Hank Played Here

Arlene Harrison made her way upstairs at Roberts Hall where her attention was diverted by something she didn’t expect to see.

She turned to Harry Warnberg and asked, “Do you see light up there?”

The appearance of a mysterious, luminous aura or the ghost of Hank Williams Sr. would have been deemed plausible by people familiar with the hall. But instead, there was a far more prosaic explanation that accounted for the shining.

A wall had separated from the roof.

Warnberg, a career Army man who was heading up an effort to restore the building that would consume six years, was unfazed, as was his manner.

“He was not a builder,” said Warnberg’s daughter, Charlotte Moreau. “He was not a carpenter in the military, but he was a Green Beret, and he learned how to do everything. He’d see a problem and figure out a solution and fix it.”

Warnberg, who died at age 90 in 2023, procured four of the biggest bolts he could find and closed the gap, cinching the wayward wall to the rafters. The bolt heads and washers remain visible at the exterior of the building.

The issue was far from the only surprise Warnberg and a team of volunteers encountered in working to stabilize and bring up to code a structure that was built by Leslie James “Lee Jay” Roberts in 1912 after he moved to Lynn Haven, Florida, from Idaho. Located at Florida Avenue and 9th Street, it has been one of the most prominent buildings in the city ever since.

Odd Fellows Lodge noble grand Arlene Harrison recounts the history of Roberts Hall, which opened in 1912 as a focal point of Lynn Haven, an early planned community established by Yankee Civil War veterans. Photo by Andrew Wardlow Photography

Roberts was a community-minded businessman. He rented the ground floor of his namesake building to operators of a restaurant, a mercantile and other concerns. But the upstairs he reserved for events and, at times, essential public functions. Dances were held there and political rallies and fundraising dinners. School classes were conducted at the hall after a student, upset with his grades, burned Lynn Haven Elementary School to the ground.

From the beginning, members of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows conducted meetings at the hall, and in 1922, they acquired it for $4,000 and closed the second floor to the public. It would be reserved for lodge members and meetings.

Among downstairs tenants, the one most remembered by Lynn Haven residents is Papa and Kitty Lloyd’s Country Store.

Arlene Harrison, a retired nurse, is the noble grand at the Odd Fellows Scarlet Lodge No. 75, owners of Roberts Hall in Lynn Haven. Harrison was influential in establishing the hall as a community events center. Photo by Andrew Wardlow Photography

“It had everything you needed from feed for livestock to bolts of fabric,” Harrison said. “They were here for 43 years. Not a week goes by when I don’t hear someone say, ‘Oh, I used to come in here and buy penny candy and sodas.’”

A bench outside the hall served as a bus stop for students awaiting delivery to Bay High School near downtown Panama City.

“There were all kinds of things scratched on the side of the building,” Harrison said. “Jerry and Barbara. Then Barbara was crossed out and it was Sally. We hated to cover it all up, but we had to paint.”

The genesis of the restoration effort was a 2007 tour of the hall, known familiarly by then as The Country Store, by members of the preservationist Lynn Haven Heritage Society. With special permission from the Odd Fellows, the delegation was permitted to go upstairs.

They concluded unequivocally that the building must be saved and tabbed Warnburg, Richard Walker and James Dean as leaders of the actual restoration work.

The trio met with lodge members in January 2008 and offered to see to the hall’s refurbishment by raising funds, arranging for workers, and completing repairs and improvements free of charge.

The offer was refused.

The lodge was concerned about exposure to liability in the event that a non-member was injured while working on the building. They had no insurance to cover outsiders. It was left to Libby Tunnell and Lyn Hindsman of the Heritage Society to suggest a workaround: The liability issue might be avoided if workers on the building were to become lodge members. And that they did.

Restoration work commenced in May 2008, and less than two months later, progress was obvious to the crowd that gathered for the city’s Fourth of July parade. Two sides of the building had been cleared of tar-paper covering, stripped of nails, scraped and painted.

“The building was no longer an eyesore when viewed from the City Hall and Highway 77 to the east,” wrote Warnberg in a book he titled If It Were Easy, Anybody Could Do It: A History of the Restoration of Roberts Hall, 2008-2014. Only a few copies of the spiral-bound book were produced, enough to ensure that documentation of the project would not vanish.

The project was not universally popular. For some, it did not marry up with their vision for the future of Florida Avenue. In 2012, Main Street Program work began in the area of the hall. In March of that year, the city’s building inspector closed down the building pending receipt of a satisfactory code completion study and structural evaluation report by an agreed-upon engineering firm.

The Heritage Society, the Odd Fellows and most especially Warnburg were undaunted. Telling Warnburg he couldn’t do something, his daughter said, was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. Red meant green.

Early on, Warnberg consulted a contractor and asked whether the building could feasibly be leveled and was told it couldn’t be done.

“He knew better,” Moreau said. “He devised his own way of slowly raising a corner of the building with a bunch of jacks spaced a foot apart. He contacted the house mover Ducky Johnson, and Ducky’s brother Wayne came out to look at what he was doing. Wayne said, ‘You are doing exactly what I would do,’ and Dad pressed on.”

Warnberg raised the sagging corner of the hall a quarter-inch a day, stopping at seven inches. Nine inches would have gotten him to level, but he feared that if he went any farther, he would crack the plaster walls upstairs.

Audience members react to a comedy set during the show. Behind them are murals painted in 1941 by John Zelm, who depicted elements of both Florida and the Holy Land. Photo by Andrew Wardlow Photography

On those walls, John Zelm, a Lithuanian immigrant, painted a series of murals in 1941. They combine, in fantastic fashion, subtropical topography with mountains and waterfalls. Harrison said some believe that the paintings were intended to unite Florida and the Holy Land.

“A picture of a waterfall with palm trees, it kind of floored us,” said Zelm’s granddaughter, Joyce Fox, recalling a visit she made to an open house at Roberts Hall in 2009. For many years, she had known that her grandfather had completed paintings at the hall, but because she wasn’t a member, she couldn’t get upstairs to see them. (And for a long while, because she was a woman, she couldn’t become a member.)

When Fox, accompanied by Zelm’s daughter, arrived upstairs, guide Bob Schultz informed her that the murals were the work of an itinerant painter who happened to come through town.

Recalled Fox, “I said, ‘Nah-ah, that was my grandfather who did them, and he lived on Chestnut Street behind the old post office in St. Andrews.’ From then on, they changed their story.”

The murals provided much of the motivation for saving the building. So did a chapter in the tragically short life of Hank Williams, who played at Roberts Hall as a singer with the Pappy Neal McCormick Band. Williams was a member of the band, led by the “inventor of the four-sided guitar,” from 1938 to 1941 and hooked up with McCormick occasionally as a guest thereafter. 

Harrison once met a woman, then in her 80s, who said she knew Williams very well when he lived with his mother in a Lynn Haven boarding house.

“She told me, ‘We swam all day and danced all night, and I was his only girlfriend when he was here. I guess he was satisfied with me.’”

As to the restoration project, it didn’t hurt that Warnberg, a musician himself, was a Hank Williams fan.

These days, Harrison, a retired critical care nurse, is Scarlet Lodge No. 75’s noble grand, and Roberts Hall has been established as a community event space and listening room, upstairs and down.

When the restoration was ongoing, Moreau said, “My dad and Arlene and I would sit in Dad’s living room and ask ourselves, ‘What are we doing this for? Why are we restoring this building if we are going to rent it out as offices? Why are we breaking our backs?’ What we wanted to see was for the building to become a hall used by the community that would generate rental-fee income to support the charitable mission of the Odd Fellows.”

Its progress that way was interrupted by COVID-19, but it has since gained momentum.

Tim Parrish, the lodge’s mild-mannered warden and, like Harrison, a nurse, helps book shows at Roberts Hall. He has long been part of the Bay County music scene through years in which he had a country band, Emerald County Line; a rock band, One Track Mind; and a trio, Tequila Mockingbird, that played Top 40 hits.

Ryan Ivey and his daughter Meadow, 7, paint a portrait of John Lennon as part of a variety show at Roberts Hall. Photo by Andrew Wardlow Photography

When in 2015, Parrish had booked shows at downtown Panama City venues and arrangements fell apart, he turned to Roberts Hall and has been hanging around ever since.

In recent months, the hall has welcomed performers including the rising eclectic star Abe Partridge and Steve Winwood’s daughter, Lilly.

It has hosted weddings, Thanksgiving dinners and activities of other nonprofits.

The Warnberg/Moreau/Harrison vision is being realized.

In an author’s note that appears in his book, Warnberg wrote:

“I never hesitated to resort to the expedient to accomplish a mission, and (in restoring Roberts Hall) I was somewhat casually observant of the burdensome procedures that were held sacred by bureaucrats.

“On the world stage in conflicts between nations, the winner writes the history. On the local level, perhaps the same obtains — I am writing the History of the Restoration of Roberts Hall.”