History

Deal Sealed With Friendship

Lance Ponton and Bobby Diez came from similar backgrounds, but it took 1,100 acres to bring them together.

LUTZ - If he'd had sons, he might have hung on to it.
He always figured he would die on his land, in the home he bought for $1,000 back when everybody liked Ike. It suited him and his wife, that pretty city girl from Ybor he had wooed with horse tricks and Cracker charm.
Bobby Diez would have taught his boys how to hunt bobcats, repair the barbed wire and round up the cattle when they strayed.
But his three girls couldn't have cared less about cows. Nowadays, they're too busy being grandmothers.
When Diez finally decided he'd had enough of ranching six years ago at the age of 80, developers swarmed like the mosquitoes he swatted away at dusk.
On a Hillsborough County map crosshatched with residential streets and cul-de-sac curlicues, Diez's remaining 1,100 acres were a tempting swath of unblemished green.
With so little land left to develop in an area marked by the encroaching neighborhoods of Lutz, New Tampa and Pasco County, everybody wanted a piece.
Twelve suitors came calling.
With his city-slicker looks, gold chains and fancy haircut, Lance Ponton, 59, looked like one of the developer pack. But by the time the men stood wingtips to cowboy boots to shake on the deal, both of them agreed: No matter what happened on the business side, their friendship meant more.
Four years after the final payout, as bulldozers chew up the land, Diez and Ponton continue to share a bond that neither predicted.
"I don't think either one of us was trying - it just happened that way," Diez says. "I consider him a friend, and you can count the friends I've got on two or three fingers."
Not once has anything like this happened to Ponton, either. In 28 years in the real estate investment business and as chief executive officer of Cordoba Development, he has done his share of deals. But nothing like this one.
"It's the first time I ever made friends with a seller," he says. "I told Bobby that even if he made the deal with somebody else, I was still going to come up here and take him out for coffee every week."
Something about Diez, his quiet and kind ways, his modest chuckle and deep love of his land, touched Ponton's heart. He couldn't simply win the old man's signature, bid adios and start bulldozing.
"I told him that no matter what, we would shake hands and ride off into the sunset together. Literally."
Four years after the deal closed, the two men still ride horses every Sunday morning, checking on the progress.
Both are comfortable in the saddle. Despite Ponton's big-city ways, he has more than a touch of country boy in him.
"We grew up in the same way," the Tampa native says. "I, too, grew up on a small farm. We're a lot alike.
"I think Bobby was just too busy working to make a lot of friends."
It's not so much that Diez has outlived most of his contemporaries, although that is certainly true. It's more that the rancher grew up in a time when a man's primary relationships were with family. With them, you shared your confidences, your trust, your livelihood.
As the 15th child born to parents from Spain, Diez grew up on a small Belmont Heights dairy farm packed with brothers and sisters. Some of his older siblings' children were his playmates.
Today, Diez and his wife, Pilar, live next door to Diez's brother Earl in a house adjacent to the 5 acres the old cowboy kept. The house in which Bobby and Pilar raised their family is gone - razed to make way for the entrance to Cordoba Ranch, an upscale residential development.
"I couldn't watch them do it," Bobby Diez says quietly.
Soon, his view will be of spas and screened pools and landscaping and all the other trappings of million-dollar homes.
"I don't know what that's going to be like," he says, pondering the construction site from his back porch. "Never had neighbors."

Still A Cowboy
All that ranching, all that fresh air, all that hard work seem to have molded a robust and healthy octogenarian, but he didn't start out that way. Bobby was so puny when he was born, his parents could see no reason to record the event. He wasn't going to make it. To this day, he celebrates his birthday two days later, when his parents began thinking the little fella might have a chance.
The Diez family lived hand to mouth, and everybody worked to keep their bellies full. As the youngest, Diez considered himself the lucky one because he got to go to school. After the morning milking, he walked an hour to Hillsborough High.
His classmates didn't know what to make of him. His father's 10-acre dairy was on the "Negro" side of Belmont Heights, which was rigidly divided white from black. His father, who delivered milk from a horse wagon, never learned to speak English. Mingling with down-on-their-luck transplants from the deep South during the Depression years, Diez came to dress and speak like a country boy.
"The kids called me a Cracker," he says, laughing. "I call myself the Spanish Cracker."
The Belmont Heights cowboy caught the eye of an Ybor City princess, the daughter of an actress and a musician who were well-known performers in Ybor clubs. Graced with natural beauty, Pilar and her sister worked as models.
Even though she was used to dating boys with city ways and clean fingernails, Pilar remembers that Bobby "hit her strong" when they met at Hillsborough High.
"He'd come riding to my house on his horse, and everybody would say, 'Here comes your cowboy! Here comes your Roy Rogers!' They thought he was somebody big," she says.
The couple have been married 65 years.
"When I saw him, and I saw all those city girls around him, I grabbed him," Pilar says. "I think he's still my cowboy."
As a newlywed in his early 20s, Bobby Diez tried to make a go of it in the city, working as a salesman at a furniture store with his brother-in-law.
"I hated that job," he says.
When he could bust free, he would head to the wilderness of northern Hillsborough County to hunt.

Fresh Air And Open Skies
He got to know a guy who owned a few thousand acres there, way out in the country. One day, the man told Diez that he had almost been crushed when his tractor flipped on top of him. He wanted out.
Diez, who longed to return to fresh air and open skies, snapped up the nearly 5,000 acres at a fair price by 1950s standards. The trick was persuading his young wife to move to the country, but once she saw the big house on the property, she was sold.
He never made much off the ranch, which originally stretched from an area west of Interstate 275 to Interstate 75, two highways that didn't exist then. He and some of his brothers worked the undeveloped land, which had to be planted with grass for the cattle. He averaged about 250 to 300 head.
Turns out the money wasn't in the cows.
In the 1960s, the government bought some acreage to put I-75 through. Diez says he can't remember how much it fetched, but it was a chunk of change for those days.
He continued to live humbly, and still does, despite the fact that the sale to Cordoba Development Cos. makes him a multimillionaire. He doesn't act wealthy. He doesn't feel wealthy.
What he mostly feels is antsy.
After untold days of honest labor, of daily rides, of ranching, he can't sit still.
His new house has a screened back porch that catches the breeze. His housekeeper has it set up nicely, with wind chimes and a couple of wooden rockers facing the construction site. But he won't sit there, not for more than a couple of minutes.
He has to walk.
Every day, he walks miles, around and around the property. Trying to make it make sense.
"Sometimes I wonder if I did the right thing," he says. "But I guess it had to happen. The city has no place else to go."
It's something, he says, that his long-ago decision to buy some scrubby land covered in hard pine stumps means that his great-grandchildren will be able to go to college. His mind knows it, but somehow the rest of him hasn't gotten the message.
Ponton saw that. So at that first meeting with the home builders' representatives and construction company owners, he brought Diez along.
He's the expert, Ponton told them.
Ponton also sought the older man's counsel about what Cordoba Ranch should be. Together they agreed the land would make a great place for people who love nature, with plenty of green space and jogging paths.
"Bobby said, 'What are you going to do with my horse trails?' I told him, 'Nothing!'"
The development will feature a stable with 30 stalls, along with those natural trails pounded out by decades of horses' hooves. Diez will always be welcome to ride.
Wildlife feeders Diez installed will remain, too. So will his deer stand, overlooking his favorite spot on the property, a large clearing ringed with oak trees and other dense foliage. At night, all kinds of wild animals peek from the trees, the men say.
The animals won't be displaced, either. Of the 1,100 acres, only 300 will be developed. The rest will stay pristine. The site is among the largest platted subdivisions in Hillsborough County.
Diez's feed silos will be secured and his name placed on them, a small tribute.
"One of my favorite things is to come out here," says Ponton, who plans to move to the new development. "It's such a break for me. It's beautiful here."
Every Tuesday morning, the two men head to Rosa's Café, a tiny Cuban restaurant adjacent to a Cumberland Farms store, near the Pasco County line. There, they drink café con leche and sometimes eat thick slices of toast.
Then they load up a box of Styrofoam cups filled with coffee and head to the work site, where construction crews gather to discuss progress. Although Diez's standard garb is blue jeans, a plaid flannel jacket and a weathered cowboy hat, sometimes he puts on a pair of dress slacks and a white button-down shirt for the meeting.
"I told those guys that if they have questions about the land, they need to ask Bobby," Ponton says. "There's nobody who knows it like he does."
Ben Stafford, 26, a project manager for a development consultant on the site, says he has never seen anything like it.
"This is the first project I've ever been on where a seller is as involved as this," he says. "I love to listen to him talk. He reminds me of my grandfather."
Diez describes for the men what his world was like before all the people came. And although he enjoys all that - the consulting, the reminiscing - he says that's not what keeps him coming around.
"The project has been secondary to the friendship with Lance," he says. "My definition of a friend is very simple. It's somebody who never asks for anything and don't expect a lot. Tell truth, I never had too many friends.
"I just hope I live long enough to see what it's going to look like," he says, gazing again at the horizon.
"I think you will, Bobby," Ponton tells his friend. "I think you will."

By DONNA KOEHN
The Tampa Tribune

Copyright © 2007, Reprinted with permission, Tampa Tribune