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Letter to the editor

Off/beat

Accentuate the positive? Where's the fun in that?

By JAN GLIDEWELL
Published May 8, 2005

The recent set-to about whether Al Capone ever hung around Moon Lake points to an interesting quirk in human nature.

We love places with historical associations, and, for some reason, we seem to be more fascinated with the negatives than the positives.

Capone probably never stayed at Moon Lake, but he did, during my lifetime, have a mansion on Palm Island midway between Miami and Miami Beach.

All of my friends knew where "Capone's house," was and, because it was in a fairly ritzy neighborhood, we just transferred the legend to a deserted and ruined mansion in nearby Coconut Grove where we built bonfires and had parties and swapped lies about the things we claimed Capone had done there.

Years ago I started getting tips that the Island Hotel on Cedar Key was haunted by the colorful ghost of a former owner. Tom Sanders, who owned it at the time, was a former newsman and, to his credit, didn't try to con me for a little free publicity.

"People like to think her ghost is here," he told me, "and strange things happen here sometimes, like they do in any old building, but there probably isn't a ghost."

To be safe a St. Petersburg Times photographer and I stayed up all night in hopes that the ghost would appear, and, even after several margaritas, were rewarded with nothing more interesting than finding one of my sandals stuck in the bedroom door about three feet off of the floor the next morning and not (surprise!) being able to remember how it got there.

I also spent all or most of two nights looking for ghosts at a burned outhouse in Dade City and at the Moon Lake Lodge, not far from where the currently disputed cabin in Hudson, but no ghosts showed up at either spot.

The people who built an apartment complex at the Dade City site, where the basic "lady-in-white-killed-by-Indians" ghost has reportedly been spotted several times in the past 100 years, never tried to capitalize on it for publicity.

Neither did the owners of an assisted living facility in Dade City, where three people were murdered either on or shortly before New Year's Day in 1989, seek, or even want, publicity. The building's renown reportedly changed the minds of a few prospective buyers, but it finally did sell and is occupied today.

Capone might not have come to Pasco, but the mob did in 1980 when the FBI agent who went undercover as Donnie Brasco set up a gambling hot spot called King's Court for a sting operation that netted several mob types and a high-ranking Pasco County sheriff's deputy. The building was demolished before anyone could turn it into Goodfellas Bed & Breakfast.

And let's not forget the Sheraton Sand Key Resort, where Room 538, the one in which televangelist Jim Bakker had his infamous tryst with Jessica Hahn, was still, six years later, booked three weeks in advance by people who considered staying there either a spiritual or a titillating experience.

And I can't ignore the fact that I live in Dade City, which draws its name from the 1835 "massacre" of Maj. Francis Dade and most of his command by Seminoles.

It was, of course, called a massacre because the Indians won. When such situations were reversed, they were described as glorious victories.

And if the cypress trees had lasted a little longer before being completely mowed down, Lacoochee (ironically a Seminole name) would probably now be the county seat and Dade City its poorer, smaller suburb to the south.

You do notice through all of this, though, that there are very few positive claims to fame hereabouts.

Elvis made a movie in Citrus and Levy counties; Grover Cleveland used to fish in Citrus County. I could tell you about the Gray Moss Inn in Dade City where Theodore Roosevelt is said to have stayed on a swing through the area that also took him to St. Leo ... but then I would probably have to point out that two of Saint Leo University's most famous former attendees were actor Lee Marvin, who got expelled from the old Saint Leo prep school for throwing another kid out of a second-story window and breaking his arm, and former brutal Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza.

They once had a dormitory named Lee Marvin Hall, since torn down, and there may yet be a building there that could have a plaque saying, "Anastasio Slept Here."

But don't hold your breath.

[Last modified May 8, 2005, 00:45:19]