Brian Hamman during his days playing for the Cape Coral High School football team.

“Growing up in Cape Coral was great — you always felt really safe. We lived just down the street from Cape Elementary and I remember riding my bike to school with my little brother every morning. It was just one of those places you could play in the front yard, the back yard, and nobody would bother you. It was a neat, safe place to grow up.

“Back then when I was a kid, if you wanted to eat at any kind of a restaurant that wasn’t fast food, you had to go over the bridge to Fort Myers to find restaurants, and shopping, too. We would go over the bridge in south Cape Coral and back then it was only two lanes. I remember we would go to the Edison Mall.

“We would go to the Yacht Club pool in Cape Coral, my dad would even go when he was a kid in the ’60s. Man, it was fun. We would go and swim and have a great time. I do remember the chlorine making your eyes fuzzy, but it was kind of a rite of passage.

“My grandparents lived on Lake Kennedy, so for us it was common almost every weekend to go out and waterski or go out on the inner tube. We always tried to see who would get flipped out of the tube the quickest and I prided myself on being able to hang in there.

“I’m so amazed to see the growth in Cape Coral. It’s great.

“We live in north Cape Coral now and I very rarely find that I have to drive south of Pine Island Road for anything. Everything is on that Pine Island Road corridor and when I was a kid, that’s what they said — that it would have everything on it and it really has come true. You look at everything we have now and it’s amazing to see.”

— Compiled by CJ HADDAD