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Family Values

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By FRANK SARGEANT | The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 18, 2008

When you meet a too-good-to-be-true family, you keep waiting for the glass to shatter.

With Jeff Horne's family, there's no crash. What you see is what you get.

The children say "sir" and "ma'am." They're great students. They don't play video games, at all. They're 10 and 11, but they talk like little adults. They don't own cell phones or iPods, don't text-message, can't imagine uttering a curse word. And they're avid outdoors fans.

Most modern parents would faint at the idea of allowing a 7-year-old to put his hands on a firearm. But for the Hornes, of Ruskin, guns are a part of the harvest of food, as they were in many traditional Florida families. The Hornes have been in Florida for six generations.

Hayden, 11, got hold of his first centerfire rifle four years ago, under the minute-by-minute supervision of his father, a fishing guide and founder of the Fish House restaurant on Shell Point, an open-air, fried-fish haven that draws standing-room crowds Thursdays through Sundays.

"He missed the first four deer he saw, but then this year he got a doe in Virginia, and then a little later he got a 9-point buck here in Florida, so we have venison to last us the year," Jeff Horne says of Hayden.

The Assembly Line

The children not only hunt, but also help in processing the venison.

"We get the whole family in an assembly line," Horne says. "I do the cutting and the kids and Mom pack and wrap and label it all."

Horne says he likes the idea that his children thoroughly understand where food comes from and take responsibility for the harvest - fish or game.

"They know that fish don't come in a box and steak doesn't come in plastic wrap," Horne says.

"It makes them a little more aware of the realities of the world than I think most kids are today."

Hannah, Hayden's 10-year-old sister, is a regular at the Fish House, waiting tables and assembling the orders. The kids work for $5 a day.

They also go to school, at home, for nearly five hours a day. Their mother, Cheryl, says they found too many unpleasant things happening to children in public schools and decided to try home schooling. The kids liked it, Cheryl liked it, and they have become thriving students.

"In the second grade, they both tested at the fourth-grade level on the state certification tests, so we know they're making great progress," Cheryl says.

And, she says, anytime they run into difficulties with any subject, she knows it immediately and gives them extra work in that area until they improve.

"I'm fortunate to have the time to give to them, and it seems to be working out really well," Cheryl says. "And, of course, when Jeff wants to take them fishing or hunting, we can work ahead and let that happen."

All Planned Out

Hayden and Hannah appear to be unusually mature for their age. They are polite and thoughtful, and they already have tentative life plans.

"I'm going to be a newscaster," Hannah says. "Mom took me on a trip to visit a news studio in New York, and that's when I made up my mind."

And Hayden, well, at this point, he's so taken with the outdoors that he says he'd like to be a taxidermist, anytime he takes a break from hauling grouper out of the bay or tracking down a whitetail.

Hayden's favorite rifle? A .243, which, he's quick to say, shoots a 130-grain ballistic tip. His scope, he says with pride, is a Leopold Vari-X-II 3 by 9.

When it comes to fishing, the catches he's most proud of are a pair of gags, one that went 21 pounds, the other 20. Both were caught with his dad while trolling Mann's Stretch 25 lures in the ship channels of Tampa Bay.

"Tie on your lures with a uni-knot," he advises me - a tip I'll take to heart.

Of course, the trials and temptations of being teenagers are still ahead for the Horne children, and many a perfect son or daughter has gone astray. But you get a feeling, talking to these kids, that their heads are on straight, and that they'll grow up to raise a seventh generation of Hornes that are just like Mom and Dad.

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