NCF Students preserve local memories

Harriet Stieff recently shared her precious Sarasota memories with third-year New College of Florida student Bianca Persechino. As the daughter of civic leader and developer Owen Burns, Harriet grew up on Sarasota’s downtown bayfront, not far from where she lives today.
In her interview, Harriet describes small-town life in early Sarasota and tells tales of moonlit explorations as one of the first students of Siesta Key’s Out of Door School. Bianca was fascinated by the stories and found Harriet to be “super-sweet and selfless — she talked about everyone but herself.”
This new oral-history interview sheds light on a time and place now long gone, and yet preserved in Harriet’s memory and now shared through New College of Florida’s Sarasota Oral History Project.