Floridian by birth and always had a passion for art. I had a collection of Highwaymen paintings before the prices skyrocketed so much. A painting by Tracy Newtown, a second-generation Highwaymen artist, is painted on a board and framed with crown molding trim. They didn’t ever use canvas. I love how from a distance it looks so detailed, but up close, it looks so simple.
Boat Building I build cedar strip kayaks. I have a workshop set up in my house. My dad was a boat builder—canoes, kayaks, dingies, anything anyone wanted. When he passed away, I inherited the canoe shop. I don’t do it for a living, but will do it for a friend. I have a fleet myself. We take rough-cut boards from a sawmill, plane them, beat and cover them. It’s a day’s work before I have material to use.
Data SCOPE is the keeper of this community’s data on wealth, demographics, education and everything going back to our founding. Our job is to curate the history of the community.
Obituaries Tons of the people come to Sarasota to retire and ultimately to pass away here. Often, people would call and ask, ‘what have you got on this person?’ An obituary can lead you to other things, like what groups this person was active in. If you want to read cool stuff, read these obits. You learn this guy invented a washing machine or a type of car, and they all ended up in Sarasota.
Turtle Patrol I was eager to work on preserving turtle populations. Manasota Key is the densest nesting colony on the west coast of Florida. At one point I was responsible to state and county government to get egg-by-egg accounting in a summer. Excel didn’t exist yet, so I had a chart with lines drawn with a ruler, and as volunteers would turn in their own papers, I was there with a pencil, adding it up to send to the state. At the time, volunteers would move nests closer to the shore because they thought more turtles would survive– I didn’t find that to be the case. We were actually raising up a better distribution of turtles leaving the nests alone, and we wouldn't have learned that if not for weighing data gathered by the patrols. Numbers tell a fascinating story.
Jack West I met Jack West, the artist and architect, when I was 19. While he didn’t say much, he talked about stuff to preserve history, and about what we should do to plan the future in Sarasota. He worshipped old buildings, but asked, ‘what of the future?’ Thirty years after I met him, I hired him as general manager of Sarasota County Parks and Recreation to restore the first building he built, the Nokomis Beach Plaza.
Walden I was not doing well in English, but I grabbed this book. It felt like something I had written–looking for answers through a connection to nature and how things work. I would take classes at Manatee Community College on whatever his name was attached to. I got into his classics, and love his writings mostly on man’s relationship to nature.
Model Doll Home I have a seven-foot tall, five-story dollhouse, done in one-sixth scale, 11-and-a-half inch fashion doll scale. It’s a complete replica of the home my wife and I live in, made from materials from how we furnished the home. The furniture all comes from Home Resource and Light Up My Life. When I did a 10-by-10 presentation at Mandeville, my 10 slides were of the dollhouse; it was all an analogy for community building.
