Jay B Starkey typically wore two uniforms.
He’d start the day in a pair of Wrangler jeans, a white T-shirt, Wolverine lace-up boots and a cowboy hat when he herded cattle on his sprawling Pasco County ranch. Once the work was done and the sun started to hang low, he’d clean up and change into a tuxedo.
Then Starkey would head out to sing with the Master Chorale or play woodwind with the Bay Area Saxophone Quartet.
“That’s just the highlight of his day was playing and performing music,” said Starkey’s oldest son, Trey.
Starkey was the most recent patriarch in one of the oldest families in Pasco County — a family known for its vast land holdings and influence over the county’s development. He presided over the Anclote River Ranch that spanned more than 16,000 acres, its conversion into neighborhoods and was part of the preservation of a swath of it for posterity.
He served on the school board in the 1970s and was a key figure in nudging Pasco, and the Tampa Bay region, to grow.
Starkey died Sept. 9. He was 90.
Dewey Mitchell, who works in real estate, is also part of a longtime Pasco ranching family, grew up nearby. His mother knew Starkey and followed him on the school board.
“He had a lot to do with shaping what Pasco has come to be today,” Mitchell said. “In a good way, in a very good way.”
He came from a storied family line
While Starkey Jr. was a Pasco institution, his family also left a large footprint a bit further south in Pinellas County.
Starkey’s grandfather, William L. Straub, was the first editor of the St. Petersburg Times that is now the Tampa Bay Times. Straub is best known for using the paper to advocate in the 1900s for the preservation of the downtown waterfront as parkland, which now includes a portion named after him. He also was key in breaking Hillsborough County apart to form Pinellas County.
And by the time Starkey was born in 1935, his father, Jay B Starkey Sr., had already started to realize his dreams of becoming a cowboy. He owned the more than 600-acre Ulmerton Ranch in Largo, where Jay B Jr. grew up. Jay B Sr. also served as the Pinellas County Tax Collector for 13 years.
But by the 1950s, Jay B Sr. had become the sole owner of 16,000 acres of Pasco land. He bought the property in the 1930s with his brothers and a former Pinellas County sheriff, and sold the Ulmerton Ranch to buy their shares, according to the family. He formed the Anclote River Ranch, named for the body of water that ran through the property, that Jay B Jr. inherited.
Jay B Jr. stepped into the cattle rancher role after he graduated from the University of Florida with a degree in animal husbandry. Over the years, his father sold hundreds of acres of the land to the Southwest Florida Water Management District. Some of it turned into a regional well field and what’s now the Jay B Starkey Wilderness Park. The family continued to sell more of the land years afterward, including to the Florida Department of Transportation.
And for much of the 1970s, Jay B Starkey Jr. served on the Pasco school board. It was during a time of fast growth in the county, when there weren’t enough classrooms to serve all the kids who called Pasco home.
So the school board moved to a year-round schedule. Instead of a long summer vacation, students had shorter breaks in each season across the year. It served as a stopgap until the county could build more schools, said one of Jay B Jr.’s daughters, Sarah.
“It was very controversial,” Sarah said. “You just felt there was some tension there, because everybody was trying to figure out how to handle all of those problems.”
That was the first part of helping to usher in Pasco County’s growth, Mitchell said.
His life away from the spotlight
Jay B Jr.’s kids all say that if he could have chosen his own path, he would likely have become a musician.
All throughout high school, Jay B Jr. sang and played the saxophone. He mainly practiced and played classical music on his saxophone, when others focused on jazz.
His interest in music led Starkey to visit the Florida Orchestra and sing with the Master Chorale after his hours of ranching. His four children said they believe it also shaped his parenting approach.
Each of his four kids said Starkey encouraged them to be balanced — play music, compete in sports and stay on top of their academics — but decide on their paths without their parents’ influence. It was autonomy Starkey wasn’t afforded after inheriting the family ranch, Trey said.
As growth continued and Starkey wanted to find ways to use portions of the Pasco land for something other than ranching, he turned to his two sons.
“We’re going to do the right thing with the land,” Trey recalled his father telling him and Frank. “It’s up to you two boys to figure out what that means.”
So the brothers landed on Longleaf, the first village-style development in Pasco County. It was first finished in the 2000s and emphasized community, Frank said. Sidewalks connect homes with front porches close to the street. The neighborhood also has parks every few blocks so families can play together — different from the spread out land that Frank grew up on.
Shortly afterward, other developers built the Starkey Ranch neighborhood. It was a much larger project, Frank said, and the 2008 recession forced the family to sell the land to another developer without the same socially minded touches of Longleaf.
But Starkey was proud of both developments, Trey said. He supported his kids in their endeavors, even if he once would not have wanted to tear down trees to make room for homes.
Starkey is survived by his four kids, Trey, Sarah, Laura and Frank, as well as their families. Trey is the husband of Pasco Commissioner Kathryn Starkey. They each had a part of working with the ranch land, some with its development, but all by caring for cattle when they were young.
Laura, his second daughter, used another pocket of land to build Heartwood Preserve. It offers burials in the woods and is billed as an eco-friendly funeral.
Leading up to his last days, Starkey enjoyed looking at palmettos and wildflowers that grew in the preserve. Sarah and Laura would drive him around Pasco, some sights new and others familiar. He found the beauty in everything, Sarah said.
Starkey was also the first investor in Heartwood Preserve. He’ll be buried there next to his wife, Marsha, a community leader that loved wildflowers and first came from St. Petersburg.
And he’ll be laid to rest in his first uniform — Wranglers jeans, a white shirt and a cowboy hat. The lid to his casket is made from wood from an old barn on the original ranch.
Jay B Starkey Jr.
Born: Oct. 19, 1935
Died: Sept. 9, 2026
