In the last week of January, Palm Valley lost two well-respected men who left their mark on the community. Sid Mickler, a member of the famed local family, died on Jan. 27. Jerry McCoy, a longtime business owner, died four days later.
The men were neighbors and friends and, each in his own way, inspired people around him. Many longtime residents knew both and mourn at their passing. Here is a little information about each.
Sid Mickler
Mickler’s roots run deep in this area. In 1825, just four years after Florida became a U.S. territory, his great-great-grandfather arrived from the Alsace-Lorraine region, which has historically changed hands between Germany and France. He settled in the area that would later become Palm Valley.
Born Nov. 15, 1926, to Sydney A. and Lucy Spreitzer, Sid Mickler was one of 10 children. The family built a home in the spot where Palmer Catholic Academy is now.
In fact, Mickler’s parents started the first school in the area on their own property, a two-room schoolhouse where he and his siblings received their primary education.
Palm Valley was very different in that era. It had dirt roads, and the family had no electricity.
As a boy, Mickler helped his father provide for the family by fishing and hunting. According to Mickler’s daughter, Julie Mickler Bhatia, they tried a number of things to make a living, including trapping alligators.
Also, Mickler and his father built the fishing pier at Mickler’s Beach. It was a project that left lifelong memories for the son.
“My father remembered all of that,” said Bhatia. “And he had very clear memories of everything down to the size of the bolts that they would use.”
In his teens, Mickler attended Fletcher High School in Duval County but quit to join the U.S. Navy and fight in World War II.
After returning home, he joined his father working on the family’s shrimp boat. A few years later, Mickler began his lifelong career as an electrician, eventually retiring from the City of Jacksonville Beach after 25 years.
He joined the electrical workers union – IBEW – which gave him and his family the opportunity to travel around the country during the summer months and escape the heat and humidity of Florida.
“He would find really cool little gigs,” said Bhatia. “He would go through the union, and they would place him on a job where he would work for a couple of months, and we would live in a campground.”
He retired in the 1980s and traveled with his wife, Jo. They were married 57 years until her death nearly 13 years ago.
“They were madly in love,” Bhatia said. “They never had an argument in 57 years.”
She said her father was well-loved by many people in the community, but not for his familiar name or for being a member of one of Palm Valley’s founding families.
“This man, Sid Mickler, was well-loved because he was a good, decent human being,” she said.
He was not one to judge, criticize or complain about others. And he valued opportunities to speak to them about forgiveness.
“Forgiving someone in your past, forgiving someone who cut you off in traffic, forgiving someone who did something wrong, forgiving someone who cheated you or stole from you or harmed you – he was big on that,” Bhatia said.
In fact, he displayed a bumper sticker on his truck that said in large letters: FORGIVE THEM.
“He really, honestly got up every morning and made a conscious decision that he was going to be a decent human being,” Bhatia recalled.
Mickler was also a religious man who made more than 1,000 rosaries to be sent to missions worldwide.
“He was very, very dedicated to making sure that people knew how much Jesus meant to him,” Bhatia said. “He was a very devout Catholic. And he didn’t judge people’s religion.”
In fact, he was one of the founding members of the Our Lady Star of the Sea parish.
For more than a decade, he volunteered at Baptist Beaches hospital, and he was active in numerous organizations and events. According to his obituary, “he was the guy that stopped to help you if you were broke down on the side of the road.”
At the same time, he enjoyed a good prank.
“If you had an opportunity to know him, you had an opportunity to be the victim of one of his jokes,” said Bhatia.
He would hold up a bucket that had a spring-loaded device inside and say something like, “Look what I just caught at the side of the road.”
“You’d lean down, and he’d open the latch, and out would spring this, like, squirrel tail that he had inside,” said Bhatia, laughing at the memory.
He might also bring a realistic-looking, but quite phony, cake to some function and “accidentally” drop it, surprising everyone present.
In 2012, Bhatia and her father published a book about his life, “As I Remember It.”
He is survived by two sons and three daughters, 12 grandchildren, a brother and four sisters.
Sid Mickler was 94.
Jerry McCoy
McCoy was born Nov. 2, 1942, to Robert Stanley McCoy and Ida Mae Radcliffe McCoy and grew up in rural Indiana.
At the age of 18, he joined the U.S. Navy, where he served for 22 years. It was during this period that he met his future wife.
“We met in 1975,” said Ronda McCoy. “He was a Navy recruiter in Memphis. And it was my third day of working in my hometown recruiting office. He came up just for the day to help my new recruiter establish his office, and it was love at first sight. Five months to the day, we got married. They said it wouldn’t last, but it lasted almost 45 years.”
He retired from the Navy in 1983 as a master chief electrician’s mate. After that, he briefly went to work for a couple of different companies.
Then, in 1986, he and his bass fishing buddy, Jerry Gray, opened Double J’s small engine sales and service shop in what McCoy called “Downtown Palm Valley.”
“The idea was just to give them something to do and have a little income,” Ronda McCoy said.
The business sold and serviced both residential and commercial equipment.
For McCoy, repairing lawnmowers, chainsaws, Weed Eaters and blowers came naturally. And in an era before so many things were considered disposable, there was a great demand for his skills.
Double J’s evolved into a family business and soon became part of the fabric of the community.
In 1993, the McCoys added mulch to their inventory. Seven years after that, they added a landscape supply business.
Jerry McCoy retired in 2018, 32 years after starting Double J’s. The McCoys sold the business to Hal and Karen Still.
Ronda McCoy described her husband as “very energetic, hard-working.”
“He had such common sense about so many things,” she said. “He didn’t have the higher education, but he knew so much about so many things and how to fix things and how to figure things out.”
And, when faced with difficulty, he would not surrender.
“He was very dedicated to his work, and he never gave up,” Ronda McCoy said. “We had tough times … and we had lean times, but he never thought of throwing in the towel and just saying, ‘That’s it.’ He always persevered.”
She said she has heard from many former customers who said her husband helped them get established in businesses of their own.
He was also well-respected by those who worked for him. Former employees have said that they felt the McCoys treated them just like family.
“That’s so special to us,” Ronda McCoy said.
In addition, Jerry McCoy was a proud American.
“He respected the flag and his country to the very end,” Ronda McCoy said.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by two sons, a sister, five grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
Jerry McCoy was 78.
