Caroline Burgeson, owner of Paddock Room Galleries on Silver Springs Blvd. in Ocala, is not unlike a character from the daytime soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful.
Caroline Burgeson
The B & B, as the soap is affectionately referred to by its millions of devotees, is set in the fashion industry in Los Angeles. Burgeson’s Paddock Room Galleries has Ocala, Florida, and the world as the setting for its high fashion art and gift boutique. Caroline easily plays the leading lady in her sphere of influence.
Dressed tastefully and elegantly and adorned with beautiful baubles, Burgeson looks the part of a CEO. The image doesn’t stop with the look. Speaking with authority and intensity about her business, Caroline could easily be right at home in a boardroom as well as her well-appointed boutique, surrounded by the unique décor and tastefully selected offerings.
Indeed Mrs. Burgeson is devoted to her business. While being interviewed in her Paddock Room Galleries, Mrs. Burgeson said, “I fell carrying a bronze in the back room. As I was falling, I thought should I save myself or the bronze? I chose the bronze, naturally.”
That’s taking one for the team. She injured her side in the fall and was limping slightly as she moved about her domain while saying, “George Steinbrenner asked me why I hadn’t retired.
I asked him why he hadn’t retired. He said, ‘Don’t be silly, I love what I am doing.’ Then, I said to him, ‘That is the answer. If I didn’t love the shop, I wouldn’t do it. If there is nothing to do, we will change a window.
People love our windows.” What does she do when she is not working? “Think of the shop, I love it so.” She did confess to one other interest in her life. “I stay home, and I listen to opera or read books on opera. My mother was an opera singer.
I used to hang out at the New York Metropolitan Opera house as a child, after school and on weekends.” When she and her late husband Edward moved to Ocala, all of that changed. “My mother would say, ‘You can’t live in Ocala because they don’t have opera,’ but they have tours, and (the tours) would come to Florida, and my husband would take me to Orlando or Miami or Tampa to see it.”
She and Edward were always in the business of business. They met in New York when working together at the same place of business. “I was an advertising research person. They hired Ed. He was vice president of advertising for the American Newspaper Publishers Assn. He gave seminars to newspaper salesmen. Guess what his theme was—‘All business is local.’ He tried to get people here to adopt that theme in 1968. Now that is what people are pushing.”
More interestingly, “He was not married, and I was single.” To make things even more compatible, “He was a Christian Scientist, and I was a Christian Scientist. While we were working at the company, there was a church meeting on Wednesday afternoons. I was late getting there one day, and the only seat left was by Ed.
He signaled me to come and sit down.” Imagine that. They didn’t even need an online dating service to find each other. In January 1968, the New York lifestyle changed. “Barron’s, Kiplinger, the Wall Street Journal all said the future was going to be in Florida, but not South Florida, Central Florida,” Mrs. Burgeson explained. Most people who moved to Central Florida were unaware of the horse community in Ocala and Marion County.
The Burgesons were different. “Every Sunday we would take a ride. Ed would say, ‘Just look at all of these fabulously beautiful horse farms.’ But there were no stores here to serve that community. There were just a few tack shops.” “You need to be at the right place at the right time,” she said. “Some of Ocala’s most successful retailers advised us not to open the shop because we would fail…
Was it Napoleon Hill that said, ‘You see a need, and you fill it?” Still, the Burgesons did not just jump in with both feet. “Ed said, ‘Let’s just try 500 square feet and get our feet wet.’” East, down Silver Springs Blvd. from her current location, there is a Chevron station with a strip mall on the north side of the boulevard.
There are just three stores in the mall, and one of them was the original location of the Paddock Room. They were there for ten years from 1968 to 1978.
“It was my little 500 sq. ft. hole-in-the-wall. “Verna Lea Goff and Jackie Gaudio drove up in a pink Rolls Royce. They bought everything I had that had horses involved.
The Paddock Room, Ocala
My husband said, ‘The handwriting is on the wall. The next time we went to New York we didn’t buy anything but upscale horse items—handbags, scarves, afghans, and jewelry.” “They cleaned us out, so we moved to the current location. At that time there was a title and abstract business on the east side of us, and a dress shop on
the west. We eventually added both of those spaces to our store. You don’t get from 500 square feet to 4,500 square feet if you are doing something wrong. “The horse people made us,” she said. Verna Lea Goff and her husband Gene owned and raced two-time champion No double.
They also owned Verna Lea Farm in Ocala. Jackie Gaudio and her husband Bob owned an Arabian farm and were instrumental in the founding of Ocala Breeders’ Sales Co. “Now that we have the shop on the east and the west, we can only go up. We are building a second floor over our part of the building,” she said.
“This location is a jewel,” she said, “because of the traffic. My husband use to say, ‘How do you get to Daytona? You have to go right past our store. He had a clicker and sometimes he counted the cars that would build up at the stoplight.” From the beginning of OBS sales, the Burgesons have always had a table in the breeze-way during the sales. “My husband and I worked the sales together. Roy Kennedy said as long as there is an OBS, you will have a booth here.”
Mrs. Burgeson also recalled a story about Roy Kennedy that caused her some momentary discomfort. “Roy Kennedy told me, ‘It’s a good thing you wear pantyhose.’ I got worried about what was coming next. Then he said, ‘because you stand on your head for your customers.’” “I do a big European trade that people don’t know about,” she revealed. “Of course, I get all my European trade from OBS.”
If the horse people made the Burgesons and the Paddock Room, the “fox-hunter crowd” provided the next trend and market. “When the Golden Hills hunter-jumper shows started, that’s how I got to know the fox people,” Mrs. Burgeson explained. The Golden Hills hunter-jumper events were the forerunner of today’s HITS competition held each winter in Ocala.
The hunter-jumper crowd is fond of the “fox motif,” and no one has a better inventory of foxy items than the Paddock Room. The appeal of the fox motif went beyond the show horse community. “People whose name was Fox would come in and buy things,” Mrs. Burgeson said with amusement.
Over the years, the Burgesons and the Paddock Room have attracted movie stars, sheikhs, CEO’s as well as the “horse people” and the “fox people.” In the 42 years since the 500 square foot hole-in-the-wall, Mrs. Burgeson has met some wonderful and fascinating people.
And she has been privy to some fascinating stories. “Oh, I have wonderful stories to tell,” she said. “People love to gossip, but my lips are sealed. (My customers) know I don’t talk about what people buy and for whom.”
