Any structure, any life, any community is a creation of the often invisible, and a thing always in the process of change. To acknowledge that reality, here Florida Weekly glances back at several individuals whose strength and force will always be a significant part of our ever-changing community. Although they surrendered the living world we share in 2025, they remain prominently part of our world in spirit, citizens of a past that is neither dead nor even past, as the writer William Faulkner once pointed out. The many energies of their acts and souls, even unseen, are sewn into the single enduring fabric of our contemporary lives and our Florida home like bright threads.
These brief tributes to just a few of many come with thanks to all of them and to those who helped make them, from us.
Roberta Sanders
Roberta “Erleene” Sanders. -COURTESY PHOTO
“Erleene,” as people who loved her called Mrs. Roberta Sanders, waited until Independence Day could be celebrated once more before leaving the world on July 6 this year, just 13 days prior to her 81st birthday. Born in Alabama on July 19, 1944, she arrived in the City of Palms from Mississippi at the age of 11, growing through her teenage years into a proud graduate of The Green Wave at Fort Myers High School.
By the time she met and married her husband, Andy — the late George Andrew Sanders — she’d done some traveling and working outside the community, before moving back to devote herself to the family life that brought them two girls, Mary and Dewey, and three grandchildren, Will, Mandy and Andrew.
A consummate wife and mother and “a firecracker in the community,” remembers friend Susan Bennett, she adopted the community at large as her additional offspring, over time devoting herself to organizations that included Edison Community Church, the Fort Myers Rebels, Junior League, Fort Myers Woman’s Community Club, Garden Club, Edison Pageant of Light, and Daughters of the American Revolution.
“If you needed something done and you had Erleene, it would be done at 110%,” Bennett said. “She was one of the forces behind the Edison Pageant, she was a force in the Fort Myers Women’s Club, she did a lot of little things people don’t know about.”
One other quality characterized her: honesty. “She spoke her mind. You knew where Erleene stood on anything that mattered to her. She was a straight shooter.”
A straight shooter about prayer, too.
“The last time I saw her, we were at breakfast at the Oasis, me and my family at one table, Mary Lee Mann and her son at another, and Erleen had just finished all her therapy for cancer.
“She came up to me and said, “I’m out of the woods. I appreciate every prayer every person ever gives me.”
The prayers, perhaps, gave her time to say thank you to a community profoundly grateful for her presence in each and all of her minutes, hours, days and years.
As a formal obituary noted, “she helped change the lives of many young people.” Her story and her journey move forward in them.
Stanley Ink
Stanley Ink. -COURTESY PHOTO
In the difficult summer of 1931, with the Great Depression settling across the United States, Stanley Knight Ink entered the world as an Ohioan, a boy whose parents spent most of the year in Fort Myers.
He grew up attending schools that no longer exist: elementary school in the Gwen Institute downtown and Fort Myers High School at its location in the first half of the 20th century, on the corner of Fowler and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, then called Anderson Avenue.
Stanley’s adult years began almost without pause in Gainesville, where he studied in the College of Engineering at the University of Florida, meeting his future wife, Edith (Dee) Williams. Both graduated in 1953, married, and Stanley joined the United States Air Force. Their oldest child, daughter Sharon Lee, was born the next year. Stanley with his young family found himself stationed in Europe before returning to the states, and to Fort Myers. There, the couple introduced their second child to the world, son James Michael.
Stanley had two, three or four careers, in effect, one of them in military service. He remained in the Air Force reserves for more than 20 years before retiring. Meanwhile, while Dee taught elementary school for 17 years, Stanley founded Ink Engineering, where she eventually stood in as bookkeeper.
With the firm, Stanley became a highly respected shape-maker of the region. Ink Engineering provided both survey and design expertise to help shape Lee County for decades.
That would have been enough for many, but Stanley and Dee, with a taste of long journeys from their military days, undertook traveling as a lifestyle. Over time and often with family or friends, they visited 125 countries in the world.
And that might have been enough for other people, too. But Stanley became a writer, cataloguing their adventures crossing borders internationally with one book of short stories published, and another in the late editing stage, an obituary reports.
There’s an additional thread running through Stanley Ink’s life into ours, too: the muscular but quiet philanthropy he and Dee practiced in the region, offering both money and their own brains and hands-on efforts to a number of non-profit community- devoted organizations in the region.
“When Stan retired, he did work for the Community Cooperative Food Kitchen delivering meals with Morton Goldberg — and that was the long and short of it,” reported Susan Bennett, a lifelong friend. “Morty was short, and Stan was tall. They were Mutt and Jeff (from a long-ago popular comic strip about a tall, stringy character and his short, stout friend).”
Stanley’s obituary, in effect his last words, reflects the quality of his heart: “In lieu of flowers,” it suggests, “Donations can be made to Community Cooperative’s ‘Meals on Wheels’ program.”
Wiley Parker
Wiley Parker. -COURTESY PHOTO
Long, lean and smart as a whip, steady and gentle, modest as a soft afternoon and as ethical and tough as proverbial nails under it, Wiley Parker came from a world that lent him the soft drawl of the Carolinas and the hard talent of a man who could do anything well, and do it with unimpeachable integrity.
Born in 1934 in Spartanburg, S.C., he’d graduated from architecture school at Clemson University and begun work in Atlanta when he was recruited and gifted to southwest Florida in 1962 by the firm McBryde & Frizzell. There, he went to work on the new Edison Community College, now Florida Southwestern State College. Over the years, he did many schools, churches, medical facilities and other projects in the region, including St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, the Pine Island Library, North Fort Myers High School, and the Calusa Nature Center & Planetarium, as well as Edison Community College’s Lely Center in Collier County. In one of his final career projects, he helped restore the Edison Ford Winter Estates.
Through those decades, he raised four children who came and went with his grandchildren for many years in the house he designed, built and shared with his wife, Betty Parker. They lived a couple of doors off the Caloosahatchee River on the north side of McGregor Boulevard in Fort Myers.
Wiley was a founder of Parker Mudgett Smith Architects, where he hired architect Bill Mudgett in 1968.
Mudgett spent much of his working life almost shoulder to shoulder with Wiley and knew him as well as anybody.
“Wiley was a man of absolute integrity,” he said. “He approached life as if it was something he was required to do with an honorable, positive and friendly (demeanor). Every person that ever worked at Parker Mudgett Smith — they all wound up being a good person. That was because of Wiley, because of what they specifically observed in how Wiley went about things.”
He was an ardent conservationist, he championed Riverwalk downtown, and he sailed.
He was no amateur at sea, racing 60-footers in international events, cruising with friends in waters around Florida, the Bahamas and the Caribbean.
And he didn’t just sail, he sailed the right way, like he did everything else, Mudgett said.
“He was the guy that took the helm in the middle of the night — the worst shift. He took it, and he never complained. He allowed his friends and people he thought highly of, the people he sailed with, to (rest easy).”
And now, 91 years after he first set sail, they’re taking the helm so he can rest, “to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield,” as Tennyson wrote of his epic sailor, Ulysses.
Charles Coffman
Charles Coffman. -COURTESY PHOTO
Born on March 8, 1955, in Illinois, when Charles “Chuck” Coffman left the world and his loving wife and fellow musician, Diane Coffman, earlier this month, he’d spent much of his three score and 10 years aiming to make life better for any he saw who needed it.
People who knew him universally say he was the kindest, gentlest man they ever met, but also one of the most ardent defenders of those who were oppressed.
That was his model for living up and down the southwest coast.
“He had the steel of a Jesus in him — he could be the kindest person in the world, but he had this fierce steel, sticking up for little people. He was always resisting oppression to humans wherever it happened, and even though he never had a lot of material goods, he was always the first to go to a hospital when someone he knew was there, the first one to send cards, the first to give whatever he had and could,” said his friend Ella Nayor.
A consummate guitar player and singer with an encyclopedic knowledge of popular songs from the age of musical theater to folk to rock, he performed with Diane, a cellist, at every kind of venue imaginable. A member of The Shalom Life Center in Fort Myers, he also performed at Jewish religious events, adopting his skill and voice to any performance.
“He was a soulful musician who could make a room go quiet with just a few chords,” Diane Coffman remembered in his obituary. “He was a humble, gracious, generous human being. If someone needed help, Chuck was there—no questions asked. He was kind and compassionate, always going out of his way for others, always the first to give and the last to complain. Chuck spent his life giving of himself, his music, and his kindness to others.”
May he be a model for all of us.