Sybil Peacock celebrated her 86th birthday at the Whistle Stop Cafe in downtown Plant City this week, surrounded by her closest family and friends.
A Trapnell native, Peacock began working at in the infant room at Eastside Baptists Church, remaining there for 20 years until the position was eliminated. Following her time at Eastside Baptist, she spent brief periods at multiple different daycares in Plant City before ending her career at 78 years old after eight years at Lil Munchkins Learning Center.
“I just loved them all,” Peacock said about the kids she worked with.
Her daughter-in-law Andrea Peacock noted how they would regularly be approached by people who had either worked alongside Sybil Peacock at one daycare or the other or had attended one of the daycares while she worked there.
“A lot of times we’d be out in public and someone would recognize her and come over to talk to her,” Andrea Peacock said. “They’d say that she had them at the daycare or that she had their baby at the daycare and she would just light up, she could tell them things that they couldn’t even remember. In the mornings she would always bring and banana and if the kids didn’t have enough food, she would smash it up and feed it to them with their formula. She just really loved working with the babies.”
Andrea Peacock joked that Sybil Peacock had helped raise Plant City, working with so many young children over the years that grew up throughout the area.
“It made me feel good to know that a lot of them went on, went to college and I even had some of their children later,” Sybil Peacock said. “I really enjoyed it, I sure did.”