‘I feel like I’m working for Mrs. Stranahan’: Why the 84-year-old groundskeeper of Fort Lauderdale’s oldest house refuses to retire

Shira Moolten, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Updated ·12 min read

FORT LAUDERDALE — Along the busy Riverwalk sits a piece of Fort Lauderdale’s history in the shadow of high-rises, and inside of it, the 84-year-old caretaker who keeps it alive. On any given day the dog walkers and tourists, yacht partiers and lawyers can see him on the old house’s balcony, varnishing a door, or in the garden, trimming a bougainvillea.

If they try to talk to John Della-Cerra, he’ll probably start telling them stories about the Stranahan House and its inhabitants, the woman he admired, and who he thinks of when he works as if she still lives there: if the garden is the way Ivy Stranahan would have wanted, if she would reprimand him for getting distracted. He only met her once, yet when he talks about her, you would think he was her original groundskeeper.

“I always kiddingly say when I’m talking too much,” Della-Cerra said Friday, “that Ivy’s gonna walk up behind me and pat me on the shoulder and say, ‘John, I’ve been watching you for a half an hour. You haven’t done a lick of work.”

The Stranahan House, built in 1901, is the oldest surviving building in Fort Lauderdale, and widely considered its most important historic landmark. Frank Stranahan built the house as a trading post that later became the city’s first bank, hotel, and post office. His wife, Ivy Stranahan, was the city’s first schoolteacher.

Today, it is relatively difficult to spot the wooden two-floor house among the city’s skyscrapers. It sits about a block away from a Cheesecake Factory and directly beneath the more recently built Icon Las Olas condo building. When you look up at the house from its driveway, the 44-story tower shoots up behind it, almost like an extension of the property.

Yet amid Fort Lauderdale’s development, flooding, hurricanes and sea level rise, a pandemic, an exodus of employees and longtime volunteers, and a recent street construction project that hampered people’s ability to find the house at all, it remains standing as if it were 1915 and the Stranahans still lived there. Much of that is Della-Cerra’s doing. A former big-box retail worker hired in 1989 to clean the house for $3 an hour, he now also performs the role of gardener, manager, builder, and tour guide.

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Della-Cerra says he still isn’t paid much, though he wouldn’t share his income, but doesn’t ask for more and isn’t planning on retiring. A small, spry man, he doesn’t mind standing for hours, going up and down the stairs, or crouching over a gardening plot. He says the work keeps him healthy. Over the last 34 years, he has seen the house through five different executive directors, and probably knows more about it than all of them combined.

Merry Wajda, 75, worked with Della-Cerra at Stranahan House for 12 years before her current job at the Plantation Historical Museum. If anyone ever had a question, she recalled, employees’ go-to response would be, “I don’t know, but I’ll ask John.”

‘He is the house’

When Jennifer Belt, the current executive director, arrived for her first day about a year and a half ago, she was unable to find the house due to the construction, and Della-Cerra was its only remaining employee.

She felt a bit intimidated.

“It felt weird to me to come into a role as a 30-something and my only employee is this 82-year-old man,” she told the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “What, I’m going to come in here and tell him what to do and how to take care of the house? It was a funny thought. I’ll make sure his check is cut every two weeks, but I’m not someone who’s going to tell this man how to do this job, because if anything, he’s going to tell me how to do mine.”

Often, Belt said, if she suggests an idea, Della-Cerra will tell her if they’ve tried it in the past and it didn’t work. If she walks through the house and doesn’t find him, she eventually catches him stopped in the middle of working, telling some passer-by a story about the house. But she says she doesn’t mind because they show up later and ask for a tour.

At the beginning of her tenure, Belt said, she sat Della-Cerra down and asked him if he wanted anything more out of his job.

“All he wanted to make sure was that he could continue to accrue sick days,” Belt recalled. “He said, ‘I just want to make sure if I ever fall off a ladder one day at work that I’ll have enough sick days.’ That was the only request I’ve ever gotten from him.”

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Della-Cerra’s own contributions hide in plain sight throughout the house: an antique washer in the kitchen, a table for a doll house. His wife’s name is written on a brick outside; she died seven years ago. The little toy cars that the house sells as souvenirs are Della-Cerra’s creation, but he declined to be reimbursed for materials. A bell Frank Stranahan had used to summon the ferry had once disappeared in 1961, thought lost for good, until one day, in 1997, Della-Cerra said he found it in the yard of a longtime Fort Lauderdale family formerly connected to Stranahan House.

It now hangs in the lush garden near the oak tree that Ivy Stranahan once posed in front of. Della-Cerra keeps the garden just a little bit unkempt, the way Ivy liked. He often tells people, “I feel like I’m working for Mrs. Stranahan.”

“He is the house,” Wajda said. “The reason that house and the grounds look the way they do is almost strictly because of John.”

Getting to know the Stranahans

Everything reminds Della-Cerra of a story. His tours are usually two-and-a-half hours long, not the estimated one, but no one seems to mind.

Much of his authority over the Stranahans’ history comes from his own experiences. He infuses everything with details and insights gathered from meeting Ivy Stranahan himself and from talking with her niece, Alice Cassels, who used to visit once a year and tell stories of her own. Occasionally Della-Cerra’s own life becomes a lens through which he understands theirs, and sometimes the opposite is true.

Frank Stranahan’s suicide is one such story, a tragic moment in the life of the Stranahans that Della-Cerra feels is sometimes misunderstood.

A little after two in the afternoon in 1929, Frank Stranahan tied himself to a storm drain and drowned himself in the New River. Ivy Stranahan’s brother watched, from the other side of the river, unable to help, Della-Cerra said.

It’s easy to explain Frank Stranahan’s suicide as a result of the financial troubles he faced at the time, but that explanation bothers Della-Cerra. His death had more to do with letting other people down, the groundskeeper explained as he stood in the garden, feet from the same stretch of river where Frank had died. Two hurricanes had hit Fort Lauderdale, destroying the majority of its homes, and many of its residents were leaving. Frank Stranahan’s bank had given them loans, which they never paid back. When others came to withdraw their money, he had nothing to give them.

“Frank was an honest guy,” Della-Cerra said. “I think that cost him his life … He just felt that people looked to him, and he didn’t have the answers.”

Later, he added, “it’s hard to put in your mind why people do that.” This time, he was talking about Frank Stranahan but also his own family. In 1951, when Della-Cerra was 12, his stepbrother died while fighting in the Korean War, and a year later, on the same date, his stepsister crashed her car into a tree intentionally and died.

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After Frank Stranahan’s death, whenever Ivy saw him mentioned in the paper, Della-Cerra said, she crossed out his name.

Della-Cerra’s father had died when he was young, leaving his mother, a limousine driver, to take care of him and his siblings. She was often away from home, so he stayed with his grandparents for long stretches of time. He didn’t have much to do in those days, he said, and at age 17, he found himself at the first of many events watching Ivy Stranahan speak.

Later, in 1969, he began working as a teacher at a school for special-needs children, often having students stay in the house he shared with his wife; another reason he now says he isn’t retiring is so he can help pay tuition for two of his own grandchildren, who also attend a special-needs school.

One day, Ivy Stranahan visited the school to speak to the students.

“She said, ‘Get serious about education,'” he recalled, imitating her voice and mannerisms. “‘… Because you’re going to be competing against students from all over the world. If you’re not serious about education, you’ll be left alone.'”

Afterwards, he said, Ivy Stranahan met with the teachers and sat right next to him.

“I’m thinking, ‘Holy smokes. Wow, she’s got a lot of personality, this lady has.”

Outside, preparing to do some garden work, Della-Cerra got distracted by another story that Alice Cassels often told: Ivy Stranahan had traveled to Tallahassee with 3-year-old Alice to work on legislation. One night, Ivy, who didn’t drink, found herself surrounded by intoxicated male lawmakers shooting the breeze. When she tapped her water glass to get their attention, a lawmaker told her, “‘Oh, now Mrs. Stranahan, don’t worry,'” Della-Cerra recalled. “‘We’re going to get everything done here today, but you know, these old boys haven’t seen each other since the last session.'”

Not having it, Ivy Stranahan retorted with something along the lines of, “No, we need to start right now.'” Della-Serra said, laughing as he imagined the look on the lawmaker’s face.

Later, standing in the home’s dimly lit hall, he said, “She reminded me so much of my mother.”

As a female limousine driver in the 1960s, his mother had a quiet conviction, just like Ivy. When a friend of hers died, she took in her orphaned children, who became Della-Cerra’s stepbrother and stepsister.

“She was the same type,” he said, “that didn’t expect to be patted on the back, but would do things and was constantly trying to make life better.”

‘There’s things that need to be preserved’

Not everyone treats the house or its former occupants with the same reverence as Della-Cerra. Once, someone shattered the glass of one of the original doors, he said. Another time, someone threw shaken bottles of Pepsi at the house, which sprayed all over the paint, damaging it.

“He’s very protective of the house,” Wajda said of Della-Cerra. “He gets very upset if people are not respectful of the house and the grounds, like after an event, or if people came in and were just walking around, or leave trash lying around, or walk on plants where they weren’t supposed to walk.”

Della-Cerra has seen the house through the more prolonged struggles: a legal battle with the Icon Las Olas lasted over a decade before the house lost. Then the Las Olas street project made it harder to find the house, and the staff had to forego hosting weddings, an important source of income. At one point, they couldn’t afford to fix the AC upstairs, Della-Cerra said, and he had to give tours despite the stifling heat.

By this point, all of Della-Cerra’s fellow volunteer tour guides, who had become a family to him, Belt said, had grown too old to handle the stairs or the long hours standing. A year ago, Alice Cassels died at the age of 97, leaving Della-Cerra alone with her stories and the task of remembering them.

When Belt came in, she began making new hires and instituting practical changes to keep up with the times. For one, due to the lack of staff, the house gave up doing only guided tours in favor of self-guided tours. Belt is now working on an audio guide to go along with them.

Self-guided tours also required putting up stanchions in the house, which make it feel less open and more like a museum, something Della-Cerra was hesitant about, but went along with, Belt said.

This year, after decades barely taking any time off, Della-Cerra used some of his sick days. He had kidney stones, and had to wear a stent. For a while he kept working, he said, but blood loss made him anemic. Finally, after a recent procedure and only four days off work, he started feeling better.

And yet, with everything, he has no plan of retiring.

“History is a fleeting thing,” Della-Cerra said. He recalled his childhood, sitting around the fireplace with his grandparents on a Saturday night, eating corn and hot dogs, talking about the past.

“Things were passed down,” he continued. “That’s not being done anymore. Things are being lost. People ask me why I don’t write a history, well, I’m not smart enough to do that. But there’s things that need to be preserved.”

Then he launched into another story.

Sun Sentinel photographer Carline Jean contributed to this report.

Wayne and Lucretia Weiner, who previously agreed to match donations to the Stranahan House for renovations, are now offering to match any donations made in John Della-Cerra’s name. All money will go towards building the home’s archival storage, which will be named after him.