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Letter to the editor

For 60 years, Weeki Wachee mermaids a Florida fantasy come to life

By Julie Hauserman
Published October 7, 2007

Hal Smith and Newt Perry looked into the cobalt depths of Florida's deepest spring and saw possibility. This month, the mermaid-centered tourist attraction they created 40 miles outside Tampa turns 60.

A perfect time, then, to pick up a copy of Weeki Wachee, City of Mermaids: A History of One of Florida's Oldest Roadside Attractions, by Lu Vickers and Sara Dionne. Florida has spawned its share of beautiful coffee table books. This one is gorgeous, thanks to Dionne's excellent design sense and a hilarious collection of cheesy mermaid photos. Vickers makes it a fascinating historical tale.

"Instead of transforming reality into fantasy the way their predecessors had, they decided to transform fantasy into reality," Vickers writes of Weeki Wachee's creators. "The result was a startling collision of kitsch and nature."

Combining historical documents and interviews with former mermaids and other workers, Vickers has crafted a story about athletic prowess, the fickle tourist economy and plucky showmanship under sometimes comical conditions.

Who knew that performing mermaids had to shoo away alligators and water moccasins and bang aggressive catfish on the nose to scare them away?

Or that bears once came out of the woods and attacked the mermaids' costume tails, which were hanging to dry overnight?

The tails, it turns out, were baited with fish roe during a 1948 movie shoot. Fish fled the spring as soon as filming started for Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid. Live fish were crucial, because Weeki Wachee was so clear audiences wouldn't believe the cameras were filming underwater. Hence, the fish-roe baited tails - and the late-night bear snack.

"People would be adamant about the show not being real," said former mermaid Bonnie Georgiadis, who worked at the attraction for 37 years. "They'd think the theater windows were aquariums with little fish in them and we were suspended out there on strings . . . The people who appreciated our shows the most were the divers because they knew how difficult it was, and they couldn't believe we could do it without weights."

When Elvis Presley visited in 1961, he asked why they hadn't built Weeki Wachee near Madison Square Garden, where more people could see it. He thought the water was piped in.

Vickers reports that the mermaids were local girls trained as free divers, long before scuba. Diving certification wasn't required for mermaids until the 1970s. For years, they made up equipment as they went along.

"Changing costumes underwater while hanging onto the air hoses required the mermaids to possess the agility and nerves of a Houdini," Vickers writes.

"Everybody lost their falsies at one time or another," said mermaid Georgiadis, "and they'd go drifting up in view of the audience and you'd go 'Oh' and dash up and snatch 'em back."

Vickers sets the spring's story in time, noting that it was segregated until the late 1960s. Also included: a section on striking mermaids in the 1970s, bikini-clad on a U.S. 19 picket line.

Weeki Wachee is still in business. As this newspaper wrote earlier this year, "The kitschy institution is still swimming in murky legal waters" in a dispute between managers and its owner, the state.

"The Weeki Wachee mermaids have weathered Disney World, hurricanes, rising gas prices, shortened attention spans, and heightened expectation," Vickers writes. "And the spring has hung in there, too, weathering development brought to its very edge with a four-lane highway, development that has meant toxic runoff from malls, overfertilized lawns, and numerous golf courses."

It's impossible to list all the nifty facts Vickers and Dionne uncover. But here's one more:

Remember that terrifying scene in the beginning of the 1975 film Jaws, when the girl gets pulled under by the great white shark? The "victim" was Susan Backlinie, a former mermaid.

"You see me do a leg lift and then sink underwater," she says. "Well, that was definitely Weeki Wachee."

Florida writer Julie Hauserman lives in Tallahassee.

Weeki Wachee, City of Mermaids: A History of One of Florida's Oldest Roadside Attractions
By Lu Vickers and Sara Dionne
University Press of Florida, 294 pages, $34.95

[Last modified October 3, 2007, 17:38:40]