Today people far and wide know Plant City, Florida, as America’s winter strawberry capital. Fifty years ago it was also home to Plant City Steel Corporation, Florida’s largest steel fabricator. Strawberries & Steel traces the remarkable lives of PCSC founders Cliff and Ethel Hardee.

            The love story begins in 1932 when impoverished teenagers Cliff Hardee and Ethel Smith first meet at Southside Baptist Church. The young married couple, with daughters Carolyn and Dorothy, open a little welding shop at the outset of WWII. The next twenty years would witness a rapidly evolving Hardee business empire, manufacturing everything from mammoth storage tanks and truck bodies to structural steel for Disney World rides. Liberal politicians may today claim, “The Hardees didn’t build that factory!” Strawberries & Steel puts an end to that lie—YES THEY DID!

            Strawberries and Steel is the story of the Hardees’ love for family, for their companies’ employees, and for their Plant City friends and neighbors. Part I of the book, intended for general readership, presents the couple’s stirring narrative. Part II contains a series of appendices with detailed family background information.