Community Spotlight | By Jocklyn Mundy | Photos by Savannah Tradd
How a lifelong resident and a Florida master sculptor gave Windermere landmarks made to be touched
Summertime Read has kept its place outside the library since 2005.
On almost any afternoon outside the Windermere branch library, a child will stop, crouch down, and rest a hand on the open bronze pages of a boy who has been reading the same book for two decades. The boy lies on his stomach, chin propped in one hand, entirely lost in his story. He does not look up. He never turns the page. And still, one visitor after another finds him, traces the raised letters, and leans in close.
He is called Summertime Read, and he was the beginning.
Today, three of these figures live at the heart of Windermere, each one a gift, each one a moment caught and kept. Behind all of them stand two men: a lifelong resident who wanted to give the town something lasting, and a Florida sculptor who has spent a lifetime turning fleeting moments into bronze.
A Gift That Began With a Book
Every line is cast, letter by letter.
Summertime Read has been a fixture outside the library since 2005, the first of the bronzes donated to Windermere by John Mills Nabers, a resident who has called the town home since 1943, moving here in first grade. Look closely at the boy, and the details are captivating. He is reading Harry Potter, and the lines on his open page can actually be read, cast letter by letter into the metal. It is the details that turn a statue into an invitation. Children stop to touch the pages. Parents pause for photographs. Neighbors recognize, in that absorbed young reader, the same curiosity that has always defined this place.
But the sculpture is more than a charming figure; the dedication tells you why it exists at all.
“In loving memory of my mother, Lucy Nabers, and my grandmother, Mollie Belle Ward, who always had time to read to a child. Donated by John Mills Nabers.”
Reading Is Forever, set into the stone at the boy’s side.
Reading, in the Nabers family, was something handed down. It passed from a grandmother to a mother to a boy. It is a fitting way to begin. The gift was never really about art. It was about the kind of attention that shapes a life.
The Man Behind the Metal
The artist John chose is W. Stanley Proctor, known to nearly everyone as Sandy. A native of Tallahassee, Proctor came to sculpture the long way around. He began as a painter, then worked his way into three dimensions through clay, alabaster, and marble, before settling into the medium that would become his signature. Bronze suited him. Casting is a slow, exacting process that marries art to engineering and chemistry, and it asks the sculptor to hold a single instant still long enough to pour it into metal. That is precisely what Proctor loves to do. His favorite subjects are the ones most likely to slip away: a child mid-motion, a dog about to bolt, the ordinary grace of people simply being themselves.
His reach extends far beyond Central Florida. In 1995, the Governor of Florida presented President Bill Clinton with a bronze by Proctor titled Bandanna, which still resides in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. His life-size children play forever in the Florida Governor's Mansion Children's Park. His monumental figures honor integration at Florida State University, Heisman-winning quarterbacks at the University of Florida, and officers who never came home. In 2006, the state inducted him into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame, and Proctor has said he was moved to find himself in the company of figures like Ernest Hemingway, Ray Charles, and Zora Neale Hurston. For all of that, he has never lost his affection for the small and the tender, the reader and the retriever, the moment that would otherwise be forgotten.
That instinct, to notice a passing moment and make it permanent, is exactly what John Nabers wanted for Windermere. He was not commissioning monuments. He was preserving the feeling of childhood.
A Companion Across Town Square
Sixteen years after the boy with the book arrived at the library, John gave the town a second figure, and this one seems to have grown up alongside the first.
Installed in 2021 just beyond the picnic pavilion in Central Park, Golden Games is also a Proctor bronze, and it too catches a single held breath. It is a moment any dog owner knows by heart, frozen the instant before release. John was clear about why the sculpture belonged; he said it was, he felt, worthy of being in Windermere.
Golden Games, installed in Central Park in 2021.
On any given day, the piece proves him right. Children point at the dog. Families use it as a meeting spot and a backdrop. Walkers slow down and smile without quite knowing why. Where the library boy invites a child to sit still and read, the park boy invites everyone to remember to play. Together they read like two chapters of the same Windermere childhood, one indoors and dreaming, one outdoors and running.
“Anyone Home”
John Mills Nabers with Anyone Home, his newest gift.
The newest of John's gifts arrived in June of 2026, and in some ways it may be the most rooted of them all. Titled Anyone Home, the Proctor bronze now stands at the Doug Bowman Tennis Center on Park Avenue. A retriever stands with its hindquarters up and tail raised, front end dropped low, nose pressed against a turtle that has drawn itself tight into its shell. The dog waits there, nose to shell, for any sign of the creature inside. It is the gentle comedy of the title made solid, a curious dog and a cautious turtle and the patient question hanging between them. Is anyone home?
What sets this installation apart is what holds it up. Rather than a poured concrete pad, the sculpture rests on a boulder, a three-thousand-pound stone chosen from a local quarry for the purpose. Moving a rock of that size is no small errand, and getting it to the site took the town's own hands. Travis Mathias, Public Works Operations Manager with the Town of Windermere, helped make the boulder's journey from quarry to park possible. The result is a piece that looks less placed than planted, the bronze rising straight out of the stone as though the two had always belonged together.
With it, John's collection became a trio. Three moments in metal, set among the places where Windermere already gathers: at the library, in Central Park, and now beside the courts on Park Avenue.
Landmarks, Not Decorations
Set side by side, the three sculptures tell you a lot about the man who gave them. A boy reading, a boy and his dog at play, a dog nosing a turtle: learning, play, and curiosity, the very things a good childhood is built from. None of it is accidental. Each piece reflects the values John Nabers carries, the three generations of his family who live them still in Windermere, and the town that raised them all.
They are landmarks. They mark the spots where neighbors meet, where children are photographed year after year, where a newcomer first senses what kind of place this is. In commissioning and donating them, John gave Windermere something that will last, a gift to a community that shaped him as much as he has shaped it. And he may not be finished. John smiles and mentions another Proctor bronze he has his eye on.
“We are so grateful for John's generosity; it has shaped the character of our public spaces. These pieces have become part of how we experience our parks.”
DENA O'MALLEY, CO-CHAIR · WINDERMERE PARKS AND RECREATION COMMITTEE
John Nabers knew Windermere when there were more orange trees than houses and people combined. So much of what made it special then still lingers. Children still spend their days chasing bass and climbing oaks. There is the imprint of footsteps on sandy streets, neighbors who do not hesitate to lend a hand, and the simple pleasure of watching the sun drop over the lake. The town has grown, but its spirit remains.
For now, thanks to one resident and the sculptor he trusted, a little of that spirit sits in bronze at the heart of it all. A reader who never closes his book. A boy who never lets go of the throw. A dog forever nosing a turtle to ask who is home. And a town that keeps passing it on, one child at a time.
