My Florida dream
Spurred by a new PBS show on Florida, a retired journalist muses on his half century of sun.
By JON WILSON, Special to the Times
Published October 21, 2007
Fifty-one years ago today, our family rolled west across Gandy Bridge, the old one, the one that's a bike path now. Through the wide-open windows of our '53 Ford, a Tampa Bay breeze carried my first, good whiff of Florida.
It smelled like fish stew. It smelled like mystery. It smelled like the ocean.
It smelled like a dream.
Chasing a vision, our Nebraska panhandle family had yanked up pioneer roots stretching to the late 19th century. We sold our property and said goodbye to a score of relatives, who wondered why in the world we wanted to leave.
Jack Kerouac, who also would wind up in St. Petersburg, spoke to a constituency beyond his beat generation. In his classic On the Road - the 50th anniversary of its publication is this year - the Lowell, Mass., native wrote this passage:
"If you drop a rose in the Hudson River at its mysterious source in the Adirondacks, think of all the places it journeys as it goes out to sea forever ..."
Kerouac went on a different journey - though he died in St. Petersburg - but his prose expressed a mighty yearning. After the Great Depression and World War II, millions of Americans wanted something new, something magic.
Lots of them looked in Florida. So did we.
A new PBS program called The Florida Dream documented the phenomenon, and the explosive growth the state experienced as a result. It went on the air for the first time Thursday on WEDU-Channel 3 and WUSF-Ch. 16. WEDU-Channel 3 produced the show in partnership with the Florida Humanities Council. (WEDU repeats it tonight at 6:30.)
The documentary is based on Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams, by University of South Florida St. Petersburg professor Gary Mormino. Fourth-generation Floridian and veteran reporter Larry Elliston, widely remembered for his Down Home Florida series that ran on WTVT-Ch. 13, made the video.
As I watched, it reminded me of the journey our family made. We were six: three adults, two toddlers and 11-year-old me. None of us had, nor would we have for years, an inkling that we were part of a significant change in America.
Looking back, I am struck by the courage it must have taken to strike out on such a venture.
The adults in our family were reliable workers but had no special skills. They knew no one in Florida. They had no jobs waiting. They knew we were bound for St. Petersburg, but they didn't know where we would live when we got there.
But they knew what they wanted. Such was the power of the Florida Dream. The PBS show made me think about its nature, its reality and its durability.
My mother, Ruthe Wilson, first experienced Florida in February 1953, touring the state on a Greyhound bus. While a blizzard tore through our hometown of Scottsbluff, the Gulf of Mexico teased Mom at Pass-a-Grille. She sent us orange-grove postcards.
My oldest brother, Jack, visited Miami on Navy liberty in 1946. I am not sure what he did there, but it made an impression.
Those brief exposures planted the seeds. Florida's expanding profile in newsreels and magazines nurtured our family's notion. A trial newspaper subscription brought boasts of St. Petersburg's balmy climate and hints of an earthly heaven.
"We were tired of the winters," Mom told me years later. "We wanted to start a new life."
So did lots of others. Between 1950 and 1960, Florida's population ballooned from 2.8-million to nearly 5-million. The 79 percent increase marked the fastest growth rate of all the states. St. Petersburg grew even faster - 96,738 became 181,298, an 87 percent leap.
Available, affordable housing was part of the appeal. We bought a three-bedroom, two-bath tract house for about $12,500 in a newly built, northwest St. Petersburg subdivision fancifully named Westgate Manor.
Our new next-door neighbors were a retired Coast Guardsman from Long Island and a working family from Springfield, Mass. My best friend down the shell-surfaced street lived with his widowed mother. They were from Port Huron, Mich.
Developers built on what had been pasture. Some of the grazing land remained, and sometimes cattle escaped, trampling patches of new St. Augustine grass and demolishing clotheslines purchased from the downtown Sears store.
As Nebraskans, we had sympathy for the brutes, but cursed and yelled and drove them away, only to be visited in succeeding weeks by representatives of the state's venomous snake population. We bashed them and shoveled off their heads and went on with life. Such annoyances were not dream-breakers.
Mom warned me not to talk politics my first day at the new school, although the presidential campaigns of Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson were challenging the Suez crisis for front-page newspaper prominence.
"We're Republicans," she said. "There are a lot of Democrats in Florida."
There were proud Southerners, too, happy to help us adjust. At Clearview Elementary School, a truculent towhead who came up to my chin challenged: "Are you a Yankee? Where you from?" When I told him, he spat in a patch of sand spurs. "Nebraska wasn't even in the war," he said 91 years after the late unpleasantness had offered its final formal shot.
Later at Lealman Junior High, schoolyard fistfights broke out when Ike sent troops to Little Rock during Central High School desegregation. Young newcomers, their parents perhaps General Electric transplants from Schenectady, N.Y., declared that they saw nothing wrong with Negroes. Some of their schoolmates begged to differ. Like the rest of Florida and the South, St. Petersburg was strictly segregated then.
Civil rights and politics evolved as people from all over made Florida grow and change.
I heard about (but did not see) Louis Armstrong playing the Manhattan Casino on 22nd Street S, St. Petersburg's African-American main street during the Jim Crow era. Satchmo brought a semblance of integration to town because white people came to hear him at what typically was an all-black venue. More complete integration arrived in the 1960s, as restaurants, theaters, hotels and stores gradually surrendered race-based restrictions. A new day at last allowed black baseball players here for spring training to enjoy the same lodging as their white teammates. In 1971, 17 years after the Supreme Court decision that ordered it, full integration came to Pinellas County schools. In theory, the Florida Dream now seemed available to all.
Throughout this period, William C. Cramer was my family's congressman. Transplanted heartland folks liked him. He helped stir a Republican revolution in Pinellas, and he became a major influence in Florida's political landscape. In 1954 he became the state's first GOP congressman since Reconstruction. That first election, Mormino pointed out in his book, allowed Cramer to woo voters with a new medium; television showed off his charm and good looks.
Meanwhile, relentlessly advancing subdivisions replaced farms and citrus groves. Shopping centers crushed fertile wetlands. Technology killed mosquitoes and cooled us off.
But we couldn't afford air conditioning at first. Our first smothering Florida summer almost provided the dream-breaker. We cranked jalousie windows wide open, hoping to catch a breeze from a wee-hour shower. I remember splaying against a bedroom wall at night, searching for a few square inches of cool surface, although the terrazzo floor was even cooler. We thought about Boulder, Colo., and subscribed to a Reno, Nev., newspaper.
But we stayed. We got a boat. We took it through steamy bayous, using shrimp to catch anything that dared bite. It was better than stalking autumn pheasants through a harvested cornfield's tawny stalks. Eventually, we installed air conditioning, first one window unit, then another and another. Life was good.
Four far-flung years in the Army presented a chance for change. A person in the service sees new places. Some had appeal, as Miami did for my brother a generation earlier.
In the end, Florida's allure remained. I came home - because that's what it was. I went to work for the Evening Independent, a newspaper famous for promoting St. Petersburg's climate. Later, I joined the St. Petersburg Times. I spent a career writing about life in the city.
In 2007, is the life good, still? Will it remain so?
The documentary made me think, as it will others. It explains how Florida got the way it is. It asks questions. It wonders about tomorrow. PBS stations will show it again. I hope lots of people see it, including business decisionmakers and public policymakers.
My family was part of the influx that changed Florida forever. Did we contribute anything positive? Or were we merely units that helped drain all that once was good? What of the future? Will we and others abandon the dream for some other perceived paradise, leaving behind an old one ruined?
I don't know.
Perhaps, as The Florida Dream suggests, a new generation will re-invent the vision. Perhaps in the 21st Century, it is a relative concept.
On a night last weekend, I sat with my English son-in-law and a group of other young people near the Vinoy Basin in downtown St. Petersburg, in a city that now has a quarter-million people. We relaxed in view of incredibly expensive high-rise condos but in a county where some schools are beginning to re-segregate. The threat of hurricanes and the costs of property taxes and insurance are changing the nature of the Florida Dream and raising its price. And though we live on the water, its shortage may be one of the toughest issues we face ahead.
Still, at this moment sailboats' silhouettes swayed and downtown lights made the water sparkle. Off Tampa Bay came a breeze soft as a sweetheart's kiss.
Mellow and reflective, my son-in-law shook his head. "And people ask me," he said, "Why I choose to live in Florida." No one answered. No one had to.
In the night there was magic, and sometimes one moment of it will keep a dream alive.
Jon Wilson recently retired from the St. Petersburg Times. He is a graduate student in the Florida Studies Department at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg and as part of a graduate assistantship, works part-time for the Florida Humanities Council.