- October 12, 2024
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Last month, the city of Ormond Beach held a ceremony at South Ormond Neighborhood Center where it unveiled the building’s new name, honoring two longtime Ormond Beach community advocates who, for decades, created opportunities for local Black youths.
But if you ask honoree Joe Daniels, the last thing he’s thought about since he started coaching young athletes at SONC in the 1970s was recognition. In fact, the 86-year-old Ormond Beach resident said he was caught by surprise when Ormond Beach Police Officer Greg Stokes, a regular at SONC, told him Daniels’ and Daniels’ wife’s names were now on the side of the building.
“I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding,’” Daniels said. “It was good, but when you’re doing stuff ... if you have a goal in mind, you just don’t think about the impact that you make.”
And an impact the Daniels have had.
Described in the mayor’s proclamation on March 4 as “pillars of Ormond Beach,” Daniels and his late wife, Elwillie, spent decades serving the community by being on boards, founding youth organizations and volunteering for numerous causes; they were also part of the driving force behind the establishment of the Ormond Beach Housing Authority. Among Daniels’ accomplishments are founding Boy Scout Troop 408 for Black boys, serving on the Police Athletic League and Ormond Beach Police Explorers and most recently, in 2021, creating the first African American Community Celebration at SONC.
“There’s not one thing I would do differently,” Daniels said.
Daniels came to Ormond Beach in 1939. He was 3, and his family was traveling with another family down from Cordele, Georgia, in the hope of finding work in Pahokee, near Lake Okeechobee. Daniels was too young to remember the journey, but was told there were about 16 people traveling in one vehicle.
Daniels’ aunt lived in Ormond at the time, and the families planned to stop and stay overnight before continuing down the state. But their vehicle wouldn’t start the next morning.
“So we got stuck here,” Daniels said. “So Dad said we might as well stay in Ormond, and my aunt — that was my dad’s sister — convinced us to stay in Ormond.”
Sports played a big role in Daniels’ life growing up in Ormond. As a student at the Rigby School, and then Campbell Street High School where he graduated from in 1955, he played on the basketball team.
He recalled playing the same teams over and over, no matter what grade he was in.
“That was before integration, you know,” he said. “Then, we had to play the schools that we could play.”
He also worked as a caddy at Oceanside Country Club, and recalls the days when the old bridge to the beachside would get stuck while trying to let boats pass through, and he’d have to pay 25 cents for someone to bring him back to the mainland in a row boat.
“They would pay us $1.50 to carry one bag, and there were some days I would regret paying that 25 cents,” Daniels said.
After graduating high school, Daniels moved to Buffalo, New York, where he met his late wife, Elwillie, at church.
Then in 1974, he came back home.
When he moved back, Daniels started volunteering to coach boys basketball at SONC. The building looked a lot different back then — it was a small facility with a single outdoor court, primarily used for volleyball. Most games were played at Nova Rec.
Daniels didn’t let that stop him. He formed the Ormond Bruins team, and even met with Ron Rice, of Hawaiian Tropic, to get the program going.
“They came under Ormond recreation, the Bruins did,” Daniels said. “But in the meantime, when I started doing this stuff, I had Hawaiian Tropic to give me shirts and things when I would do camps and tournaments.”
He got with Fred “Curly” Neal of the Harlem Globetrotters and had him come for summer camps at Nova Rec for the kids.
Vince Carter was also part of that program, Daniels recalled.
“I knew he was going to be pretty good,” Daniels said. “People would come out to Nova to see him because he was a lot better than most other kids, and at the time people would come out there and he could play. He was so gifted.”
Daniels coached for 30 years.
After he married Elwillie, Daniels brought her to Ormond to meet his family.
One of the places he showed her was Bethune-Cookman University.
“She never had seen a predominantly Black school,” he recalled. “... She said, ‘Eventually, we’ll move down here and I want to work at that school.’ She said, ‘I want to work at Bethune-Cookman.’ That was her dream.”
About a week after moving to Ormond, she had a job at B-CU as an office manager.
According to the city’s proclamation, she also founded First Impressions, a youth social organization, and served as the chair on the board of directors for the Ormond Neighborhood Child Development Center. She was a deaconess and choir member of the Mount Carmel Missionary Baptist Church.
She and Joe were married for 61 years and raised three sons.
While Ormond Beach has certainly changed in the time Daniels has lived in the community, one thing, for him, has remained constant: His regular attendance at City Commission meetings since 1974.
He said he’s known every mayor and every commissioner since. His wife ran for office too in the 1980s, but, he jokingly said, she only got around 20 votes.
He did, however, know late former Mayor David Hood rather well. The two met while Daniels was with the city’s T-ball program, in which Hood’s son participated. When Daniels found out that Hood, a commissioner at the time, was going to run for mayor in 1994, he campaigned for him.
When asked what he thought of Hood, Daniels said he was a “very fine fellow.”
It had been a mission of Hood’s to name SONC after Daniels, according to the city.
Several people have asked Daniels how he feels now that SONC bears his and his wife’s names.
He feels good about it, but he also feels like it hasn’t sunk in yet.
“Everybody thinks something of it other than me, but it hasn’t hit me yet,” Daniels said. “I don’t know why. Because see — it’s like going to the commission meetings. I feel like I need to go. ... Maybe it’ll eventually hit me that it’s a good thing I went.”
