Our own ‘Green Acres’

ESTO HAD NO Jews or Catholics when I was growing up, and nearly no Yankees or Republicans. The same was true for most of Holmes County. But there was one Jewish family, the Balabans, who owned a farm outside the county seat of Bonifay.

Steve Balaban was in our class from first through sixth grade, when his family moved north. He had an older brother, Mike, and a younger sister, Rachel.

I always wondered how they ended up in Bonifay — even more so after reading last fall about their Aunt Judy Balaban’s death in the Hollywood Reporter. During her glamorous long life she dated actors Montgomery Clift and Merv Griffin, married Tony Franciosa and was a bridesmaid at Grace Kelly’s wedding to Prince Rainier of Monaco. Her father, Barney Balaban, was president of Paramount Pictures from 1936 to 1964. Her brother Red Balaban was a noted jazz musician. The actor Bob Balaban is her first cousin.

I wanted to know more. Fortunately, Steve and I reconnected last year while we were planning our 50th high school reunion. It seemed a little strange that someone who’d left long before we graduated would be interested in the reunion. But it soon became clear that Steve had fond and formative memories from his early years in the county, and so did the rest of his family.

An email exchange with his brother Mike revealed more of the story.

“Yes, our dad was a jazz musician and the son of a movie mogul,” Mike wrote. “He was a renegade from the time he was 12. There probably was some romantic notion to the original scheme to move to a rural existence, perhaps a bit of F-U to his parents, and a lot of just plain rebellion. Dad never did what others did or would have been expected to do.”

After graduating from Brown University, where he met his wife, Micki, Leonard “Red” Balaban left his privileged life and came to study animal husbandry at the University of Florida extension. In 1952 the Balabans moved to Holmes County and bought an 800-acre farm. After a year as a dairy, the place they called Lookout Plantation became a cattle ranch where they raised 300 prize head of purebred American Angus cattle — and three kids.

“Both my parents were eager to escape their confining families,” Mike wrote. “Like Lisa and Oliver Wendell Douglas on Green Acres, they traveled from Gainesville looking for a farm to buy and found the place outside of Bonifay.”

The Balabans’ famous family visited them down on the farm.

“Lookout Plantation was just a fancy name,” Mike wrote. “The centerpiece was a ramshackle old white Florida farmhouse with everything falling apart and needing repairs. My Hollywood aunt, Judy, Red’s sister, who died in October at 91, told me that when their parents and she came to visit us early in our time in Bonifay, she woke up one night to find the walls and bed covered with good old Florida cockroaches.”

His father studied music and learned to play Dixieland jazz while running the ranch.

“As a teenager, he had begun hanging out with jazz musicians at clubs in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village,” Mike wrote. “They would become his lifelong friends, visit us on Lookout Plantation in Bonifay, and help him learn on the ranch how to play ukulele, then banjo, then guitar, etc., which eventually — along with how much money he was losing — fueled his decision to sell the farm, move north and become a jazz musician full time.” From 1975 to 1985 he owned and ran Eddie Condon’s club on West 54th Street in Manhattan and led a rotating all-star group that included some of the veteran jazz players he revered.

During their years in Bonifay, the Balabans were seen as sophisticated and exotic, especially by local standards.

“When I was 13,” Mike wrote, “despite having had little instruction in Judaism, I had to be bar mitzvahed for the sake of my paternal grandfather, who was not only president of Paramount Pictures but also head of the B’nai B’rith charity. My parents paid the 16-year-old daughter of local Quaker (!) friends to drive me to Dothan every Friday night for six months for Hebrew instruction. At the ceremony I was petrified, but fortunately it went smoothly, and I was a hit with my Bonifay friends at their first-ever bar mitzvah: As the bar mitzvah boy, I was able to procure alcoholic drinks for them.”

The Balabans gained acceptance and became locally prominent during their 15 years in Holmes County. Red was elected vice president of the American Angus Association. The kids made friends and played sports. Their parents helped found, act in and direct plays at the Spanish Trail Playhouse in Chipley, which is still producing plays today.

People of a certain age in Bonifay remember the Balabans — and, as it happens, their years on the farm still spark happy memories for them as well.

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Remembering Anna’s lemon pound cake

By MIKE BALABAN

In 1952, Red and Micki Balaban bought a cattle ranch five miles north of Bonifay and moved there with their 3-month-old son, me.

Despite being northerners, we easily integrated into the community and remained residents until 1967. During that time, Micki and Red expanded their family with the addition of my brother Steve and our baby sister Rachel. Managing a growing family led our mom to realize she needed some assistance. She found a reliable helper in town, Anna Phillips, who became a steadfast presence in our lives throughout our time in Bonifay.

Anna played the role of surrogate mother, often driving us to town or to school events. She cooked our meals and maintained our home, and also imparted practical southern life lessons, like how to catch a fish. Among the memories of our time with Anna are the delicious meals she cooked for us, her infectious sense of humor, and visits to her home, where we ate salted watermelon on the porch.

Anna delighted us with her favorite dishes. Two recipes in particular captivated us so much that we asked her to write them down and teach us to make them: her lemon pound cake and her buttermilk biscuits. These recipes have endured for more than 65 years and we continue to savor both dishes. Just last night, my brother Steve and I and our families relished Anna’s pound cake after our weekly Sunday dinner in San Diego, prompting this story.

Reflecting on our time as the sole Jewish family in Holmes County, we were uncertain whether we would be accepted. But we were. We went to temple in Dothan, Alabama, some weekends, but more often were to be found with our friends at services in their Baptist and Methodist churches. Years later, my classmate Mary Matthews reassured me. “My minister mama taught us that Jews were the chosen people,” she said. “And your family was just so exotic looking. We wanted to BE y’all!” 

More than half a century after we left, I’m told our ranch on the Poplar Springs Road — we called it Lookout Plantation — has been split up, but is still referred to as “the old Balaban place.”

The last time we saw Anna in person was in 2008 during a family visit to Bonifay. Despite a few added years, Anna remained unchanged, inquiring about each family member with the characteristic gleeful laugh we knew from our childhood days.

Anna died in 2015 and is buried in the Bonifay cemetery. She was special to us, and today we remember and celebrate her by continuing to use the recipes she taught us to love more than half a century ago.

READ MORE: “Micki Balaban (1929-2024) left her mark“